4/29/2002 1:03:31 PM
Prince Emleth did it where? with a what? when?
This weekend I purchased two books. Started even to read them. Hamlet On The Holodeck – The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace by Janet H. Murray and How To Build a Time Machine by Paul Davies. I had a couple different things in mind when I purchased them, but simultaneous reading of the first few chapters has given me a topic for Blog Articles for this week and maybe more.
Hyper-literature. There I’ve just made up a word. I’ll make up a few more before all this is through and misuse them as well. The misuse is how I thrive.
A warning shot across your collective bows. I am notorious for thinking that is far less than rigorous. Rigor does quickly to Mortis turn in my so very daft hands. Here is li’l ole me about to take on a topic that by all rights should have some proper Rigor for proper Study. I will, however take the low road and stick to the sloppy intuitive stuff that so suffuses and pleases my soul.
What then is this hyper-literature? Well, now, me pretty, that is precisely the question. Is it merely a literature that is enabled with the use of hypertext? What? Hypertext? Those words in a colored font and underlined that you click on to move you at warp speeds to a more appropriate place in the document at hand. Changes colors sometimes to indicate cyberroads you have traveled, cyberpaths you have blazed. The markings used as a part Hypertext Transfer Protocol. Maybe!
Ubiquitous is the HTTP!
Also find hypertext in Help Files. You get perfectly opaque and vile answers by clicking on the menu item that proclaims Help in the common user interface of most programs. Sometimes you can type in a direct English question like. Where do I find a blivet binder? Most likely you are perplexed because in the tutorial section of the help files you have just read a sentence that stated “The only way to copy a graphic target file to the email text box is by using a blivet binder.” “Where,” you swear as you type hungrily, “the hell is the blivet whatsis?” And get a very indirect answer that looks like this:
Blivet,
function.
word type
Show
Polymorphic
indigenous
And pick and click for want of a better notion the infamous blivet comma indigenous. Only to discover that a blivet, polymorphic or no, doesn’t seem to have any reference to binder. Here is the story, my fine friends; help (unlike its name and possibly its intention) is very little HELP!
Help files are the dark nightmare side of hypertext. Self referential definitions that chase us and themselves all around the Rosey until ashes ashes we all fall dumbfounded to the new Black Bubonic Rag, ohhh its sooo elegant!
Course, hyper-literature, uses hypertext! It also spans the entire blivet binder of media. It sounds, views, scans, will with a little prodding via virtual brass noses(so like the one that old Tycho Brahe wore around Uraniborg while he explored the heavens) smell, with one handed gloves, help us either to moon walk or to feel., with Lotta Lenya like (I loved From Russia with Love the Movie) stiletto boots let us take a swipe at Bond James Bond, while we drink a virtual stirred shaken satisfied and sacred martini (so dry is it that someone has opened and quickly closed a bottle of vermouth somewhere in the room).
‘Cause in hyper-literature we will be assailed and supplied by all viewpoints. Be at once Odd Job, James Bond, Auric Goldfinger and Miss Lotte Lenya and Ole Lucy Brown. Scary, eh? Well if you had any sense it would be! This is new stuff to be used only by the adventurous or if you’re anything like me, merely the brainless. I am so hopeless that I rush in where fools fear to tread.
For who else but someone lower on the chain than a fool, would want to work in a medium that lets the reader/viewer/audience/experiencer interact and challenge the very presentation itself. Yes, you can turn off the TV (Go ahead try it) Yes, you can nod off in the middle of the latest John Grisham (and it is especially good to sleep at the endings) thriller, Yes, you can switch from radio frequency to frequency, but you can’t mess with the flow! Yes, you can smash a CD (or a pumpkin) into a million pieces, but some recording company will still covet the royalties. You may not be there, mon frere, but like a good catholic mass, the liturgy beats on forever and ever whether or not you are or even care to be present.
In cyberspace you will shape the flow as much as the author will. Maybe in good cyberspace you will influence it even more. Without you, comrade, there is no flow. I believe that what is emerging is truly collaborative. In the best and the worst senses. Be wery careful, paraphrases Elmer, there are wabbits here.
Look at Blogs! Simulations, which I find ever more satisfying than games. Study as experience. Experience as study. Text, layer and subtext on the new nightly news. Will people of either or the same sex have long term sexual liaisons with unknowable long distance partners? Will babies be born of sperm captured in virtual passion shipped via Federal Express and placed in Petri uterus? Is it a brave new world? This manifestation of hyper-literature
I’m tired and I rail at the thought of any collaboration but I will take it all up precisely there in Part II. The Growing Menace of Cyberspace. Or In Vitro Veritas. Chapter II. What did this have to do with a Time Machine? How do I get out of this help file?
Monday, April 29, 2002
Friday, April 26, 2002
4/26/02 6:48 AM Friday
Another dream another time.
March of 1994 I took a class, 3 nights (10 hours) to become a competent person. There are those who say I failed, but I have the card in my wallet to prove it. It was an official Occupational and Safety Hazard Administration course and my competency was merely an issue of safety in the workplace.
The class, sponsored by the Mechanical Contractor's Association of America, Steamfitters Local 449 and The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 5 was held at the Sheet Metal Workers Hall Local 12 in Harmarville. Whadyu just say! A series of OSHA classes on 29CFR 1926 sponsored by the MCAA and IBEW for Local 449 & 5 & 12 at the SMWA Hall. How millennial, yet 19th Century!
Route 28, my most logical route for exit towards home in the Greenfield section of Pittsburgh was closed at the Highland Park Bridge. I had little choice, after a meal of some very green meat loaf with a bright red interior (oh, yes they fed us well) and three or four hours of very dull pointed regulations and procedures that I was responsible to know, but to take the Hulton Bridge and travel down the other side of the river on Allegheny River Boulevard.
When I was a child, Harmarville had been a place of grand recreation for my family. There was the Driving Range, the Pitch and Putt Golf course, the Drive-in Theatre. As a high schooler there was a perfectly disreputable pool hall with a cigar smoked back room poker game casted by some very tough coal miners shuffling cards and spitting. I hadn't any occasion to travel this direction for probably fifteen maybe even twenty years.
It was no real surprise when I picked up a ghost as I passed the only remnant left of my early days after the new 28 construction obliterated my world, an Eat 'n Park Restaurant. My car changed into a Root Beer and White '55 Buick and my old man kicked me into the back seat and took over the wheel.
We glided to the traffic light before the Hulton Bridge waited for the green and turned left. The bridge was at once in its newer solid concrete form and the more archaic clanking metal decked riveted steel plate frightening structure that my brother and I had proclaimed with little imagination but a great glop of fear the Clickety Clack Bridge. We knew with dead certainty that someday we would plummet mid-bridge into the pacifically flowing Allegheny. Our bodies, a statistic, washed up at the Point. I sighed relieved as we left the bridge surface and looked over at my brother who was asleep. My mother was gazing out the front passenger window and I could tell that my father was contemplating stopping at the Dairy Queen.
He decided against it and we tooled down Allegheny Road on the back side of the tracks in Oakmont. I could smell the fish and see the saw dust floors at Hofstot's. It has long since become a fancy restaurant and even the bottoms of Oakmont for all its light industry has become a desirable place to live. Friday's, my father, would drive down over the tracks and place an order with the bartender while he tossed down a beer and gossiped. I sat there high on a stool with a coke in front of me. Fish sandwiches with fish dwarfing the loaf of bread that was the bun. Four in a couple bags with an extra bag for the cocktail and tartar sauce, salt, pepper, plastic forks and knifes. My old man knew every bar and every bartender and every serving maid in Greater Pittsburgh. If I were stumble this day into almost any liquor selling establishment over the age of ten. Mention my name. I would be gladly greeted. Most likely served a coke in a cold old fashioned glass.
Verona! I couldn't resist driving down the back street where Billy Kay's Bar looking newer than ever was doing a landmark business. Fake ID (even when the picture was of a black one eyed toothless man) would bring you a quart of beer in a bag. My father scowled at me as we drove by an innocent looking store front that had served as a pool hall. He forbad me to go there and knew instinctively when I had hitched and visited the small pool room run by a black transvestite, who was tolerated for some reason by the densiens of that deep. I rubbed the mist of condensation from my breath off the rear window to see the first Pizza Shop, after a Junior High School dance, that had every served me commercial Pizza. Here was a place that even my mother’s great cuisine could not compete.
I knew my father was firmly in charge when the wheel turned strongly to the left on to Verona Road. I should have traveled straight down the river road.
William Penn School, the log cabin house that is the oldest structure in Penn Hills, Bobby and Jimmy Alcorn' house, the Fire Hall and playground, sadly Dr Ferguson and Joseph's Barber Shop with different business ensconced looked lonely and deserted A quick turn to the right would lead down to Green Oaks Country Club and Third Street.
We continued straight on. Della Salla’s Pizza (Strangest cheese in the world. My brother feasts when he comes up from Houston), the bus stop that I stood shivering winter days waiting for a ride to school, Strunk’s Superette that ran many a Super Market out of business across the street because Mr. Strunk ran a tab for the neighborhood families. "Joey, said my mother,” go up and get a pound of pressed ham, six pork chops and some ketchup. Yes, you can get yourself a Three Musketeers." She paid at the end of the week.
The Service Station next to the alley and finally at the top of Maple Avenue hill Sam Arno's Barber Shop. His wife Annette’s Drug Store and the Beauty Parlor, The Harmony Short Line Bus Stop, where my uncle picked up renegade business people and drove them to town, the newspaper box that had no lock (piece of paper stuffed in the chamber to keep the coins) and was a bank where we got funds for a Coke and a Candy Bar.
My volition gone, somewhere grumping, unable to resist, we turned right. Maple Avenue. Going Home.
Cimino's House, then Stewart's my father/my foot on the brakes. I pulled into the familiar parking place on the street in front of 1533 Maple Ave and it was all that I could do:
not to set the emergency brake,
not to turn off the engine,
not to reach for the keys in the ignition,
not to open the door
not to run up to the front door, insert the key
and be home.
The ghosts fled. I drove down the hill turned on to Third Street and drove to Greenfield.
Another dream another time.
March of 1994 I took a class, 3 nights (10 hours) to become a competent person. There are those who say I failed, but I have the card in my wallet to prove it. It was an official Occupational and Safety Hazard Administration course and my competency was merely an issue of safety in the workplace.
The class, sponsored by the Mechanical Contractor's Association of America, Steamfitters Local 449 and The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 5 was held at the Sheet Metal Workers Hall Local 12 in Harmarville. Whadyu just say! A series of OSHA classes on 29CFR 1926 sponsored by the MCAA and IBEW for Local 449 & 5 & 12 at the SMWA Hall. How millennial, yet 19th Century!
Route 28, my most logical route for exit towards home in the Greenfield section of Pittsburgh was closed at the Highland Park Bridge. I had little choice, after a meal of some very green meat loaf with a bright red interior (oh, yes they fed us well) and three or four hours of very dull pointed regulations and procedures that I was responsible to know, but to take the Hulton Bridge and travel down the other side of the river on Allegheny River Boulevard.
When I was a child, Harmarville had been a place of grand recreation for my family. There was the Driving Range, the Pitch and Putt Golf course, the Drive-in Theatre. As a high schooler there was a perfectly disreputable pool hall with a cigar smoked back room poker game casted by some very tough coal miners shuffling cards and spitting. I hadn't any occasion to travel this direction for probably fifteen maybe even twenty years.
It was no real surprise when I picked up a ghost as I passed the only remnant left of my early days after the new 28 construction obliterated my world, an Eat 'n Park Restaurant. My car changed into a Root Beer and White '55 Buick and my old man kicked me into the back seat and took over the wheel.
We glided to the traffic light before the Hulton Bridge waited for the green and turned left. The bridge was at once in its newer solid concrete form and the more archaic clanking metal decked riveted steel plate frightening structure that my brother and I had proclaimed with little imagination but a great glop of fear the Clickety Clack Bridge. We knew with dead certainty that someday we would plummet mid-bridge into the pacifically flowing Allegheny. Our bodies, a statistic, washed up at the Point. I sighed relieved as we left the bridge surface and looked over at my brother who was asleep. My mother was gazing out the front passenger window and I could tell that my father was contemplating stopping at the Dairy Queen.
He decided against it and we tooled down Allegheny Road on the back side of the tracks in Oakmont. I could smell the fish and see the saw dust floors at Hofstot's. It has long since become a fancy restaurant and even the bottoms of Oakmont for all its light industry has become a desirable place to live. Friday's, my father, would drive down over the tracks and place an order with the bartender while he tossed down a beer and gossiped. I sat there high on a stool with a coke in front of me. Fish sandwiches with fish dwarfing the loaf of bread that was the bun. Four in a couple bags with an extra bag for the cocktail and tartar sauce, salt, pepper, plastic forks and knifes. My old man knew every bar and every bartender and every serving maid in Greater Pittsburgh. If I were stumble this day into almost any liquor selling establishment over the age of ten. Mention my name. I would be gladly greeted. Most likely served a coke in a cold old fashioned glass.
Verona! I couldn't resist driving down the back street where Billy Kay's Bar looking newer than ever was doing a landmark business. Fake ID (even when the picture was of a black one eyed toothless man) would bring you a quart of beer in a bag. My father scowled at me as we drove by an innocent looking store front that had served as a pool hall. He forbad me to go there and knew instinctively when I had hitched and visited the small pool room run by a black transvestite, who was tolerated for some reason by the densiens of that deep. I rubbed the mist of condensation from my breath off the rear window to see the first Pizza Shop, after a Junior High School dance, that had every served me commercial Pizza. Here was a place that even my mother’s great cuisine could not compete.
I knew my father was firmly in charge when the wheel turned strongly to the left on to Verona Road. I should have traveled straight down the river road.
William Penn School, the log cabin house that is the oldest structure in Penn Hills, Bobby and Jimmy Alcorn' house, the Fire Hall and playground, sadly Dr Ferguson and Joseph's Barber Shop with different business ensconced looked lonely and deserted A quick turn to the right would lead down to Green Oaks Country Club and Third Street.
We continued straight on. Della Salla’s Pizza (Strangest cheese in the world. My brother feasts when he comes up from Houston), the bus stop that I stood shivering winter days waiting for a ride to school, Strunk’s Superette that ran many a Super Market out of business across the street because Mr. Strunk ran a tab for the neighborhood families. "Joey, said my mother,” go up and get a pound of pressed ham, six pork chops and some ketchup. Yes, you can get yourself a Three Musketeers." She paid at the end of the week.
The Service Station next to the alley and finally at the top of Maple Avenue hill Sam Arno's Barber Shop. His wife Annette’s Drug Store and the Beauty Parlor, The Harmony Short Line Bus Stop, where my uncle picked up renegade business people and drove them to town, the newspaper box that had no lock (piece of paper stuffed in the chamber to keep the coins) and was a bank where we got funds for a Coke and a Candy Bar.
My volition gone, somewhere grumping, unable to resist, we turned right. Maple Avenue. Going Home.
Cimino's House, then Stewart's my father/my foot on the brakes. I pulled into the familiar parking place on the street in front of 1533 Maple Ave and it was all that I could do:
not to set the emergency brake,
not to turn off the engine,
not to reach for the keys in the ignition,
not to open the door
not to run up to the front door, insert the key
and be home.
The ghosts fled. I drove down the hill turned on to Third Street and drove to Greenfield.
Wednesday, April 24, 2002
4/24/02 Tuesday 6:36 PM
Pickman’s Model and the Terror Under the Stairs
I have a recurring dream. It takes place in the basement of the house that my father built and that we lived and grew in. My father was a housing contractor during the formative years of my life. He designed and built houses that were as remarkable for their interior space as they were prosaic for their outward architecture. A housing plan is a housing plan until you step inside one of my old man’s houses. Mr. Freud and Mr. Jung take note from your perspicacious psychiatric perches as this dream moves out from the superego into the transpersonal.
When I was in the seventh possibly the eighth grade, my mother's mother, you’ve glommed on to it, my grandmother, moved from her and my mother’s side Whittier Street homestead just a few scant blocks off Larimar Avenue in East Liberty, definitely T(capital)he N(capital)eighborhood, to our home in Penn Hills. 1533 Maple Avenue for which it still stands. Several years ago post my marital break-up, another dream for another time, I lived as a boarder of the present owners in the upstairs apartment for about a year. Full, you betcha', circle. Recursion! A journey from (as you shall soon see), the basement to the attic and back again.
When Grandma Serrao, so we called her to differentiate from Grandma Coluccio, came, she took over what had been my brother's and my bedroom, overlooking the backyard next to the unfinished patio. We moved down the stairs to what had been the game room. A larger and more cavernous underground hideaway. Gaily painted, red, green yellow, concrete walls, a large mural of a Mexican village with a Senor taking a siesta next to a crumbling wall. Adequately painted by the man who rented the upstairs apartment that I have more recently inhabited. A bar with a five foot bottle of 4 Roses Whiskey resting on a pink painted refrigerator. The dark glass jug was a trophy from a downtown Pittsburgh Saloon one happy New Year’s Eve. My father cut a slot in the cap. We used it as a penny bank until he wrapped the pennies one day and bought some real booze. We had access to the blond wood console record player that had a 78 copy of Hearts Made of Stone by the Chordettes, a Sinatra that spun Young at Heart and of course Julius LaRosa's incomparable Eh, Cumpari!, a tootatoot u saxophone.
On the far side of the room was a laundry room, very scary and full of strange gurgling noises in the night. I remember reading Lovecraft's Pickman's Model one lonely evening and never quite recovering from the frisson. Like a fool I opened the perfectly closed door to the room across from the closet under the stairs. My father cached his tools there. The door slowly creaked open. I flung my hand inward and quickly flicked the light switch and found…..I can’t go on it’s just too horrible! Nothing! An eight foot level that sits to this day in the garage next to me, a couple wheel barrows with a dried coats of plaster, wooden tool boxes with hammers, crosscut and ripping saws, plumb bobs and wooden planes. The concrete and shaved wood smell of a million buildings. Not a rat, not a big horrible face with large dripping fangs, nothing animate at all, except me as I shoved the door closed quickly in anticipation of grasping skeletal fingers and a low moan like the wind on a moonless October night. Nada!
Where were the frightful little bastards who make these chilling noises as I read? Dissatisfied I move on down the hallway toward the little office in the extreme rear of the house. This door is also closed. Why, is the door closed? It crosses my mind for about the tenth time that all the horrors in the all those films can be avoided simply by the act of walking away. Don’t go down the steps and the ghastly tentacle of whatever Boogey just won’t grab you. If you know the Creature with very sharp claws that likes to gnaw on folk inhabits the lake then damn well don’t go swimming. Better yet, hire John Wayne or Clint Eastwood, the movie would only last a few minutes but whatever primeval Thing that crosses from nightmare to real world would meet a very satisfactory end. Dumb, I open the door. Moonlight is streaming through the window fills the bottom of the window well. Some things are revealed
In a few years I will begin my book collection at the desk and book shelf situated on the side wall, stealing the backwater office from my father. Those who have visited my basement, damn I guess I still live in a basement, more recursion, can attest to the fact that the collection has grown. My desktop into this very computer has grown. Surrounded am I by myriad volumes, hard paged and virtual, some important some dead frivolous, all loved and hard won.
It is in this rear of the house back room that my dream always begins. There is a hitherto unseen half-sized wonderland door that I climb through. Follow a hallway that gives way to another door which leads to room after room of small treasures. Hallway after hallway that transfer to universe after universe. Treasures of knowledge, on I go endlessly following the discoveries learning by intuition the nature of all things. It is an integrating dream. I know from the sense of well being and health that I have on awakening.
And Pickman and his grisly model’s are after all just more literary pictures on the wall reflecting a perfectly dark and acceptable vision. At least until tonight.
Pickman’s Model and the Terror Under the Stairs
I have a recurring dream. It takes place in the basement of the house that my father built and that we lived and grew in. My father was a housing contractor during the formative years of my life. He designed and built houses that were as remarkable for their interior space as they were prosaic for their outward architecture. A housing plan is a housing plan until you step inside one of my old man’s houses. Mr. Freud and Mr. Jung take note from your perspicacious psychiatric perches as this dream moves out from the superego into the transpersonal.
When I was in the seventh possibly the eighth grade, my mother's mother, you’ve glommed on to it, my grandmother, moved from her and my mother’s side Whittier Street homestead just a few scant blocks off Larimar Avenue in East Liberty, definitely T(capital)he N(capital)eighborhood, to our home in Penn Hills. 1533 Maple Avenue for which it still stands. Several years ago post my marital break-up, another dream for another time, I lived as a boarder of the present owners in the upstairs apartment for about a year. Full, you betcha', circle. Recursion! A journey from (as you shall soon see), the basement to the attic and back again.
When Grandma Serrao, so we called her to differentiate from Grandma Coluccio, came, she took over what had been my brother's and my bedroom, overlooking the backyard next to the unfinished patio. We moved down the stairs to what had been the game room. A larger and more cavernous underground hideaway. Gaily painted, red, green yellow, concrete walls, a large mural of a Mexican village with a Senor taking a siesta next to a crumbling wall. Adequately painted by the man who rented the upstairs apartment that I have more recently inhabited. A bar with a five foot bottle of 4 Roses Whiskey resting on a pink painted refrigerator. The dark glass jug was a trophy from a downtown Pittsburgh Saloon one happy New Year’s Eve. My father cut a slot in the cap. We used it as a penny bank until he wrapped the pennies one day and bought some real booze. We had access to the blond wood console record player that had a 78 copy of Hearts Made of Stone by the Chordettes, a Sinatra that spun Young at Heart and of course Julius LaRosa's incomparable Eh, Cumpari!, a tootatoot u saxophone.
On the far side of the room was a laundry room, very scary and full of strange gurgling noises in the night. I remember reading Lovecraft's Pickman's Model one lonely evening and never quite recovering from the frisson. Like a fool I opened the perfectly closed door to the room across from the closet under the stairs. My father cached his tools there. The door slowly creaked open. I flung my hand inward and quickly flicked the light switch and found…..I can’t go on it’s just too horrible! Nothing! An eight foot level that sits to this day in the garage next to me, a couple wheel barrows with a dried coats of plaster, wooden tool boxes with hammers, crosscut and ripping saws, plumb bobs and wooden planes. The concrete and shaved wood smell of a million buildings. Not a rat, not a big horrible face with large dripping fangs, nothing animate at all, except me as I shoved the door closed quickly in anticipation of grasping skeletal fingers and a low moan like the wind on a moonless October night. Nada!
Where were the frightful little bastards who make these chilling noises as I read? Dissatisfied I move on down the hallway toward the little office in the extreme rear of the house. This door is also closed. Why, is the door closed? It crosses my mind for about the tenth time that all the horrors in the all those films can be avoided simply by the act of walking away. Don’t go down the steps and the ghastly tentacle of whatever Boogey just won’t grab you. If you know the Creature with very sharp claws that likes to gnaw on folk inhabits the lake then damn well don’t go swimming. Better yet, hire John Wayne or Clint Eastwood, the movie would only last a few minutes but whatever primeval Thing that crosses from nightmare to real world would meet a very satisfactory end. Dumb, I open the door. Moonlight is streaming through the window fills the bottom of the window well. Some things are revealed
In a few years I will begin my book collection at the desk and book shelf situated on the side wall, stealing the backwater office from my father. Those who have visited my basement, damn I guess I still live in a basement, more recursion, can attest to the fact that the collection has grown. My desktop into this very computer has grown. Surrounded am I by myriad volumes, hard paged and virtual, some important some dead frivolous, all loved and hard won.
It is in this rear of the house back room that my dream always begins. There is a hitherto unseen half-sized wonderland door that I climb through. Follow a hallway that gives way to another door which leads to room after room of small treasures. Hallway after hallway that transfer to universe after universe. Treasures of knowledge, on I go endlessly following the discoveries learning by intuition the nature of all things. It is an integrating dream. I know from the sense of well being and health that I have on awakening.
And Pickman and his grisly model’s are after all just more literary pictures on the wall reflecting a perfectly dark and acceptable vision. At least until tonight.
Tuesday, April 23, 2002
4/22/2002 7:19:33 PM
How many princes of the guitar has God laid his finger on?
The first time I heard mention of Django Reinhardt was in 59 or 60 when I read From Here to Eternity, I became a Django fan without ever hearing a note. Prewitt and some of his musician friends talk in the barracks as they play the blues about this Gypsy genius of the guitar. James Jones (quick aside: I consider From Here to Eternity a prime example of “the” American novel that everyone claims, (sure Huck and Moby belong there too, who said there only had to be one)) tired to write a roman a clef about Django with a working title of, No Peace I Find. He eventually abandoned the idea. Jones through the doomed bugle player and his mates sparked anew a desire in me to once again pick up the guitar. It stayed dormant until the years following high school.
As I write I am listening to Nuages and looking at a CD cover with Django, hair greased back, receding hairline (God bless the bald I cannot help but say), cigarette in the right corner of his mouth punctuating his thin moustache, Epiphone arch top f-hole guitar on his right knee, left hand, small fingers resting on the two high strings in a fifth position chord configuration, right hand picking high E. Tweed suit and plain tie. Listen will you to the miracle of Honeysuckle Rose or Djangology.
My life lately has been honed and drilled down to an existence of early to rise (hardly ever a worm) practice (guitar, keyboard), learn (calculus, relative pitch, a polyglot of language) and write (this blog, Lackzoom, some stories) and of course that good old external prod, work (refrigeration) and early to bed (more healthy than I used to be, not a wit wiser and certainly my wealth is laughable (ask Uncle Sam). To paraphrase Dan Hicks, I worry myself. Where are the people? Where is the experience? Where is the recreation? Where is the relaxation? What is the quality of life? Weedhopper?
Forgive me if, as I blog, I dwell endlessly on the raptures of science fiction and the infinite beauty of the guitar. These things are major in my life, now and forever, Amen. I search my memory for significant things to write and finally settle in on the narrow span of my present diminished weltanschauung.
I have to face it and you (if you read on must put up with it), I am hung up on the guitar. I even listen to Tony Motolla and Acoustic Alchemy recordings. How queer and single minded is that? And Django I have been thinking about Django Avec Le Quintet du Hot Club de France. Le Jazz Hot!
When I was a young kid my parents decided that I should play the guitar. I had two uncles worth of footsteps to follow. Actually they played the ukulele more than the guitar, but who was counting strings in that era?. Long days I would sit, wanting to go out and play in the cruel baseball game that unfolded outside my window. Twang high E to low E. I showed such talent and interest that my instructor showed up one day with an accordion and a new lesson book. I did, I can assure you with some supreme satisfaction, learn the beginning strains of Lady of Spain.
Django was a Romany, born in a gypsy caravan in 1910. He played the banjo, violin and finally guitar from a young age in dance halls and night clubs. In 1928 his left hand was disfigured in a fire. Although his index and ring finger still functioned, his two small fingers were twisted and fused. While he was bed ridden he re-learned and re-invented guitar technique. He learned to grip the guitar on the E-string with his little finger and the B-string with the next finger up, which may account for some of the chord formation and distinctive sound to his music. Go to www.lobsterfilms.com/loaz04.htm to see a Quicktime clip of Django playing.
When Segovia met Django the maestro was dazed by the playing that he heard. Segovia asked for a transcript of what was just played, Django laughed and said , Oh that was merely an improvisation.
This was the same Segovia who said of John Williams “A prince of the guitar has arrived in the musical world. God has laid a finger on his brow…..” Django and John My world turns on them. I don’t have much of the technique and musicality of either. Each morning I practice, early, a devotion. I choose to play with p-i-m-a my fingers instead of the pick. I cannot achieve the wonderful rhythms of Le Jazz Hot, but Bach and Sor come more readily to me after a run of various scales from Major to Mixolydian.
I think God was doing more of a finger shaking in my case.
How many princes of the guitar has God laid his finger on?
The first time I heard mention of Django Reinhardt was in 59 or 60 when I read From Here to Eternity, I became a Django fan without ever hearing a note. Prewitt and some of his musician friends talk in the barracks as they play the blues about this Gypsy genius of the guitar. James Jones (quick aside: I consider From Here to Eternity a prime example of “the” American novel that everyone claims, (sure Huck and Moby belong there too, who said there only had to be one)) tired to write a roman a clef about Django with a working title of, No Peace I Find. He eventually abandoned the idea. Jones through the doomed bugle player and his mates sparked anew a desire in me to once again pick up the guitar. It stayed dormant until the years following high school.
As I write I am listening to Nuages and looking at a CD cover with Django, hair greased back, receding hairline (God bless the bald I cannot help but say), cigarette in the right corner of his mouth punctuating his thin moustache, Epiphone arch top f-hole guitar on his right knee, left hand, small fingers resting on the two high strings in a fifth position chord configuration, right hand picking high E. Tweed suit and plain tie. Listen will you to the miracle of Honeysuckle Rose or Djangology.
My life lately has been honed and drilled down to an existence of early to rise (hardly ever a worm) practice (guitar, keyboard), learn (calculus, relative pitch, a polyglot of language) and write (this blog, Lackzoom, some stories) and of course that good old external prod, work (refrigeration) and early to bed (more healthy than I used to be, not a wit wiser and certainly my wealth is laughable (ask Uncle Sam). To paraphrase Dan Hicks, I worry myself. Where are the people? Where is the experience? Where is the recreation? Where is the relaxation? What is the quality of life? Weedhopper?
Forgive me if, as I blog, I dwell endlessly on the raptures of science fiction and the infinite beauty of the guitar. These things are major in my life, now and forever, Amen. I search my memory for significant things to write and finally settle in on the narrow span of my present diminished weltanschauung.
I have to face it and you (if you read on must put up with it), I am hung up on the guitar. I even listen to Tony Motolla and Acoustic Alchemy recordings. How queer and single minded is that? And Django I have been thinking about Django Avec Le Quintet du Hot Club de France. Le Jazz Hot!
When I was a young kid my parents decided that I should play the guitar. I had two uncles worth of footsteps to follow. Actually they played the ukulele more than the guitar, but who was counting strings in that era?. Long days I would sit, wanting to go out and play in the cruel baseball game that unfolded outside my window. Twang high E to low E. I showed such talent and interest that my instructor showed up one day with an accordion and a new lesson book. I did, I can assure you with some supreme satisfaction, learn the beginning strains of Lady of Spain.
Django was a Romany, born in a gypsy caravan in 1910. He played the banjo, violin and finally guitar from a young age in dance halls and night clubs. In 1928 his left hand was disfigured in a fire. Although his index and ring finger still functioned, his two small fingers were twisted and fused. While he was bed ridden he re-learned and re-invented guitar technique. He learned to grip the guitar on the E-string with his little finger and the B-string with the next finger up, which may account for some of the chord formation and distinctive sound to his music. Go to www.lobsterfilms.com/loaz04.htm to see a Quicktime clip of Django playing.
When Segovia met Django the maestro was dazed by the playing that he heard. Segovia asked for a transcript of what was just played, Django laughed and said , Oh that was merely an improvisation.
This was the same Segovia who said of John Williams “A prince of the guitar has arrived in the musical world. God has laid a finger on his brow…..” Django and John My world turns on them. I don’t have much of the technique and musicality of either. Each morning I practice, early, a devotion. I choose to play with p-i-m-a my fingers instead of the pick. I cannot achieve the wonderful rhythms of Le Jazz Hot, but Bach and Sor come more readily to me after a run of various scales from Major to Mixolydian.
I think God was doing more of a finger shaking in my case.
Wednesday, April 17, 2002
4/17/02 Wednesday 6:56 AM
Don't you Sofis me!
I was probably fourteen, maybe fifteen. My old man and his crew, Betts, Sofis, and Barney were working on a remodel close to the corner of Elsworth and Negley. My muscles to this very day quiver when I approach that corner with that house.
It was summer. I was doing nothing which meant I had to go along to help rather than sit at home all the idyllic day and read the science fiction mags. Play first base, Big Klu, they called me even though I was a righty, down at the field behind the housing plan. Go swimming at Rosedale Beach, or at least stand outside the fence by the Barrel Roll and Slide and ogle the flesh.
I sat in the rear compartment of the wagon along with trowels, hammers, saws, paint and bags of 8, 10 and 16 penny common nails. The four of them forward. Talking construction. More likely babes and booze.
The house was a three story nightmare with a small garage in the rear. In that garage stacked neatly were far too many one hundred pound sacks of plaster, playing with my imagination, taunting my overactive brain. "You work with Sofis today." says my father. Sofis Pedersen was a big Swede of a man who spoke English with a pleasing accent that sounded more Irish than Swedish to me. His hair was sandy fine, tinted red and fully covered his scalp. When he worked he wore a white rimless plasterer’s yarmulke, white T shirt, white overalls that had more loops and pockets than a roller coaster. For my money he looked more like a baker. Man, could Sofis plaster. The old man's crew, funny names redolent of Scandinavia and Italy really were artists of their trades. They worked hard and never expected any less of me.
Little compromise in his tone, Sofis told me with that deceptive sweetly lilting voice to carry six sacks up to the third floor. Which I, grunting, moaning, sweating crying all the way, did. Out of that small garage, up the back porch steps, pass through the first floor kitchen, turn to the left hallway to second story stairs, up to a short landing and then a sharp turn and a very narrow set of steps to the third story attic where sat a plaster mixing box that looked like a flat everglades boat. Back down, back up. Six torturous trips.
Sofis meantime is setting up in the other room. There is metal lath covering the wall and ceiling in an elegant curve. He is preparing for the application of the scratch coat. He sets up a platform that pretty much covers the area of the floor of the small room and raises him to within inches of the ceiling. Me huff up down!
Trip six I fall to the floor and relax. Enter Sofis a mighty titan towering over my supine form "Fill them with water, Joey!" points to four empty buckets, "from the basement laundry sink." Up down four times more like Mickey in the Sorcerer's Apprentice. Buckets full, check, sacks stacked, check. Sofis instructs me on the intricacies of mixing water and plaster "Like your mama makes pasta." he croons and mixes. I am hungry for ravioli. (Rip goes the paper opening two bags) Make a hole, put the water in the middle (splash from the bucket), and mix (a hoe with a long handle) from the in out." I master it pretty quickly really. Like mama and pasta, I think. Sofis in the other room, "Bring plaster, Joey!" which I do.
He quickly scoops the perfectly constituted wet plaster mass, proudly presented in the dual purpose water buckets, that I been struggling to carry with two hands, single handedly onto his plasterer's hawk. A large square flat metal plate with a handle stuck in the middle. Raises the immense load to the ceiling with frightful ease, and pushes the entire yield into the metal lathing with terrifying speed. I am appalled. I look at the huge muscles of his arms which are just barely contained by his shirt. The bastard has the nerve to not even sweat. Suddenly, I realize I am in for a very long day. "More," says Sofis, "Joey!"
Oh that cry! "More, Joey!" I would mix, shuffle into the room, watch Sofis fill the hawk with the precious essence of plaster, lift it with one handed ease and make it disappear and become the first coat of the wall. "More, Joey!"
The horror! I got back to the mixing room, Sofis bellowing and singing. Only empty sacks, the plaster was three floors below and a back yard away. Sisyphus had to endure no more than I that morning. I would look at the sun as I toiled, an Egyptian Slave building a pyramidal tomb, willing the star to rise toward noon and lunch and respite. Praying for a tornado to haul me off the Oz. I spilled water as I climbed unable to stabilize the swirling liquid, blisters appeared in the webbing of my thumbs, broke raw and red. Cuts on my hands and arms and legs congealed with white plaster dust. More Joey More Joey! MORE JOEY! It became my mantra to alleviate the pain. The lathing sucked up the plaster; the walls looked the same as before, we're never going to be done, Sofis singing.
It ended. All earthly happenings must. Sofis did, Betts did, and my father did. (Barney, I can only assume, did) It wasn't even the hardest that I worked in my life. But it was a daunting trial by fire and somehow it purified me. Oh, I still ran like hell when my father was looking for me to help in the good old summertime.
I don't really shudder when I approach Elsworth and Negley. I look with pride and a deep stirring memory. The house still stands and for all I know the blood and sweat that I spilled to help mix the plaster, Sofis prodding, More Joey, singing my name with his soft accent, still echoes up that third story room.
Don't you Sofis me!
I was probably fourteen, maybe fifteen. My old man and his crew, Betts, Sofis, and Barney were working on a remodel close to the corner of Elsworth and Negley. My muscles to this very day quiver when I approach that corner with that house.
It was summer. I was doing nothing which meant I had to go along to help rather than sit at home all the idyllic day and read the science fiction mags. Play first base, Big Klu, they called me even though I was a righty, down at the field behind the housing plan. Go swimming at Rosedale Beach, or at least stand outside the fence by the Barrel Roll and Slide and ogle the flesh.
I sat in the rear compartment of the wagon along with trowels, hammers, saws, paint and bags of 8, 10 and 16 penny common nails. The four of them forward. Talking construction. More likely babes and booze.
The house was a three story nightmare with a small garage in the rear. In that garage stacked neatly were far too many one hundred pound sacks of plaster, playing with my imagination, taunting my overactive brain. "You work with Sofis today." says my father. Sofis Pedersen was a big Swede of a man who spoke English with a pleasing accent that sounded more Irish than Swedish to me. His hair was sandy fine, tinted red and fully covered his scalp. When he worked he wore a white rimless plasterer’s yarmulke, white T shirt, white overalls that had more loops and pockets than a roller coaster. For my money he looked more like a baker. Man, could Sofis plaster. The old man's crew, funny names redolent of Scandinavia and Italy really were artists of their trades. They worked hard and never expected any less of me.
Little compromise in his tone, Sofis told me with that deceptive sweetly lilting voice to carry six sacks up to the third floor. Which I, grunting, moaning, sweating crying all the way, did. Out of that small garage, up the back porch steps, pass through the first floor kitchen, turn to the left hallway to second story stairs, up to a short landing and then a sharp turn and a very narrow set of steps to the third story attic where sat a plaster mixing box that looked like a flat everglades boat. Back down, back up. Six torturous trips.
Sofis meantime is setting up in the other room. There is metal lath covering the wall and ceiling in an elegant curve. He is preparing for the application of the scratch coat. He sets up a platform that pretty much covers the area of the floor of the small room and raises him to within inches of the ceiling. Me huff up down!
Trip six I fall to the floor and relax. Enter Sofis a mighty titan towering over my supine form "Fill them with water, Joey!" points to four empty buckets, "from the basement laundry sink." Up down four times more like Mickey in the Sorcerer's Apprentice. Buckets full, check, sacks stacked, check. Sofis instructs me on the intricacies of mixing water and plaster "Like your mama makes pasta." he croons and mixes. I am hungry for ravioli. (Rip goes the paper opening two bags) Make a hole, put the water in the middle (splash from the bucket), and mix (a hoe with a long handle) from the in out." I master it pretty quickly really. Like mama and pasta, I think. Sofis in the other room, "Bring plaster, Joey!" which I do.
He quickly scoops the perfectly constituted wet plaster mass, proudly presented in the dual purpose water buckets, that I been struggling to carry with two hands, single handedly onto his plasterer's hawk. A large square flat metal plate with a handle stuck in the middle. Raises the immense load to the ceiling with frightful ease, and pushes the entire yield into the metal lathing with terrifying speed. I am appalled. I look at the huge muscles of his arms which are just barely contained by his shirt. The bastard has the nerve to not even sweat. Suddenly, I realize I am in for a very long day. "More," says Sofis, "Joey!"
Oh that cry! "More, Joey!" I would mix, shuffle into the room, watch Sofis fill the hawk with the precious essence of plaster, lift it with one handed ease and make it disappear and become the first coat of the wall. "More, Joey!"
The horror! I got back to the mixing room, Sofis bellowing and singing. Only empty sacks, the plaster was three floors below and a back yard away. Sisyphus had to endure no more than I that morning. I would look at the sun as I toiled, an Egyptian Slave building a pyramidal tomb, willing the star to rise toward noon and lunch and respite. Praying for a tornado to haul me off the Oz. I spilled water as I climbed unable to stabilize the swirling liquid, blisters appeared in the webbing of my thumbs, broke raw and red. Cuts on my hands and arms and legs congealed with white plaster dust. More Joey More Joey! MORE JOEY! It became my mantra to alleviate the pain. The lathing sucked up the plaster; the walls looked the same as before, we're never going to be done, Sofis singing.
It ended. All earthly happenings must. Sofis did, Betts did, and my father did. (Barney, I can only assume, did) It wasn't even the hardest that I worked in my life. But it was a daunting trial by fire and somehow it purified me. Oh, I still ran like hell when my father was looking for me to help in the good old summertime.
I don't really shudder when I approach Elsworth and Negley. I look with pride and a deep stirring memory. The house still stands and for all I know the blood and sweat that I spilled to help mix the plaster, Sofis prodding, More Joey, singing my name with his soft accent, still echoes up that third story room.
Monday, April 15, 2002
4/12/02 6:51 AM Friday
Polished off 4/15/02 6:54 PM
Is there an aesthetic anesthetist in the house?
Rules. Can't stand 'em. Never could.
When I formulate them I am tapping out a code of behavior for someone else. People should follow their own codes of behavior. Hush now! I can hear your negating thoughts. What about crime what about traffic lights what about murder what about pollution what about grammar! I didn't say there shouldn't be ethical behavior. Just said, I can't stand rules, unless (I give you an out) they are intended as guides. Rules should take Virgil's Role in the Inferno (who wants to reside in heaven when all the interesting people have crossed the River Acheron with Charon for the price of a coin), or perhaps Mr. Myagi in Karate Kid. Wax On Wax Off Buddy!
All this talk of rules, ethics and such relates to the massive agita that people who write books about writing or painting or composing music or dressing a turkey or undressing a super model or building an outdoor barbecue pit, give me. The best know that the last thing you should do is pay attention to what they are proposing. And further relates to what Lackzoom Acidophilus in general and I, in particular, as we try to create our little web area in cyber space, are placing under the close scrutiny of considerable consideration.
WebPage Aesthetic 101
Tutorial Version 6.5.2a-30
1. Old form rules don't apply even as guidelines. Present web pages often look like magazine advertisements. After all, are not 3D deep shadowed graphics and glossy print the catchy order of the day? Now add a dollop of some flash animation to grab the attention of the flighty audience. Voila (Pardon my French especially when I can't find my way to the accent grave on the keyboard), a new form is born. The aesthetic is realized, the medium mastered. Possibly not!
2. The nature of the new medium is interactive and demands frequent change. That means rather constant work is required (Please take note you old time Protestant American Work Ethic Mavens). I am told that farmers come to despair at the fact that cows must be milked every day whether or not Ma and Pa want to take a trip over the two lane blacktop to the County Fair for the weekend or just sleep in. Behold the new bovine!
3. The "audience" doesn't have to pay attention to your particular sets of logic. They can manage the hypertext wormholes provided in any order they want, including forsaking you for the open arms of another cyberlover.
Faced with the above stated precepts, I give my thoughts about what Lackzoom Acidophilus is doing while searching for a web aesthetic in the new and possibly already passe (see accent missing aigu again) millennium.
We used to do a lot of radio both prerecorded and real time, when we were on the air circa 1974 - 78 at WYEP then 91.5 FM. Our idols were The Firesign Theater and Stan Freberg. Both used the audio medium in a wonderful manner. An environment was created in which the most adventurous and absurd actions could be described in very textured sound. One of the important aspects of radio, is put forth by Stan, (It is true that I can't describe his example very well in print. Get the picture?), He describes (the audio air full of sounds) a giant strawberry being picked up by several helicopters and then being dropped into the ocean off the New York coast. Finally, as it floats, covered with a frothy layer of whipped cream. "Alright! Now," says Stan (hold for proper emphasis)," do that on TV." Radio is profoundly different from TV. Much that would be visual is left to your rather rabid imagination. Part of what we are exploring is audio.
In our cyberspace, hypermedia, electronic messaging we can also provide the visual, static or moving images, with or without color, with or without sound. This isn't radio. This isn't sound recording. This isn't a live music performance.
It isn't writing. There is an inner depth of meaning and expression that can only be revealed with words, scenes, structure. Can't get it with radio. Can't get it with poetry which is different from writing literature. This isn't poetry either.
Movies, you have to reveal in images, which can be striking, but the weakest film contains a script that explains to you what the film images should be exploring. People, who opine that movies are about writing, don't close their eyes in the theater. Or maybe they do. This isn't the movies.
Comic books, visual novels, animations, TV commercials, TV infomercials, audio books, electronic books, grocery store food labels, MSDS forms, all have their aesthetic. Some even have a definite use. All have proselytizers hawking their revealed rules. I read and listen to what they say, I appreciate some of what they say, but I choose not to follow what they say. If some of it gets incorporated into my personal vision, that's okeedokee with me.
I hate RULES. Rules come at the end of process. At the end of the universe there will be one very pervasive rule. And I won't like it very much!
We thus arrive at the Web Page of Lackzoom Acidophilus. Several of us, all with differing visions, are collaborating. Makes it even harder doesn't it. The RULES given for work in this completely new medium are so desperately formulated by others that they must ignored. The government tries to censor, Recording Companies and Hollywood try to control, Corporations flock to be there to sell.
We are only doing this because it is life and death to us. Like all fun things must be.
We don't have answers. Rules pop in and out of existence like solar neutrinos in a tank of perchlorethene, bathing deep underground. Some even travel backwards in time.
The best of us know that the last thing you should do is pay attention to what we have to say.
Polished off 4/15/02 6:54 PM
Is there an aesthetic anesthetist in the house?
Rules. Can't stand 'em. Never could.
When I formulate them I am tapping out a code of behavior for someone else. People should follow their own codes of behavior. Hush now! I can hear your negating thoughts. What about crime what about traffic lights what about murder what about pollution what about grammar! I didn't say there shouldn't be ethical behavior. Just said, I can't stand rules, unless (I give you an out) they are intended as guides. Rules should take Virgil's Role in the Inferno (who wants to reside in heaven when all the interesting people have crossed the River Acheron with Charon for the price of a coin), or perhaps Mr. Myagi in Karate Kid. Wax On Wax Off Buddy!
All this talk of rules, ethics and such relates to the massive agita that people who write books about writing or painting or composing music or dressing a turkey or undressing a super model or building an outdoor barbecue pit, give me. The best know that the last thing you should do is pay attention to what they are proposing. And further relates to what Lackzoom Acidophilus in general and I, in particular, as we try to create our little web area in cyber space, are placing under the close scrutiny of considerable consideration.
WebPage Aesthetic 101
Tutorial Version 6.5.2a-30
1. Old form rules don't apply even as guidelines. Present web pages often look like magazine advertisements. After all, are not 3D deep shadowed graphics and glossy print the catchy order of the day? Now add a dollop of some flash animation to grab the attention of the flighty audience. Voila (Pardon my French especially when I can't find my way to the accent grave on the keyboard), a new form is born. The aesthetic is realized, the medium mastered. Possibly not!
2. The nature of the new medium is interactive and demands frequent change. That means rather constant work is required (Please take note you old time Protestant American Work Ethic Mavens). I am told that farmers come to despair at the fact that cows must be milked every day whether or not Ma and Pa want to take a trip over the two lane blacktop to the County Fair for the weekend or just sleep in. Behold the new bovine!
3. The "audience" doesn't have to pay attention to your particular sets of logic. They can manage the hypertext wormholes provided in any order they want, including forsaking you for the open arms of another cyberlover.
Faced with the above stated precepts, I give my thoughts about what Lackzoom Acidophilus is doing while searching for a web aesthetic in the new and possibly already passe (see accent missing aigu again) millennium.
We used to do a lot of radio both prerecorded and real time, when we were on the air circa 1974 - 78 at WYEP then 91.5 FM. Our idols were The Firesign Theater and Stan Freberg. Both used the audio medium in a wonderful manner. An environment was created in which the most adventurous and absurd actions could be described in very textured sound. One of the important aspects of radio, is put forth by Stan, (It is true that I can't describe his example very well in print. Get the picture?), He describes (the audio air full of sounds) a giant strawberry being picked up by several helicopters and then being dropped into the ocean off the New York coast. Finally, as it floats, covered with a frothy layer of whipped cream. "Alright! Now," says Stan (hold for proper emphasis)," do that on TV." Radio is profoundly different from TV. Much that would be visual is left to your rather rabid imagination. Part of what we are exploring is audio.
In our cyberspace, hypermedia, electronic messaging we can also provide the visual, static or moving images, with or without color, with or without sound. This isn't radio. This isn't sound recording. This isn't a live music performance.
It isn't writing. There is an inner depth of meaning and expression that can only be revealed with words, scenes, structure. Can't get it with radio. Can't get it with poetry which is different from writing literature. This isn't poetry either.
Movies, you have to reveal in images, which can be striking, but the weakest film contains a script that explains to you what the film images should be exploring. People, who opine that movies are about writing, don't close their eyes in the theater. Or maybe they do. This isn't the movies.
Comic books, visual novels, animations, TV commercials, TV infomercials, audio books, electronic books, grocery store food labels, MSDS forms, all have their aesthetic. Some even have a definite use. All have proselytizers hawking their revealed rules. I read and listen to what they say, I appreciate some of what they say, but I choose not to follow what they say. If some of it gets incorporated into my personal vision, that's okeedokee with me.
I hate RULES. Rules come at the end of process. At the end of the universe there will be one very pervasive rule. And I won't like it very much!
We thus arrive at the Web Page of Lackzoom Acidophilus. Several of us, all with differing visions, are collaborating. Makes it even harder doesn't it. The RULES given for work in this completely new medium are so desperately formulated by others that they must ignored. The government tries to censor, Recording Companies and Hollywood try to control, Corporations flock to be there to sell.
We are only doing this because it is life and death to us. Like all fun things must be.
We don't have answers. Rules pop in and out of existence like solar neutrinos in a tank of perchlorethene, bathing deep underground. Some even travel backwards in time.
The best of us know that the last thing you should do is pay attention to what we have to say.
Wednesday, April 10, 2002
4/10/2002 7:04 PM
“Of course.” said Cadrax, the three snouted Balovina GortWorm pointing a blasix cannon in the direction of the ottoliner, “I cannot let you escape into N-dimension.”
I have this problem and I would like to believe that it has nothing to do with Nostalgia Ain’t Being What it Used to Be. Or when I was a child I spoke like a man, now that I am a man I speak like a kid. Or I’m older and set in my ways. Or even that the failing isn’t mine but the failure belongs to:
Science Fiction!
What, you say, the hell is this all about? I hold that many of the littler pleasures that I encounter as I move through this day to the next, are precisely those non-earth shaking, seemingly inconsequential rather than life over death items that make living not only bearable but worth the living. Worth more than your work position, social standing, religious persuasion, ethical demeanor, bathing habits (I will however point out here that in my mind clean is better) and just about anything else you can petulantly point to as “important and/or meaningful.” In short, in the small matters lies my spirituality. Seeing, if you will,
a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
(Thank you, William!)
Always sweat the small stuff.
Where was I before all this heady poetical muck ... oh, yes... Science Fiction.
I love Science Fiction! Since the days of third grade at William Penn School when I took a trip with Tyco M. Bass and Eleanor Cameron’s Wonderful Trip to the Mushroom Planet.
I have never returned.
You never found me as a pre-teen too far from an edition of Astounding Science Fiction Magazine. I knew that John W. Campbell Jr. was the kind of brilliant editor that was there to discover me along with Heinlein and Asimov and Sturgeon. I wrote a story. It had, with little exaggeration, Scores of Bug Eyed Monsters (called BEM to let the cognoscenti know just how hip I really was), Beamers and Blasters. A thing that would attach itself to part of your spine and take over your nervous system, revealing your inconsistent behavior to only those closest to you, and one of the best Air Force/UFO battles of all times, flashing lightning and red blaster bursts while an evil saucer shaped intergalactic cruiser tried to fight it’s way against Earth’s obnoxious gravity. John W commented long enough to send me a form letter that thanked me and explained that what I had written was not quite the kind of story that Astounding Science Fiction could use. The fool! And then he changed the name to Analog Science Fiction. (It is still, Chilren, on the newsstand today.) I have long since figured that he was forced to change, because he rejected my story.
The problem.
I have recently renewed my waning interest in Science Fiction. (Periodically I have dabbled over the decades and have always read this and that, subscribed to a sf mag here and there, attended a convention or two). I walk into a bookstore. Approach the science fiction racks. Run my hands hungrily down the spines of hard and paper backed books. And I find….
Well….I find a lot of fantasy novels with guys and gals in chain mail hacking at a dragon with reptilian wings, or I find….dark stories of dark fantasy with dark things happening to really dark people who are in the thrall of their dark past. I move down the aisle and come across computer games that have become science fiction novels, followed by thousands of TV shows that have become science fiction novels, followed by movies that have become science fiction novels, followed by a cottage industry of books about the various incarnations of the Star Ship Enterprise and more yet about Hans Solo, Luke Skywalker, Lando Calrissian, Obi Wan, Yoda and Darth Vader. Seldom do I find what I am looking for. What I will call, for lack of a more cogent term, “real” science fiction. Oh, sure there are the classics repacked, more Heinlein, Sturgeon and Asimov than you can shake a stick at. And the military guys, who are always fighting BEM’s with Blasters (okay they are better than that, but conservative and about a wacky a contingent as you can find short of the green Berets.)
I have tried! Honest, I have read, Stephen Baxter into Greg Egan into Greg Baer into Ken MacLeod into Robert Sawyer into Nancy Kress into Catherine Asaro into Charles Sheffield into Connie Wills into .. well I have tried. They all fall short of satisfying my wonder. Some of it is the science. I hate many modern conceptions of the cosmos, they may be superior in theory but they lack poetry. The modern changing biological world just plain scares me silly. It smells more of Stephen King, it is more awful that awe inspiring. And I never believed in sociology nohow.
Look, the “classic” writers weren’t much when it came to creating superior literature. Most were close to inept. But they often featured a breathless view of the cosmos that rivaled guys like William Blake. Current writing has become more competent. Less sloppy. I just don’t care for the vision.
Tonight I will move on to Manifold Space (The second in a (so far) trilogy (please, I keep saying in a mantra, stop writing series and trilogies) by Stephen Baxter. Volume 1 Manifold Time - Great science, writing in need of an editor, and unformed characters. What’s to like so far?
Dr. Borthwick flipped the toggle switch on the massive Townsend p-brane generator and disappeared. Maybe John Jr. was right!
“Of course.” said Cadrax, the three snouted Balovina GortWorm pointing a blasix cannon in the direction of the ottoliner, “I cannot let you escape into N-dimension.”
I have this problem and I would like to believe that it has nothing to do with Nostalgia Ain’t Being What it Used to Be. Or when I was a child I spoke like a man, now that I am a man I speak like a kid. Or I’m older and set in my ways. Or even that the failing isn’t mine but the failure belongs to:
Science Fiction!
What, you say, the hell is this all about? I hold that many of the littler pleasures that I encounter as I move through this day to the next, are precisely those non-earth shaking, seemingly inconsequential rather than life over death items that make living not only bearable but worth the living. Worth more than your work position, social standing, religious persuasion, ethical demeanor, bathing habits (I will however point out here that in my mind clean is better) and just about anything else you can petulantly point to as “important and/or meaningful.” In short, in the small matters lies my spirituality. Seeing, if you will,
a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
(Thank you, William!)
Always sweat the small stuff.
Where was I before all this heady poetical muck ... oh, yes... Science Fiction.
I love Science Fiction! Since the days of third grade at William Penn School when I took a trip with Tyco M. Bass and Eleanor Cameron’s Wonderful Trip to the Mushroom Planet.
I have never returned.
You never found me as a pre-teen too far from an edition of Astounding Science Fiction Magazine. I knew that John W. Campbell Jr. was the kind of brilliant editor that was there to discover me along with Heinlein and Asimov and Sturgeon. I wrote a story. It had, with little exaggeration, Scores of Bug Eyed Monsters (called BEM to let the cognoscenti know just how hip I really was), Beamers and Blasters. A thing that would attach itself to part of your spine and take over your nervous system, revealing your inconsistent behavior to only those closest to you, and one of the best Air Force/UFO battles of all times, flashing lightning and red blaster bursts while an evil saucer shaped intergalactic cruiser tried to fight it’s way against Earth’s obnoxious gravity. John W commented long enough to send me a form letter that thanked me and explained that what I had written was not quite the kind of story that Astounding Science Fiction could use. The fool! And then he changed the name to Analog Science Fiction. (It is still, Chilren, on the newsstand today.) I have long since figured that he was forced to change, because he rejected my story.
The problem.
I have recently renewed my waning interest in Science Fiction. (Periodically I have dabbled over the decades and have always read this and that, subscribed to a sf mag here and there, attended a convention or two). I walk into a bookstore. Approach the science fiction racks. Run my hands hungrily down the spines of hard and paper backed books. And I find….
Well….I find a lot of fantasy novels with guys and gals in chain mail hacking at a dragon with reptilian wings, or I find….dark stories of dark fantasy with dark things happening to really dark people who are in the thrall of their dark past. I move down the aisle and come across computer games that have become science fiction novels, followed by thousands of TV shows that have become science fiction novels, followed by movies that have become science fiction novels, followed by a cottage industry of books about the various incarnations of the Star Ship Enterprise and more yet about Hans Solo, Luke Skywalker, Lando Calrissian, Obi Wan, Yoda and Darth Vader. Seldom do I find what I am looking for. What I will call, for lack of a more cogent term, “real” science fiction. Oh, sure there are the classics repacked, more Heinlein, Sturgeon and Asimov than you can shake a stick at. And the military guys, who are always fighting BEM’s with Blasters (okay they are better than that, but conservative and about a wacky a contingent as you can find short of the green Berets.)
I have tried! Honest, I have read, Stephen Baxter into Greg Egan into Greg Baer into Ken MacLeod into Robert Sawyer into Nancy Kress into Catherine Asaro into Charles Sheffield into Connie Wills into .. well I have tried. They all fall short of satisfying my wonder. Some of it is the science. I hate many modern conceptions of the cosmos, they may be superior in theory but they lack poetry. The modern changing biological world just plain scares me silly. It smells more of Stephen King, it is more awful that awe inspiring. And I never believed in sociology nohow.
Look, the “classic” writers weren’t much when it came to creating superior literature. Most were close to inept. But they often featured a breathless view of the cosmos that rivaled guys like William Blake. Current writing has become more competent. Less sloppy. I just don’t care for the vision.
Tonight I will move on to Manifold Space (The second in a (so far) trilogy (please, I keep saying in a mantra, stop writing series and trilogies) by Stephen Baxter. Volume 1 Manifold Time - Great science, writing in need of an editor, and unformed characters. What’s to like so far?
Dr. Borthwick flipped the toggle switch on the massive Townsend p-brane generator and disappeared. Maybe John Jr. was right!
Monday, April 08, 2002
Monday 4-8-02 6:10 PM
I'll raise you two geeks and a nerd.
This is the first weekday of daylight savings time. It is probably 65 degrees (ยบ) Fahrenheit (F) (being in the refrigeration business I am always scrupulous about my units) No shade or relief on my backyard picnic table. The sun is glowing at me in the East. It won't set for another hour or so. I hate, despise and otherwise don't care for daylight savings time. I figure, if I wanted to get up at three in the morning, I would just set my alarm clock for that very eerie hour. Last week my alarm said 4 AM when it clicked and spit sound at me and it was indeed 4 AM. Now it mocks me. Still says 4 AM, but behind the red lit digital dial, a massive smile on the rather cruel face of time. It snickers. “It is really 3 AM, sucker!”
I am a devoted person of the morning. I think the late night is reserved for reprobates, criminals and vampires. If you fall within the limits of my categories, well, I figure, you should probably find a way to straighten out your life. Nuff said?
Now that I have set the vituperative tone of this rather peevish post, I will move on to the other group of people (I know in my heart of hearts that you are all the same group, but I dare not let my prejudice show). Those who insist that it is better to write with a pencil than with an electronic keyboard. Those who spend inordinate times drawing lines on papers to make a schedule instead of using some (and I admit it) less than perfect piece of software. Those who have you fill out (been to a doctor's office lately) the same information of twenty disparate forms so that your writing hand that starts with a decent calligraphy (mine does not even meet that minimum requirement) soon shrivels your mitt into a withered claw.
Early in my computer experience the company I worked for used an accounting software that though low on the list of top thousand accounting packages, still soared above the best one-write system.. A woman at the front desk, who would enter data hour after hour, toiled mightily. One day I was talking to the guy who wrote that particular accounting software. He pointed out that with the wonder of the F8 key that you could save six maybe seven keystrokes. Well, hell, I thought that was just great. So I showed Diane. She looked at me like I was smiling from the other side of sanity. "No." she informed me and displayed the repeated the six key strokes with sure hard pecked vengeance, "it's much easier this way!"
This was my first peek into the unyielding world of all too human habit when referring to any change. I'm pretty sure what she was saying was, and I choice to be charitable here, instead of just flat out calling her dumb, ‘I have done these six keystrokes so many times that even though one keystrokes seems easier, it would take me an insurmountable effort to do something different.’
That thinking leads me to despair. But I can accept it. Instead she insisted when I repeated my observation that six keystrokes could not be easier to manage than one, that I was the one prone to idiocy. This thinking leads me to the other side of sanity.
So, you like to work at your typewriter because that is the way that you work with comfort. Okay! I can accept that. In fact, I'll go you one better. I just don't give a damn. Do it! All I ask is that you please try not to tell me that it is an easier way to go about writing. I spent many a dreadful day, with plenty of white-out and threw out many a soiled, pock marked piece of paper before I typed one that was acceptable. I felt that my time was utterly wasted. I wanted to write and create.
Use your pencils or pens, they are charming. I don't want to strip you of the pleasure of a long line gliding over a smooth clear sheet of paper. Just stop your yammering about how much better it all is than writing on a computer.
I am sitting on my back patio with my one month old Pocket PC, writing with a version of Pocket Word. Last year in the summer, I used my laptop. The pocket PC ids more easily read in the bright sun, it does not take a full three or four minutes to boot, it's battery charge lasts about ten hours, the laptop, at best three, I have innumerable books and articles stored that I can read when I tire of this writing and best of all when it begins to rain or I must move, I fold up the keyboard and put both it and the Pocket PC in my POCKET and move. This, I contend is better and is a definite improvement over the Poor Performing Palm Pilot with constant battery failure and not enough memory that I last owned.
This new technology is a marvel that continues to amplify my intelligence (and there are those who say it could use some mighty amplification). I don't much care about artificial intelligence, AI, but I do think that my salvation and perhaps our salvation will be in Intelligence Amplification, IA. This Pocket PC, my laptop, my desktop computer, my VCR, my Yamaha Keyboard, my toaster that actually browns rather than burns to a black cinder a piece of bread, the microwave that I use mostly for coffee and left-overs, my digital camera that saves me from going to the supermarket and waiting a week for the pictures that chronicle my life, all help make me a more versatile and interesting person.
Wow, this is way more of a soap box than I intended to climb upon. There are old ways that I revere. There are old times that I wish I could recapture. When I dream of time travel (I do more and more frequently. Time is definitely on my mind) it is with an eye toward the past. But the technology of the computer revolution disappoints me only in the fact that it doesn't advance more quickly. Moore's law just doesn't get it for me. (The amount of information storable on a given amount of silicon has roughly doubled every year and a half) And a hearty, Hell Yes!, most of companies creating software are too blinded by securing their intellectual property, IP, and creating really boring acronyms, than by moving forward to far greater rewards.
Amen Brother!
Can I have an Oy Vey?
I'll raise you two geeks and a nerd.
This is the first weekday of daylight savings time. It is probably 65 degrees (ยบ) Fahrenheit (F) (being in the refrigeration business I am always scrupulous about my units) No shade or relief on my backyard picnic table. The sun is glowing at me in the East. It won't set for another hour or so. I hate, despise and otherwise don't care for daylight savings time. I figure, if I wanted to get up at three in the morning, I would just set my alarm clock for that very eerie hour. Last week my alarm said 4 AM when it clicked and spit sound at me and it was indeed 4 AM. Now it mocks me. Still says 4 AM, but behind the red lit digital dial, a massive smile on the rather cruel face of time. It snickers. “It is really 3 AM, sucker!”
I am a devoted person of the morning. I think the late night is reserved for reprobates, criminals and vampires. If you fall within the limits of my categories, well, I figure, you should probably find a way to straighten out your life. Nuff said?
Now that I have set the vituperative tone of this rather peevish post, I will move on to the other group of people (I know in my heart of hearts that you are all the same group, but I dare not let my prejudice show). Those who insist that it is better to write with a pencil than with an electronic keyboard. Those who spend inordinate times drawing lines on papers to make a schedule instead of using some (and I admit it) less than perfect piece of software. Those who have you fill out (been to a doctor's office lately) the same information of twenty disparate forms so that your writing hand that starts with a decent calligraphy (mine does not even meet that minimum requirement) soon shrivels your mitt into a withered claw.
Early in my computer experience the company I worked for used an accounting software that though low on the list of top thousand accounting packages, still soared above the best one-write system.. A woman at the front desk, who would enter data hour after hour, toiled mightily. One day I was talking to the guy who wrote that particular accounting software. He pointed out that with the wonder of the F8 key that you could save six maybe seven keystrokes. Well, hell, I thought that was just great. So I showed Diane. She looked at me like I was smiling from the other side of sanity. "No." she informed me and displayed the repeated the six key strokes with sure hard pecked vengeance, "it's much easier this way!"
This was my first peek into the unyielding world of all too human habit when referring to any change. I'm pretty sure what she was saying was, and I choice to be charitable here, instead of just flat out calling her dumb, ‘I have done these six keystrokes so many times that even though one keystrokes seems easier, it would take me an insurmountable effort to do something different.’
That thinking leads me to despair. But I can accept it. Instead she insisted when I repeated my observation that six keystrokes could not be easier to manage than one, that I was the one prone to idiocy. This thinking leads me to the other side of sanity.
So, you like to work at your typewriter because that is the way that you work with comfort. Okay! I can accept that. In fact, I'll go you one better. I just don't give a damn. Do it! All I ask is that you please try not to tell me that it is an easier way to go about writing. I spent many a dreadful day, with plenty of white-out and threw out many a soiled, pock marked piece of paper before I typed one that was acceptable. I felt that my time was utterly wasted. I wanted to write and create.
Use your pencils or pens, they are charming. I don't want to strip you of the pleasure of a long line gliding over a smooth clear sheet of paper. Just stop your yammering about how much better it all is than writing on a computer.
I am sitting on my back patio with my one month old Pocket PC, writing with a version of Pocket Word. Last year in the summer, I used my laptop. The pocket PC ids more easily read in the bright sun, it does not take a full three or four minutes to boot, it's battery charge lasts about ten hours, the laptop, at best three, I have innumerable books and articles stored that I can read when I tire of this writing and best of all when it begins to rain or I must move, I fold up the keyboard and put both it and the Pocket PC in my POCKET and move. This, I contend is better and is a definite improvement over the Poor Performing Palm Pilot with constant battery failure and not enough memory that I last owned.
This new technology is a marvel that continues to amplify my intelligence (and there are those who say it could use some mighty amplification). I don't much care about artificial intelligence, AI, but I do think that my salvation and perhaps our salvation will be in Intelligence Amplification, IA. This Pocket PC, my laptop, my desktop computer, my VCR, my Yamaha Keyboard, my toaster that actually browns rather than burns to a black cinder a piece of bread, the microwave that I use mostly for coffee and left-overs, my digital camera that saves me from going to the supermarket and waiting a week for the pictures that chronicle my life, all help make me a more versatile and interesting person.
Wow, this is way more of a soap box than I intended to climb upon. There are old ways that I revere. There are old times that I wish I could recapture. When I dream of time travel (I do more and more frequently. Time is definitely on my mind) it is with an eye toward the past. But the technology of the computer revolution disappoints me only in the fact that it doesn't advance more quickly. Moore's law just doesn't get it for me. (The amount of information storable on a given amount of silicon has roughly doubled every year and a half) And a hearty, Hell Yes!, most of companies creating software are too blinded by securing their intellectual property, IP, and creating really boring acronyms, than by moving forward to far greater rewards.
Amen Brother!
Can I have an Oy Vey?
Friday, April 05, 2002
4/5/02 7:30 AM Friday
Bettino Fragale
Betts was my father's best friend and one of the few adults that I called by first name.
A word about names.
One high school weekend, we loaded ourselves into Jake's father's car, me, Jake, Phil and Mike, went to somewhere in East Liberty, picked up a couple of Mike's friends and went looking for trouble. Stupid I know, but it’s what we did weekly. Luckily we hardly ever found it. We scored some beer and very raw whiskey with fake IDs, and off we went. One of the new guys said they knew where there was a party at Chatham College. Man, we were impressed, an all girls school. Say no more, we headed up Negley Hill.
The people at the party did not receive us well. The hostess, daughter of the Dean or some administrator, avoided us. She whispered in her boyfriend's ear. Someone called him a college puke. We were kicked out. We battled a group of protecting boyfriends on the snow covered front yard. They got their bumps we got ours. After a little blood was spilled, we hopped back into the car full of bravado and craving more beer and cheap whiskey. Now we were combatant buddies and one of the East Liberty guys asked my name in a maudlin, bumbling drunken way that indicated he was going to hug me or give me a wet kiss. Someone told him. He looked surprised and then laughed in loud jerky movements, Kootchicalo, he said, what the hell kind of name is that. It is the kind of name that you gain and never loose. I became Kootchie. There are some who still would call me that. Them I permit, we are after all combatant comrades. I advise all others to avoid it.
Names! My parents lived in a complicated dance of strange names. Here are the people that inhabited my childhood. There was Pickles, Betts, and Maiyu (Actually I don't know how to spell Maiyu. It is pronounced like the word Mayan but with a U ending in place of the -an.), There was my Uncle Cal, Pally, Sparky and Rabbit. Is it any wonder when my family migrated to the suburbs of Wright, Donaldson, Buether, Woods and Fisher, that I felt out of place?
So Betts was my father's best friend and he was the closest thing my brother and I had to Obi Wan Ben Kanobi. Betts paid attention to me and my brother and we adored him.
His trade was painter, and an exquisitely good one he was. I remember him painting the wood trim of a window. Straddling a ladder, cigarette dangling from his mouth, ash would fall and float to the ground as he breathed. The paint brush pointed upward to a severe point, he would move along the wooden sash and execute perfectly. Never an overrun, never a drop spilled. I know how he would have scored me at the same job. Hastily applied pieces of masking tape. Gross strokes as the brush paints tape window and wood. After the removal of the mask, vigorous wiping with a wet paint soaked rag, scraping with a razor the excess dried paint from the window. What, Betts would look, the hell is wrong with you?
Betts was a short, thin guy with a large nose and a sad sack face. He fought with Patton’s Army in Europe. He drove a gas truck that supplied the tanks. He would always laugh and shake his head when he told us how he hid under his truck when German planes strafed the first time.
Betts taught us how to play chess. I was never very good. The game always kind of bored me. Game thinking is not one of my strengths. I get frustrated and desperate as the possibilities begin to close down after every move. My brother was pretty good. Betts was unrelenting. He would never “let” us win. He never tired of playing us and teaching either. His eyes would gleam when we would finally make a worthy move.
Betts lived, later in his life, in a small trailer and managed a pitch and putt golf course in Harmarville, Pa. My brother and I spent endless summer days either working at the Pitch and Putt or at the driving range up on Freeport Road. I remember sitting at the trailer table with a coke, Betts and my old man with some whiskey and explaining this book that I was enamored of. It was called Atlas Shrugged. I mentioned that the author Ayn Rand said that the social structure of the world was typified by a pyramid with rich folk at the apex holding the world together with their cunning, strength and goodness. Betts, laughed, took a drink and explained that the pyramid image might be right but as far as he saw it, it was the working man at the bottom holding up the world. I ultimately figured that who rests the world on their shoulders is really of little importance. Betts' vision was more perceptive than Ayn's, no mater how strange the spelling of her name.
Betts suffered a stroke a short time after he got married, That was, as it turned out very late in his life. He was no longer Betts after the stroke. He passed away one morning. I was coming home on the bus with my mother. I heard the news earlier in the day and assumed that she knew. She couldn’t figure out why my father was such a mess when we got home or why I hadn’t mentioned anything. I worked out a lot of things on that ride home. It was my first silent mourning.
I regret that I have not yet launched my time machine. I would go to visit my father and Betts at a bar that they used to frequent called The Hub. In my heart I know that I would not be the kind of man that they would want to hang with, but for a drink or two I could fake it.
Bettino Fragale
Betts was my father's best friend and one of the few adults that I called by first name.
A word about names.
One high school weekend, we loaded ourselves into Jake's father's car, me, Jake, Phil and Mike, went to somewhere in East Liberty, picked up a couple of Mike's friends and went looking for trouble. Stupid I know, but it’s what we did weekly. Luckily we hardly ever found it. We scored some beer and very raw whiskey with fake IDs, and off we went. One of the new guys said they knew where there was a party at Chatham College. Man, we were impressed, an all girls school. Say no more, we headed up Negley Hill.
The people at the party did not receive us well. The hostess, daughter of the Dean or some administrator, avoided us. She whispered in her boyfriend's ear. Someone called him a college puke. We were kicked out. We battled a group of protecting boyfriends on the snow covered front yard. They got their bumps we got ours. After a little blood was spilled, we hopped back into the car full of bravado and craving more beer and cheap whiskey. Now we were combatant buddies and one of the East Liberty guys asked my name in a maudlin, bumbling drunken way that indicated he was going to hug me or give me a wet kiss. Someone told him. He looked surprised and then laughed in loud jerky movements, Kootchicalo, he said, what the hell kind of name is that. It is the kind of name that you gain and never loose. I became Kootchie. There are some who still would call me that. Them I permit, we are after all combatant comrades. I advise all others to avoid it.
Names! My parents lived in a complicated dance of strange names. Here are the people that inhabited my childhood. There was Pickles, Betts, and Maiyu (Actually I don't know how to spell Maiyu. It is pronounced like the word Mayan but with a U ending in place of the -an.), There was my Uncle Cal, Pally, Sparky and Rabbit. Is it any wonder when my family migrated to the suburbs of Wright, Donaldson, Buether, Woods and Fisher, that I felt out of place?
So Betts was my father's best friend and he was the closest thing my brother and I had to Obi Wan Ben Kanobi. Betts paid attention to me and my brother and we adored him.
His trade was painter, and an exquisitely good one he was. I remember him painting the wood trim of a window. Straddling a ladder, cigarette dangling from his mouth, ash would fall and float to the ground as he breathed. The paint brush pointed upward to a severe point, he would move along the wooden sash and execute perfectly. Never an overrun, never a drop spilled. I know how he would have scored me at the same job. Hastily applied pieces of masking tape. Gross strokes as the brush paints tape window and wood. After the removal of the mask, vigorous wiping with a wet paint soaked rag, scraping with a razor the excess dried paint from the window. What, Betts would look, the hell is wrong with you?
Betts was a short, thin guy with a large nose and a sad sack face. He fought with Patton’s Army in Europe. He drove a gas truck that supplied the tanks. He would always laugh and shake his head when he told us how he hid under his truck when German planes strafed the first time.
Betts taught us how to play chess. I was never very good. The game always kind of bored me. Game thinking is not one of my strengths. I get frustrated and desperate as the possibilities begin to close down after every move. My brother was pretty good. Betts was unrelenting. He would never “let” us win. He never tired of playing us and teaching either. His eyes would gleam when we would finally make a worthy move.
Betts lived, later in his life, in a small trailer and managed a pitch and putt golf course in Harmarville, Pa. My brother and I spent endless summer days either working at the Pitch and Putt or at the driving range up on Freeport Road. I remember sitting at the trailer table with a coke, Betts and my old man with some whiskey and explaining this book that I was enamored of. It was called Atlas Shrugged. I mentioned that the author Ayn Rand said that the social structure of the world was typified by a pyramid with rich folk at the apex holding the world together with their cunning, strength and goodness. Betts, laughed, took a drink and explained that the pyramid image might be right but as far as he saw it, it was the working man at the bottom holding up the world. I ultimately figured that who rests the world on their shoulders is really of little importance. Betts' vision was more perceptive than Ayn's, no mater how strange the spelling of her name.
Betts suffered a stroke a short time after he got married, That was, as it turned out very late in his life. He was no longer Betts after the stroke. He passed away one morning. I was coming home on the bus with my mother. I heard the news earlier in the day and assumed that she knew. She couldn’t figure out why my father was such a mess when we got home or why I hadn’t mentioned anything. I worked out a lot of things on that ride home. It was my first silent mourning.
I regret that I have not yet launched my time machine. I would go to visit my father and Betts at a bar that they used to frequent called The Hub. In my heart I know that I would not be the kind of man that they would want to hang with, but for a drink or two I could fake it.
Wednesday, April 03, 2002
Farseeing, TV or maybe not TV.
4/3/02 7:43 AM Sitting in the coffee shop of the Giant Eagle Supermarket on Camp Horne Road about one-half mile up the hill climb to where I work.
I am always tempted to make things clear, so let me make it clear before I go into this tirade, that I am almost no social critic, have few social graces and have nothing against television. I grew up watching from December Bride til Outer Limits and enjoying, and also that I don't give a damn whether or not viewing causes violence in our children. Imagine that violence in the world, what an anomaly.
As I sit here just trying to write a simple entry into my daily journal I am distracted horribly. Someone, with the intellect of a mollusk thought it would be a good idea to have a TV hanging in the corner of an ersatz coffee shop in a supermarket. To compound this act of architectural befuddlement another person of questionable intellect thought it necessary to turn said TV on. I won't gripe about the fact that no one is ever behind the coffee bar here to serve you a too small plastic cup for too much money so that you can select from a too meager array of brewed coffee beans in shiny stainless steel covered hot pots. I will not bitch because Babcock Blvd. was teeming with ridiculous traffic holding me back from my habitual morning coffee joint and journal.
Stranding, I might add in a huff, if I was complaining, me among the fruits and vegetables, the dread sound of Musak to my right over the speakers atop the coffee counter and the far more familiar grating sound of the TV to the left. A ridiculous thriller mystery. I cannot help but watch. A guy picks up a gun off the floor and points it at a lady who has gun in her hand covering him and says, "Put it down!" in a voice stern enough that she does. I bite my tongue and enjoy the pain in the face of the really insipid writing that has manifested itself. Hey, I take it all back; maybe I don't like TV all that much.
It is a social question after all. Where have we come in America that we cannot bear the natural ambient supermarket noises? The sound of the workers in the deli and bakery, ovens hissing, saws cutting lunch meat, hard four wheel carts clanking over terra cotta floors, people pushing grocery carts with one of the front wheels defective, thump squeal squeak around the store. Why must we have the constant application of musical wall paper, the comforting sounds of commercials, sitcoms, and uninteresting mysteries? Are we puppy dogs who must have the sound of a clock in our sleeping baskets to remind us of mother's heart beat?
Several years ago I purchased the Whole Platinum Package from the cable company. Every time I called them with a problem they would explain that some portion of my service that I had been hitherto receiving wasn't part of the Gold or Silver or Pewter Package that I was paying for. "Look, I said, to the phone representative, what would it cost to just receive everything?" "Well, Mr. Coluccio," he said with an earnest voice, "I believe that at this minute as we speak the High Plateau Platinum Exclusive Service would be ten dollars less than you are paying now."
I knew then that I had crossed over into the new economics. "Oh." I said.
I sat fat, serious inner glow, in front of the digital blinking box with about twenty or thirty channels full of movies. After some cursory viewing it was revealed to me in a kind of glittering mental swelling of my frontal lobe, that very often the same channels, like the birth of identical twins were merely delayed, in this case proving that my simile isn’t strictly true, because of time zone. Hence the very descriptive names HBO East and HBO West. Okay, I thought with my new clarity, no wonder it's cheaper. The economics weren’t so new. New speak, I guess.
A friend of mine once called with a request that the cable company add The Science Fiction Channel to their offerings. The sage representative tied to the other end of the phone said, “I'm really tired of all you people calling about this, we just don't have enough demand for that channel to be added.” Cable is really a corner of the through-the-looking-glass world.
Now I have a godzillion movies showing like the mirror scene in Citizen Kane, endlessly repeating themselves, hour after hour, bad movies into horrible turn. I watch hungrily for a change. Saturday night, all the movie channels assure me. I watch and despair as they roll out movies that I have either seen in the theaters or as a part of my growing DVD collection.
I cannot watch the vestiges of network TV. Writing and production is done by lowest common denominator. Bean counters who pass for creative people choose. BUT, and this is the cruelest BUTT of all.
If the TV is on, I watch. It is tirelessly seductive. I had to make a decision that except for the news in the morning, which I have also stopped watching, not to turn the thing on. Sure enough my productivity has gone up. I am writing and reading more. Playing the guitar and the keyboard with the better proficiency that comes with practice.
The cable channels now repeat themselves, like a Zen tree falling in the forest. On the weekends I weaken and watch for a time. I am more cut off from American culture than I ever have been. I'll bet I couldn't even begin to fill out those TV crossword puzzles in TV Gude. Bereft of all contemporary culture, I create my own, which it turns out is what I was after all along.
Ciao! Superman just came on the tube and this new Lois Lane is quite a dish!
4/3/02 7:43 AM Sitting in the coffee shop of the Giant Eagle Supermarket on Camp Horne Road about one-half mile up the hill climb to where I work.
I am always tempted to make things clear, so let me make it clear before I go into this tirade, that I am almost no social critic, have few social graces and have nothing against television. I grew up watching from December Bride til Outer Limits and enjoying, and also that I don't give a damn whether or not viewing causes violence in our children. Imagine that violence in the world, what an anomaly.
As I sit here just trying to write a simple entry into my daily journal I am distracted horribly. Someone, with the intellect of a mollusk thought it would be a good idea to have a TV hanging in the corner of an ersatz coffee shop in a supermarket. To compound this act of architectural befuddlement another person of questionable intellect thought it necessary to turn said TV on. I won't gripe about the fact that no one is ever behind the coffee bar here to serve you a too small plastic cup for too much money so that you can select from a too meager array of brewed coffee beans in shiny stainless steel covered hot pots. I will not bitch because Babcock Blvd. was teeming with ridiculous traffic holding me back from my habitual morning coffee joint and journal.
Stranding, I might add in a huff, if I was complaining, me among the fruits and vegetables, the dread sound of Musak to my right over the speakers atop the coffee counter and the far more familiar grating sound of the TV to the left. A ridiculous thriller mystery. I cannot help but watch. A guy picks up a gun off the floor and points it at a lady who has gun in her hand covering him and says, "Put it down!" in a voice stern enough that she does. I bite my tongue and enjoy the pain in the face of the really insipid writing that has manifested itself. Hey, I take it all back; maybe I don't like TV all that much.
It is a social question after all. Where have we come in America that we cannot bear the natural ambient supermarket noises? The sound of the workers in the deli and bakery, ovens hissing, saws cutting lunch meat, hard four wheel carts clanking over terra cotta floors, people pushing grocery carts with one of the front wheels defective, thump squeal squeak around the store. Why must we have the constant application of musical wall paper, the comforting sounds of commercials, sitcoms, and uninteresting mysteries? Are we puppy dogs who must have the sound of a clock in our sleeping baskets to remind us of mother's heart beat?
Several years ago I purchased the Whole Platinum Package from the cable company. Every time I called them with a problem they would explain that some portion of my service that I had been hitherto receiving wasn't part of the Gold or Silver or Pewter Package that I was paying for. "Look, I said, to the phone representative, what would it cost to just receive everything?" "Well, Mr. Coluccio," he said with an earnest voice, "I believe that at this minute as we speak the High Plateau Platinum Exclusive Service would be ten dollars less than you are paying now."
I knew then that I had crossed over into the new economics. "Oh." I said.
I sat fat, serious inner glow, in front of the digital blinking box with about twenty or thirty channels full of movies. After some cursory viewing it was revealed to me in a kind of glittering mental swelling of my frontal lobe, that very often the same channels, like the birth of identical twins were merely delayed, in this case proving that my simile isn’t strictly true, because of time zone. Hence the very descriptive names HBO East and HBO West. Okay, I thought with my new clarity, no wonder it's cheaper. The economics weren’t so new. New speak, I guess.
A friend of mine once called with a request that the cable company add The Science Fiction Channel to their offerings. The sage representative tied to the other end of the phone said, “I'm really tired of all you people calling about this, we just don't have enough demand for that channel to be added.” Cable is really a corner of the through-the-looking-glass world.
Now I have a godzillion movies showing like the mirror scene in Citizen Kane, endlessly repeating themselves, hour after hour, bad movies into horrible turn. I watch hungrily for a change. Saturday night, all the movie channels assure me. I watch and despair as they roll out movies that I have either seen in the theaters or as a part of my growing DVD collection.
I cannot watch the vestiges of network TV. Writing and production is done by lowest common denominator. Bean counters who pass for creative people choose. BUT, and this is the cruelest BUTT of all.
If the TV is on, I watch. It is tirelessly seductive. I had to make a decision that except for the news in the morning, which I have also stopped watching, not to turn the thing on. Sure enough my productivity has gone up. I am writing and reading more. Playing the guitar and the keyboard with the better proficiency that comes with practice.
The cable channels now repeat themselves, like a Zen tree falling in the forest. On the weekends I weaken and watch for a time. I am more cut off from American culture than I ever have been. I'll bet I couldn't even begin to fill out those TV crossword puzzles in TV Gude. Bereft of all contemporary culture, I create my own, which it turns out is what I was after all along.
Ciao! Superman just came on the tube and this new Lois Lane is quite a dish!
Monday, April 01, 2002
April 1, 2002 7:06PM
Counterculture and counterweights
I returned to Pittsburgh in 1972, fresh from Denmark and New Experimental College, prior to that Berkeley CA from the Summer of Love onward. I had a daughter one and a half years old, a failed marriage and not much part of a dime in my pocket. My parents bailed me out and I lived with them. I was deep into alternative education and counter to culture and looking for something. One day I found it.
First:
I have been a devotee of the radio since the early days of my life. I remember having the essence scared out of me one night while my parents were out partying and my father's best friend Bettino Fragale, Bets, was babysitting. I was maybe six or seven and my brother was probably three or four. The program was Inner Sanctum, for some reason we were listening to it on the upstairs radio scary in itself because it was where my severe grandmother lived, and the story, as far as my inchoate impressionable brain could tell was about a guy that had fire in his head. I know, it sounds nuts and is probably wrong, but so strong is that image, that I can imagine ,now, a man with his head, lid open a stoked furnace blazing like the hearths of the steel mills a short distance away skirting the Mon River Valley. It still scares the bejeebers out of me. O! That image!
Eventually we got a TV and I was sunk watching Howdy Doody each day, Flub-a-dub and spaghetti and meatballs and the Gillette Friday night fights which really kind of bored me, except for the commercials and alas radio declined in the living room, as surely supplanted by the eye as the horror of a guy with fire in place of his brain turned to image fed with a visual spoon.
Came a revolution. All of this really great rockabilly, jump and jive music that throbbed, just made you feel alive with rhythm, connected. Even better pissed off, if not your parents then, every other adult you met. We had raging arguments, the tables pulled down like Murphy beds, from the walls of William Penn School Grade School, transforming the gymnasium into our lunch room, about the merits of Elvis. I contended that I had never heard a more poignant song than Heartbreak Hotel to my third grade confreres and the joy I felt at Hound Dog could hardly be spoken. And then, Chuck Berry, I was a goner. I couldn't get enough of the radio, early on, KQV and Al Noble became the station and DJ to listen to. On Saturday morning Al would play the top one hundred or so in order. It was, well it was boss or tough or whatever the hell we said. It was even cool for a while. Lee Andrews and the Hearts, Teardrops, is something that I can sing to this day. It's in my head now.
Science Fiction and Rock 'n Roll two guilty pleasures I have carried into my later years.
Sitting with my blue plastic Arvin transistor radio, AM only, there was no Frequency to Modulate on the front steps door stoop you would find me most temperate days reading Astounding Science Fiction, listening next to the rhododendron bushes and the pink flamingos that we had brought back from our I Love Lucy trip to Florida. Believe that trip has taken on mythic dimensions in my family.
Years turned I listened to soppy jazz and montavani strings, matured listened with ineffable joy to KPFA in Berkeley California, thank you Phil Elwood for my education in jazz on Sat and Sun morning, learned Scott Joplin and Django to Ornette Coleman.
I remember one frightful January snowy evening when I was alone in the farmhouse at Fosdalsgaard Danmark, ’67, with only the large vacuum tube international table top radio to DX the world. The red kitchen wooden table. I couldn't sleep well, the darkness outside, the wind blowing wickedly attacking at the thatched roof, the empty dark rooms, Jan was gone, Susan was gone, Sheldon and Betsy, Jake, Aage and Sara. I was stranded, alone in the world except the sound of Radio America and the BBC and whatever I could, distant station Brought to the red table and warm. Trying to keep as sane as possible in the dense dark cold Danish night the nearest neighbor miles away. Cold. Elvis, British Rock, Glenn Miller, snatches of foreign conversation. Alive.
So I returned to America to Pittsburgh and found this radio station. It was borrowing time from WDUQ the local NPR station in the afternoons, while struggling to get the funds to go on the air. WYEP-FM . They were asking for volunteers to help with mailing, licking envelopes etc. I called.
Eventually I became program director.
I remember the first unofficial night best. Larry called from the top of the cathedral, Klystron Tube hot and ready to broadcast. Man, I thought, the Klystron tube! There were only a few of us in the empty basement at four cable place and a small Shure mixer that we used eventually for remote radio broadcasts. Someone hooked it up. John got a twinkle in his eye. “Let’s go on the air!” he said. Just like that. I could feel the excitement that started in my stomach and buoyed me up. I was floating. We plugged in a microphone to the mixer. We were “on the air” John said some extemporaneous things, he handed the mic to me and I said something very inane. John picked up a book off a table. Alan Ginsburg’s Howl and started to read. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,…. It was a perfect start. We even got a phone call from some student in the Pitt dorms who was wondering what the hell he was hearing. Our first talk show.
Two days later the station officially launched, but the programming never matched that first peerless night.
Counterculture and counterweights
I returned to Pittsburgh in 1972, fresh from Denmark and New Experimental College, prior to that Berkeley CA from the Summer of Love onward. I had a daughter one and a half years old, a failed marriage and not much part of a dime in my pocket. My parents bailed me out and I lived with them. I was deep into alternative education and counter to culture and looking for something. One day I found it.
First:
I have been a devotee of the radio since the early days of my life. I remember having the essence scared out of me one night while my parents were out partying and my father's best friend Bettino Fragale, Bets, was babysitting. I was maybe six or seven and my brother was probably three or four. The program was Inner Sanctum, for some reason we were listening to it on the upstairs radio scary in itself because it was where my severe grandmother lived, and the story, as far as my inchoate impressionable brain could tell was about a guy that had fire in his head. I know, it sounds nuts and is probably wrong, but so strong is that image, that I can imagine ,now, a man with his head, lid open a stoked furnace blazing like the hearths of the steel mills a short distance away skirting the Mon River Valley. It still scares the bejeebers out of me. O! That image!
Eventually we got a TV and I was sunk watching Howdy Doody each day, Flub-a-dub and spaghetti and meatballs and the Gillette Friday night fights which really kind of bored me, except for the commercials and alas radio declined in the living room, as surely supplanted by the eye as the horror of a guy with fire in place of his brain turned to image fed with a visual spoon.
Came a revolution. All of this really great rockabilly, jump and jive music that throbbed, just made you feel alive with rhythm, connected. Even better pissed off, if not your parents then, every other adult you met. We had raging arguments, the tables pulled down like Murphy beds, from the walls of William Penn School Grade School, transforming the gymnasium into our lunch room, about the merits of Elvis. I contended that I had never heard a more poignant song than Heartbreak Hotel to my third grade confreres and the joy I felt at Hound Dog could hardly be spoken. And then, Chuck Berry, I was a goner. I couldn't get enough of the radio, early on, KQV and Al Noble became the station and DJ to listen to. On Saturday morning Al would play the top one hundred or so in order. It was, well it was boss or tough or whatever the hell we said. It was even cool for a while. Lee Andrews and the Hearts, Teardrops, is something that I can sing to this day. It's in my head now.
Science Fiction and Rock 'n Roll two guilty pleasures I have carried into my later years.
Sitting with my blue plastic Arvin transistor radio, AM only, there was no Frequency to Modulate on the front steps door stoop you would find me most temperate days reading Astounding Science Fiction, listening next to the rhododendron bushes and the pink flamingos that we had brought back from our I Love Lucy trip to Florida. Believe that trip has taken on mythic dimensions in my family.
Years turned I listened to soppy jazz and montavani strings, matured listened with ineffable joy to KPFA in Berkeley California, thank you Phil Elwood for my education in jazz on Sat and Sun morning, learned Scott Joplin and Django to Ornette Coleman.
I remember one frightful January snowy evening when I was alone in the farmhouse at Fosdalsgaard Danmark, ’67, with only the large vacuum tube international table top radio to DX the world. The red kitchen wooden table. I couldn't sleep well, the darkness outside, the wind blowing wickedly attacking at the thatched roof, the empty dark rooms, Jan was gone, Susan was gone, Sheldon and Betsy, Jake, Aage and Sara. I was stranded, alone in the world except the sound of Radio America and the BBC and whatever I could, distant station Brought to the red table and warm. Trying to keep as sane as possible in the dense dark cold Danish night the nearest neighbor miles away. Cold. Elvis, British Rock, Glenn Miller, snatches of foreign conversation. Alive.
So I returned to America to Pittsburgh and found this radio station. It was borrowing time from WDUQ the local NPR station in the afternoons, while struggling to get the funds to go on the air. WYEP-FM . They were asking for volunteers to help with mailing, licking envelopes etc. I called.
Eventually I became program director.
I remember the first unofficial night best. Larry called from the top of the cathedral, Klystron Tube hot and ready to broadcast. Man, I thought, the Klystron tube! There were only a few of us in the empty basement at four cable place and a small Shure mixer that we used eventually for remote radio broadcasts. Someone hooked it up. John got a twinkle in his eye. “Let’s go on the air!” he said. Just like that. I could feel the excitement that started in my stomach and buoyed me up. I was floating. We plugged in a microphone to the mixer. We were “on the air” John said some extemporaneous things, he handed the mic to me and I said something very inane. John picked up a book off a table. Alan Ginsburg’s Howl and started to read. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,…. It was a perfect start. We even got a phone call from some student in the Pitt dorms who was wondering what the hell he was hearing. Our first talk show.
Two days later the station officially launched, but the programming never matched that first peerless night.