Monday, July 28, 2003 5:48:02 PM Joe Coluccio
Things are more not now than they had even been then.
La plus ça change, la plus change seems like a lot.
I thought I had, for a guy 58 years old, weathered the fast and ever quickening pace of the electronic frontier. I do not quake at the sight of code written in almost any flavor from pre-assembler to 4GL and beyond. Can't say I understand them either, but they don't scare me a whit! No more than looking at some twisted Cyrillic or a diagrammatic Hiragana and Katakana or some squiggling Semitic Notations or High Order Partial Differentiations. I merely sigh; to me they look beautiful, unattainable and full of a promise.
I have embraced blogs and moblogs and wikis. Believed them? Hell, I've used them. How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Praxis, praxis, praxis! I can watch a high res copy of a movie on any of my computers. I can turn key strikes on a piano keyboard or from the strings of my guitar through a synthesizer into instant music notation in a file residing somewhere on my high hard drive. I listen frequently to KQED San Francisco and Wisconsin Public Radio and LBC London and WGN Chicago and 2GS Sydney Australia as freely via the internet as if they were in this same region (It is all that I can do not to pound my fists on this flimsy desk at the state of radio in this city this country because of the mole like vision of the industry and its regulatory agency. Local radio is as dead as the bland formats that it tries to foist on us.). And via router and WAP I can sit in wireless glory at my backyard lawn glasstop table and stay connected.
An aside.
I gathered all this great wireless equipment only to be defeated by the rain. The amount of rain we have had for the last forty days and nights should have me mizzening the mainmast on a schooner heading for Ararat. Proof once again that the testaments old and new are more mythically drawn than accurate real. All we've gotten for the extreme amount of rain is soggy grounds, the inability to stay dry and an aching summer cold that two aspirins and an antihistamine do nothing to alleviate.
Given all my easy acceptance of what most people face with a daily horror I must admit that I was given to pause this weekend when I heard the following story on NPR.
The names are changed 'cause I can't remember them and it doesn't really matter. There is a fantasy game played on the internet 24 hours a day and forever and a year. Let's call it ElvenQuest. It might really be the name. You enter this world formed by the force and imagination of a myriad of others, create a character and have adventures with a hapless group of fellow travelers. If your character is unfortunate enough to stand in the fiery breath of a Dragon from the next zip code you and your creation expire and are no longer a part of the game. Tu es mort, mon ami! Being a mere mortal and possibly a thief or a third level sorcerer and hence not immune to the dangers of your quest, you are able through guile, robbery or just plain old fashioned bludgeonery to obtain objects with power to protect you and keep you swinging on a star. The Magic Sword of Arthur, the babushka of Babiyaga, the Tongue of a young toad or a deferred annuity. So that when, Clem, the Dragon, puffs cigarette rings toward you, you can throw up your asbestos cloak given you by someone who abates hazardous compounds, or jump through the center of the rings with a flubber powered pogo stick. Leaving you, whole and healthy and able to move on to yet another level of adventure.
Let us back to the world that we think we inhabit for a short second and watch as it crumbles. There is this new institution called EBay, an internet agora where you can find, buy and sell just about anything, less the Nazi trinkets just banned and some extreme antisocial forms of pornography.
It turns, Meine Damen und Herren, that you can buy, with real dollars, taken from your working pockets, many of the implements that will save you in the world of ElvenQuest with a mere twist of credit card on an EBay Auction! Stunned I continue!
I thought I was clever looking for the first baby that would be born during an internet tryst. Sexual liaison would be done via a hot chat session which would provide as a result some container full of male seed which would be shipped cross country or world and implanted in the woman partner and Viola (her name) nine months later a spawn of that virtual passion would be the issue. Welcome CyberInfusedBaby !
That seems downright plebeian now in the light of this new Republican Revelation. Who, I ask, will become the first entrepreneurial and very real billionaire, selling these evanescent wares to be figuratively used to save characters overwrought by imagination in a fantasy game spread across the planet into eternity?
Gives new perception to the cave doesn't it, Plato?
Monday, July 28, 2003
Monday, July 07, 2003
Sunday, July 06, 2003 6:24:42 PM Joe Coluccio
I don't expectorate that you'll concede me.
When I first starting writing comedy bits for Lackzoom, I turned to all the early sources of comedy that had afflicted me so as a youngster. I created a character called Julius Waspstinger who opined mightily like Groucho. I turned years of Steve Allen over in my mind, thought about all those guy in street interviews. One of whom was Gabe Dell, a little more about that a little later. I tried writing with the sang froid of SJ Perelman and the shear intellectual mummery of Robert Benchley. Alas, I make this confession here, I was never much of a Stooge Fan. It is only recently that I have appreciated the pure poetic humor of WC Fields, with the sole shining exception of It's A Gift. My mind runs frequently over the blind Mr. Muckles, honey, exploding a table piled high with incandescent light bulbs, pop pop pop while another customer questions ceaselessly "What about my kumquats?" What ever did happen to Capital C small a small r small l Laphong? That movie I always considered great.
As I started writing I did not have to consider the one comic who most affected my writing style. I just accepted that James Joyce of caramelized comedy, that slipped stream of stratified consciousness, that model of modern malapropriate malediction, Leo Gorcey, as my mentor. I think I channeled him.
The Dead End Kids became the East Side Kids became the Bowery Boys. (For about nine features and three serials there were the Little Tough Guys, with Huntz Hall, sans Leo Gorcey).
When I was a kid I lived on Carver Street in the Larimar Avenue section of East Liberty. My family migrated to the Penn Hills suburbs (called only Penn Township in those days) when I reached the third grade. I lived in that small ethnic Italian section of Pittsburgh, that sent more men to fight in World War II than any other part of the country at the end of an era. Larimar Avenue read like a bildungsroman out of the 1930's or 1940's. My parents would take me there vicariously in almost everything we did. Sunday mornings my father would drive down to the Italian Pastry and grab a most satisfying selection of Sfogliatelle, Pasticciotti Canoli, Napoleons Eclairs Ricotta Tarts and Nut Horns. It was truly the stuff that they eat in heaven when there having a treat. Today you can still get yourself to Monroeville and buy the same quality pastries, but you may have to remortgage your house to afford them. My parent’s friends would drop in frequently and I would hear, embellished, of course, stories about the "old" neighborhood. I can still remember the parades of men dressed in red uniform slowly marching and playing brass insturments and the carnival that was held in the lot across from the Larimar School. I went to catechism at Help A Christian Church and I remember the gang of kids that hung out around Carver Street.
There was, I believe still is, an institution in that section of town called The Kingsley House. Summer evenings, the neighborhood would gather, sit as best we could in the stone playground and watch movies that started at the dark end of twilight.
More often than not they would be films of the Bowery Boys.(Or the East End Kids) The strangeness of all this cultural clash is that I felt more like I grew up in 1940 than I grew up in the "Happy Days" of the fifties and sixties. (Make no mistake about it I love Rock n Roll from Bill Haley on and still shiver when Mr. Dadier enters the classroom.)
It wasn't the dupe, the comic heart of the group, Horace Debussy "Sach" Jones (Glimpy, Dippy or just plain Goofy) played by Huntz Hall but the leader, the intellectual of the group, Terrence Aloysius "Slip" Mahoney (aka Ethelbert Muggs McGinnis and an assorted few others), played by Leo, that I adored. And the words that came out of his mouth!
Here is the rest of the Bowery line-up: Bobby Jordan as Bobby, Billy Benedict as Whitey, David Gorcey as Chuck, Bennie Bartlett as Butch, Gabriel Dell in many roles and we can never forget Bernard Gorcey as Louie Dumbrowski, proprietor of Louie's Sweet Shop (honorable mention for Billy Halop and Bernard Punsley in the original Dead End Kids)
It wasn't until years later that I discovered that the Dead End Kids had started in a series of Warner Brother’s socio serious crime films, starring with the likes of Bogart, Cagney, Pat O'Brien and John Garfield. Yikes, I thought, how appropriate, considering that all humor comes from a very deep well. Well?
So it is without a climatic bit of fondue that I represent to you a paradactyl or two from the armadilla of Slipper, mainly me, the Mahoney.
Leities and Genitalnuns,
Never have the clamatious events of the past antidiluvial pituitary given a rise to the post migrational thespis of temporal periodicals. It is with a certain post toastiness that I plot a gyration of normative congloteration that will, I think, sink to the heart of the custard. To my many fantods, I give a rotational shake of the chateau and wish you all a crepuscular crenellated crack on the a postiori.
Say g'night, Slip!
I don't expectorate that you'll concede me.
When I first starting writing comedy bits for Lackzoom, I turned to all the early sources of comedy that had afflicted me so as a youngster. I created a character called Julius Waspstinger who opined mightily like Groucho. I turned years of Steve Allen over in my mind, thought about all those guy in street interviews. One of whom was Gabe Dell, a little more about that a little later. I tried writing with the sang froid of SJ Perelman and the shear intellectual mummery of Robert Benchley. Alas, I make this confession here, I was never much of a Stooge Fan. It is only recently that I have appreciated the pure poetic humor of WC Fields, with the sole shining exception of It's A Gift. My mind runs frequently over the blind Mr. Muckles, honey, exploding a table piled high with incandescent light bulbs, pop pop pop while another customer questions ceaselessly "What about my kumquats?" What ever did happen to Capital C small a small r small l Laphong? That movie I always considered great.
As I started writing I did not have to consider the one comic who most affected my writing style. I just accepted that James Joyce of caramelized comedy, that slipped stream of stratified consciousness, that model of modern malapropriate malediction, Leo Gorcey, as my mentor. I think I channeled him.
The Dead End Kids became the East Side Kids became the Bowery Boys. (For about nine features and three serials there were the Little Tough Guys, with Huntz Hall, sans Leo Gorcey).
When I was a kid I lived on Carver Street in the Larimar Avenue section of East Liberty. My family migrated to the Penn Hills suburbs (called only Penn Township in those days) when I reached the third grade. I lived in that small ethnic Italian section of Pittsburgh, that sent more men to fight in World War II than any other part of the country at the end of an era. Larimar Avenue read like a bildungsroman out of the 1930's or 1940's. My parents would take me there vicariously in almost everything we did. Sunday mornings my father would drive down to the Italian Pastry and grab a most satisfying selection of Sfogliatelle, Pasticciotti Canoli, Napoleons Eclairs Ricotta Tarts and Nut Horns. It was truly the stuff that they eat in heaven when there having a treat. Today you can still get yourself to Monroeville and buy the same quality pastries, but you may have to remortgage your house to afford them. My parent’s friends would drop in frequently and I would hear, embellished, of course, stories about the "old" neighborhood. I can still remember the parades of men dressed in red uniform slowly marching and playing brass insturments and the carnival that was held in the lot across from the Larimar School. I went to catechism at Help A Christian Church and I remember the gang of kids that hung out around Carver Street.
There was, I believe still is, an institution in that section of town called The Kingsley House. Summer evenings, the neighborhood would gather, sit as best we could in the stone playground and watch movies that started at the dark end of twilight.
More often than not they would be films of the Bowery Boys.(Or the East End Kids) The strangeness of all this cultural clash is that I felt more like I grew up in 1940 than I grew up in the "Happy Days" of the fifties and sixties. (Make no mistake about it I love Rock n Roll from Bill Haley on and still shiver when Mr. Dadier enters the classroom.)
It wasn't the dupe, the comic heart of the group, Horace Debussy "Sach" Jones (Glimpy, Dippy or just plain Goofy) played by Huntz Hall but the leader, the intellectual of the group, Terrence Aloysius "Slip" Mahoney (aka Ethelbert Muggs McGinnis and an assorted few others), played by Leo, that I adored. And the words that came out of his mouth!
Here is the rest of the Bowery line-up: Bobby Jordan as Bobby, Billy Benedict as Whitey, David Gorcey as Chuck, Bennie Bartlett as Butch, Gabriel Dell in many roles and we can never forget Bernard Gorcey as Louie Dumbrowski, proprietor of Louie's Sweet Shop (honorable mention for Billy Halop and Bernard Punsley in the original Dead End Kids)
It wasn't until years later that I discovered that the Dead End Kids had started in a series of Warner Brother’s socio serious crime films, starring with the likes of Bogart, Cagney, Pat O'Brien and John Garfield. Yikes, I thought, how appropriate, considering that all humor comes from a very deep well. Well?
So it is without a climatic bit of fondue that I represent to you a paradactyl or two from the armadilla of Slipper, mainly me, the Mahoney.
Leities and Genitalnuns,
Never have the clamatious events of the past antidiluvial pituitary given a rise to the post migrational thespis of temporal periodicals. It is with a certain post toastiness that I plot a gyration of normative congloteration that will, I think, sink to the heart of the custard. To my many fantods, I give a rotational shake of the chateau and wish you all a crepuscular crenellated crack on the a postiori.
Say g'night, Slip!