Monday, June 16, 2003 7:02:28 PM Joe Coluccio
Con'd from last rock
Message from Barney to Fred on the Road to the Bronze Age.
One Thanksgiving Art and another friend took off. Live fast. Left the gripes of home and parent behind and grabbed a bus to Chicago, where a childhood friend of Art’s, Frankie, had moved the year before. I drove them to the bus stop and pledged Omerta! I would never reveal where they went to anyone for any reason.
It was cold, just a slight stick of snow on the windshield. We sat in the heat of the car with a bag of burgers between us, ten for a buck, bought at a shack mid Frankstown Road. Talked until our noses filled with the heavy smell of diesel and our ears filled with the swish of air brakes. They took a last bite, grabbed their bags out of the trunk. Left.
I lived up to that promise the next morning when the Art's father called and demanded that I tell him where his son was. "Do you know what he took with him?" Art helped himself to the stash of cash from the bottom of the dining room china closet. The roll looked round and rich, more than a few months worth of saving. "He took my gun!" Die young.
I held silence, through the onslaught dealt by my own parents who couldn’t really figure out what to make of the situation, and the glass tears of Art’s mother and the blazing indignity of Art’s father and the stern looks of the police who visited. You could see the real story in their authoritative eyes. ‘Two more juveniles we won’t have to hassle with.’
I felt that it was an unfair burden foisted on me by some imagined Italian code of honor made up from gangster novels and Mafia movies. Not only did I take the beating from all authority, but I lost my two closest friends.
Two week later they came home. One hating the other more than the other hated the other. It came out in drips in conversation in the following months. Art thought his former closest friend was a slob. “He picked up French fries that had fallen to the dirty greasy street and ate them,” in a voice that said clearly that such actions lacked dignity, honor, panache!
“We were starving!” Explained my other friend. Art and Frankie attempted armed robbery. Pleading, he stopped them from killing the victim. Somewhere along the line dreaming ideology met irrational practicality. Leopold and Loeb meet Holden Caulfield. And have a good looking corpse.
For the next year I was in one camp or the other. There would be no reconciliation. Then Art disappeared seriously. Left for New York City and did not reappear for five or more years.
We graduated from High School, failed miserably at Penn State, worked at too many poor jobs, restaurants, book stores, machinery shops, and traveled to Europe. Always gathered back in Pittsburgh.
Art reappeared as suddenly as he was gone. Relating stories of days of hustling in New York City. He had money. Taken from the suckers and the queers. As he talked I felt smaller and smaller. It was a part his hustle to grow large, laugh large, keep the world under his control. Until someone bigger and badder and one up comes along. Many people think this is a technique worth mastering. Mostly, I laugh at the foolish posturing, but catch me on a down day and you can bluster and become king of my world. For what its worth.
He finagled a position as salesmen in the phonograph record industry in the city of Pittsburgh. He got a me job with one of the many arcane companies and corporations that made up the business. I was hired to transship phonograph records, a slightly unethical practice with borders on illegal that was cross purposes with the Record Labels and Distributors. I learned how to strip shipping cartons of all but one destination label. Anonymous boxes delivered to the bus station three or four times a day. Art wore salesman well with thin ties and shining suits. He would grab me by the arm and laugh with his big laugh. 'We're still friends, Joe. We know what’s going on here' he seemed to say as he circled higher and higher with the buzzards. Flew with the mighty and high ones. I was grounded.
Winter came. I went to work at a place that made Rolling Mills for the Steel Industry.
Somewhere along the line we lost touch probably when I married and left for California. He was married with three children. Stunning beautiful wife and dissatisfied. Looking for more action. Cheating in open green pastures.
I saw his father maybe ten or fifteen years ago at a movie theatre with a pretty young woman. Said nothing.
In the night I can hear that big laugh.
Monday, June 16, 2003
Monday, June 09, 2003
Sunday, June 08, 2003 8:19:15 AM Joe Coluccio
Wait for me, Wild Bill!
Art and I were friends all the years and summers that I struggled for my PA State Driver's License. I went to the State Police Barracks at Washington Boulevard twice. Crushed by my first defeat, I managed the loops and backwards logic of parallel parking on the follow-up test a few weeks later. Freedom! As long as I could manage to talk the keys of the car out of my old man's hands.
By the tenth grade Art was gone. A runaway to New York City, heartache to his parents and sociopath to the rest of us. Live fast, we thought, die young, we fantasized and have a good looking corpse. Art came the closest to emulating Nick Romano.
He was a good looking guy, a clone of his father, his mother a clone of Barbara Billingsly caring for the Beaver, perfectly coifed, sexually repressed and suburban dressed. She tolerated me but despised the bulk of his other friends. It was a house where you left the assumption of your dirty shoes on the rug at the back door and walked in uncomfortable socks over splendid carpet that carried immaculate furniture poised on plastic leg coasters. He had a sister who was dark and voluptuous but too budding young to pay close attention.
Art's black hair swept back heavy was glued to the side of his head with the grease that passed for gel in that time. When he didn't carry it as a carrier top in the summer, it waved casually to his forehead so that he could push it back with his fat flat fingers. His nose was small straight and his lips were heavy, slightly feminine. He had a big laugh that never failed to lead us to trouble. He would start with a twisted grin, grab my arm, open his mouth and work his way up to a maniacal breaking decibel. That laugh was meant to draw me into a friendly intimacy as if to say we know, wink, a lot better than this Joe. Don’t we? Eh?
He loved to run with what passed for the rough crowd. It was in the rarefied air of Sturm und Drang and desperate scholarship that our friendship flourished. We were rebellious, outlaws, and disdained the notions of a morality being foisted upon us by the school district, the church, our parents and the President of the United States.
We imagined ourselves as a river boat gamblers, wise in the hard intentions of the world but initiates in the truly great dimensions of literate culture. He knew and quoted Annabelle Lee at the drop of a scanned meter. Was more intimidating playing pool than good. Gave hard looks at all night poker marathons and lost poorly. Our heroes were all the bad guys. But we loved the border character the best. The one that could turn terrible bad in an instant and leave all goody two shoes posturing in the dust.
Girls flocked to him with an ease that left me breathless and jealous. I drove. He made out loudly in the front passenger seat, the girl pushing passion against my legs and arms making the vehicle a lethal weapon in my inexperienced hands. Occasionally there was a double date, but the girl I was with really wanted Art and was probably as put off as I was by the loud sexual sounds that issued from often as not her sister in the rear of the car. I never made the moves. So I guess I'll never know.
One Thanksgiving Art and another friend left home. For good. This was episode one.
I remember feeling a peculiar bleakness as we walked through the cold past glowing Christmas decorations and gift displays at the then prospering East Hills Shopping Center. My friends talked of Chicago like it was the grand salvation of all their miserable existence. Come along, they said. But I never felt that I had it that bad. I would miss the warmth of my family, close and extended, during the coming vacation. The rebellion that I felt had nothing to do with the world around me. It was a heat that I carried in the center of my being that makes allowances for the imperfection of situations. I never really lost it. Carry it to this day. And I knew that Chicago could do nothing to make it better.
One night I drove them to the bus stop. Watched as they checked a bag each with the driver and stepped up on to the bus heading west dark into America. I went home, listened to the radio until I fell asleep.
Con'd on the next blog post.
Wait for me, Wild Bill!
Art and I were friends all the years and summers that I struggled for my PA State Driver's License. I went to the State Police Barracks at Washington Boulevard twice. Crushed by my first defeat, I managed the loops and backwards logic of parallel parking on the follow-up test a few weeks later. Freedom! As long as I could manage to talk the keys of the car out of my old man's hands.
By the tenth grade Art was gone. A runaway to New York City, heartache to his parents and sociopath to the rest of us. Live fast, we thought, die young, we fantasized and have a good looking corpse. Art came the closest to emulating Nick Romano.
He was a good looking guy, a clone of his father, his mother a clone of Barbara Billingsly caring for the Beaver, perfectly coifed, sexually repressed and suburban dressed. She tolerated me but despised the bulk of his other friends. It was a house where you left the assumption of your dirty shoes on the rug at the back door and walked in uncomfortable socks over splendid carpet that carried immaculate furniture poised on plastic leg coasters. He had a sister who was dark and voluptuous but too budding young to pay close attention.
Art's black hair swept back heavy was glued to the side of his head with the grease that passed for gel in that time. When he didn't carry it as a carrier top in the summer, it waved casually to his forehead so that he could push it back with his fat flat fingers. His nose was small straight and his lips were heavy, slightly feminine. He had a big laugh that never failed to lead us to trouble. He would start with a twisted grin, grab my arm, open his mouth and work his way up to a maniacal breaking decibel. That laugh was meant to draw me into a friendly intimacy as if to say we know, wink, a lot better than this Joe. Don’t we? Eh?
He loved to run with what passed for the rough crowd. It was in the rarefied air of Sturm und Drang and desperate scholarship that our friendship flourished. We were rebellious, outlaws, and disdained the notions of a morality being foisted upon us by the school district, the church, our parents and the President of the United States.
We imagined ourselves as a river boat gamblers, wise in the hard intentions of the world but initiates in the truly great dimensions of literate culture. He knew and quoted Annabelle Lee at the drop of a scanned meter. Was more intimidating playing pool than good. Gave hard looks at all night poker marathons and lost poorly. Our heroes were all the bad guys. But we loved the border character the best. The one that could turn terrible bad in an instant and leave all goody two shoes posturing in the dust.
Girls flocked to him with an ease that left me breathless and jealous. I drove. He made out loudly in the front passenger seat, the girl pushing passion against my legs and arms making the vehicle a lethal weapon in my inexperienced hands. Occasionally there was a double date, but the girl I was with really wanted Art and was probably as put off as I was by the loud sexual sounds that issued from often as not her sister in the rear of the car. I never made the moves. So I guess I'll never know.
One Thanksgiving Art and another friend left home. For good. This was episode one.
I remember feeling a peculiar bleakness as we walked through the cold past glowing Christmas decorations and gift displays at the then prospering East Hills Shopping Center. My friends talked of Chicago like it was the grand salvation of all their miserable existence. Come along, they said. But I never felt that I had it that bad. I would miss the warmth of my family, close and extended, during the coming vacation. The rebellion that I felt had nothing to do with the world around me. It was a heat that I carried in the center of my being that makes allowances for the imperfection of situations. I never really lost it. Carry it to this day. And I knew that Chicago could do nothing to make it better.
One night I drove them to the bus stop. Watched as they checked a bag each with the driver and stepped up on to the bus heading west dark into America. I went home, listened to the radio until I fell asleep.
Con'd on the next blog post.
Monday, June 02, 2003
Sunday, June 01, 2003 9:22:07 AM Joe Coluccio
The internet is high contact not high content.
A paraphrase of something that I heard via KQED's on air streaming internet feed. I dislike curt statements of this type that with subtle manipulations by the author create a whole all encompassing worldview that solves everything well into the next millennium, but I have to admit, often as not, there is something to them.
There is something high contact about the internet.
And content, which is, without doubt, lacking, may turn to be quite different than any we can imagine.
Web Logs (Blogs) are a cross between an internet home page and an autobiography or diary. They have grown from just a few five or so years ago to upwards of half a million. A lot of disparate souls desperate for communications in the electronic wilderness. I admit freely that I am one of them. And the contact over the couple years that I have been bloging is interesting.
I have come to be “in touch" with:
Two lost school friends, one from high school and one who lived two doors away from me in the "Larimar Avenue" section of Pittsburgh when we were in Kindergarten through the 2nd Grade. A school mate who I don't recall meeting other than passing in the hallways of Penn Senior High School (I've looked in the year book) but who was apparently touched enough by my writing to email me. My ninth grade English teacher who I wrote about in an earlier entry. One of the authors of a book about Shakespeare that I mentioned in another entry. The daughter of a friend who wondered some about her father's early years. And several more that that I will not mention here because I have not become reacquainted via this "blogging" effort, but are equally delightful to me and directly related to contact by means of the internet.
I cannot express in words and images satisfying enough the ecstasy of that high contact and what it has meant to me. What was it called in the dopey sixties and seventies, "a contact high"? Breathing in the new bytefilled "smoke" of the world wide web.
In earlier blog entries I have stated (as well as to anyone who would sit long enough to listen) that the primary use a computer is to amplify intelligence. I tackle tasks now that I would have found impossibly daunting precomputer. And have pointed out that at present I have little interest in artificial intelligence. Some AI could be a species dangling anew on the chain of survival. Our next rival for the new world order may be an enhanced wide slice bagel toaster. When it comes time to be sensitive to the cycles of, say, my washing machine, I will be there, as always, with waves of empathy, but for now I discount appliances and modes of transportation as places to spend my psychic tokens. There are those who would take issue with me and would also point out that the use of AI should not be limited to utility. I never claimed I was Nostradamus. The only seering I do is in a frying pan and I like the surprise that comes from discovery not fortune telling.
Therefore
I was taken completely unaware by the kind of linking that I would find via the world vast internetwork. As I sit here and think it takes my breath away. I get up in the morning go to work. Spend my day at something diverting that hopefully has some meaning beside earning the "greenbacka dollah". Struggle home in the funk of high drive traffic, write (in the backyard when the weather allows), drink a glass or two of some wine that was on sale at the State Store, read, and often as not am in bed by 9 or 9:30 PM. I see my extended family on holidays. Lackzoom meets once a week. I seldom see my children (except for my son who lives with me; come to think of it, I seldom see him either). It is the life of a monk, a hermit, a recluse. A Boo Radley kind of existence. Yet I feel close to all you. This blog contains the objects that I leave in the knot of the tree and the nearness I feel is a direct result of the "high contact" of the internet.
I always thought a great name for a drink would be a Tequila Mockingbird. Absinthe, wormwood and moonflowers? Contact!
The internet is high contact not high content.
A paraphrase of something that I heard via KQED's on air streaming internet feed. I dislike curt statements of this type that with subtle manipulations by the author create a whole all encompassing worldview that solves everything well into the next millennium, but I have to admit, often as not, there is something to them.
There is something high contact about the internet.
And content, which is, without doubt, lacking, may turn to be quite different than any we can imagine.
Web Logs (Blogs) are a cross between an internet home page and an autobiography or diary. They have grown from just a few five or so years ago to upwards of half a million. A lot of disparate souls desperate for communications in the electronic wilderness. I admit freely that I am one of them. And the contact over the couple years that I have been bloging is interesting.
I have come to be “in touch" with:
Two lost school friends, one from high school and one who lived two doors away from me in the "Larimar Avenue" section of Pittsburgh when we were in Kindergarten through the 2nd Grade. A school mate who I don't recall meeting other than passing in the hallways of Penn Senior High School (I've looked in the year book) but who was apparently touched enough by my writing to email me. My ninth grade English teacher who I wrote about in an earlier entry. One of the authors of a book about Shakespeare that I mentioned in another entry. The daughter of a friend who wondered some about her father's early years. And several more that that I will not mention here because I have not become reacquainted via this "blogging" effort, but are equally delightful to me and directly related to contact by means of the internet.
I cannot express in words and images satisfying enough the ecstasy of that high contact and what it has meant to me. What was it called in the dopey sixties and seventies, "a contact high"? Breathing in the new bytefilled "smoke" of the world wide web.
In earlier blog entries I have stated (as well as to anyone who would sit long enough to listen) that the primary use a computer is to amplify intelligence. I tackle tasks now that I would have found impossibly daunting precomputer. And have pointed out that at present I have little interest in artificial intelligence. Some AI could be a species dangling anew on the chain of survival. Our next rival for the new world order may be an enhanced wide slice bagel toaster. When it comes time to be sensitive to the cycles of, say, my washing machine, I will be there, as always, with waves of empathy, but for now I discount appliances and modes of transportation as places to spend my psychic tokens. There are those who would take issue with me and would also point out that the use of AI should not be limited to utility. I never claimed I was Nostradamus. The only seering I do is in a frying pan and I like the surprise that comes from discovery not fortune telling.
Therefore
I was taken completely unaware by the kind of linking that I would find via the world vast internetwork. As I sit here and think it takes my breath away. I get up in the morning go to work. Spend my day at something diverting that hopefully has some meaning beside earning the "greenbacka dollah". Struggle home in the funk of high drive traffic, write (in the backyard when the weather allows), drink a glass or two of some wine that was on sale at the State Store, read, and often as not am in bed by 9 or 9:30 PM. I see my extended family on holidays. Lackzoom meets once a week. I seldom see my children (except for my son who lives with me; come to think of it, I seldom see him either). It is the life of a monk, a hermit, a recluse. A Boo Radley kind of existence. Yet I feel close to all you. This blog contains the objects that I leave in the knot of the tree and the nearness I feel is a direct result of the "high contact" of the internet.
I always thought a great name for a drink would be a Tequila Mockingbird. Absinthe, wormwood and moonflowers? Contact!
Monday, May 19, 2003
Monday, May 19, 2003 4:54:32 AM Joe Coluccio
The dreadful desperate dark world of writing.
I make no secret of it. I write. I do however when I am approached at a brisk café typing somewhat contentedly on this laptop computer, tell the person that I am merely getting some business document ready for the next day. So, my measure being took, I am then asked by the mostly retired person, who has been sold a bill of goods about the wonder of the computer and the internet, if I can get stock quotations fresh from the sprawling web right there in the restaurant. My immediate mental response is, 'What the hell would I do with them?' but I realize that I have established myself as some far seeing technologically savvy business maven, so I just explain that I don't have the proper wireless gear to grab greedy market wisdom.
I make no secret of it. I write. Except to myself. In the past I have needed all sort of personal prodding to get me to confront the blank screen that is portraying a blank piece of paper. The screen that is and is not pristine white paper actually makes my progress easier. Soiling white nothing with black ASCII code that I can completely erase with ease and will, silly spelling mistake and even sillier thoughts that I can change with equal ease but a bit more energetic act of will, and self publishing via copy and paste or FTP (really both) to the internet so that people can read has made a whole world of difference to me. (Aside: If the gods of microsoft and allied software vendors are insufficiently amused I lose power or some molecule collides with some bitful switch and just causes the whole thing to cascade to black. My world folds. I sigh! I reboot!) Here then is the true miracle of the dub dub dub, even I can make a fool of myself open for the whole world in 19 degrees of separation to view. So, those of you who actually take the time to read this, thanks, I can truly say, “I need you!" And can only hope that it pays some dividend to you.
I make no secret of it. I write. Last week I wrote a screenplay. This weekend I purchased a piece of software called Storyboard Quick 4.0. Here we encounter again the miracle of our new digital heritage. I search engined (hey, if you can Fed Ex?) to find software that would help me, I found a page with a demo, I was convinced by the pretty pictures, I purchased the product and downloaded it. About a half an hour later I was drawing my story. Story boarding is a process where you develop a screenplay visually. The results are much like a comic book. It is true that you can storyboard by artistic hand with sheets of paper or cards, but my drawing skills are as close to nonexistent as I have made them. PLUS I realize I only have my own dim understanding about the way in which a movie is structured. I storyboard to learn.
I make no secret of it. I write. I was at once exhilarated and appalled at what happened as I put, shot by shot, the scenes together. I have noticed in the past that as I write I become woefully upset as the depth of what is in my mind becomes more and more limited and hopelessly complicated. It never ends up as the simple, clear beautiful thing that I thought I was writing. Characters get in the way, Plot gets in the way. 'Why, I cry, would any sane person put up with this?' As I worked with the new program, those people and visual angles became concrete and started to limit even more of my vision. I became desperate. Every image as it became stable, no longer shimmered with the magnificent potential that I dreamed.
I make no secret of it. I write. "What,' I reasoned after some fortification of spirit, 'is telling a story but the process of limiting and molding the unlimited gloop that runs through my thinking?' There was still something more to consider. Without those choices, without that limitation, you really have nothing resembling narrative. Maybe an inchoate mess of streaming image and words. What was disturbing me was the jolt of emotion and viscera that sit behind all the lightning of words that rush to create an image which tries to stand. The great ones make it stand. The manifestation of the jolt of guts and memory.
I make no secret of it. I write. It is like firing a twisted arrow from a warped bow blindfolded at a target that only appears capriciously. That is writing. I ride and seek to tame the rush of it. Eventually portray it. With some joy I have discovered that after the initial work of writing, after the rough fashioning of story, comes the work of recreation where if I haven't precisely achieved this vision of emotional target, it is at least indicated. What happens after I pen Finis is in your court.
I write. It is a great secret that I explore, deplore and adore.
The dreadful desperate dark world of writing.
I make no secret of it. I write. I do however when I am approached at a brisk café typing somewhat contentedly on this laptop computer, tell the person that I am merely getting some business document ready for the next day. So, my measure being took, I am then asked by the mostly retired person, who has been sold a bill of goods about the wonder of the computer and the internet, if I can get stock quotations fresh from the sprawling web right there in the restaurant. My immediate mental response is, 'What the hell would I do with them?' but I realize that I have established myself as some far seeing technologically savvy business maven, so I just explain that I don't have the proper wireless gear to grab greedy market wisdom.
I make no secret of it. I write. Except to myself. In the past I have needed all sort of personal prodding to get me to confront the blank screen that is portraying a blank piece of paper. The screen that is and is not pristine white paper actually makes my progress easier. Soiling white nothing with black ASCII code that I can completely erase with ease and will, silly spelling mistake and even sillier thoughts that I can change with equal ease but a bit more energetic act of will, and self publishing via copy and paste or FTP (really both) to the internet so that people can read has made a whole world of difference to me. (Aside: If the gods of microsoft and allied software vendors are insufficiently amused I lose power or some molecule collides with some bitful switch and just causes the whole thing to cascade to black. My world folds. I sigh! I reboot!) Here then is the true miracle of the dub dub dub, even I can make a fool of myself open for the whole world in 19 degrees of separation to view. So, those of you who actually take the time to read this, thanks, I can truly say, “I need you!" And can only hope that it pays some dividend to you.
I make no secret of it. I write. Last week I wrote a screenplay. This weekend I purchased a piece of software called Storyboard Quick 4.0. Here we encounter again the miracle of our new digital heritage. I search engined (hey, if you can Fed Ex?) to find software that would help me, I found a page with a demo, I was convinced by the pretty pictures, I purchased the product and downloaded it. About a half an hour later I was drawing my story. Story boarding is a process where you develop a screenplay visually. The results are much like a comic book. It is true that you can storyboard by artistic hand with sheets of paper or cards, but my drawing skills are as close to nonexistent as I have made them. PLUS I realize I only have my own dim understanding about the way in which a movie is structured. I storyboard to learn.
I make no secret of it. I write. I was at once exhilarated and appalled at what happened as I put, shot by shot, the scenes together. I have noticed in the past that as I write I become woefully upset as the depth of what is in my mind becomes more and more limited and hopelessly complicated. It never ends up as the simple, clear beautiful thing that I thought I was writing. Characters get in the way, Plot gets in the way. 'Why, I cry, would any sane person put up with this?' As I worked with the new program, those people and visual angles became concrete and started to limit even more of my vision. I became desperate. Every image as it became stable, no longer shimmered with the magnificent potential that I dreamed.
I make no secret of it. I write. "What,' I reasoned after some fortification of spirit, 'is telling a story but the process of limiting and molding the unlimited gloop that runs through my thinking?' There was still something more to consider. Without those choices, without that limitation, you really have nothing resembling narrative. Maybe an inchoate mess of streaming image and words. What was disturbing me was the jolt of emotion and viscera that sit behind all the lightning of words that rush to create an image which tries to stand. The great ones make it stand. The manifestation of the jolt of guts and memory.
I make no secret of it. I write. It is like firing a twisted arrow from a warped bow blindfolded at a target that only appears capriciously. That is writing. I ride and seek to tame the rush of it. Eventually portray it. With some joy I have discovered that after the initial work of writing, after the rough fashioning of story, comes the work of recreation where if I haven't precisely achieved this vision of emotional target, it is at least indicated. What happens after I pen Finis is in your court.
I write. It is a great secret that I explore, deplore and adore.
Monday, May 12, 2003
Sunday, May 11, 2003 8:51:00 AM Joe Coluccio
Am I the boob, googoo g'joob?
About three weeks ago I made a decision not to watch television. It has been an interesting experiment. Not because, you understand, I am a snob about the déclassé nature of the boob tube. I find people who ban their snooty minds and/or children from viewing have arguments as cogent as people who have found the most convincing new diet and conversations as mind numbing as golfers describing the dog leg just before the sand trap on number sixteen at Alamogordo Pines.
Au contraire --mon semblable,--mon frere-- I was raised in the blue electronic bath of the cathode ray. To me it was mother's milk and other things of that ilk. Perhaps that is the problem. Time for me to wean from the "glass teat".
What then, I ask, am I missing?
Look at what they call the news.
It is at the very least alarmist and certainly slanted to Middle America. Someone once explained to me that the soap opera formula was to immerse a population of upper middle class folk into a vat of lower class problems. It seems to me that news takes a similar tack. It amplifies very small and very tragic situations and places them statistically high in our living rooms so that we can cower and bite our nails to the very nub until the balm of commercial message can be applied. News sells soap as well.
A local newscaster answered when queried, "Well, what is good news? We can't very well report that Joe Doaks didn't get shot last night." The good news to these, what was it, “nattering nabobs" is the commercials. They don't really have any idea, nor do they care to spread the wonders of imagination and good work that occurs daily!
I have my own ghosts to scare me thank you very much!
I can't really comment on network prime time shows. I simply don't watch. There is that tradition of great TV comedy after you strain out the truly boring sit coms with comfortable people doing simple things in an unconvincing manner. I don't need to name the great shows. You know them. I have heard that a network manages a gem on occasion. I just don't have the patience to set aside a period of time to sit and watch. Although technologically adept (I can even set the timer on my VCR), I find myself far too lazy and disinterested to videotape for a later viewing.
Sports. I think TV is excellent for sports and I think it is well done. It is immediate and real. Somewhere along the line my interest waned. The Pirates get me in the spring for about a month. I watch a couple games even learn a new name or two. Alas Dixie Walker and Ralph Kiner or the whole menagerie that The "Gunner" named for the 60's Pirates are part of another time. The new world is about contracts and sports, I am told endlessly, is a "business". Sorry friends, no matter how many employ the litany, sports remains an entertainment. I preferred my players and teams to seem loyal to the city and region, even when they weren't. Shucks betrayed again!
Educational TV can be swell. Sadly it is not only bound by time constraints but defeated by the medium. It cannot give you the depth of a subject; it can provide an emotional response that starts you on a journey of discovery. It is often tainted by the same problem as news. SARS killed a little more than 500 people out of a world population of 6 billion. 0.00000000833%. This is not even a blip on a very finely attuned radar screen. I'm not saying that a story about a new potentially harmful vector in the world isn't something of concern. I am saying that last year it was shark bites. There was more danger in turning on the specials about rampaging marine life. TVs can spontaneously combust, you know. Saw it on America's Most Subtle Videos.
The commercials. Isn't it amazing that these little gems of video and audio aesthetic are the best of TV? And boy do I have a great admiration for the infomercial. It is a commercial that mimics a real television broadcast by interrupting itself with a commercial. This, I swear, is more ingenious than insidious. The brilliance of the whole concept sets both my tongue and my tail to wagging.
Maybe if there were all infomercials all the time I would turn the set back on.
Just when I figured where the yellow went.
Am I the boob, googoo g'joob?
About three weeks ago I made a decision not to watch television. It has been an interesting experiment. Not because, you understand, I am a snob about the déclassé nature of the boob tube. I find people who ban their snooty minds and/or children from viewing have arguments as cogent as people who have found the most convincing new diet and conversations as mind numbing as golfers describing the dog leg just before the sand trap on number sixteen at Alamogordo Pines.
Au contraire --mon semblable,--mon frere-- I was raised in the blue electronic bath of the cathode ray. To me it was mother's milk and other things of that ilk. Perhaps that is the problem. Time for me to wean from the "glass teat".
What then, I ask, am I missing?
Look at what they call the news.
It is at the very least alarmist and certainly slanted to Middle America. Someone once explained to me that the soap opera formula was to immerse a population of upper middle class folk into a vat of lower class problems. It seems to me that news takes a similar tack. It amplifies very small and very tragic situations and places them statistically high in our living rooms so that we can cower and bite our nails to the very nub until the balm of commercial message can be applied. News sells soap as well.
A local newscaster answered when queried, "Well, what is good news? We can't very well report that Joe Doaks didn't get shot last night." The good news to these, what was it, “nattering nabobs" is the commercials. They don't really have any idea, nor do they care to spread the wonders of imagination and good work that occurs daily!
I have my own ghosts to scare me thank you very much!
I can't really comment on network prime time shows. I simply don't watch. There is that tradition of great TV comedy after you strain out the truly boring sit coms with comfortable people doing simple things in an unconvincing manner. I don't need to name the great shows. You know them. I have heard that a network manages a gem on occasion. I just don't have the patience to set aside a period of time to sit and watch. Although technologically adept (I can even set the timer on my VCR), I find myself far too lazy and disinterested to videotape for a later viewing.
Sports. I think TV is excellent for sports and I think it is well done. It is immediate and real. Somewhere along the line my interest waned. The Pirates get me in the spring for about a month. I watch a couple games even learn a new name or two. Alas Dixie Walker and Ralph Kiner or the whole menagerie that The "Gunner" named for the 60's Pirates are part of another time. The new world is about contracts and sports, I am told endlessly, is a "business". Sorry friends, no matter how many employ the litany, sports remains an entertainment. I preferred my players and teams to seem loyal to the city and region, even when they weren't. Shucks betrayed again!
Educational TV can be swell. Sadly it is not only bound by time constraints but defeated by the medium. It cannot give you the depth of a subject; it can provide an emotional response that starts you on a journey of discovery. It is often tainted by the same problem as news. SARS killed a little more than 500 people out of a world population of 6 billion. 0.00000000833%. This is not even a blip on a very finely attuned radar screen. I'm not saying that a story about a new potentially harmful vector in the world isn't something of concern. I am saying that last year it was shark bites. There was more danger in turning on the specials about rampaging marine life. TVs can spontaneously combust, you know. Saw it on America's Most Subtle Videos.
The commercials. Isn't it amazing that these little gems of video and audio aesthetic are the best of TV? And boy do I have a great admiration for the infomercial. It is a commercial that mimics a real television broadcast by interrupting itself with a commercial. This, I swear, is more ingenious than insidious. The brilliance of the whole concept sets both my tongue and my tail to wagging.
Maybe if there were all infomercials all the time I would turn the set back on.
Just when I figured where the yellow went.
Monday, May 05, 2003
Sunday, May 04, 2003 8:27:08 AM Joe Coluccio
I saw what you did, I know who you are
After about four years of journaling in the morning, I see a lot of what I did.
I made a deal in a dream, very shortly after I began my personal scratching, with my inner censor in which I was granted the kind of unlimited access that memory can allow to the very personal past. As I began to write, events began to come into close focus, memory tickled memory triggered event. Often along with those images, sometimes smells, sometimes sounds, at other times with a kind of synesthesia came a rush of emotion. I found myself blushing in embarrassment at gaffs that should by now have become less sharply pointed. I found myself laughing at some truly funny moments. I have relived days with folks that have passed on (even among the living), so delicate and so precise that it at times has taken my breath away.
It is the source, the wellspring from which my life and my writing derive and I was glad to find that the water there wasn't stagnant but fresh and strong and bubbling. As I journal it is possible to set a tributary of those ghostly waters flowing more closely to the surface. I am not always pleased with the result.
Stringing along with that memory comes a little self knowledge. Enough to keep me up at nights counting the mistakes I made along the way, which seem more numerous than the grains of sand flung into the night sky to form the milky way. Finally I realized that those mistakes were in reality no more than lighted blips along the way. Little reflector signs that I had been turning into large neon blinking display arrows pointing to gouts of landscape that I had been chewing up and never really spitting out. It came to me as I dismantled one relatively Las Vegas large blazing sign and filled over the hole making it resemble a fresh grave that these markers had one virtue over the others (the ones where I was one smart SOB and did everything right and caused joy in Mudville). They are there for me to remember. They make up the road map of a large portion of my memory. We remember the place where the bee stung us not the place where a pleasant picnic with crustless sandwiches and potato salad took place. And so we learn.
I wish that I could say that I no longer cringe when I see Joe take part in such asinine drama, like when he kicked his kindergarten teacher and got expelled from school before it really even started. Like when he lied and told Madame Rose that he could speak and read Italian. Didn’t think I was gonna tell you the real country blues, did you? The day I lost my life? The day I gained it back? That remains in the dark recesses of my daily journal and my mind.
Every so often I get a glimpse a small taste of the universal. It’s enough to make me believe in Jung and his archetypes. It comes as an extremely personal vision which then transcends and integrates. It comes in dreams. It comes when I am driving in the car. It comes when I write. For those few seconds I know without any doubt that I am connected every point of my being with every point of all other being, with the universe at small and at large. I get mystical just holding your hand.
What do you remember? Give old Mnemosyne a kick in the pants for me. Don’t worry we already know that you peed your pants in the third grade when someone slipped a frog under your belt. You’ve only got your life to win.
I saw what you did, I know who you are
After about four years of journaling in the morning, I see a lot of what I did.
I made a deal in a dream, very shortly after I began my personal scratching, with my inner censor in which I was granted the kind of unlimited access that memory can allow to the very personal past. As I began to write, events began to come into close focus, memory tickled memory triggered event. Often along with those images, sometimes smells, sometimes sounds, at other times with a kind of synesthesia came a rush of emotion. I found myself blushing in embarrassment at gaffs that should by now have become less sharply pointed. I found myself laughing at some truly funny moments. I have relived days with folks that have passed on (even among the living), so delicate and so precise that it at times has taken my breath away.
It is the source, the wellspring from which my life and my writing derive and I was glad to find that the water there wasn't stagnant but fresh and strong and bubbling. As I journal it is possible to set a tributary of those ghostly waters flowing more closely to the surface. I am not always pleased with the result.
Stringing along with that memory comes a little self knowledge. Enough to keep me up at nights counting the mistakes I made along the way, which seem more numerous than the grains of sand flung into the night sky to form the milky way. Finally I realized that those mistakes were in reality no more than lighted blips along the way. Little reflector signs that I had been turning into large neon blinking display arrows pointing to gouts of landscape that I had been chewing up and never really spitting out. It came to me as I dismantled one relatively Las Vegas large blazing sign and filled over the hole making it resemble a fresh grave that these markers had one virtue over the others (the ones where I was one smart SOB and did everything right and caused joy in Mudville). They are there for me to remember. They make up the road map of a large portion of my memory. We remember the place where the bee stung us not the place where a pleasant picnic with crustless sandwiches and potato salad took place. And so we learn.
I wish that I could say that I no longer cringe when I see Joe take part in such asinine drama, like when he kicked his kindergarten teacher and got expelled from school before it really even started. Like when he lied and told Madame Rose that he could speak and read Italian. Didn’t think I was gonna tell you the real country blues, did you? The day I lost my life? The day I gained it back? That remains in the dark recesses of my daily journal and my mind.
Every so often I get a glimpse a small taste of the universal. It’s enough to make me believe in Jung and his archetypes. It comes as an extremely personal vision which then transcends and integrates. It comes in dreams. It comes when I am driving in the car. It comes when I write. For those few seconds I know without any doubt that I am connected every point of my being with every point of all other being, with the universe at small and at large. I get mystical just holding your hand.
What do you remember? Give old Mnemosyne a kick in the pants for me. Don’t worry we already know that you peed your pants in the third grade when someone slipped a frog under your belt. You’ve only got your life to win.
Monday, April 28, 2003
Monday, April 28, 2003 5:57:12 PM Joe Coluccio
Harmarville Redux
"Where the hell did you go last night, Cleveland." It was my father's question two or three times a week. "You put 300 miles on the car last night!" He would punctuate the last with a sneer that was meant to show me that he knew the depths my wrong doing. He would write it down in his accruing accounting columns for later consideration.
I take a little comfort that for the last year I have been back and forth to Cleveland, about 240 miles by the way, round, about fifty times and that my father sits somewhere with a knowing smile that finally and forever proves his conjecture.
The truth is at the same time so much more plebeian and so much more sinister. It would start like this.
I would hop in the car at about six pm after dinner. I would first pick up Phil in East Hills, then Jake just off Lincoln Road and then Art in Verona. The thought of that travel exhausts me as much now as it enlivened me then. We would empty out pockets, snake all the change that we had between us and head down to Allegheny River Boulevard and purchase gas at one of the feuding gas stations. Thirteen cents a gallon one glorious evening. Across the road it was fourteen cents. We were not loyal customers and would flock to either owner that would show us an even imperceptible price advantage. Wished they would give it away. Sometimes we would manage to put in about thirty-five or forty cents worth and we were off. "Uh give me thirty seven cents of regular, please!"
To the Eat 'n Park in Harmarville. Across the Hulton Bridge and to the right, zip on by the Harmar Pool Hall, we would stop later after we tired to pick up chicks. The words we used for chicks were far more picturesque and pungent than I will state here. We had all been influenced by equal parts Nick Romano, Live Fast, Die Young and have a Good Looking Corpse, Fast Eddie Felson (yes, I felt compassion for Piper Laurie. I knew that Fats would win in the end, it was just the way of the world in those days) and, for a quirk, a smattering of Elmer Gantry as portrayed by Burt Lancaster. "What is love brother? Love is the morning and the evening star.....!" We talked tough, smoked cigarettes and bought beer down at Billy Kays in Verona and consumed it by the quart. It cost less than the gasoline. Either I looked older than I was or the picture of the guy with a moustache and gray hair on the license fooled them. "Two quarts of your finest, please." It was a miracle that no one could hear the very loud Tom Tom drumming of my heart.
Like a shark in a zoo aquarium we would endlessly drive through the curb serve at the restaurant. Honking our car horn and squeaking our voices. We would stop and just say the most embarrassing things possible to the delicious girls that bobbed nervously on car seats to loud music that we now call oldies. One Two Three I Shot Mr. Lee. Did we ever score? Well, I never did. Too hung up and it is true to this day that women just scare the hell out of me. But it didn't keep me from imagining. I have vivid imagination.
Someone would always want a ride back to East Hills, so we'd hit 'em up for a quarter or more go back to Verona, pump some cheap ethyl and take them. Two or three times around the environs of the shopping center. No one in front of the Eastwood Theater. Scare up enough money for a pack of Luckies and back down Verona Road to Harmarville. Billy Kays for more brew if we were flush. This was definitely the night. Once we were convinced by a school chum to ride down to Garfield to see the 'morphadike'. The 'morphadike' must have been safely in his/her room that evening for we never saw the slightest glimpse of that female deception.
Bold, cigarettes out of the side of our mouths, we would walk into the pool hall. Nod to the fellow pool players that we knew. Rack 'em. O! and it was a dingy place. We would have had it no other way. Yes, spittoons sitting at strategic places on the dirt encrusted wooden slat floor. If this wasn't heaven, it couldn't have been too far away. In the back room was the legendary card game. We would walk around the card laden table on the way to the bathroom. Two brothers both in tieless white dress shirts, brown pants, black shoes, and hats from the Canal Zone presided. I have heard since that these nightly poker matches, made up mostly of the coal miners from up on the Harmar hill, were truly tough games. And that a winning night of hands wasn't safe in the dark parking lot. I have no way of proving it now, but it has a romantic kind of symmetry.
After endless rounds of eight ball and nine ball, of course after the Hustler, straight pool we would hop back into the car and head for the Eat 'n Park. Round and round the parking lot. A hundred times, a thousand. I don't think that we ever had a single meal there. All our money went to gas, beer and cigarettes. Who could afford a burger?
Back to East Hills. A urine stop somewhere in the dark coolness of Verona Road after Lincoln but not yet to Mt Carmel. Eventually after about three hundred miles. I would make it home.
It never occurred to me to look at the speedometer.
Harmarville Redux
"Where the hell did you go last night, Cleveland." It was my father's question two or three times a week. "You put 300 miles on the car last night!" He would punctuate the last with a sneer that was meant to show me that he knew the depths my wrong doing. He would write it down in his accruing accounting columns for later consideration.
I take a little comfort that for the last year I have been back and forth to Cleveland, about 240 miles by the way, round, about fifty times and that my father sits somewhere with a knowing smile that finally and forever proves his conjecture.
The truth is at the same time so much more plebeian and so much more sinister. It would start like this.
I would hop in the car at about six pm after dinner. I would first pick up Phil in East Hills, then Jake just off Lincoln Road and then Art in Verona. The thought of that travel exhausts me as much now as it enlivened me then. We would empty out pockets, snake all the change that we had between us and head down to Allegheny River Boulevard and purchase gas at one of the feuding gas stations. Thirteen cents a gallon one glorious evening. Across the road it was fourteen cents. We were not loyal customers and would flock to either owner that would show us an even imperceptible price advantage. Wished they would give it away. Sometimes we would manage to put in about thirty-five or forty cents worth and we were off. "Uh give me thirty seven cents of regular, please!"
To the Eat 'n Park in Harmarville. Across the Hulton Bridge and to the right, zip on by the Harmar Pool Hall, we would stop later after we tired to pick up chicks. The words we used for chicks were far more picturesque and pungent than I will state here. We had all been influenced by equal parts Nick Romano, Live Fast, Die Young and have a Good Looking Corpse, Fast Eddie Felson (yes, I felt compassion for Piper Laurie. I knew that Fats would win in the end, it was just the way of the world in those days) and, for a quirk, a smattering of Elmer Gantry as portrayed by Burt Lancaster. "What is love brother? Love is the morning and the evening star.....!" We talked tough, smoked cigarettes and bought beer down at Billy Kays in Verona and consumed it by the quart. It cost less than the gasoline. Either I looked older than I was or the picture of the guy with a moustache and gray hair on the license fooled them. "Two quarts of your finest, please." It was a miracle that no one could hear the very loud Tom Tom drumming of my heart.
Like a shark in a zoo aquarium we would endlessly drive through the curb serve at the restaurant. Honking our car horn and squeaking our voices. We would stop and just say the most embarrassing things possible to the delicious girls that bobbed nervously on car seats to loud music that we now call oldies. One Two Three I Shot Mr. Lee. Did we ever score? Well, I never did. Too hung up and it is true to this day that women just scare the hell out of me. But it didn't keep me from imagining. I have vivid imagination.
Someone would always want a ride back to East Hills, so we'd hit 'em up for a quarter or more go back to Verona, pump some cheap ethyl and take them. Two or three times around the environs of the shopping center. No one in front of the Eastwood Theater. Scare up enough money for a pack of Luckies and back down Verona Road to Harmarville. Billy Kays for more brew if we were flush. This was definitely the night. Once we were convinced by a school chum to ride down to Garfield to see the 'morphadike'. The 'morphadike' must have been safely in his/her room that evening for we never saw the slightest glimpse of that female deception.
Bold, cigarettes out of the side of our mouths, we would walk into the pool hall. Nod to the fellow pool players that we knew. Rack 'em. O! and it was a dingy place. We would have had it no other way. Yes, spittoons sitting at strategic places on the dirt encrusted wooden slat floor. If this wasn't heaven, it couldn't have been too far away. In the back room was the legendary card game. We would walk around the card laden table on the way to the bathroom. Two brothers both in tieless white dress shirts, brown pants, black shoes, and hats from the Canal Zone presided. I have heard since that these nightly poker matches, made up mostly of the coal miners from up on the Harmar hill, were truly tough games. And that a winning night of hands wasn't safe in the dark parking lot. I have no way of proving it now, but it has a romantic kind of symmetry.
After endless rounds of eight ball and nine ball, of course after the Hustler, straight pool we would hop back into the car and head for the Eat 'n Park. Round and round the parking lot. A hundred times, a thousand. I don't think that we ever had a single meal there. All our money went to gas, beer and cigarettes. Who could afford a burger?
Back to East Hills. A urine stop somewhere in the dark coolness of Verona Road after Lincoln but not yet to Mt Carmel. Eventually after about three hundred miles. I would make it home.
It never occurred to me to look at the speedometer.
Monday, April 21, 2003
4/19/03 6:58 PM Joe Coluccio
It's only Harmarville, Joe
I had just filled the cassette with CD's full of the music of Bernard Hermann and slipped it into the player in the trunk of my car. Sure, you know Bernard Hermann! He's the guy that wrote the music for one of the most renowned scenes in movie history. And drove to Harmarville. Crossed the Hulton Bridge turned the right and I began to pass a motel that looked like either a hot sheet haven or a place that would be right comfortable for Mom and Norman Bates when the shrill pizzicato strikes and shrieks of violins issued from my car speakers. Yes, Bernard Hermann wrote the music for the movie Psycho and is as famous audibly for the shower scene as Hicthcock is visually. Citizen Kane, North By North West, The Twilight Zone, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Spellbound, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Gidget Goes Hawaiian (just checking to see if you read these lists that I prepare so lovingly).......
I took it as a sign.
I began, car wheel firmly in hand, like a craftsman in the restoration of a palimpsest to apply solvents to the world around me and started to work off the lacquer of time. First I loosened and erased Super Route 28 and all of its car wheezing glory. Then I scraped off the two mile long cacophony of Gas Station, Fast Food Joints, Fast Slapped Motels, OTB Palace and Retail Shopping Mart. Next came a more delicate operation. I had to apply a mask of old road, just enough to get me a short distance down from the old Harmar Drive-in Theatre. I restored the pool hall closer to the bridge and finally placed the Stop and Sock back in its rightful frame, proud Freeport Road Center. And worried the Hulton Bridge
I spent my summers (and a cold winter day or two) in the company of my father in Harmarville. My old man was a carpenter and a contractor, had been all his life. He was working those days for the man who owned both the Stop and Sock Driving Range and back toward Pittsburgh, a scant mile or so beyond the Harmar Drive-in Theater, the Pitch and Putt Golf course. He lived in a trailer (mobile home they are more prudently called) next to a Luncheon Diner on the gravel bumpy lot of the driving range. My father's best friend Bettino Fragale lived in an even smaller rounded trailer in front of it. We would drive to work over the Hulton Bridge, which in those days had a frightening metal plate deck, stuck together by loose rivets and coat hangers that caused it to shake and sway as our car wheels rolled over the cold dark steel. I still dream of plunging into the Allegheny, gasping for breath, looking for a way out pounding on the closed windows while catfish and carp looked on from the murky depths.
Mornings, my father, Betts, the owner, would sit in the trailer at a small Formica kitchenette table, drink whiskey, swear, introduce me to the sweet enticements of women. I would look out the window at myself, the dew rinsing my shoes as I scooped the golf balls that dotted the meadow from the deep grass into a wagon hooked to a small tractor. The land was wet and sweet and was bound to the North by the hills that led up to the Gulf Research Center.
I was learning. Becoming. Bad instruction and good tinted my world view. Some was laughable and foolish, some served me well. They would drink whiskey and swear and tell me the finer points of the feminine. My father a secret smile on his face, Betts with an innocent seeming irony that could have convinced poor Socrates that life was preferable to hemlock even when the high ones get their ways. Politicians were as trustworthy as a man desperate to sell you a used car. Nothing including electricity was as it was advertised or seemed to be. Religion was in the hands of the boosters and not the saints. Capital or Marx the world rode heavy on the shoulders of poor working people. Kings, popes and presidents are not divine. And the Bucs would never win the pennant again.
Later in the day working in a hot wooden building that contained a green box filled with smudged golf balls, I would be confronted by the visiting visions of passionate and romantic love, dream stories that inflamed the strong pull of lust that accompanied each and every young woman who would hang on the arm of her date as he paid for a wire bucket brimming with golf balls that heaped on the counter like a visit to the hen house and a brushed aluminum headed steel shafted driver. I hungered obviously and pathetically at the petite freshness of blush brushed faces as I handed back the change and Romeo swaggered away victorious, the prize captured, my ego crushed. My eyes would follow in a long soul filled solemn camera pan as a parade of Bermuda and short shorts walked toward the tees, white blouse neatly tucked under a slim pastel belts.
The evenings were cool. My father would drop me at the Pitch and Putt. It was nine short holes. Customers would get a ball, an iron, a short eraserless pencil and a score card. I learned to play a more than adequate game and would show off at the drop of a flag. One twilit evening we walked down the stream bed below the course and snuck into the Harmar Drive-in. Peyton Place. The movie did little to cool my ardor and desire for a mature relationship.
I don't know when or if the hunger left me. My passion flares on occasion under the most peculiar circumstances, but mostly I'd just rather read or write or play the guitar. But in Harmarville this Sunday I buzzed for quite a moment. It was glorious!
It's only Harmarville, Joe
I had just filled the cassette with CD's full of the music of Bernard Hermann and slipped it into the player in the trunk of my car. Sure, you know Bernard Hermann! He's the guy that wrote the music for one of the most renowned scenes in movie history. And drove to Harmarville. Crossed the Hulton Bridge turned the right and I began to pass a motel that looked like either a hot sheet haven or a place that would be right comfortable for Mom and Norman Bates when the shrill pizzicato strikes and shrieks of violins issued from my car speakers. Yes, Bernard Hermann wrote the music for the movie Psycho and is as famous audibly for the shower scene as Hicthcock is visually. Citizen Kane, North By North West, The Twilight Zone, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Spellbound, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Gidget Goes Hawaiian (just checking to see if you read these lists that I prepare so lovingly).......
I took it as a sign.
I began, car wheel firmly in hand, like a craftsman in the restoration of a palimpsest to apply solvents to the world around me and started to work off the lacquer of time. First I loosened and erased Super Route 28 and all of its car wheezing glory. Then I scraped off the two mile long cacophony of Gas Station, Fast Food Joints, Fast Slapped Motels, OTB Palace and Retail Shopping Mart. Next came a more delicate operation. I had to apply a mask of old road, just enough to get me a short distance down from the old Harmar Drive-in Theatre. I restored the pool hall closer to the bridge and finally placed the Stop and Sock back in its rightful frame, proud Freeport Road Center. And worried the Hulton Bridge
I spent my summers (and a cold winter day or two) in the company of my father in Harmarville. My old man was a carpenter and a contractor, had been all his life. He was working those days for the man who owned both the Stop and Sock Driving Range and back toward Pittsburgh, a scant mile or so beyond the Harmar Drive-in Theater, the Pitch and Putt Golf course. He lived in a trailer (mobile home they are more prudently called) next to a Luncheon Diner on the gravel bumpy lot of the driving range. My father's best friend Bettino Fragale lived in an even smaller rounded trailer in front of it. We would drive to work over the Hulton Bridge, which in those days had a frightening metal plate deck, stuck together by loose rivets and coat hangers that caused it to shake and sway as our car wheels rolled over the cold dark steel. I still dream of plunging into the Allegheny, gasping for breath, looking for a way out pounding on the closed windows while catfish and carp looked on from the murky depths.
Mornings, my father, Betts, the owner, would sit in the trailer at a small Formica kitchenette table, drink whiskey, swear, introduce me to the sweet enticements of women. I would look out the window at myself, the dew rinsing my shoes as I scooped the golf balls that dotted the meadow from the deep grass into a wagon hooked to a small tractor. The land was wet and sweet and was bound to the North by the hills that led up to the Gulf Research Center.
I was learning. Becoming. Bad instruction and good tinted my world view. Some was laughable and foolish, some served me well. They would drink whiskey and swear and tell me the finer points of the feminine. My father a secret smile on his face, Betts with an innocent seeming irony that could have convinced poor Socrates that life was preferable to hemlock even when the high ones get their ways. Politicians were as trustworthy as a man desperate to sell you a used car. Nothing including electricity was as it was advertised or seemed to be. Religion was in the hands of the boosters and not the saints. Capital or Marx the world rode heavy on the shoulders of poor working people. Kings, popes and presidents are not divine. And the Bucs would never win the pennant again.
Later in the day working in a hot wooden building that contained a green box filled with smudged golf balls, I would be confronted by the visiting visions of passionate and romantic love, dream stories that inflamed the strong pull of lust that accompanied each and every young woman who would hang on the arm of her date as he paid for a wire bucket brimming with golf balls that heaped on the counter like a visit to the hen house and a brushed aluminum headed steel shafted driver. I hungered obviously and pathetically at the petite freshness of blush brushed faces as I handed back the change and Romeo swaggered away victorious, the prize captured, my ego crushed. My eyes would follow in a long soul filled solemn camera pan as a parade of Bermuda and short shorts walked toward the tees, white blouse neatly tucked under a slim pastel belts.
The evenings were cool. My father would drop me at the Pitch and Putt. It was nine short holes. Customers would get a ball, an iron, a short eraserless pencil and a score card. I learned to play a more than adequate game and would show off at the drop of a flag. One twilit evening we walked down the stream bed below the course and snuck into the Harmar Drive-in. Peyton Place. The movie did little to cool my ardor and desire for a mature relationship.
I don't know when or if the hunger left me. My passion flares on occasion under the most peculiar circumstances, but mostly I'd just rather read or write or play the guitar. But in Harmarville this Sunday I buzzed for quite a moment. It was glorious!
Tuesday, April 01, 2003
Tuesday, April 01, 2003 6:14:31 PM Joe Coluccio
A Tribute to Picksburgh
Late Friday afternoon last I had barely dropped my duds when I was forced to make a trip city side. Out at the car I turned the ignition key, roiled the motor up.
The entire week prior maps and people had been guiding me around the unknown environs of York PA. Go South on I 83 and turn East on Route 30 and you will find, for example, the Harley Davidson plant. A world of Soft Tails and Fat Boys. How remarkable, head due south! and then turn due east! These directions are the things dreams are made of when you are from Pittsburgh.
Legend has it that the roads here follow old wild deer and perhaps domestic oxen paths. Around the hills. Into the dark hollars. Along the edge of the creeks. Then came an industrial overlay of tarmacadam on the animal stamped frontier corduroy and the Roebling's steel rope that created bridges over the gaping valleys. Streets with no good reason now could end abruptly at a cliff edge and start again one half mile to the south only to hiss and cross their own existence several times like some mad Moebius Strip. No cartographer from the nether regions could create a more tormented landscape. Vespucci rolled over in his grave
My God, the frantic thought came into my brain, what if it was my charge to tell someone new to the city how to get to say East Liberty from say Penn Hills?
No verbal instruction could be devised. You'd have to lead them in a caravan down Lime Hollow up Verona Road to Lincoln and Nadine down Allegheny River Boulevard to Washington Blvd past the old state police barracks, where I in a moment of extreme shame and perilously low self image bumped the curb and was denied my driver's license on my sixteenth birthday, up over Negley Run to the Circle that forever forbids you access to what was, I swear I remember it, at one time an area as vital as and as beautiful as any City Reverie. I, a long time native, (raised on Carver Street in my younger day) can find entry to the new and devastated East Liberty (Sliberty to the cognoscenti), but this poor posited new comer to the region would be forced to circle forever looking hopelessly for some means of entrance. 'Course if they were lucky enough to divine the magic entry and slip into the realm of Sliberty, there wouldn't be much to greet them. Glorious glimpses of the past in pasted shut buildings. Ah! Three Cheers for Urban Renewal!
Pittsburgh (more generally Western Pennsylvania) is truly renowned for "you can't get there from here". We revel in it. Highway planners take it into serious consideration. (Go ahead try to get to the east end of the city from I 279 South, our newest highway.)
We have, all of us tied, clumped and dried to this region, maps in our minds that are as complicated as a fishing line tangle. My shoe laces, cut in several places where they have been grazed by the shoe eyelets and bound again with a sturdy half hitch knot, tied in a pretty bow, outline a path less complicated than the way I drive to work every morning.
I believe that this mass of misdirection makes the people here uniquely capable of keeping tabs of overwhelmingly complex and chaotic situations. I predict that many citizens of the city of Pittsburgh will become preeminent thinkers in this new millennium characterized by the innovative laws of chaos. Hell, if the thrumming wings of a butterfly in Tokyo can change the global patterns that make weather seem nigh impossible to predict to those who live in areas where east crosses north crosses west crosses south with tedious predictability, it is a snap for the denizens of this city, where SSWNE is a legitimate direction, to provide a deft yet incomprehensible analysis of the insect incited typhoon.
That being said, tomorrow, I travel to Turtle Creek by way of Wilmerding.
A Tribute to Picksburgh
Late Friday afternoon last I had barely dropped my duds when I was forced to make a trip city side. Out at the car I turned the ignition key, roiled the motor up.
The entire week prior maps and people had been guiding me around the unknown environs of York PA. Go South on I 83 and turn East on Route 30 and you will find, for example, the Harley Davidson plant. A world of Soft Tails and Fat Boys. How remarkable, head due south! and then turn due east! These directions are the things dreams are made of when you are from Pittsburgh.
Legend has it that the roads here follow old wild deer and perhaps domestic oxen paths. Around the hills. Into the dark hollars. Along the edge of the creeks. Then came an industrial overlay of tarmacadam on the animal stamped frontier corduroy and the Roebling's steel rope that created bridges over the gaping valleys. Streets with no good reason now could end abruptly at a cliff edge and start again one half mile to the south only to hiss and cross their own existence several times like some mad Moebius Strip. No cartographer from the nether regions could create a more tormented landscape. Vespucci rolled over in his grave
My God, the frantic thought came into my brain, what if it was my charge to tell someone new to the city how to get to say East Liberty from say Penn Hills?
No verbal instruction could be devised. You'd have to lead them in a caravan down Lime Hollow up Verona Road to Lincoln and Nadine down Allegheny River Boulevard to Washington Blvd past the old state police barracks, where I in a moment of extreme shame and perilously low self image bumped the curb and was denied my driver's license on my sixteenth birthday, up over Negley Run to the Circle that forever forbids you access to what was, I swear I remember it, at one time an area as vital as and as beautiful as any City Reverie. I, a long time native, (raised on Carver Street in my younger day) can find entry to the new and devastated East Liberty (Sliberty to the cognoscenti), but this poor posited new comer to the region would be forced to circle forever looking hopelessly for some means of entrance. 'Course if they were lucky enough to divine the magic entry and slip into the realm of Sliberty, there wouldn't be much to greet them. Glorious glimpses of the past in pasted shut buildings. Ah! Three Cheers for Urban Renewal!
Pittsburgh (more generally Western Pennsylvania) is truly renowned for "you can't get there from here". We revel in it. Highway planners take it into serious consideration. (Go ahead try to get to the east end of the city from I 279 South, our newest highway.)
We have, all of us tied, clumped and dried to this region, maps in our minds that are as complicated as a fishing line tangle. My shoe laces, cut in several places where they have been grazed by the shoe eyelets and bound again with a sturdy half hitch knot, tied in a pretty bow, outline a path less complicated than the way I drive to work every morning.
I believe that this mass of misdirection makes the people here uniquely capable of keeping tabs of overwhelmingly complex and chaotic situations. I predict that many citizens of the city of Pittsburgh will become preeminent thinkers in this new millennium characterized by the innovative laws of chaos. Hell, if the thrumming wings of a butterfly in Tokyo can change the global patterns that make weather seem nigh impossible to predict to those who live in areas where east crosses north crosses west crosses south with tedious predictability, it is a snap for the denizens of this city, where SSWNE is a legitimate direction, to provide a deft yet incomprehensible analysis of the insect incited typhoon.
That being said, tomorrow, I travel to Turtle Creek by way of Wilmerding.
Tuesday, March 25, 2003
Tuesday, March 25, 2003 5:54:45 PM
When you wish upon a star....
Just by way of clarity and the shock of the real, Collodi had Pinocchio beat the talking cricket with a hammer into a wet cricket paste all over the hard stone wall for giving the kid sage advice while Geppetto was in jail. Jiminy as guardian angel was of American making. Gets you to thinking doesn't it? Well, it does me.
For reasons that I will leave in the dark, I have been pondering two events in the making of American consciousness. The White City of the Chicago World Fair of 1893 and the wonder of the World of Tomorrow at New York City World's Fair 1939. That future that we all now inhabit.
First I can tell you the Columbian Exposition of 1893 - 400 (Yes, my dear, math wiz, they did miss the date by a year) years after Columbus beat his way against the stormy Atlantic and stopped at some beach front that he thought was the orient and generally brought European Civilization to America, (A lot is made of this fact both revisionist and traditionalist, but it doesn't much interest me) - was built on the cusp of America becoming an industrial behemoth. A Wonder of the White City was the electric lights that lit the place. Who cares that Tom Edison and George Westinghouse were combatants on the battleground of power delivered. Tom, ever inventive and staunchly DC, led his side of the debate by juicing and reducing an elephant with a grand jolt of AC. It was all in that grand new tradition of American robber baron industrial fun. I wished that Tesla (the very dark horse) would have won, spotting towers of wireless power dotting the rural landscape. The White City represented the burgeoning greatness of America. It was a glimpse of a forceful now.
Then I can tell you that 1939 was a year deep into a desperate economic depression (as was the world of 1893) and was the charming beginning to World War Two. Hitler on a Blitz, The Spanish Republican Army was toppling to Franco. No real reason for the optimism that the World's Fair Radiated. And radiate it did to imagine what the world of 1960 would be like (The Disney Tomorrowland of 1955 was meant to represent the world of 1986, even the man who resurrected Jiminy Cricket failed the future.) Trylon and Perisphere, Futurama, the fair was a monument to optimism. The world would have a marvel of television. Look at the mediocre field of play that bit of technology plows. Dreams of safe super highways, gliding streamlined beauties, buildings to challenge Valhalla. A lot of it came true.
I wonder what happened to the optimism.
As a kid (some say that I never really emerged from the gel into a full blown adult, and I believe they have a point, just not the one they think they are making) I spent a lot of my time of the rear porch, on the front porch, in the classroom, on the bus reading science fiction. The writing was untrained, childlike, disparaged and disparaging, fit me like a warm glove on a cold day. And it was full of optimism. That same hopefulness manifest by the World of Tomorrow in 1939.
Walk down the aisles and aisles of fantasy and science fiction books of the modern bookseller. They are full of books, read by millions (spawned by midocre movies, tawdry television and worse yet games!) and they are scarcely hopeful and I find them helpless. I pick my way among the reprinted editions and read Heinlein and Asimov and Clarke and Dick and Finney and Bradbury and Williamson and Smith and a score others possibly only familiar to me. I know that this sounds like the railings of a person who has not been paying attention, but I also assure you that it is not quite that.
See, I figure that sometime in the mid sixties maybe into the seventies we all stepped into the future and immediately lost the dreams that propelled us. Disney closed tomorrow land and remodeled. It scarcely mattered. Too late. Information comes to us in an awful torrent. Wonder is a scarce commodity. I long for and come at times upon gleeful pieces of that which is great. That make life worth living. Some things abide.
...your dreams come true.
When you wish upon a star....
Just by way of clarity and the shock of the real, Collodi had Pinocchio beat the talking cricket with a hammer into a wet cricket paste all over the hard stone wall for giving the kid sage advice while Geppetto was in jail. Jiminy as guardian angel was of American making. Gets you to thinking doesn't it? Well, it does me.
For reasons that I will leave in the dark, I have been pondering two events in the making of American consciousness. The White City of the Chicago World Fair of 1893 and the wonder of the World of Tomorrow at New York City World's Fair 1939. That future that we all now inhabit.
First I can tell you the Columbian Exposition of 1893 - 400 (Yes, my dear, math wiz, they did miss the date by a year) years after Columbus beat his way against the stormy Atlantic and stopped at some beach front that he thought was the orient and generally brought European Civilization to America, (A lot is made of this fact both revisionist and traditionalist, but it doesn't much interest me) - was built on the cusp of America becoming an industrial behemoth. A Wonder of the White City was the electric lights that lit the place. Who cares that Tom Edison and George Westinghouse were combatants on the battleground of power delivered. Tom, ever inventive and staunchly DC, led his side of the debate by juicing and reducing an elephant with a grand jolt of AC. It was all in that grand new tradition of American robber baron industrial fun. I wished that Tesla (the very dark horse) would have won, spotting towers of wireless power dotting the rural landscape. The White City represented the burgeoning greatness of America. It was a glimpse of a forceful now.
Then I can tell you that 1939 was a year deep into a desperate economic depression (as was the world of 1893) and was the charming beginning to World War Two. Hitler on a Blitz, The Spanish Republican Army was toppling to Franco. No real reason for the optimism that the World's Fair Radiated. And radiate it did to imagine what the world of 1960 would be like (The Disney Tomorrowland of 1955 was meant to represent the world of 1986, even the man who resurrected Jiminy Cricket failed the future.) Trylon and Perisphere, Futurama, the fair was a monument to optimism. The world would have a marvel of television. Look at the mediocre field of play that bit of technology plows. Dreams of safe super highways, gliding streamlined beauties, buildings to challenge Valhalla. A lot of it came true.
I wonder what happened to the optimism.
As a kid (some say that I never really emerged from the gel into a full blown adult, and I believe they have a point, just not the one they think they are making) I spent a lot of my time of the rear porch, on the front porch, in the classroom, on the bus reading science fiction. The writing was untrained, childlike, disparaged and disparaging, fit me like a warm glove on a cold day. And it was full of optimism. That same hopefulness manifest by the World of Tomorrow in 1939.
Walk down the aisles and aisles of fantasy and science fiction books of the modern bookseller. They are full of books, read by millions (spawned by midocre movies, tawdry television and worse yet games!) and they are scarcely hopeful and I find them helpless. I pick my way among the reprinted editions and read Heinlein and Asimov and Clarke and Dick and Finney and Bradbury and Williamson and Smith and a score others possibly only familiar to me. I know that this sounds like the railings of a person who has not been paying attention, but I also assure you that it is not quite that.
See, I figure that sometime in the mid sixties maybe into the seventies we all stepped into the future and immediately lost the dreams that propelled us. Disney closed tomorrow land and remodeled. It scarcely mattered. Too late. Information comes to us in an awful torrent. Wonder is a scarce commodity. I long for and come at times upon gleeful pieces of that which is great. That make life worth living. Some things abide.
...your dreams come true.
Monday, February 24, 2003
Monday, February 24, 2003 7:02:50 PM
"Government even in its best state is but a necessary evil...."
Thomas Paine said that in “Common Sense”.
People often scream, or sometimes cringe, when I quote the foundling fathers.
I got to thinkin' about it watching cops handing out tickets to flustered evil doers on the side of the highway. I've sat there perplexed and embarrassed on occasion. Probably you have too. We become for that brief moment outlaws, or at least ones who have been apprehended by the strong arm of the law.
I always figured that laws and rules were great as guidelines, but as arbiters of our lives they are at best a necessary evil and at worst just plain beastly. Speeding and traffic tickets are by my definition "at worst." Who, for example, sets the speed limit at 15 miles per hour on certain stretches of road? It is damn nigh impossible if you use your foot and the accelerator to meter at that speed. Better would it be to open the door and push like a scooter.
The statistics get trotted out by the high mucky mucks of highway verification. At 65 miles per hour there were 7,000 more fatalities during the year than at the 55 mile per hour. Course, you are never told that the increased traffic on secondary roads caused by slower speeds on main roads has resulted in 14,000 more fatalities. No, those aren't real statistics. See how easy it is to be fooled. But there is some truth to them.
But I wonder would fatalities go to zero if the speed limit was zero miles per hour? Or perhaps we should lower the speed limit to 35 miles per hour on our super highways. At about ten we could abandon the automobile entirely and go back to the Conestoga wagon. Just think of how taxes would decrease. Highways replaced with gently rolling plains and deep passages through mountain gorges.
AHA!
say the lawmakers and givers. Taxes wouldn't decrease at all. Because, they say, in the star chambers of the state, under those conditions, there would be no traffic tickets and revenues would dwindle. And this, it is my suspicion, is the true reason for traffic violations. Increased revenues. In PA you get smacked anywhere from $100 to $180 for a speeding ticket. That is not a friendly warning. That, my friends, is a slap across the fiscal face.
Did you ever read what it says on those traffic tickets? You have 10 days or maybe two weeks to respond or a warrant will be issued for your arrest! If you want to pay the fine you have to plead guilty to the crime by signing your name at the bottom of the ticket. Hard to take, ain’t it when criminals of high degree walk free, less punished. And then in a wonderful week of two you receive an amount of points against your driver's license that threatens to suspend it, most likely placing your livelihood in danger of extinction. To be fair, there is an out. You can also study and take a test lessening the accrued point count to prove that you know the driving laws of the state. I suppose the reasoning of our governors is that those rules must have been expunged from your mind in a vortex of wind when you surpassed the speed limit. The studying and testing will cram them back in tight. This ain't big brother. This is big father coming home after work to mete out punishment for your evil ways.
Perhaps it is just my independent spirit. Was me. I'd give some guidelines for safe driving. Put up some signs where I thought the curve lead into Dead man’s Leap then let the driver figure it out as best they could. Is there some science of speed limitology? Did some highway mavens do empirical testing on their roadways? I figure if they did they would find that their methods of construction were far more "criminal" than people cranking up to seventy-five miles an hour. And those righteous cops who travel the highways at speeds in excess of those allowed us...what's the story...the rules of safety no longer apply. Those who are the law are above the law?
Like old Tom said....
cain't nothin' outrun my broke down V8 Ford...
Or was that Chuck Berry?
"Government even in its best state is but a necessary evil...."
Thomas Paine said that in “Common Sense”.
People often scream, or sometimes cringe, when I quote the foundling fathers.
I got to thinkin' about it watching cops handing out tickets to flustered evil doers on the side of the highway. I've sat there perplexed and embarrassed on occasion. Probably you have too. We become for that brief moment outlaws, or at least ones who have been apprehended by the strong arm of the law.
I always figured that laws and rules were great as guidelines, but as arbiters of our lives they are at best a necessary evil and at worst just plain beastly. Speeding and traffic tickets are by my definition "at worst." Who, for example, sets the speed limit at 15 miles per hour on certain stretches of road? It is damn nigh impossible if you use your foot and the accelerator to meter at that speed. Better would it be to open the door and push like a scooter.
The statistics get trotted out by the high mucky mucks of highway verification. At 65 miles per hour there were 7,000 more fatalities during the year than at the 55 mile per hour. Course, you are never told that the increased traffic on secondary roads caused by slower speeds on main roads has resulted in 14,000 more fatalities. No, those aren't real statistics. See how easy it is to be fooled. But there is some truth to them.
But I wonder would fatalities go to zero if the speed limit was zero miles per hour? Or perhaps we should lower the speed limit to 35 miles per hour on our super highways. At about ten we could abandon the automobile entirely and go back to the Conestoga wagon. Just think of how taxes would decrease. Highways replaced with gently rolling plains and deep passages through mountain gorges.
AHA!
say the lawmakers and givers. Taxes wouldn't decrease at all. Because, they say, in the star chambers of the state, under those conditions, there would be no traffic tickets and revenues would dwindle. And this, it is my suspicion, is the true reason for traffic violations. Increased revenues. In PA you get smacked anywhere from $100 to $180 for a speeding ticket. That is not a friendly warning. That, my friends, is a slap across the fiscal face.
Did you ever read what it says on those traffic tickets? You have 10 days or maybe two weeks to respond or a warrant will be issued for your arrest! If you want to pay the fine you have to plead guilty to the crime by signing your name at the bottom of the ticket. Hard to take, ain’t it when criminals of high degree walk free, less punished. And then in a wonderful week of two you receive an amount of points against your driver's license that threatens to suspend it, most likely placing your livelihood in danger of extinction. To be fair, there is an out. You can also study and take a test lessening the accrued point count to prove that you know the driving laws of the state. I suppose the reasoning of our governors is that those rules must have been expunged from your mind in a vortex of wind when you surpassed the speed limit. The studying and testing will cram them back in tight. This ain't big brother. This is big father coming home after work to mete out punishment for your evil ways.
Perhaps it is just my independent spirit. Was me. I'd give some guidelines for safe driving. Put up some signs where I thought the curve lead into Dead man’s Leap then let the driver figure it out as best they could. Is there some science of speed limitology? Did some highway mavens do empirical testing on their roadways? I figure if they did they would find that their methods of construction were far more "criminal" than people cranking up to seventy-five miles an hour. And those righteous cops who travel the highways at speeds in excess of those allowed us...what's the story...the rules of safety no longer apply. Those who are the law are above the law?
Like old Tom said....
cain't nothin' outrun my broke down V8 Ford...
Or was that Chuck Berry?
Wednesday, February 19, 2003
Wednesday, February 19, 2003 6:06 PM Joe Coluccio
Help, the sky is falling! I know because a chunk of the Andromeda Nebula is sticking out of my roof!
They’ve gone too far. The news people, the weather people, those little fashionably dressed would be icons that sit in front of desks designed by copy cat surrealists out of Scandinavia. After they soften you up with traffic congestion. Serious faces suggesting that you need to “exercise caution” (I looked in vain for the caution machine at the health club. One device informed me that I shouldn’t stick a pinky into any of the many whirling gears or wires or pulleys) this morning as you “find” your way to work.
Comes the scandalous weather line. Grave face, impeccable tie, hair swept into a glazed tsunami like front wave, the weather giver (PC are they ever) speaks. The temperature is 75ºF this morning, but with the wind chill it is -454º Rankin, close to absolute zero when all molecular motion stops. You might want to give yourself an extra hour to reassemble your pulverized car windows.
Then of course the several thousand murders that have been committed in almost every village in the US and Australia and some mountainous parts of North Eastern Asia.
A moment or two for the good news. Grove Department Store is having a sale on indoor cement ponds this weekend. New Honey Oat Buncha Gran Sugar Flops are more nutritious than two slivers of tofu and the new Alera Bravada will get you six miles to the gallon highway better than any of the new military issue tanks.
After the onerous North Eastern snow fall this week, which was sufficiently scary on its own, thank you (winter precipitation here in Pittsburgh is now measured by milk, bread and toilet paper sales at the local supermarket), came the word of the possibility of floods. Cute little news babes, red nosed with long knit scarf hats, sit on the bank of the Monongahela River and warn of the impending disaster that floods will bring. If, of course, they happen. Hence, the flood watch is born.
One station had the absolute genius to supply us with a list of things we would need in a flood. Sand Bags. Wouldn’t be caught wet without them. Plywood and nails. So we can build a raft to join Huck and Jim on our way down the river? 3 gallons of bottled water. No brand names mentioned, but a nice flavored designer mineral water is probably best as you munch on one of the many bloated dead fish that leisurely float past you while you lounge on the roof of your house.
I and most of the residents of Western Pa, live so high above the river level that if there were a flood on our collective properties, the world would be in serious need of Noah and his boys.
My mind shudders. What next? There are so many things missed by these news mavens and only a viewing of 50’s horror movies and their rabid imagination can predict and prepare us for the next conflagration.
A plague of goats. Large roving bands of monstrous free range chickens pecking at the tops of trees and television towers. A skyful of whoopee cushions floating fearfully to earth making that dread noise as they splatter in a noisome puddle on the moist ground. Rampaging bowls of Mother’s Oats, sticking to people’s pallets like pasty peanut butter as we try mightily to swallow. Cascading mounds of pre chewed gum sticking together the very gears of civilization. A raging virus that actually makes our computers work correctly.
I think I’ll tune in early tomorrow. Seldom have I been so genuinely entertained.
Help, the sky is falling! I know because a chunk of the Andromeda Nebula is sticking out of my roof!
They’ve gone too far. The news people, the weather people, those little fashionably dressed would be icons that sit in front of desks designed by copy cat surrealists out of Scandinavia. After they soften you up with traffic congestion. Serious faces suggesting that you need to “exercise caution” (I looked in vain for the caution machine at the health club. One device informed me that I shouldn’t stick a pinky into any of the many whirling gears or wires or pulleys) this morning as you “find” your way to work.
Comes the scandalous weather line. Grave face, impeccable tie, hair swept into a glazed tsunami like front wave, the weather giver (PC are they ever) speaks. The temperature is 75ºF this morning, but with the wind chill it is -454º Rankin, close to absolute zero when all molecular motion stops. You might want to give yourself an extra hour to reassemble your pulverized car windows.
Then of course the several thousand murders that have been committed in almost every village in the US and Australia and some mountainous parts of North Eastern Asia.
A moment or two for the good news. Grove Department Store is having a sale on indoor cement ponds this weekend. New Honey Oat Buncha Gran Sugar Flops are more nutritious than two slivers of tofu and the new Alera Bravada will get you six miles to the gallon highway better than any of the new military issue tanks.
After the onerous North Eastern snow fall this week, which was sufficiently scary on its own, thank you (winter precipitation here in Pittsburgh is now measured by milk, bread and toilet paper sales at the local supermarket), came the word of the possibility of floods. Cute little news babes, red nosed with long knit scarf hats, sit on the bank of the Monongahela River and warn of the impending disaster that floods will bring. If, of course, they happen. Hence, the flood watch is born.
One station had the absolute genius to supply us with a list of things we would need in a flood. Sand Bags. Wouldn’t be caught wet without them. Plywood and nails. So we can build a raft to join Huck and Jim on our way down the river? 3 gallons of bottled water. No brand names mentioned, but a nice flavored designer mineral water is probably best as you munch on one of the many bloated dead fish that leisurely float past you while you lounge on the roof of your house.
I and most of the residents of Western Pa, live so high above the river level that if there were a flood on our collective properties, the world would be in serious need of Noah and his boys.
My mind shudders. What next? There are so many things missed by these news mavens and only a viewing of 50’s horror movies and their rabid imagination can predict and prepare us for the next conflagration.
A plague of goats. Large roving bands of monstrous free range chickens pecking at the tops of trees and television towers. A skyful of whoopee cushions floating fearfully to earth making that dread noise as they splatter in a noisome puddle on the moist ground. Rampaging bowls of Mother’s Oats, sticking to people’s pallets like pasty peanut butter as we try mightily to swallow. Cascading mounds of pre chewed gum sticking together the very gears of civilization. A raging virus that actually makes our computers work correctly.
I think I’ll tune in early tomorrow. Seldom have I been so genuinely entertained.
Monday, February 17, 2003
Monday, February 17, 2003 6:32:16 PM Joe Coluccio
Come a Ti Yi Yippie Yippie Yeah Yippie Yeah.
I admit it! I love Cowboy Songs! I ride around, CD set for stun while Powder River Jack and Kitty Lee sing Tying a Knot in the Devil’s Tale or Ken Maynard paints his Home On The Range.
I have no idea why. What better time than this present to plumb the wrecks of my aesthetic dead reckonings.
I have always preferred Gene Autry to Roy Rogers. Not because Gene went off to war and Roy remained Hollywood side and reaped the name King of the Cowboys. Nope! That fact in my formative buckaroo years was not available to me. Besides the Duke also stayed in America and did so much during WWII to squelch the Nips that he died movie end with a frightful frequency. My screen favorites are Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys filling in with song and an improbable set of old jug and new swing instruments during the lighter moments of (hard to believe that moments can get much lighter than the script itself) the endless westward march of the Durango Kid. Charles Starrett.
Nope! Nor does fact that I resonated with the dapper Cisco Houston and the talkative Ramblin' Jack Elliot rather than Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger give more than just a slight compass shift to the west. The world of song does not get much better than Ramblin Jack singing Guabi Guabi in tongues.
But all this isn't really getting any nearer the roots of what some would label my malady. ...A rootin' tootin' son of a gun from Arizona, Ragtime Cowboy Joe...
Two things to get straight before we move forward one single demisemiquaver.
I am not a particular fan of Country Music. And although I do love Hank Williams and Alison Kraus is a miracle and swoon over Emmy Lou Harris. Like George Strait, revere Patsy Cline etc etc etc. A certain brand of commercial country produces a vile song like "The Baby" sitting high on the country charts by a white stetsoned long haired blue eyed devil called Blake Shelton singing about the fact that he is the baby, so his mother always called him, and he could do no wrong in her eyes and one night he was called home from afar but didn't make it in time for his mother’s expiration and then he cried just like a baby. A song like this, dependent as it is on a prurient emotion and commercially produced desire, falls squarely within the bounds of my definition of pornography.
Second, cowboy songs just aren't country music. They are, to use the tautological categorization, Cowboy Songs.
Twas in the town of Jacksboro in the spring of seventy-three,
A man by the name of Crego came steppin up to me,
Saying, "How do you do young fellow and how would you like to go
And spend one summer pleasant on the range of the buffalo?"
That is Verse One of “The Buffalo Skinners”. Needless to say, "While skinning the damned old stinkers our lives they had no show, For the Indians watched to pick us off while skinning the buffalo", the summer was not a pleasant one. Crego tells these honest working Americans lads when it is time to drag up and head back that they had been extravagant and were in debt to him so "We coaxed him and we begged him and still it was no go, We left old Crego's bones to bleach on he range of the buffalo."
This song may have been written, possibly experienced, by a guy called Buffalo Jack. It takes my breath every time I hear it. Among the best of the cowboy songs. It has all the irony and impact of The Treasure of Sierra Madre.
Sioux City Sioux, Across the Alley from the Alamo, Happy Trails, Back in the Saddle Again. Tumblin' Tumbleweeds, Water, San Antonio Rose, Along the Cimarron, Sante Fe Trail, Sons of the Pioneers, Riders in the Sky, The Flying W Wranglers, Hot Club of Cow Town, Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, Asleep at the Wheel.
Yes I envelope Western Swing Music under the dusty serape of Cowboy songs. Lovingly I sweep Tex Mex Border Music (lately called Tejano I believe) into my westward progressing wagon train.
It is music with humor and passion and rhythm, written often by common working folk, expressing longings and exposing desire. Its performance allows catharsis, much as a throbbing of a blues can rid you of darkness and despair. Hey, I guess it's just not the far from all the art that I love.
Most of the working cowhands on that wagon trail from southern Texas to Abilene sang a more salacious version of the Old “Chisholm” Trail.
I don’t define that as pornography at all.
Come a Ti Yi Yippie Yippie Yeah Yippie Yeah.
I admit it! I love Cowboy Songs! I ride around, CD set for stun while Powder River Jack and Kitty Lee sing Tying a Knot in the Devil’s Tale or Ken Maynard paints his Home On The Range.
I have no idea why. What better time than this present to plumb the wrecks of my aesthetic dead reckonings.
I have always preferred Gene Autry to Roy Rogers. Not because Gene went off to war and Roy remained Hollywood side and reaped the name King of the Cowboys. Nope! That fact in my formative buckaroo years was not available to me. Besides the Duke also stayed in America and did so much during WWII to squelch the Nips that he died movie end with a frightful frequency. My screen favorites are Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys filling in with song and an improbable set of old jug and new swing instruments during the lighter moments of (hard to believe that moments can get much lighter than the script itself) the endless westward march of the Durango Kid. Charles Starrett.
Nope! Nor does fact that I resonated with the dapper Cisco Houston and the talkative Ramblin' Jack Elliot rather than Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger give more than just a slight compass shift to the west. The world of song does not get much better than Ramblin Jack singing Guabi Guabi in tongues.
But all this isn't really getting any nearer the roots of what some would label my malady. ...A rootin' tootin' son of a gun from Arizona, Ragtime Cowboy Joe...
Two things to get straight before we move forward one single demisemiquaver.
I am not a particular fan of Country Music. And although I do love Hank Williams and Alison Kraus is a miracle and swoon over Emmy Lou Harris. Like George Strait, revere Patsy Cline etc etc etc. A certain brand of commercial country produces a vile song like "The Baby" sitting high on the country charts by a white stetsoned long haired blue eyed devil called Blake Shelton singing about the fact that he is the baby, so his mother always called him, and he could do no wrong in her eyes and one night he was called home from afar but didn't make it in time for his mother’s expiration and then he cried just like a baby. A song like this, dependent as it is on a prurient emotion and commercially produced desire, falls squarely within the bounds of my definition of pornography.
Second, cowboy songs just aren't country music. They are, to use the tautological categorization, Cowboy Songs.
Twas in the town of Jacksboro in the spring of seventy-three,
A man by the name of Crego came steppin up to me,
Saying, "How do you do young fellow and how would you like to go
And spend one summer pleasant on the range of the buffalo?"
That is Verse One of “The Buffalo Skinners”. Needless to say, "While skinning the damned old stinkers our lives they had no show, For the Indians watched to pick us off while skinning the buffalo", the summer was not a pleasant one. Crego tells these honest working Americans lads when it is time to drag up and head back that they had been extravagant and were in debt to him so "We coaxed him and we begged him and still it was no go, We left old Crego's bones to bleach on he range of the buffalo."
This song may have been written, possibly experienced, by a guy called Buffalo Jack. It takes my breath every time I hear it. Among the best of the cowboy songs. It has all the irony and impact of The Treasure of Sierra Madre.
Sioux City Sioux, Across the Alley from the Alamo, Happy Trails, Back in the Saddle Again. Tumblin' Tumbleweeds, Water, San Antonio Rose, Along the Cimarron, Sante Fe Trail, Sons of the Pioneers, Riders in the Sky, The Flying W Wranglers, Hot Club of Cow Town, Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, Asleep at the Wheel.
Yes I envelope Western Swing Music under the dusty serape of Cowboy songs. Lovingly I sweep Tex Mex Border Music (lately called Tejano I believe) into my westward progressing wagon train.
It is music with humor and passion and rhythm, written often by common working folk, expressing longings and exposing desire. Its performance allows catharsis, much as a throbbing of a blues can rid you of darkness and despair. Hey, I guess it's just not the far from all the art that I love.
Most of the working cowhands on that wagon trail from southern Texas to Abilene sang a more salacious version of the Old “Chisholm” Trail.
I don’t define that as pornography at all.
Monday, February 03, 2003
Monday, February 03, 2003 6:51 PM Joe Coluccio
Looking for the greens…
The extreme pressure of searching for something humorous to ponder and develop with deep glimpses of insight into the all too human condition has actually stopped me from writing entirely...that and the demands of my schedule at work, which had the effrontery to eat into my vacation and several of my latest weekends.
My mother made minest tonight. Perplexed, I thought how the hell do you spell minest, so out I goes to the internet and look it up. I tried manest. Not anything close, except for manifest destiny. I will in good time reveal what I have come to believe is a gospel according to minest, but first I will tell you that the eating of tonight’s delicious dinner put me in another decade. A decade which frequently substituted pastafazool, or even better green peppers stuffed with a wonderful mixture of tuna, bread and spices baked in tomato sauce, for meat on Friday. I have long since forgiven my mother for the endless meals of Kraft macaroni and cheese.
A decade where my severe, white hair pulled back in a bun, black dress that covered to her calves her rolled down stockings, grandmother on my father’s side of the family would sit in her Carver Street home gazing equally out the window to the back yard into a garden of mint and greens and pop dragons and the weekend afternoon wrestling matches on a luminous black and white kind of oval television screen. What is that geometric shape? The cross between the rectangle and the oval. Rectovular? I’m sure that some cathode ray marketing inventor came up with a technologically adept name. I need only to mention the Superhetrodyne Radio to prove my point.
That was a time when we were all our own television technicians. We would take hot glass vacuum tubes from the set (remember the 6AU6) up to the drug store and stand for a delicious half hour or so in front of the Tube Tester watching for the plate of the glass evacuated tube to glow hot and orange. The more sophisticated testers gave some kind of gauge that read in a science fiction theatre logorhythmic scale, along with a more “user friendly” meter that indicated – green: good – yellow: marginal – red: bad. We would sigh when then needle settled solidly at the red end of the TV Tube spectrum. Purchase a new one of the offending valves (British, you know) from the well stocked bottom of the Tester cabinet and return to plug the lot from our inelegant brown paper carrying bag into the appropriate sockets, button up the back of the set, a happily view that week’s December Bride.
In any case, there sat Grandma Coluccio, on her stove endlessly was a large pot with boiling greens of many sorts (escarole, spinach) billowing steamy into the air making a kind of vitamin rich inhaler for the world to savor and be cured. “What the hell are you making, Ma?” My father used to say in grave frustration, white face turning florid, a dangerous mixture of both disbelief and disapproval that often lead whole nations into armed conflict. “Minest, again? You gotta eat something else once it a while!” My grandmother, tough bird that she was, just used to look at him and snort. And root for the guy in the white shorts who was finally pinning the evil black dressed contortionist to the mat. Sonamabitch!
Minest is a soup made of greens, (spinach) and tomato sauce and pork and perhaps some broth. I don’t know the recipe and like an initiate to the Latin Mass, In Nomine Patris Et Filii Et Spiritus Sancti, I don’t want great detail. Just mange! Enjoy! And, oh yeah, I figure the name is short for minestrone.
Did Gorgeous George ever beat Crusher Lisowski?
Looking for the greens…
The extreme pressure of searching for something humorous to ponder and develop with deep glimpses of insight into the all too human condition has actually stopped me from writing entirely...that and the demands of my schedule at work, which had the effrontery to eat into my vacation and several of my latest weekends.
My mother made minest tonight. Perplexed, I thought how the hell do you spell minest, so out I goes to the internet and look it up. I tried manest. Not anything close, except for manifest destiny. I will in good time reveal what I have come to believe is a gospel according to minest, but first I will tell you that the eating of tonight’s delicious dinner put me in another decade. A decade which frequently substituted pastafazool, or even better green peppers stuffed with a wonderful mixture of tuna, bread and spices baked in tomato sauce, for meat on Friday. I have long since forgiven my mother for the endless meals of Kraft macaroni and cheese.
A decade where my severe, white hair pulled back in a bun, black dress that covered to her calves her rolled down stockings, grandmother on my father’s side of the family would sit in her Carver Street home gazing equally out the window to the back yard into a garden of mint and greens and pop dragons and the weekend afternoon wrestling matches on a luminous black and white kind of oval television screen. What is that geometric shape? The cross between the rectangle and the oval. Rectovular? I’m sure that some cathode ray marketing inventor came up with a technologically adept name. I need only to mention the Superhetrodyne Radio to prove my point.
That was a time when we were all our own television technicians. We would take hot glass vacuum tubes from the set (remember the 6AU6) up to the drug store and stand for a delicious half hour or so in front of the Tube Tester watching for the plate of the glass evacuated tube to glow hot and orange. The more sophisticated testers gave some kind of gauge that read in a science fiction theatre logorhythmic scale, along with a more “user friendly” meter that indicated – green: good – yellow: marginal – red: bad. We would sigh when then needle settled solidly at the red end of the TV Tube spectrum. Purchase a new one of the offending valves (British, you know) from the well stocked bottom of the Tester cabinet and return to plug the lot from our inelegant brown paper carrying bag into the appropriate sockets, button up the back of the set, a happily view that week’s December Bride.
In any case, there sat Grandma Coluccio, on her stove endlessly was a large pot with boiling greens of many sorts (escarole, spinach) billowing steamy into the air making a kind of vitamin rich inhaler for the world to savor and be cured. “What the hell are you making, Ma?” My father used to say in grave frustration, white face turning florid, a dangerous mixture of both disbelief and disapproval that often lead whole nations into armed conflict. “Minest, again? You gotta eat something else once it a while!” My grandmother, tough bird that she was, just used to look at him and snort. And root for the guy in the white shorts who was finally pinning the evil black dressed contortionist to the mat. Sonamabitch!
Minest is a soup made of greens, (spinach) and tomato sauce and pork and perhaps some broth. I don’t know the recipe and like an initiate to the Latin Mass, In Nomine Patris Et Filii Et Spiritus Sancti, I don’t want great detail. Just mange! Enjoy! And, oh yeah, I figure the name is short for minestrone.
Did Gorgeous George ever beat Crusher Lisowski?
Monday, January 13, 2003
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.
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 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.
Tuesday, December 24, 2002
Tuesday, December 24, 2002 3:18 PM
Family Christmas Party
Last year, I pretty much walked out of this Christmas gathering and into a hospital. I spent three days prodded with a stainless array of needle and plastic tubing filling my body with a modern miracle of biological soup. Parked planted and potted I sat in cold hallways with equally forlorn souls opposite me gazing at the floor or longingly out a window. Ill health like a ruthless final examination starts you to thinking. I have spent the year thinking.
I realized that what got me to this state of abominable bad health was a lifelong series of bad decision. I began to dwell with microscopic intensity not only on my physical bad decision, but those of the intellect and those of the spirit. It turned out that at every branch in my life’s path I had made grossly immature judgments and acted in equal proportion with bad faith. What a mess! Don’t worry I won’t list in front of you the egregious list of monumental blunders that I found in my life. Trust me it was a number that rivaled all the sand in all the beaches in all the world, and possibly Mars as well.
I spent dark nights of the soul searching, awake, sweating in the bed. I counted up all the bodies and finally could sleep fitfully on a mattress of gripes and sorrows and plights and hurts and sores and sickness and weaknesses and faults and failings and defects and flaws and shortcomings.
This year I feel like I have been slogging through all that same troubled sand just to get here. At every juncture something has intervened to keep me from fully appreciating the holiday spirit that I have projected on the full silver screen of my fantasy. I feel like a series of sharp stinging electric jolts keep me away from my true desires and hobbled to the “real” world. I shake my head after one year of considering, and wonder if an eternity of thinking will improve me. Changes, large and small, positive and negative, come with a series of corrections in the dark on storm chased seas.
When you begin writing a story, the first idea to develop is the main character’s “fatal flaw”. Without that flaw there will be no engine to drive the story forward. My story is driven by my flaws. So is yours! Those flaws are more responsible for our growth and personality than are our strengths, our talents, our gifts. Isn’t that what they are called? Those shining parts of us? Gifts? Like gifts they are acquired with ease and enjoyed with delight.
It used to make me crazy that gifted people could learn faster, sing sweeter, jump higher, look better, relate more easily than I can. I guess it still does bother me. That bother is one of my flaws. I cry. I rail. I gnash my teeth. I’m really getting the hang of this suffering.
But when I peer subatomically at all the problems that I had been gleefully dwelling upon with the intensity of a Dramatic Tragedy I find that they are merely shrines that I had carefully and lovingly erected on the path. When I open the creaking doors, there is nothing inside. The contents long ago had been transformed. They had been resurrected. They had been reborn, propelled, for better and for worse, into some part of my psyche that became manifest in my personality. They are some of the fuel that feeds the engine that drives me.
One day a friend and I wrote on yellow lined paper tablets lists of all the twisted awful things that we knew somehow interfered with our lives our work our selves. We then took the list, placed it into an empty trash can. Carried it down to the Mon River. Then we set it afire. It blazed in the twilight. Gray dark smoke roiled out of the container. When it remained as only charred ashes, we then kicked the hot can and emptied it into the River. As our worries, our fears, memories of ill wrought events, bad ideas, bad smells, worthless longings, our shower of flaws hit the river, a massive wave kicked a hiss of water back at us onto the shore. It flowed over our shoes and seeped the purified and transformed residue back into us.
I think that we should enjoy, praise and showcase our gifts. They are also a part of our precious selves. But it is time tonight to celebrate our flaws. Here is the challenge. Here is where we limit ourselves. Here is where we embarrass ourselves. Here is where we can dwell in groundless stupidity. Here is where we can truly cause evil to happen to ourselves and to others. Here is where we kill ourselves. And here is where we can be seen in all human splendor.
We find our true worth in the struggle, in the muck of decision that drives us forward in despair, in doubt, and with anxiety. Often we don’t measure up. We dwell lovingly with images that have long ago been raised and transformed from our hollow empty monuments. But it is here, in this slippery, confused ground of being that we can also be delivered to hope and to glory. And as we struggle on this muddied indeterminate field we can turn on nights like these to our friends and family, greater and close, past and present and get a shining smile of affirmation. Merry Christmas to you all!
Family Christmas Party
Last year, I pretty much walked out of this Christmas gathering and into a hospital. I spent three days prodded with a stainless array of needle and plastic tubing filling my body with a modern miracle of biological soup. Parked planted and potted I sat in cold hallways with equally forlorn souls opposite me gazing at the floor or longingly out a window. Ill health like a ruthless final examination starts you to thinking. I have spent the year thinking.
I realized that what got me to this state of abominable bad health was a lifelong series of bad decision. I began to dwell with microscopic intensity not only on my physical bad decision, but those of the intellect and those of the spirit. It turned out that at every branch in my life’s path I had made grossly immature judgments and acted in equal proportion with bad faith. What a mess! Don’t worry I won’t list in front of you the egregious list of monumental blunders that I found in my life. Trust me it was a number that rivaled all the sand in all the beaches in all the world, and possibly Mars as well.
I spent dark nights of the soul searching, awake, sweating in the bed. I counted up all the bodies and finally could sleep fitfully on a mattress of gripes and sorrows and plights and hurts and sores and sickness and weaknesses and faults and failings and defects and flaws and shortcomings.
This year I feel like I have been slogging through all that same troubled sand just to get here. At every juncture something has intervened to keep me from fully appreciating the holiday spirit that I have projected on the full silver screen of my fantasy. I feel like a series of sharp stinging electric jolts keep me away from my true desires and hobbled to the “real” world. I shake my head after one year of considering, and wonder if an eternity of thinking will improve me. Changes, large and small, positive and negative, come with a series of corrections in the dark on storm chased seas.
When you begin writing a story, the first idea to develop is the main character’s “fatal flaw”. Without that flaw there will be no engine to drive the story forward. My story is driven by my flaws. So is yours! Those flaws are more responsible for our growth and personality than are our strengths, our talents, our gifts. Isn’t that what they are called? Those shining parts of us? Gifts? Like gifts they are acquired with ease and enjoyed with delight.
It used to make me crazy that gifted people could learn faster, sing sweeter, jump higher, look better, relate more easily than I can. I guess it still does bother me. That bother is one of my flaws. I cry. I rail. I gnash my teeth. I’m really getting the hang of this suffering.
But when I peer subatomically at all the problems that I had been gleefully dwelling upon with the intensity of a Dramatic Tragedy I find that they are merely shrines that I had carefully and lovingly erected on the path. When I open the creaking doors, there is nothing inside. The contents long ago had been transformed. They had been resurrected. They had been reborn, propelled, for better and for worse, into some part of my psyche that became manifest in my personality. They are some of the fuel that feeds the engine that drives me.
One day a friend and I wrote on yellow lined paper tablets lists of all the twisted awful things that we knew somehow interfered with our lives our work our selves. We then took the list, placed it into an empty trash can. Carried it down to the Mon River. Then we set it afire. It blazed in the twilight. Gray dark smoke roiled out of the container. When it remained as only charred ashes, we then kicked the hot can and emptied it into the River. As our worries, our fears, memories of ill wrought events, bad ideas, bad smells, worthless longings, our shower of flaws hit the river, a massive wave kicked a hiss of water back at us onto the shore. It flowed over our shoes and seeped the purified and transformed residue back into us.
I think that we should enjoy, praise and showcase our gifts. They are also a part of our precious selves. But it is time tonight to celebrate our flaws. Here is the challenge. Here is where we limit ourselves. Here is where we embarrass ourselves. Here is where we can dwell in groundless stupidity. Here is where we can truly cause evil to happen to ourselves and to others. Here is where we kill ourselves. And here is where we can be seen in all human splendor.
We find our true worth in the struggle, in the muck of decision that drives us forward in despair, in doubt, and with anxiety. Often we don’t measure up. We dwell lovingly with images that have long ago been raised and transformed from our hollow empty monuments. But it is here, in this slippery, confused ground of being that we can also be delivered to hope and to glory. And as we struggle on this muddied indeterminate field we can turn on nights like these to our friends and family, greater and close, past and present and get a shining smile of affirmation. Merry Christmas to you all!
Monday, December 16, 2002
Monday, December 16, 2002 8:50 PM Joe Coluccio
Dreams of ExtraTerrestrials - Three
Falling swiftly across the frigid north, high above the DEW line geodesic domes painted pure white snow; further blurred white by frequent blizzard came the bright glowing sphere. Some say yellow, some say green. Esquimaux waved as it streaked across the sky. It paid little heed and plowed a heated furrow in the upper atmosphere. Saber jets from nearby Prudhoe AFB scrambled but could not match the incredible speed of the fiery ball. Nations went on Option One Alert Red Red Red. Two youngsters, call them Tommy and Johnny pitched desultory soggy soft balls to one another, whap! and let two or three gather in the outfield before one boy or the other would hop the distance and retrieve them with a weak overhand throw to the pitchers mound. Newscasters with wide banded hooked down brim Stetsons sweated in front of hot studio microphones and announced with a growing foreboding the impending doom. Somewhere above Manitoba the thing did a hard left turn and headed toward our boys in anytown everytime US of A.
Johnny, or Tommy, laid down at the base of the pitchers mound. Tommy, or Johnny, joined him. They shaded their eyes with their heavy hooked hands and looked into the hot pale blue summer cloudless sky. The heat wavered around their bodies. They used the webbing of their catching mitts , expended more work than purchased, to cool sweat rivulets that ran the contour of their faces. A long cool shadow and a low pitched throb that shook the roots of Tommy’s new silver fillings settled over them. The low pleasant throb started an ascent to a high howl and slowly, a slowness that expended massive impressive quantities of sheer power, the, some say yellow, some say green, globe settled earth ward. Eventually landing dead concentric center in the pitchers mound. By that time both youngsters were sitting, one in a blighted elm the other in a sticky maple about ten feet above the ground at the edge of the field.
The Civilian Guard came first with comfortably armed, 50 mm rounds dispensed from an air coiled platform, open half-tracks. Shiny green hard helmets over admirable young shaven heads and khaki green fatigues. They set up a perimeter of fire and drank tin cups filled with sloppy coffee made in large silvery commissary pots. Several shook brown papered cigarettes from government issued packages adorned with green targets. After about two hours decks of playing cards came out of field packs, and from under front vehicle seats and wagers consisting of cans of water packed fruit, tins of spicy ham, three by five photographs of bathing beauties began to madly change hands. Johnny, and Tommy, timidly came down from their perches and ate a can of peaches that was offered to them. The glowing object on the pitcher’s mound throbbed and twinkled. Finally the press was granted entry to the area by General Higgenbottham..
At a little after midnight a hatch making a sound like a man hole cover twirling down the spiral of entropy opened and out popped, quicker than any one eye could see, later photographs, taken by Jim Schneider who was walking the dog and had a camera complete with infrared scan, revealed in time lapse a radiant red dot that grew and finally filled the 35 mm frame with a fearful iridescence, a large metallic, smooth as the gleam on a mirror, robot. Ten feet tall if it was an inch. The Guard sprang to attention and bristled a fairly large array of rifled barrel at the creature. It stood, impassive in the moonlight. David clean features chiseled by some alien Michelangelo. “Hey. Kids, stay back!” barked Corporal Henry Baker IV Corps press liaison. Tommy, and Johnny, moved forward slowly toward the solid monument in the grass next to the sphere sitting on the pitchers mound, Grand Memorial Park. They had their baseball caps in their hands and moved in a dreadful unison. As if in a daze.
The large tin man bent slowly and picked both of them up and quick as a nod up the chimney disappeared back into the vessel. Oh Dear! The growing throng of listless people flared passed the phalanx of the Guard and beat on the sides of the space, if that is indeed where it came from, ship. Time, parallel time was another possibility. Eventually a governmental gent from Project Blue Book showed up but by then all the evidence was trampled into the deep recesses of the playground and Tommy, or Johnny, was in the engineering program at MIT. So issued another case of inconclusive evidence by the Air Force experts Possibly, suggested Gustav Holstbinder, Doctor of somethinghighorother, it was just a case of burgeoning master hysteria caused by the psychosociopolitco temper of those times. Most of the crowd pounders got bad ruddy blisters and lived to be a hundred and seven.
9:01 AM The church bells at St Benny’s began to clang and several of the volunteer fire crew present felt the irresistible urge to fire up the sirens down at the hall on Borgman Road. Tommy or Johnny appeared in front of the crowd. The globe began to flash a pastel rainbow of noise that changed to a fine garish neon display and gently, with stealth ease lifted to about twenty feet, then disappeared into an arc of light that reached the ionosphere in 2.34578 seconds, but who was really counting and finally it was coasting on a solar wave into the depths of intergalactic space. After the blush of wonder wiped off the faces of those present, Tommy, or Johnny, were questioned. “What was it like in there?” breathed ace reporter Carol Sajak, for Channel Seven, Canal Broadcasting, the News Team.
“Like a big baseball stadium.” said Johnny.
“Yeah, but the balls were in the stands watching as people went rolling around the bases.”
They never, Tommy or Johnny, said another word about the experience.
Dreams of ExtraTerrestrials - Three
Falling swiftly across the frigid north, high above the DEW line geodesic domes painted pure white snow; further blurred white by frequent blizzard came the bright glowing sphere. Some say yellow, some say green. Esquimaux waved as it streaked across the sky. It paid little heed and plowed a heated furrow in the upper atmosphere. Saber jets from nearby Prudhoe AFB scrambled but could not match the incredible speed of the fiery ball. Nations went on Option One Alert Red Red Red. Two youngsters, call them Tommy and Johnny pitched desultory soggy soft balls to one another, whap! and let two or three gather in the outfield before one boy or the other would hop the distance and retrieve them with a weak overhand throw to the pitchers mound. Newscasters with wide banded hooked down brim Stetsons sweated in front of hot studio microphones and announced with a growing foreboding the impending doom. Somewhere above Manitoba the thing did a hard left turn and headed toward our boys in anytown everytime US of A.
Johnny, or Tommy, laid down at the base of the pitchers mound. Tommy, or Johnny, joined him. They shaded their eyes with their heavy hooked hands and looked into the hot pale blue summer cloudless sky. The heat wavered around their bodies. They used the webbing of their catching mitts , expended more work than purchased, to cool sweat rivulets that ran the contour of their faces. A long cool shadow and a low pitched throb that shook the roots of Tommy’s new silver fillings settled over them. The low pleasant throb started an ascent to a high howl and slowly, a slowness that expended massive impressive quantities of sheer power, the, some say yellow, some say green, globe settled earth ward. Eventually landing dead concentric center in the pitchers mound. By that time both youngsters were sitting, one in a blighted elm the other in a sticky maple about ten feet above the ground at the edge of the field.
The Civilian Guard came first with comfortably armed, 50 mm rounds dispensed from an air coiled platform, open half-tracks. Shiny green hard helmets over admirable young shaven heads and khaki green fatigues. They set up a perimeter of fire and drank tin cups filled with sloppy coffee made in large silvery commissary pots. Several shook brown papered cigarettes from government issued packages adorned with green targets. After about two hours decks of playing cards came out of field packs, and from under front vehicle seats and wagers consisting of cans of water packed fruit, tins of spicy ham, three by five photographs of bathing beauties began to madly change hands. Johnny, and Tommy, timidly came down from their perches and ate a can of peaches that was offered to them. The glowing object on the pitcher’s mound throbbed and twinkled. Finally the press was granted entry to the area by General Higgenbottham..
At a little after midnight a hatch making a sound like a man hole cover twirling down the spiral of entropy opened and out popped, quicker than any one eye could see, later photographs, taken by Jim Schneider who was walking the dog and had a camera complete with infrared scan, revealed in time lapse a radiant red dot that grew and finally filled the 35 mm frame with a fearful iridescence, a large metallic, smooth as the gleam on a mirror, robot. Ten feet tall if it was an inch. The Guard sprang to attention and bristled a fairly large array of rifled barrel at the creature. It stood, impassive in the moonlight. David clean features chiseled by some alien Michelangelo. “Hey. Kids, stay back!” barked Corporal Henry Baker IV Corps press liaison. Tommy, and Johnny, moved forward slowly toward the solid monument in the grass next to the sphere sitting on the pitchers mound, Grand Memorial Park. They had their baseball caps in their hands and moved in a dreadful unison. As if in a daze.
The large tin man bent slowly and picked both of them up and quick as a nod up the chimney disappeared back into the vessel. Oh Dear! The growing throng of listless people flared passed the phalanx of the Guard and beat on the sides of the space, if that is indeed where it came from, ship. Time, parallel time was another possibility. Eventually a governmental gent from Project Blue Book showed up but by then all the evidence was trampled into the deep recesses of the playground and Tommy, or Johnny, was in the engineering program at MIT. So issued another case of inconclusive evidence by the Air Force experts Possibly, suggested Gustav Holstbinder, Doctor of somethinghighorother, it was just a case of burgeoning master hysteria caused by the psychosociopolitco temper of those times. Most of the crowd pounders got bad ruddy blisters and lived to be a hundred and seven.
9:01 AM The church bells at St Benny’s began to clang and several of the volunteer fire crew present felt the irresistible urge to fire up the sirens down at the hall on Borgman Road. Tommy or Johnny appeared in front of the crowd. The globe began to flash a pastel rainbow of noise that changed to a fine garish neon display and gently, with stealth ease lifted to about twenty feet, then disappeared into an arc of light that reached the ionosphere in 2.34578 seconds, but who was really counting and finally it was coasting on a solar wave into the depths of intergalactic space. After the blush of wonder wiped off the faces of those present, Tommy, or Johnny, were questioned. “What was it like in there?” breathed ace reporter Carol Sajak, for Channel Seven, Canal Broadcasting, the News Team.
“Like a big baseball stadium.” said Johnny.
“Yeah, but the balls were in the stands watching as people went rolling around the bases.”
They never, Tommy or Johnny, said another word about the experience.
Monday, December 09, 2002
Monday, December 09, 2002 5:26 PM Joe Coluccio
Everyone who’s heard of Groff Conklin raise your tentacle!
One of the ways, as I chronologically fight with more and hardier resources, sagging skin, loss of hair, couch potato ness and a decided degree of angst in the face of all that I have not achieved, I move, somewhat mentally and mostly spiritually, against ever present entropy is via my own personal time machine. It is a simple mechanism really. No “way back machine”. No Delorian. Hardly new technology. Invented mid-fifteenth century, born royal folio size by hands and design of a German in Mainz, Rhineland, 180 volumes strong of which only 48 remainder pieces are extant, and none of those at the mall in B.Dalton Booksellers next to coffee table books about Hitler’s SS, Marionettes in History and Quilt Making. I refer to Moveable Type! The Gutenberg Bible, the referenced work. Over the centuries the presses have become more efficient, influential and pervasive. Put that in your e-reader Mr. Virtual!
I have been a collector of many peculiar books most of my life. Witness the wall to wall profusion in the basement where I presently sit. Filled as it is with “many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.”
So, find me, if you look and will, frequently in thrift stores hidden behind rows of hand me down clothing and partially damaged appliances, looking at the eclectic tattered normally plebian selection of magazines, paper backs and hard backs. It is nothing less significant than the conquest of time that I seek. Or maybe just something good to read.
Now, take a trip with me if you will to 1533 Maple Avenue circa 1957, Rosedale. There I sit with old Fezziwig. It’s Fezziwig alive again!…ooops wrong story…on the front door stoop between the rhododendron plants and the damaged pink flamingos that survived a return trip with my family after a visit to Uncle Augie in Miami Beach. That blue plastic Arvin transistor radio in my lap with the 360 degree AM antenna has no FM band. Frequency Modulation has not debuted. Out of the speakers this wonderfully warm Saturday morning is Al Noble counting down the top 100 hits on KQV. Still 1410 AM. I am personally hoping that the Bobbettes and Mr. Lee make it to number one this week. ..three, four, five, look at him jive.
Next to me three or four garish, lurid science fiction pulp magazines, Astounding Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Galaxy Science Fiction and atop those an anthology of SF stories called Omnibus of Science Fiction. Compiled by none other that Groff Conklin. I was certain that Groff was his real name all these years until a small doubt crept into my thinking the other day and I looked it up, dub dub dub. O me of little faith, it is his real name, and what a moniker for the man who is as influential in the history of SF as many of the more luminous bodies. Hugo Gernsback, John W. Campbell Jr., Healy and McComas, Rod Serling even. (Admit it you don’t have a clue except for Serling.)
The doubt was occasioned by a first edition dust jacketless copy of the aforementioned Omnibus set behind the endless scratchy rows of LP 33 1/3 RPM Phonograph Records. I paid my seventy five cents, less I might add than the original cover price, and jumped (this is real time travel terminology here) back to young Joe. The hard head paid scant attention to my advice. Indeed, he paid no attention to me at all. Youth is wasted, I sighed, on the wrong people. Lest you think this is a fantasy. I am well aware that the Omnibus was published in 1952. I will only point out that the copy with me five years later was from the library. Verisimilitude restored!
I spent time (all the time in the world) in the introduction. Groff Conklin was an Aristotle of Science Fiction. He categorized with endless invention his compilations of stories: Worlds of Tomorrow, From Outer Space, The Best of Science Fiction, The Atom, Adventures in Dimension, The Super Science of Man, Far Traveling a smattering of the groupings cataloged. All of the great, optimistic, golden age science fiction writers are represented in the first five or six of Groff’s anthologies. (Andre Maurois? Jack London? I guess everyone tries Science Fiction.)
I slip back each evening, while I eat some dread natural food and sip some low level dose of alcohol. I laze the lazy day on the stoop, look out at the somnambulant traffic patterns on Maple Avenue (RD1, Verona, PA), wave to relations and friends, listen softly to Come Go With Me, Johnny B. Goode, Rocking Pneumonia and Boogie Woogie Flu, I wonder wonder who wrote the book of love, and read the wonders prepared for me by Groff.
You scoff? Don’t think it happens? Well then, look closely at that picture taken the following summer in front of the house. The Coca Cola Brown and White ’55 Buick in the drive to the left. Isn’t that me? In the picture? Well?
Everyone who’s heard of Groff Conklin raise your tentacle!
One of the ways, as I chronologically fight with more and hardier resources, sagging skin, loss of hair, couch potato ness and a decided degree of angst in the face of all that I have not achieved, I move, somewhat mentally and mostly spiritually, against ever present entropy is via my own personal time machine. It is a simple mechanism really. No “way back machine”. No Delorian. Hardly new technology. Invented mid-fifteenth century, born royal folio size by hands and design of a German in Mainz, Rhineland, 180 volumes strong of which only 48 remainder pieces are extant, and none of those at the mall in B.Dalton Booksellers next to coffee table books about Hitler’s SS, Marionettes in History and Quilt Making. I refer to Moveable Type! The Gutenberg Bible, the referenced work. Over the centuries the presses have become more efficient, influential and pervasive. Put that in your e-reader Mr. Virtual!
I have been a collector of many peculiar books most of my life. Witness the wall to wall profusion in the basement where I presently sit. Filled as it is with “many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.”
So, find me, if you look and will, frequently in thrift stores hidden behind rows of hand me down clothing and partially damaged appliances, looking at the eclectic tattered normally plebian selection of magazines, paper backs and hard backs. It is nothing less significant than the conquest of time that I seek. Or maybe just something good to read.
Now, take a trip with me if you will to 1533 Maple Avenue circa 1957, Rosedale. There I sit with old Fezziwig. It’s Fezziwig alive again!…ooops wrong story…on the front door stoop between the rhododendron plants and the damaged pink flamingos that survived a return trip with my family after a visit to Uncle Augie in Miami Beach. That blue plastic Arvin transistor radio in my lap with the 360 degree AM antenna has no FM band. Frequency Modulation has not debuted. Out of the speakers this wonderfully warm Saturday morning is Al Noble counting down the top 100 hits on KQV. Still 1410 AM. I am personally hoping that the Bobbettes and Mr. Lee make it to number one this week. ..three, four, five, look at him jive.
Next to me three or four garish, lurid science fiction pulp magazines, Astounding Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Galaxy Science Fiction and atop those an anthology of SF stories called Omnibus of Science Fiction. Compiled by none other that Groff Conklin. I was certain that Groff was his real name all these years until a small doubt crept into my thinking the other day and I looked it up, dub dub dub. O me of little faith, it is his real name, and what a moniker for the man who is as influential in the history of SF as many of the more luminous bodies. Hugo Gernsback, John W. Campbell Jr., Healy and McComas, Rod Serling even. (Admit it you don’t have a clue except for Serling.)
The doubt was occasioned by a first edition dust jacketless copy of the aforementioned Omnibus set behind the endless scratchy rows of LP 33 1/3 RPM Phonograph Records. I paid my seventy five cents, less I might add than the original cover price, and jumped (this is real time travel terminology here) back to young Joe. The hard head paid scant attention to my advice. Indeed, he paid no attention to me at all. Youth is wasted, I sighed, on the wrong people. Lest you think this is a fantasy. I am well aware that the Omnibus was published in 1952. I will only point out that the copy with me five years later was from the library. Verisimilitude restored!
I spent time (all the time in the world) in the introduction. Groff Conklin was an Aristotle of Science Fiction. He categorized with endless invention his compilations of stories: Worlds of Tomorrow, From Outer Space, The Best of Science Fiction, The Atom, Adventures in Dimension, The Super Science of Man, Far Traveling a smattering of the groupings cataloged. All of the great, optimistic, golden age science fiction writers are represented in the first five or six of Groff’s anthologies. (Andre Maurois? Jack London? I guess everyone tries Science Fiction.)
I slip back each evening, while I eat some dread natural food and sip some low level dose of alcohol. I laze the lazy day on the stoop, look out at the somnambulant traffic patterns on Maple Avenue (RD1, Verona, PA), wave to relations and friends, listen softly to Come Go With Me, Johnny B. Goode, Rocking Pneumonia and Boogie Woogie Flu, I wonder wonder who wrote the book of love, and read the wonders prepared for me by Groff.
You scoff? Don’t think it happens? Well then, look closely at that picture taken the following summer in front of the house. The Coca Cola Brown and White ’55 Buick in the drive to the left. Isn’t that me? In the picture? Well?
Sunday, December 01, 2002
Sunday, December 01, 2002 7:20 AM Joe Coluccio
Dreams of Extraterrestrials Version 2.0.0.0
If you go up into the mountains along Rt. 62 and wind down the two lane blacktop with stands of trees that reach past the sky and keep the world green and cool yet on the hottest august day. You come, eventually, after a bridge that crosses a narrow strip of the Allegheny to a double A frame country style store that was equipped with a couple display glass door coolers, filled with milk and sparkling beverages, so the blue and red magic marker sign said; an ice cream novelty case; a small meat locker; a counter the runs the back wall loaded with newspapers some day or older; a dirt brown cash register; beef jerky hung in proud profusion from a pictured placard; furry notions and trinkets fashioned of soft wood sporting outhouse jokes.
Next to the store is a small office mostly abandoned, except Saturdays in the morning, that has gilt painted Justice of the Peace, Roy “Mad” Hatter on a glass frame in a heavy dark door. At the far end of the strip of building is yet another small office.
“The place has been abandoned and dark like that for nearly fifteen years now. Since Gregory Lukacs died and his daughter moved the Ohio Indiana border.”
Around back in rustic disuse the remnants of chicken wire cages stapled to the long bark stripped poles that once organically graced the clearing in a less civilized day.
“They used to keep the skunks in that one!”
Weathered sign over an entry that would with its large log arch do the great wall of Skull Island, burned as Selznick conflagrated Atlanta in ’39, proud, painted in crude red letters, Petting Zoo. Cage, the rabbits, after cage, a doe and her bambi, after cage, once a bear, but no one would pet it, after cage, two raccoons, an opossum nearly blind crazy from the sun.
“Dolores, that was the daughter, tried to keep the animals, but old Greg was really just a scratch farmer and when cold weather came and tourists left their camps, well…the girl really did the best she could. She was a pretty little thing. Would break your heart. Some would have liked to see Greg sitting in a cage.”
The empty room at the far end was just really four bare wooden walls, a picture of President Eisenhower in general attire with a smile, a log hewn table with matching chair and a plastic covered single pane glass window at the rear. One lighting fixture turned on with a pull chain that clanged like a dull bell against the bare bulb when you used it hung down from the ceiling.
“It made the papers all the way down to Pittsburgh. Not the headlines or nothing like that. There was a picture of Old Greg holding that twisted rock. And people started coming like it was a pilgrimage to something holy. Father Daniels gave us a sermon the first Sunday after, saying that he didn’t think the church was doing such a good job any more of filling our life with the spirit when a piece of a flying saucer could replace Jesus.”
Farmer Discovers Part of a Flying Saucer. The rock was still warm to the touch when Gregory Lukacs traced down the flaming streak in the sky in the woods south of his back porch. Harry Danton picked up the story from Greg at the barber shop the next day and ran it in the Gazette. No one made mention of the little round eyed aliens that surely must now reside up on the Ridge.
“Eloise Cutter seen one, when she puttin’ an apple pie to cool on the sill, across the back yard. Cute little thing. She left the pie hot and shimmering there figurin’ it was hungry.
The Arcadia down on Mulberry Street started running factual movies about “lights in the sky” and the high school dance committee made Flying Saucers the theme of the Spring Dance. Hung cardboard replicas silver painted with gold sparkles outlining the border from the rafters of the gymnasium. Two babies were conceived that night at the Ford high across the river under the dark night glittering with stars.
“Greg did a pretty good job with the empty back room. He hung a bunch of heavy black cloth, donated by Fay’s Fabrics on the walls, over the window, got a spotlight from the hardware that beamed down on the rock sitting on a brick covered with a piece of dark purple crushed velvet.”
It was Delores who took people in. Greg was just too happy collecting the two dollars, five per family no matter what the size. People stood, hats in their hands, contemplating the marvelelous artifact that had come from across the universe.
One small boy, holding his mother’s hand, longing equally for Delores and the gnarled lump of heavy metal stared silently as the dead room air recognized his thoughts. He twisted his head skyward penetrating the confines of the room soaring out into a deep black hostile familiar universe. Rode a comet out to the bounds of the solar system, flowed beyond the frigid Styx guarding Pluto, further than Proxima Centauri, through the dense hot belly of the Milky Way on toward expanding Andromeda and the start of time.
Dreams of Extraterrestrials Version 2.0.0.0
If you go up into the mountains along Rt. 62 and wind down the two lane blacktop with stands of trees that reach past the sky and keep the world green and cool yet on the hottest august day. You come, eventually, after a bridge that crosses a narrow strip of the Allegheny to a double A frame country style store that was equipped with a couple display glass door coolers, filled with milk and sparkling beverages, so the blue and red magic marker sign said; an ice cream novelty case; a small meat locker; a counter the runs the back wall loaded with newspapers some day or older; a dirt brown cash register; beef jerky hung in proud profusion from a pictured placard; furry notions and trinkets fashioned of soft wood sporting outhouse jokes.
Next to the store is a small office mostly abandoned, except Saturdays in the morning, that has gilt painted Justice of the Peace, Roy “Mad” Hatter on a glass frame in a heavy dark door. At the far end of the strip of building is yet another small office.
“The place has been abandoned and dark like that for nearly fifteen years now. Since Gregory Lukacs died and his daughter moved the Ohio Indiana border.”
Around back in rustic disuse the remnants of chicken wire cages stapled to the long bark stripped poles that once organically graced the clearing in a less civilized day.
“They used to keep the skunks in that one!”
Weathered sign over an entry that would with its large log arch do the great wall of Skull Island, burned as Selznick conflagrated Atlanta in ’39, proud, painted in crude red letters, Petting Zoo. Cage, the rabbits, after cage, a doe and her bambi, after cage, once a bear, but no one would pet it, after cage, two raccoons, an opossum nearly blind crazy from the sun.
“Dolores, that was the daughter, tried to keep the animals, but old Greg was really just a scratch farmer and when cold weather came and tourists left their camps, well…the girl really did the best she could. She was a pretty little thing. Would break your heart. Some would have liked to see Greg sitting in a cage.”
The empty room at the far end was just really four bare wooden walls, a picture of President Eisenhower in general attire with a smile, a log hewn table with matching chair and a plastic covered single pane glass window at the rear. One lighting fixture turned on with a pull chain that clanged like a dull bell against the bare bulb when you used it hung down from the ceiling.
“It made the papers all the way down to Pittsburgh. Not the headlines or nothing like that. There was a picture of Old Greg holding that twisted rock. And people started coming like it was a pilgrimage to something holy. Father Daniels gave us a sermon the first Sunday after, saying that he didn’t think the church was doing such a good job any more of filling our life with the spirit when a piece of a flying saucer could replace Jesus.”
Farmer Discovers Part of a Flying Saucer. The rock was still warm to the touch when Gregory Lukacs traced down the flaming streak in the sky in the woods south of his back porch. Harry Danton picked up the story from Greg at the barber shop the next day and ran it in the Gazette. No one made mention of the little round eyed aliens that surely must now reside up on the Ridge.
“Eloise Cutter seen one, when she puttin’ an apple pie to cool on the sill, across the back yard. Cute little thing. She left the pie hot and shimmering there figurin’ it was hungry.
The Arcadia down on Mulberry Street started running factual movies about “lights in the sky” and the high school dance committee made Flying Saucers the theme of the Spring Dance. Hung cardboard replicas silver painted with gold sparkles outlining the border from the rafters of the gymnasium. Two babies were conceived that night at the Ford high across the river under the dark night glittering with stars.
“Greg did a pretty good job with the empty back room. He hung a bunch of heavy black cloth, donated by Fay’s Fabrics on the walls, over the window, got a spotlight from the hardware that beamed down on the rock sitting on a brick covered with a piece of dark purple crushed velvet.”
It was Delores who took people in. Greg was just too happy collecting the two dollars, five per family no matter what the size. People stood, hats in their hands, contemplating the marvelelous artifact that had come from across the universe.
One small boy, holding his mother’s hand, longing equally for Delores and the gnarled lump of heavy metal stared silently as the dead room air recognized his thoughts. He twisted his head skyward penetrating the confines of the room soaring out into a deep black hostile familiar universe. Rode a comet out to the bounds of the solar system, flowed beyond the frigid Styx guarding Pluto, further than Proxima Centauri, through the dense hot belly of the Milky Way on toward expanding Andromeda and the start of time.