Monday, January 13, 2003 6:22 PM Joe Coluccio
Perchance to be dream a farce, or maybe a broad comedy…
When I was just a young popinjay in Mrs. Dunham’s 10th Grade English Class, 1st Period Penn Sr. High, (You understand of course that I am pretty much making this up, ‘cause I can hardly distinguish 7th from 8th from 9th from 10th ... well, you get the picture, grade. I am fairly certain there was a pleasing matronly English teacher named Mrs. Dunham, and that great tragedy befell her when her daughter died in a car crash one weekend. Sorry. It happened. I remember the starkness and the horror of it.) I had ‘em lying in the aisles with laughter over a story I had written about a friend of mine called Grieco, on account’a that was his name.
It is true that Grieco was a study in spontaneity which I managed to escalate into a bit of outrageous behavior that was not very far from the truth and well down the road to hilarious. I believe I had a way with turn of phrase back then that gave the funny bone a bit of a bite. Grieco was a fertile ground of whimsy, because he was so damn serious about the mischief that he caused. It didn’t hurt very much that he was a perfectly normal looking human being from whom everyone expected perfectly normal behavior.
Where is he now? I have no idea. Where am I now? That is the question before me this evening.
I am finding it increasingly hard to escalate any of the bizarre behavior that I see from perfectly normal people into anything funny any more. Have I lost my sense of humor? And gained instead a humor of sense?
I peruse the papers each morning (via the internet, which could well be some of the problem) looking for some incident that sparks me into a full blown joy of the laughing jabbers, but find a kind of illogic that instead gives me a case of the shivering fits. I mimic the truly outrageous words of people in the grocery store or at the bus stop, but instead of high humor, I find pathos and turn it into bathos.
I try to write a comedy bit weekly for Lackzoom, one of them, Ask Emiglio, even appears on the web site. And with some labor I manage to finish what I start. But I regret that I seem to have lost the facility to cause an otherwise strong sensible adult to fall in a fit full of splendid fatuous excess onto the ground and roll around under the table with tears of gut busting abandon and agonizing gaiety.
I vow…what? yet another New Year’s Resolution…I will, deerstalker covering my not yet completely bald head, a magnifying glass of considerable power in one hand, a shaker fashioned from the tail end of a rattler to beat the bushes in the other, move deliberately down the path of this life like a mongoose in search of a cobra, looking for the complete sense of humor that I have let shuck from me like a snake shedding its skin.
Sheesh!, what a bunch of really wretched images! See what I mean? What’s with all this wormy, squiggly, serpentine stuff?
After a stint at WYEP-FM as Program Manager I took a job as Traffic Manager at a TV production facility. One of the on-air people, a guy who managed an off beat avant garde jazz radio program each morning, visited me one day. He had a remarkable resemblance to the magician Doug Henning with long flowing hair and full moustache and was wearing, loose fitting jeans, a colorful woven belt, some kind of mukluks and a tie-dyed shirt. He took one look at me and said, “You look all grown-up!”
Was that the day that I lost it? My ability to take the very serious stuff of life and hold it up to wonderful ridicule? Is that knack here inside me, dormant, waiting for the revolution to occur? Or, as in the last words attributed of Sir Donald Wolfit, is comedy just hard? (Sir Don’s last and oft quoted were said to be “Dying is easy, comedy is hard.” At least he got some of it right.)
In any case, win place or fail, neither sleet nor slate nor flail, you will see that I begin my re-emergence from the muck of all seriousness, into the whole yoke of the highly comedic, right here, bi and poly sected, in front of all of Bloggerdom.
What a joke!
Possibly.
Monday, January 13, 2003
Monday, January 06, 2003
Monday January 6, 2003 6:56:21 PM Joe Coluccio
MIDI on our life’s journey, I went astray...
It is a new year. In three or so months, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, spring and renewal will awaken. Chaucer sings of April’s sweet showers and T.S. Eliot is more pleased with breeding Lilacs out of the dead land. And Holmes returns from his plunge from the Rickenback Falls and, of course, Jesus is resurrected from the dead. With all that going on how can I not sit here and wonder what direction I will take. I come up every year with the same answers.
Please don’t mistake this for some vapid New Year’s Vision. Those piles of stock resolutions are easily broken. Nope, I’m damn serious about this business. Just look at the pages of my journals...on second consideration, I’ll just tell you about them.
First and foremost there is the “I will write more and actually finish something soon.” preamble That’s the most risible of all. I’m laughing out loud right this instant in scathing skepticism. How presumptuous, I guffaw. How impertinent, I chortle. How particularly peculiar, I chuckle. And how preposterous, I snicker. Go ahead, I direct my now smaller self, give it a try. Put yourself on the line. You’ll just be even sillier.
Second there is the “I will learn to speak a foreign language.” gambit. Followed by a fitful frenzy of search for audio tapes, complete sets of French in a Minute less the volume two cassette, “Getting along at the train station and cafeteria.” Voulez-vous une tasse de Cognac avec du crème fraîche , monsieur?” Along the way I find a battered copy of Wheelock’s Latin and Workbook, Agricolae in puella est! Hmmm there seems something solemnly salacious about this sentence that I have long ago penned in a ecstatic frenzy on Page Thirteen just above the Title - Syntax. Ah, bene, cogito ergo amo. Then the unending word drills in Danish and Italian and even an occasional smattering of German. Ich est uno polyglot!
And forget about the Greek in the Attic, Aristotelian or otherwise, ‘cause I really can’t figure how to get it to print in a post to the internet. Which reminds me of the promise of those Learn in 21 days, C++, Java, CGI, Visual Basic, Perl, VBA, XML and LSMFT manuals, that sit snarling at me about the fact that their time on this programming world is perishing apace.
Consider my real world work with me a moment. I look longingly at Will Stoecker’s book on Industrial Refrigeration and I stubbornly won’t compel myself to use the SI (Système International, AKA, Metric) instead of the IP (Inch Pound, AKA, the measuring system we recalcitrant dumb Americans use). Kilopascals to you, psig to me. And I can’t possibly, old man, consider Watts a proper measure of British Thermal Units. Tut! The Empire and all that, you know!
Down the shelf a click, intrepid we go. Calculus for Dummies, the Utterly Confused, People who Hate Calculus, Pilgrims Who Have Forgotten Calculus, abandoned, closed, integrated and differentiated covered in dust, remain unused.
And Oh The Music, the Guitar, The Keyboard. This year I have torn it a deeper rip with the procurement of a Guitar Synthesizer and piece of software, called Sibelius, designed to help with music composition and manuscript preparation. (I know, Beethoven is decomposing in my basement as well,)
What in the world, you say, does a guitar synthesizer do. Well..ahh...it can make my guitar sound like a piano and.. Uh, it can play a nifty rhythm accompaniment on the Low E String while I pick a mean lick of the High E String...and ...well c’mon what does it matter what it can do, lotsa stuff, including connect to the MIDI Port of my computer and print those luscious notes on the staff of a piece of virtual paper on the screen provided by Sibelius (The Program not the Swede) as my guitar softly weeps.
See, I get there eventually. MIDI Stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. And it is a dance of signal that lets a MIDI Prepared Musical Instrument Interface with some Digital Device or other. My Keyboard is MIDI, my cheap Stratocaster Guitar now has a pick-up that sends separate string signal to a MIDI device that connects to a Synthesizer and my computer’s sound card has a MIDI Port. I connect them together. Power up Keyboard, Synthesizer and Guitar, boot the computer, start the Sibelius Program. And.
Nothing happens!
(other than some sixty cycle hum and the susurration of a few air cooling equipment fans)
It isn’t intelligence. It just helps amplify ours. (At some later date I will pommel you with my ideas about IA and not IA)
Oh, did I mention that I was going to look very seriously into composing music this year. Let’s see! Start with a very soft CMaj7 Chord played in Third Position, slowly on Staff Two after a bar or so a cushion of tin whistle about a third higher, while the Tambora beats a slow sad rhythm on Staff Six....
..and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood.
MIDI on our life’s journey, I went astray...
It is a new year. In three or so months, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, spring and renewal will awaken. Chaucer sings of April’s sweet showers and T.S. Eliot is more pleased with breeding Lilacs out of the dead land. And Holmes returns from his plunge from the Rickenback Falls and, of course, Jesus is resurrected from the dead. With all that going on how can I not sit here and wonder what direction I will take. I come up every year with the same answers.
Please don’t mistake this for some vapid New Year’s Vision. Those piles of stock resolutions are easily broken. Nope, I’m damn serious about this business. Just look at the pages of my journals...on second consideration, I’ll just tell you about them.
First and foremost there is the “I will write more and actually finish something soon.” preamble That’s the most risible of all. I’m laughing out loud right this instant in scathing skepticism. How presumptuous, I guffaw. How impertinent, I chortle. How particularly peculiar, I chuckle. And how preposterous, I snicker. Go ahead, I direct my now smaller self, give it a try. Put yourself on the line. You’ll just be even sillier.
Second there is the “I will learn to speak a foreign language.” gambit. Followed by a fitful frenzy of search for audio tapes, complete sets of French in a Minute less the volume two cassette, “Getting along at the train station and cafeteria.” Voulez-vous une tasse de Cognac avec du crème fraîche , monsieur?” Along the way I find a battered copy of Wheelock’s Latin and Workbook, Agricolae in puella est! Hmmm there seems something solemnly salacious about this sentence that I have long ago penned in a ecstatic frenzy on Page Thirteen just above the Title - Syntax. Ah, bene, cogito ergo amo. Then the unending word drills in Danish and Italian and even an occasional smattering of German. Ich est uno polyglot!
And forget about the Greek in the Attic, Aristotelian or otherwise, ‘cause I really can’t figure how to get it to print in a post to the internet. Which reminds me of the promise of those Learn in 21 days, C++, Java, CGI, Visual Basic, Perl, VBA, XML and LSMFT manuals, that sit snarling at me about the fact that their time on this programming world is perishing apace.
Consider my real world work with me a moment. I look longingly at Will Stoecker’s book on Industrial Refrigeration and I stubbornly won’t compel myself to use the SI (Système International, AKA, Metric) instead of the IP (Inch Pound, AKA, the measuring system we recalcitrant dumb Americans use). Kilopascals to you, psig to me. And I can’t possibly, old man, consider Watts a proper measure of British Thermal Units. Tut! The Empire and all that, you know!
Down the shelf a click, intrepid we go. Calculus for Dummies, the Utterly Confused, People who Hate Calculus, Pilgrims Who Have Forgotten Calculus, abandoned, closed, integrated and differentiated covered in dust, remain unused.
And Oh The Music, the Guitar, The Keyboard. This year I have torn it a deeper rip with the procurement of a Guitar Synthesizer and piece of software, called Sibelius, designed to help with music composition and manuscript preparation. (I know, Beethoven is decomposing in my basement as well,)
What in the world, you say, does a guitar synthesizer do. Well..ahh...it can make my guitar sound like a piano and.. Uh, it can play a nifty rhythm accompaniment on the Low E String while I pick a mean lick of the High E String...and ...well c’mon what does it matter what it can do, lotsa stuff, including connect to the MIDI Port of my computer and print those luscious notes on the staff of a piece of virtual paper on the screen provided by Sibelius (The Program not the Swede) as my guitar softly weeps.
See, I get there eventually. MIDI Stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. And it is a dance of signal that lets a MIDI Prepared Musical Instrument Interface with some Digital Device or other. My Keyboard is MIDI, my cheap Stratocaster Guitar now has a pick-up that sends separate string signal to a MIDI device that connects to a Synthesizer and my computer’s sound card has a MIDI Port. I connect them together. Power up Keyboard, Synthesizer and Guitar, boot the computer, start the Sibelius Program. And.
Nothing happens!
(other than some sixty cycle hum and the susurration of a few air cooling equipment fans)
It isn’t intelligence. It just helps amplify ours. (At some later date I will pommel you with my ideas about IA and not IA)
Oh, did I mention that I was going to look very seriously into composing music this year. Let’s see! Start with a very soft CMaj7 Chord played in Third Position, slowly on Staff Two after a bar or so a cushion of tin whistle about a third higher, while the Tambora beats a slow sad rhythm on Staff Six....
..and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood.