10/29/06
Take a walk, trust me
I felt like absolute garbage, dried out and still stinking, today. All day, really. I was so *&%#ing depressed I could barely move. Slept most of the afternoon after church (religion is pretty much a requirement in Dixie, kind of depressing in itself, but I'm a believer, so it's usually cool with me), but felt even worse after I got up. Wolfed a bowl of spaghetti, which just gave me heartburn. Laid my head on the sofa arm and just shut my eyes and grooved straight into misery. Dragged myself to the grocer's for weekly foodstuffs, and caught dreary little Dido on the in-store Muzak, going down with her ship. Fit my mood to a "T".
Cool night, quarter Carolina moon, even some stars twinkling through the haze and the streetlight glare. So, once I got the food packed away, off I went, down the sidewalk. No cars, no people, no nothin' -- just me and my footsteps. The air nipped at my hands, so I picked up the pace. Within three or four blocks, I was all better. Made a mile or so, just to make sure. Now it's the witching hour, and here I am, typing away on my new journal, happy as a clam in deep water.
10/30/06
What went wrong
Pins and needles, needles and pins. What do you do with yourself when you don't know what to do with yourself? That kind of day.
Which brings me to the topic of tonight, and, as I write, the Witching Hour approaches. I'm planning to watch a DVD episode of Tru Calling at the stroke of midnight, so I've got to hurry.
That show had its ups and downs in season one, but really got better in the second half. Why Fox cancelled it after only a few episodes in season two was obvious. The quality was gone. Somebody apparently thought a more formulaic storyline would boost ratings. It didn't.
What went wrong? Well, I could go on and on, but really I think a playing a guessing game with the audience can only go so far. Tru Davies was a dream clairvoyant, not a time traveler. She always "rewound a day" only when she woke up -- consistently. It works great when the hero learns of their powers gradually, and makes mistakes along the way. It worked great, obviously, for Buffy. But what the Giles character did for the Buffy series was to help the audience figure out what was going on. Tru Calling didn't have that. Tru's boss was coming close to playing that role, and there were signs (in his library) that he knew more than he was telling about "psychic phenomena". But Tru never learned enough about her clairvoyance to allow her character to deepen, and thus make the audience care more about her.
The same thing went wrong with another network's entry into the field -- Joan of Arcadia. I think the 'secret' of the series was that Joan was talking to ghosts, who claimed to be the Almighty. Arcadians who died from foul play or negligence, and who wanted to give other 'potential' victims a better shake. But because the show's whoever didn't want to give away the guessing game, the stories eventually lost impact. That was only one of many troubles with that show's second season, but I think it lay at the core.
I like it when a story teases me along, but if it just plays the same old tease over and over, I get "lost." What each of those coming-of-age shows needed was a "medium" -- someone experienced in both this world and the next -- to help the lead character learn about her situation. Sometimes your mistakes can both cost you and benefit others. I've been on that losing end enough to know.
(The clock just struck. Gotta move. One more thing: the actors and crews in both shows were great. I don't fault them at all. Sometimes it's just the little things. Like a creak in the night.)
10/31/06
A better day overall, I must say. Since I'm in a better mood, I want to list some faves:
"Pet Sounds" by the Beach Boys
"The Roominghouse Madrigals" by Charles Bukowski
The watercolors of Andrew Wyeth
"I Love Lucy" black-and-whites I watched as afternoon reruns when I was eye-level to the center of the console screen.
"Love and Rockets" by Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez
"Memories, Dreams, Reflections" by C.G. Jung
"Free Jazz" by Ornette Coleman
"The Mike Douglas Show"
Here's a link {now gone} to another one, a Lost Fave I remember well. The show was one of the best ever on television. Just to hear it described, it doesn't sound like much. But you need to remember two things as you look at the season rundown: nothing like this had ever been done on national network television before. Sequential stories, all tragi-comic, and all linked to an overall theme. After it was cancelled, the star used to complain over his inability to get the show syndicated or out on video (at the time). He eventually created another show around a few ideas the cancelled show had. He and his producers put the story in a contemporary setting, used some of the same actors from the cancelled show, and then made the new one work for I think six or seven seasons. It was called "The Rockford Files." But hardly anybody remembers the show that informed "The Rockford Files" back in the 70's, and dozens of TV shows since!
11/02/06
My misspent youth
Spent all day yesterday pulling out some of the needles. Most, it seems, I put there myself!
Fast post about music. My memories of the 70s are probably not most people's. I remember taking a music appreciation course as a high school sophomore, and hearing the teacher's description of her 60s trip to New York with a group of other high school music teachers. On their itenerary was a concert by the Ornette Coleman Quintet (he'd added a violin by then, I think). Naturally, I waited for the monthly trip to the nearest Big City (I'm a very small town kid) to check out the only real record store in 100 miles. In the bin (vinyl records go in bins, CDs in racks -- how I know this is another post altogether) was the store's only Ornette Coleman record -- a double album called "Free Jazz". With some trepidation, I marched to the register and laid down my cash (about two week's worth) for it. The first spin was a challenge, the second spin (many weeks later) even more so. I took it to the music appreciation class (the "play your record" Friday) and the kids' jaws just dropped. We couldn't play the whole thing (I listened to the whole thing at one sitting only twice in my life -- and I owned the record!), but what they heard just was unbelieveable. Naturally they hated it and hated me for playing it. I loved them hating me. It's stamped my life forever. So, even though I gave away the record to a college girlfriend (don't ask) some years later, I never forgot the experience of listening to it.
As a sidebar, the tiny little newsstand-cum-record-store in my hometown would only stock two or three copies of the then-highly controversial Rolling Stone magazine. The 70's era underground folded tab was a far cry from the mainstream hipster pub it is now. What the shop did to appease complaining kids like me was to also stock Creem and the others, but also another folded tab called "Changes" -- published by Charles Mingus's wife. A perfect compliment to my Ornette experience, I saw in an article about the Jazz Composers Orchestra Association, got its catalog, and ordered avant garde jazz to my parents' absolute bewilderment. Don Cherry's solo effort (forget the name -- recall excellent tracks "King of Tung Ting Lake" and "Desireless" -- or something like that), Robin Kenyatta's "Girl From Martinique", and something by the Manhattan Quartet (didn't like except for the bass solo). Everybody thought I was crazy. I was. I am. And that's why "Free Jazz" is in my fave list.
11/03/06
The default userpic is a crop of a shot of me trying to turn off the flash on my little Nikon while I'm standing in the bathroom facing the mirror. I'm trying to look at the viewer on the back of the camera while tripping the shutter for a test shot. I thought the crop made me look like some evil scientist creating something bad out of the blue glow at the bottom left. Now that I see it in LiveJournal mode, I realize I just look like an a**hole. Oh, well. I can change it.
One of my more modern music faves has apparently announced she is through with performing. I liked Fiona Apple's last CD, probably because I must like the sound of self-torture. Anyway, the producer of two of the tracks is someone else I like, and I liked his arrangements. Also, I bought the CD about two weeks before my broadcast news career came to its conclusion, and the songs just fit my mood to a "T". But it begs another question. What is a middle-aged character like me doing listening to someone like Fiona Apple? There's an answer.
It all goes back to the end of my daily print journalism career, back in 1984. I just walked out (after two weeks notice) with no job. My upstairs neighbor ran a local record shop, part of a small regional chain -- the same chain I bought the Ornette Coleman record at, though in a different, and smaller, town. I was older than everybody, except my neighbor. I had focused on my career, to the extent that I bought very few records and mainly listened to my old college collection over and over again. Occasionally, while a newspaper hound, I'd get the odd movie to review when the regular reviewer had a conflict, so I'd see a free movie, hear a song I didn't know but liked, and bought the record, which I'd end up hating. Other than that, I knew nothing about the music scene (local commercial radio was then pretty much like now -- very commercial -- and I did not live in a town with an "alternative" station or get an NPR affiliate that wasn't all classical). I got an education just walking in the door the first day. At the register stood the local District Attorney's daughter (whom I did not know), hair in a four-color mohawk, tats on both shoulders, at least six piercings in each earlobe, and wearing a some kind of tore-up tee shirt under a leather vest. She didn't notice me, because she was busy slamming a customer's record in a bag with the words "Seizure, dude!" She also looked like she was ready to rip somebody's head off. It turns out she had just been told for the millionth time she could not play Black Flag records in the store during operating hours. At the back desk filling out special orders (all had to be done by hand, pressing down the pen as hard as you could to get all four carbon copies to print through) was a slightly older employee. He had his hair in what we called a "shag" cut, was a musician, and hated the manager so passionately he refused to speak to me (the manager's uncool neighbor hire) for about two weeks. Kenny was into ... I don't remember what Kenny was into, actually. I think he played synth in several local bands, apparently hating them all. I think he liked Howard Jones and stuff like that, but he didn't communicate with me. Then there was Johnny, the large black super friendly guy who knew all music and liked mostly soul and light jazz. I hid my old jazz tastes from him and everybody else, because I was afraid they'd think I was a nut (Plus, I held so-called "light jazz" in utter contempt -- another thing I wanted to hide from Johnny, the assistant manager). The other employees were music hounds who were quitting in droves. They all hated the manager, who was fired shortly after that. Now I had no one on my side, and was held in such disdain by the staff that all the records I played in-store (we had to take turns changing whatever was on the turntable) were promptly removed with a loud scratching sound. ("You want to play Juice Newton? What are you?") The first CD's were about six months from being released -- it was all vinyl and cassettes then. The job was not boring to me, but Friday and Saturday nights were pure bedlam. Hordes of working-class youth poured into the only record store in town to buy the latest KISS ("Animalize"), Def Leppard, Dio, Ratt, and -- brace yourselves -- Hank Williams Jr. cassettes. Marty (the hardcore girl) brought her friends over during the last hour before closing -- all to sneer at the kids buying music they also liked, but wouldn't admit. I was saved partly by a work ethic I learned in newspapers and retail (I come from a long line of retail managers), and because the new manager liked me. Christy was the best boss I ever had. She was sympathetic, fair, and friendly -- but also a music-retail pro. Christy was from Athens, Georgia, and knew REM and others in that scene personally. (Marty knew Black Flag -- she'd house them when they came to play The Milestone Club in the nearest Big City). Kenny's replacement was a true music snob, but who knew his stuff. He played bass in an actually good local band. His favorite band was The Smiths. His band didn't sound like them, though. Christy loved alternative stuff, and played a lot of female singer songwriters that preceeded Fiona Apple. I'm writing this while listening to The Deftones' latest release on AOL Listening Party. I like most of it. Another I've heard I liked is "BeHeMe" by a group I'll think of later (something to do with gardening).
So that's what a guy in his early 50's is doing listening to music people half his age are listening to. He remembers when going to work was fun.
(By the way, I screwed up something in the earlier post. Vinyl went in bins, cassettes went in racks. CD's went in two to a bin -- three wide didn't quite fit.)
11/04/06
Cold, full moon, clear sky, and the heart of Saturday night lay downtown. Lots of students out and about, fun just me walking and having a nice gyro. Reminded me of college days gone by.
Because I wasn't much different then. I had longer hair, wore Clark's instead of Birk's Footprints (wrecked my feet covering the South Carolina legislature a few years ago -- six hours standing a day without orthotics is a bad idea for a flat-floot like me). Thought of myself as an outsider, but I always had my nose to the glass of the Inside World. Wondered what it was like feeling normal, back then. Now, I don't care. Normal is what I call it, long as I don't cheat, steal, lie, attack somebody, etc. But back then, it was something that looked like it was out on the horizon, always further away the faster I ran toward it. Phantoms are like that.
Still, that outsider feeling is not altogether a bad thing. I just bought (hardly can afford to, but ... ) the DVD set of Buffy Season Six -- the one everyone says they hate. I'm hooked solid, watching an episode almost every night. I relate to being somebody who is living a life in a world they never made, and irritated as hell about it.
My habit was to buy a season and watch one episode a week, always on Sunday night. It made a nice end to the weekend, and gave me something to look forward to at the end of the work week. Plus, it was like a defiant little "miracle" play, a story about love and belief, a counterpoint to churchly piety.
I'd never thought about the show much, before 2002. I thought it was a trendy little piece of fluff that I didn't miss not being able to watch (cable only in my area -- and I haven't had a cable hookup in nearly 20 years). But Nine-Eleven (an assignment brought me to NYC three months after the planes hit -- saw Ground Zero, interviewed firefighters who'd lost friends, etc) and its aftermath of more plane crashes and aerosolized anthrax haunted me, and left me channel surfing blankly night after night -- just numb. Then, in January, the local Fox affiliate began airing Buffy re-runs late Sunday nights. They started, for some reason, with Season Four -- the other season nobody likes. I settled down and watched, just because something finally caught my attention. Within twenty minutes, I was hooked for life. The station ran the shows in sequence, but only the WB ones. After season five ended with Buffy swan-diving to her death, the station went back to Season One repeats the following week.
Oddly, another station declared it would broadcast part of the WB and part of the UPN schedules in early 2003. I got to see the last eight or so broadcast episodes of BtVS as they were aired on Wednesday nights, not in repeat -- and then watched the repeats of Season Two on Sunday nights. So, when I could (I'd gotten fired again by that time -- radio, don't ask), I bought all of Season Three, then all of Season Seven. Finally, I'm watching the season that had eluded me all this time. And, to me, it's better than all the others. I know I'm the only person on Earth who feels this way. Sorry -- but remember, I'm an outsider.
There is an advantage to watching the show like this. You relate to it personally, because everybody else who possibly could have cared has already seen it. You feel as though the shows are speaking directly to you. And there's no need to analyze them, because when they're personal, they are burned into your unconscious like a CD-ROM. The other advantage is that (this is a not-too-well-kept secret) the shows in repeat are often rough cuts. They have to leave in a total of 30 seconds or even a minute to compensate for less advertising, and to keep the aired version copyrighted. So, you'll see boom mic's hanging down over the actor's heads, slight miscues, and other tiny bits of stuff that actually make the shows a little more interesting (If you're watching for it, you can see things like that on Seinfeld, Friends, all the big shows running in heavy syndication). One of the better ones in Buffy rerruns is when Zander is squirting water on evil rodents chasing Cordelia out of a house. Charisma Carpenter runs out of the house, yelling "Oh, that water's cold! Stop it, Nick!" Meanwhile, Nicholas Brendan is grinning evilly, continuing to spray his co-star. Bad boy, Nick!
11/05/06
Again the witching hour approaches, and I'm typing away. Less cool here, some clouds tonight.
One of the things I'm trying to write (won't call it a book, don't know where I'm going with it) is about the "power of personal choice". It really is a powerful thing we humans have, the freedom to use our wills however we want, within the limitations of time, space, genetics, and other factors in our immediate environment. We can choose to lie, cheat, steal, fake stuff, be an idiot when you know better, etc. And we have the power to do otherwise, to make better choices. Plus, we have the additional power to respond to those who do either -- something good for us, something bad to us, and the like.
Once upon a time, a guy chose to take some of my personal identity (not account numbers, it was other stuff -- I need to be vague here) and use it to acquire status that I at that time could not have. When a relative informed me of this, the situation was that I could basically do nothing to retaliate at that point. I felt powerless. I got angry for a while, but then I realized something that has helped me ever since. It was this: I had something worth stealing. Some phony took from me something I had made, and was pretending he could do the same things with it I could. He could not, because it was my creation: my God-given ability to create inhered in it, and I could still use that power to do more. After maybe a year, the guy disappeared from the scene. Because what I did once I realized I still had power -- the power to create something even better in the place of what he'd taken -- made it so. I employed additional skills I'd honed from other God-given talents to create something much better, and something no one could ever take away -- because this time, I created something that had more of me in it. It was inimitable. It was either me doing it, or no one. The "secret ingredient" was that the process itself was the secret. Once I realized I had something inherent in me that created something worth stealing, or copying, or whatever -- that meant I could make something else to replace what I'd lost, more of it, and make it better than before. The power of love (I loved what I was doing), the power of insight, the power of self-help, the power of honest work -- all essential. But none of them were worth anything until I used my power to choose.
11/06/06
Graphic Story, Part 1
Warmer still, and the rain's on its way, they say.
I got into comics like every other American boy, when I was 12. That's when my friends started suddenly raving about their new comic book faves, acting as though they'd been fans for years. Waving the colored little pulp mags in my face, like, "Look what I have, and you can't get one now!" Sure enough, when I walked by the local newsstand-record-and-book store in my little hometown, the comic rack was right in the front window. And all the Spider-man and Fantastic Four issues were always gone by the time I got there. Nobody bought Captain America/Iron Man, though. Or DC titles like The Flash. There was no point looking at Superman or Batman in those days. TV series and years of market domination left those titles aimed at audiences even younger than 12. Well, that's what we told ourselves, anyway. The high school kids were getting the FF and Spideys, in those days, so reading one as a sixth-grader was considered advanced, at least by us. My friends were getting their copies from sources they never revealed. Neither had older siblings, so that remains a mystery.
Anyway, Flash had storylines by two greats: Julius Schwartz on story and art by Carmine Infantino. So it was well worth the read. Plus, the myth of Mercury has worldwide appeal, so it was a good title, as long as those two titans of the comics world were doing it. Cap and Iron Man shared a comic book, and they were straight-ahead comic book stories that lacked the hip appeal of Marvel's first line, but they were good enough for me. King Kirby did Cap's art, and Gene Colan did Iron Man. I loved those titles, partly because they were all I could get my hands on that weren't silly to me. Oh, yeah, Hulk sold out, too, but that title never appealed to me. I don't know why.
Later, I learned (after interrogating one of my friends) of a old fashioned grocery store up the road a ways that sold "reader's copies" -- in other words, they were reselling used back issues. The store was on the way to my Grandma's (the other one, my mother's mother), but not one my mother ever wanted to stop at, for some reason. But I begged and begged, and actually got an hour in the store as my 13th birthday present. That's where somebody had left battered copies of Spider-Man at Ditko's peak. I would take them home and read them like they were writ in gold. They were just gems. I couldn't believe I even held them in my hands, much less owned them. Something like that stays with a guy.
But I grew up, discovered girls, and forgot comics entirely in high school. And by then FF and Spidey had lost their luster, with the departure of Kirby and Ditko as artists, so they weren't hip anymore. Also by then, I'd taken up reading adventure stories, with Doc Savage and Tarzan (Ballantine had reprinted all of the Edgar Rice Burroughs classics -- I must have read a half-dozen or more). Conan the Barbarian had covers too racy for my parents to tolerate, so I let the "cool guys" have those (but I stared at the tiny cover art by Frazetta, totally obsessed, when no one was looking). As luck would have it, Ballentine published a Burroughs bio and retrospective of his work in mass-market paperback when I was a high school wage earner. It had Frazetta ink drawings all through it, and I think I "read" the binding off that one!
By college, I dormed with a guy who was a local to the campus area, and he had a car! He knew where to get the records and mags in the nearest town (the campus was rural), and that's where I tasted being a 'fanboy". Barry Windsor Smith had brought out a "book-length" Conan in black and white, around that time. I loved it, as a college kid would, somewhat dispassionately. Frankly, I'd found music a much better source of pleasure (see previous posts), and I stunned my college friends by using spending money for Miles Davis "Live at the Fillmore East", instead of rather sick Vampirella titles (I bought a couple to try and fit in. Great art, but disgustingly cynical stories, at least to my taste.) My cool jazz and "middle period" Joni Mitchell records ("For the Roses", "Hejira" etc.) were always getting borrowed by guys who hated the music, but used them to try and seduce their dates. At least for a year or so, before the girls figured out what came next after Joni or Miles. (That's where the "Free Jazz" record mentioned a few posts back went for -- revenge. As if it was my fault! No, I didn't try the technique myself. I'd found a girlfriend, who told me flat out it was creepy to lend records, knowing what they would be used for. You figure out the rest what happened to my poor Ornette disc!) Oh, well.
11/07/06
Graphic Story Part 2
Started raining, as promised, very early this morning and well into the afternoon. Stopped in time for the voter turnout to surge. Naturally, I was caught in it.
One of the things that stands out in my memory was the strange way Jack Kirby drew hands in his comics for action scenes. An outstretched hand was forever jumping off the page toward the reader, with the palm down and the fingers all fanned out, but with the wrist bent outward a little. Didn't matter if it was Mister Fantastic, The Thing, the Human Torch, Captain America, the Hulk, the Silver Surfer (what a comics character!), the Black Panther, one of the Inhumans, or even Galactus pronouncing destruction, or Doctor Doom pronouncing ... well, doom. They all hand this outstretched arm with very carefully fanned out fingers and the wrist bent outward a little. It was Kirby's signature. If you saw that hand sticking out of the cover (in effect), you knew Kirby drew the comic, and it was going to be fun to look at.
Kirby knew what to exaggerate to bring a kid into the action on the page. Shoulders always big, legs really muscular, waists tight. Eyebrows were always thick and drawn together in concentration. And all the hair stayed in place, unless maybe somebody got clobbered hard, and a lock would fly out. (Speaking of clobbering, of course the Thing's hair stayed on tight under all those orange scales!) But that wasn't all. Kirby would sequence a fight scene across an entire page, with Cap or somebody jumping over the evildoer and flipping end over end, and then kicking the guy in the head, with style, to boot! (No pun intended, but I'll take it.)
As I said in yesterday's post, these things stick in a kid's head. I later found out more about Jack "King" Kirby shortly before he died back in the mid-80s. Kirby lived in New York, grew up tough, and yearned to be in the circus. It was a means of escape for him, to fantasize being a trapeze artist, flying high above the crowd. But for some reason, he never pursued it. Then, I was watching something on TV ("Circus of the Stars") and a trapeze artist was trying to show some TV actor how to swing on a trapeze. He said you didn't want to grab the bar overhand if you were going to do some kind of flip. You had to fan out your fingers, aim your thumbs at the bar, grab it underhand as it swung toward you and lock your grip with your thumbs coming over the top. Like the "Kirby hand." So, Jack maybe did learn something about trapeze flying, after all!
But if so, why did he quit? One of my Marvel faves was Daredevil -- the Man without Fear. (This was years and years before Frank Miller made Daredevil into, well, a devil.) Kirby drew the first Daredevil cover, and probably designed Daredevil's first uniform -- a bright yellow with a black singlet and a cowl with devil's horns. I'd read years and years later that Kirby had intended it to look like a trapeze artist's costume. Why would Daredevil be The Man without Fear? He can't see converging lines -- so he can't get vertigo. Vertigo is an optical illusion that many trapeze artists fear, because it can come on you suddenly, and for no apparent reason. Daredevil's sonic hearing made him completely immune to vertigo -- hence, no fear. Maybe Jack had a problem with getting vertigo, and couldn't do the high wire. I guess we'll never know. (Kirby could draw as a kid, and used that skill to get himself a cartoonist's job in the Army so he could get off the World War Two battlefield's front lines.)
Look at the Fantastic Four -- they're all in trapeze costumes. One of the acts in a circus was a man who shot himself out of a cannon while holding flames or being "on fire" as an extra stunt. He was called The Human Torch. On the circus midway were people who could do contortionist tricks -- Mister Fantastic. There was always a brutish strongman doing seemingly impossible feats of strength -- The Thing. And the Inivisible Girl? Making a woman disappear was a standard magic act on the circus midway. I think that's what lay behind The Fantastic Four's popularity -- the unconscious connection with many a little boy's dream -- to run away and join the circus, just like the king of comic artists wanted to do.
Kirby had a lot of younger imitators who adored his work. I mentioned Barry Windsor-Smith yesterday. He was one. Another was responsible for my quiet revenge on the cool guys who bought the FF and Spider-Man comics before I could get to the store. His name was Jim Steranko. Part Oriental, Steranko was into martial arts -- judo, I think. And Steranko loved movies. He took over drawing a failing comic from Kirby -- Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD. It shared a comic with Doctor Strange. (By the way, the only woman who drew a Marvel comic in those days was Marie Severin. She temporarily took over the title when Steve Ditko quit Marvel. If you can get back issues that old, you may agree that she did a better job than Ditko -- better by far, in my opinion.)
Steranko got a few issues under his wing, and all the cool guys bought the comic before me, again. They laughed at me as I begged to borrow them when the teacher wasn't looking! Steranko drew huge futuristic guns and outlandish vehicles, as well as really sexy female counterparts to Nick Fury -- who wore an eyepatch. And Steranko was so good at storytelling that Stan Lee just let him take over, and then gave Nick Fury his own comic. That's when Steranko went wild -- OpArt effects, wild panel layouts, or maybe no layouts at all, detail unheard of in comics art before that, and imaginative spy stories, blended with eerie science fiction twists. It left the cool guys behind. They didn't like it, because they didn't understand it. I had Nick Fury comics all to myself. They stuck in my head, as I saw nearly twenty years later. Steranko's work was that far ahead of its time. What happened twenty years later? Next time -- along with the reason behind another of my faves.
11/08/06
A Most Holy Aardvark
Clouds and yuck all day. The sun set, the clouds left, and the temps started dropping. A foot-long trip down the Subway and I'm all better.
I promise to set aside my pontiff's tiara when I post in the future. Yesterday's was ... OK, don't read it. Please.
I worked in a comics store for eight months. I was the manager, chief sales clerk, bathroom washer, floor mopper and backstock counter. I was king of this street-level triangle cut out of a building laid down in a old tobacco town's odd angle. There was an air conditioner in the transom, but no heat. The old coal furnace had died, and the owner refused to replace it. He brought a clunky portable kerosene heater when autumn set in, and he said I'd need to buy the kerosene myself. He left me a little plastic hand pump as well. This was still the American South, right? Winter was a cool breeze or two ... no problems. Except we got more snows that winter than any ten previous. We got more actual snow on the ground than the previous ten years total. One was a 14-incher with one inch of ice on top of it. The weather that followed was subfreezing for two weeks. The mail stopped. City services stopped. Anybody caught without enough oil in their home heater reserve tanks either found shelter or froze to death. I had a half-inch left on the heating oil measuring stick when the snow and ice finally began to melt. Before that, I would run the heat for an hour a day, just to try and hold out. I was renting two rooms in an antique house with walls you could blow air through with your mouth. The heater was a basement (or cellar) model than was at least fifty years out of date. To boot, (this is a pun I intend, grimly) I owned one leaky pair of cowboy boots. That, and a worn pair of Clark's Wallabee Weavers, was all I owned to put on my feet. I damn near died.
Why did I damn near die? Fanboys. All stores, restaurants, and nearly everything else was closed. But that didn't stop the fanboys. The store owner, who lived in a city many miles distant, called me at home the day after the snow fell for eight hours straight that night, and demanded to know why his store was closed! I tried to explain to him that this town was not prepared to cope with winters made for Buffalo, New York. He said he found me my apartment within a few blocks of the store for a reason, and I'd better get going! When I finally stumbled over there, who should be waiting but a line of fanboys six or seven deep. They had gone to a pay phone (this was ten years before cell phones) and called the owner at home to demand their comic books! For those who may be a little clueless, fanboys are not 12-year-olds -- physically. They are adult males, some in their 30s and 40s, who are obsessed with comic books. Not adult-oriented graphic novels or Japanese imports, no. Comic books. They are not collectors, either. No, they only want new comic books, but in mint condition, in case they ever become collectors. They were all bigger than me, and I don't carry a sidearm, so I opened the *#%^@*(!ing store.
You see, I had gotten the weekly shipment (the owner ran his own distributorship), complete with unsorted special orders (that was half the shipment) the evening before as it started to snow, but after store hours. These fanboys were not at work the next day because of the snow, and they were bored. So, they all got in somebody's Rachero Deluxe (again, this was many years before passenger SUV's were common) or whatever the thing was called, and somehow made it to the store.
They didn't even let me get the heater running. They wanted their damn comic books, and they wanted them now!
In a way, I am to blame. I took the job, thinking it would be fun for a while. I had enjoyed comics as a lad, and some even in college, as I've mentioned. Before I knew about the job, I'd begun reading some of the newer ones of that time, and enjoyed many -- American Flagg, Journey, Love and Rockets (in my faves list below) Mister X, and several others I don't recall. I took the job, believing I would sell Marvels and DC's to 12-year-olds and the "alternative" titles to single adults like me. I did not know what a fanboy was. I learned. I learned the hard way. I stopped reading comic books of any kind. Except one.
Cerebus The Aardvark. It kept me alive.
11/09/06
Miscellany
Super nice, clear sky, sunny and like late September all day.
Played Tetris and started listening to the Fu's latest on AOL before starting to write this. It's a live recording. Cool acoustic set so far, which includes "My Hero" and "Another Round."
I hope any readers caught my self-satire in the last post. When I was a comic buyer in another 'burg, I was as bad as anyone else. I used to wait for the mall days on end to open to get my fix. Working on the other side of the register killed it.
I hope I caught the tone of the typical Cerebus letter page of that era with the post. When Dave Sim was still publishing replies to selected letters, not only did he print mine, but had a pretty neat reply. He was starting to get controversial even then (mid-80's), and I wrote to say he had the right to say what he wanted in his own book. I never read Cerebus again after I left the comic book retail business, but I understand Sim went off the deep end with Cerebus years later. I understand he's now pretty much a recluse.
A duo still cranking out work is Los Bros. I don't have money -- a perpetual problem -- to buy their stuff, but I do read bits standing when I can. Discovering that kind of thing around '85 was a real breath of fresh air. Hopey and Maggie started me off, but I gradually came to "get" Palomar later on. If you're not a reader of Love and Rockets, give it a try. The quality black and whites might be a better long term value than the color graphic novels, which are expensive, I think. I did scrounge for a copy of the Fray color graphic novel a few months back, though, and continue to enjoy re-reading parts. (The Fu's are sticking with the acoustic set, and I'm about seven tracks into it now. There are 15 in all. It's very folky. They even have a string quartet playing behind "Live Again". The audience is really quiet, like they're wondering "Where's the rock?" The second set has now started, and it's just Dave on vocals and guitar.)
There's another black-and-white from my retail days. It was called "Usaggi Yojimbo." The hero was a walking and talking rabbit who was a displaced samurai, a ronin. The footnotes explained samurai culture and Japanese terms as the story of Usaggi unfolded. Quit before the mini-series finished, but maybe it's another oldie to look up. (Dave's now doing "Best of You" -- still solo acoustic guitar and vocals. The audience is singing along, so I guess they didn't all leave.)
"Journey" was another black and white title in a kind of limited series. Very high quality cartooning and storytelling, along with some historical material. William Loebs did the comic guy stuff, while I think his wife did the research. I really remember one sequence where it's snowing like crazy in the story (now why would I remember that?) and the snow looked like it was 'whiting out' the characters. Neat effect.
Most people into comics are not going to go for titles like that, I realize. Color titles like Ronin and the Elektra series by Bill Sin-KEV-itch (sorry, I can't spell his name -- the fanboys taught me how to pronounce it. Yes, I was friends with several of them. It was just that one day.) were way ahead of their time and really popular.
The Watchmen (the Alan Moore book) started coming out in comic book form a little after I got thawed out that year. I read the first issue or two, but could never "get" Moore in any title. I loved the way he told the stories, but couldn't quite handle his attitude toward them. I had the same problem with Frank Miller, except with the art. I liked his style, but not his actual execution. (Fu's have quit -- rockers beware! "Skin and Bones" is all acoustic.) I did see "V for Vendetta" earlier this year, and really liked the movie. Moore didn't -- so I guess his stuff is not my cup of tea (Twining's Russian Caravan, if I ever get back in the money ... . Not likely.)
OK, so I've lost everybody. But look up the Sienkiewicz book. (I did, for the spelling, on Wikipedia just now.) Frank Miller did the story. It's called "Elektra: Assassin". The art was way gone. (Is that how you say it?) OK, I'm done.
11/11/06
Elected Out
Sunny, warm, a little humid. I didn't get out till late.
We had a national election day earlier this week. I know this is not a bulletin for most people. I voted, and that was it. It hasn't always been like that. Most of my posts have focused non-career stuff, except for some of the more luducrous foilbles. I don't think I've ever mentioned I was a career newsman -- 26 years. I say, was because the future does not look promising, but I could be wrong.
The reason I bring it up now is because rolling around my head this week was one flashback after another of election days past. They are hell. Absolute hell for anyone in journalism. In the states, big network TV anchors always used to say how excited they are about a political season. That's because all they do is sit there. The rest of us have to go out and work like dogs, and then come back and work like beavers till we drop.
The dog part is hounding people to get voter comment, turnout numbers, and all kinds of other stuff. Then, once the voting stops and the counting begins, you must go to some election HQ or some candidates HQ and wait. If you're in broadcasting, you must send off reports about how everyone is waiting for results, and just try to make enough chatter to suit your employers.
The last one I did was probably the worst, but I would hate to have to go back and rate them. As a radio broadcaster, I had to pull my normal shift (a fair challenge in itself), wolf a sandwich and then off to election central with my recording kit and a company cell phone. As I have mentioned, my feet are not in good shape, and election central has a floor of bare concrete. The few chairs are taken by workers or volunteers. I announce best standing, so I was already hurting when I got there, burping the gases from an inhaled sandwhich. "Hello, Senator such and such, how's (burp) it (gasp, brrappp, gulp) goin (urp)?" The next thing that went wrong, my cell battery died in the middle of my first report. So I reached in my kit for the spare. (Both were freshly charged, I was told). Gone. Must still be in the car. By now, it's dark. It wasn't when I parked there. I had hopped out of the car and walked the half-mile (presidential election year -- lots of cars before me), without noticing the deep hole inches before my car's front bumper. I had just wanted to avoid the steep gulley to the car's passenger side, and get the car off the potholed road leading to election central. Off I go, frustrated and still belching, when I approach my car and -- yikes! -- down the hole I go! Oh no, the (very dim) streetlamp reveals a pile of two-inch-square blocks of gravel headed toward my face! My hands go out, aaauggh, the gravel bites into my palms. This hole is deep, so I'm falling hard with my recording gear flying everywhere in the (almost) pitch black, and I get my head forward enough to -- bleah! -- eat a faceful of nasty smelling dirt. My right knee really hurts. The other one is numb. My less-sore foot is twisted sideways, but not at the ankle. How is that possible? Jump in black hole half-full of industrial sized gravel and run-off crud to see for yourself. I slowly tried to get up and, still spitting nasty dirt, I feel a couple of tickles on my arm (I'd rolled up my sleeves -- warm night like tonight). Little black specks barely visible hopping like tree spiders all over 'em. I shake off all, but one of the more nimble devils hops off my chest and onto my left arm. I swipe, but he doesn't move. I do. My arm flies back as if hit by a nailgun. It felt like it, too. The little devil had the bite of a cobra! I got him off, dancing around as one leg fell back into the pit, spewing nasty dirt and gravel all over my gear. Wincing in pain, I get to my car, get out the flashlight, and locate the scattered pieces of recording gear, including the dead phone.
I get inside, and grab the other battery I'd left in the seat somehow. Back to election central I go (It's actually a warehouse). Just in time for report number two. The new battery goes dead in the middle of my second sentence. Results are starting to pour in, and I have no idea who is winning what. My sample ballot lay somewhere in the black pit, and we had to read results as they periodically flashed across one of four computer monitors with print as small as what I'm typing now. I search the warehouse for the one electrical outlet we're allowed to use. It's four inches from the floor. I attempt to get on one knee (YEEOUCH! That one's no longer numb), then I just plop face forward on the floor as I hear feet shuffling behind me and whispers commencing. (Are they coming to help me? Are you kidding?) I stab the charger's prongs into the outlet, realize the battery switch has killed speed dial, and now I have to find the special election-day-only number to call the station for a replacement phone. I wait an hour for a new phone to come. Meanwhile, I madly play catch up, trying to hold my notepad with the left arm that has sprouted a purple and red blotch and has begun to throb like a trip hammer. I decide there's no catching the other reporters. I just have to stoop to eavesdropping on their reports, so I can regurgitate their material when my phone comes.
But there's good news in the interim. A former TV reporter had gotten hersefl hired as the new elections director. She was that night running around as if her hair were on fire, and I spot her board members doing work an elections director is supposed to do. I breathe a sigh of relief, as I realize the final results would be a little late. But breathing out forces my chest to move, where a chunk of gravel had nestled itself so gently only a little while ago. Now my chest is not numb, either. The phone arrives, and its courier looks at me oddly. "Are you OK?" "Oh, sure, sure -- I'm fine! Want to stay and help!" "Oh, no, you're doing a great job! Bye!" Oh, well.
The night wears on, and spectators decide watching TV at home or in a bar is a better idea. I get a chair, phone in some kind of numb-brain results, get a few interviews (my recorder works! the dirt I knocked out of it did not jam it! now if i could just get that clod of foul-smelling crud out of the microphone screen! raise an aching foot to tap the mic head on the sole and -- oh, no. Not that too.) I'd found the only bathroom in the place and had washed my face and hands between reports, but no first aid kit anywhere. I thought about doing a Sean Connery and suck the poison out of my spider bite, but, my, wouldn't that look odd on Election Night? Just let it throb. Maybe my arm will fall off and I won't have to worry about it.
I get a call to wrap up and come back to the studio to help produce the morning's reports. It's only 11 pm. I'd been at work since 10 ... am. I'd been given a two hour break to go home and nap earlier that day around 3, but I didn't sleep. As soon as I got to the studio, I hobbled to the production room. The afternoon anchor greeted me with unusual gusto, briefly recounted what was on the tape machine, and promptly left the station. When I pulled my mouth off the floor as she smartly shut the door, I bent down to the tape machine and started to work. Four interviews, plus my own. Two more came in later. I decided to work on one story at a time, do all the versions required, and then write and produce the next set, in order of what I thought would be newsworthy. The rank of the winners (President, Senator, state official, etc.) set my course. The dim production room light began to bother my eyes around 2 am, so I cut all the audio I needed, jotted down the cues and went to the brightly lit newsroom to write the rest of the stories -- alone. Around 4 am, I pretty much stopped feeling anything except profound indigestion from the food an advertiser had brought for us to enjoy during "our" allnighter. At 4:30 the morning jock from one of the other stations in the building came in to make the coffee for everyone else on the morning shift. "Hey, are the riotiing in the streets? Har, har har." I just looked at him. Finally, my mouth unstuck and I managed to offer "Is there a riot too? I don't know about a riot ... ." He shook his head and left. I stacked all my work, knowing my station's morning crew was due in 30 minutes, and if I saw them coming in, I might grab the fire axe just above the station console.
The resulting newscast won first prize in the state competition. The prize added enough to our yearly tally to make us Station of the Year -- again. Who's names are on the plaque? The station's call letters, of course.
It turned out that the afternoon anchor would be covering my shift the next day and hers too. That's why she left when she did. I took the entire next day off, being careful not to sleep on my left side. The spider bite ached for a week, but it didn't get bigger or leave a scar.
A night to remember. I'm glad I don't do elections anymore.
11/12/06
It's ludicrous, silly!
Clouded up and rained like mad last night. Clear and much cooler for Sunday go-to-meeting time, now fairly cold.
Tonight's title refers to a misspelled word in Friday night's marathon post.
That post is a good example of the problem of the "natural" journalist. We simply do not know when to stop. It's a compulsion well illustrated in the "Smallwood" series. Cloe Sullivan absolutely has no idea how much trouble she's getting into until Superboy has to save her. If you don't have a Superperson to pull your fanny out of it, you'll have the life I've led -- if you call it living and you call what I did leading. What makes it worse for the "natural" is he or she can't wait to turn pro -- without realizing the nature of most professional journalists. Most pro journalists are more like the Lois Lane character in "Smallwood". I'll let you choose your own adjectives.
I understand why people hate us. We have a dirty job, and we don't always face that fact squarely, trying to paint over the dirtiness of it with "our First Amendment responsibility." At least that's how it goes in the States. There are ethical journalists here, don't get me wrong. But you can get carried away all too easily.
So here's my career hint of the night: if you're a "natural" at journalism, don't make a career of it. Maybe do it for a year or two for pay to see what it's like, then get out. Go back to school and learn to be something else. Then your "natural" talent can be used as a hobby, like a blog or photo album, or as a hidden asset at work -- the person in the office who does well on presentations, for instance. The more you keep your natural thing to yourself, the better off you'll likely be. That may apply in a lot of fields.
If I sound like I'm pontificating, OK. But I think it's wisdom from the pain. Sometimes when the knife feels like justice, it is.
11/13/06
Oh the Pain! (in the ...)
It seems to me that the first journalists were also the first writers. All the earliest writing samples we know of (hierogylphics, cuneiform, etc.) came about when some king wanted to leave a record of his exploits on a wall or a ziggurat or something. Or maybe he wanted to know how many men were in his army, how many bales of wheat he had in storage, etc. Somebody had to collect the information and then commit it to the writing medium of choice (a rock, a clay tablet, whatever).
Then, at some point, the scribe had to actually go out to the battlefield to watch what happened, and jot something down to give to a courier -- rather than just hope a runner like the first marathoner makes it far enough to yell "Rejoice, we conquer!" before dropping dead. The on-scene scribe has got to make sure what's on the note is right, it's readable, and it's usable. It doesn't have to be fair to the other side, it just has to be basically correct.
The first public journalist was said to be the Greek historian Thucydides, who was in Athens during the Peloponnesian War when the plague hit. I think he caught it, but survived, unlike Pericles and lots of other people. He wrote about that first-hand (if I recall correctly) and left it to posterity. He did lots of historical writing as well, but the part he saw he bore witness to.
I believe the first English journalist was thought to be Samuel Pepys. He was a government bureaucrat, who was in London during the Great Fire and the ensuing plague there. He wrote about what he witnessed first hand, but apparently was afraid his candid observations would get him in trouble, so he posted to his journal in a personal code. I don't think it was broken until sometime in the 1800s. Again, a witness-bearer to violence and disease, but this one apparently recognized how easy it is to make somebody angry when you're telling the truth.
Then comes my favorite -- John "That Devil" Wilkes. He was jailed for doing something that was highly illegal in his day: going to Parliament and reporting on the debates that went on. I think he was sent to the Tower for it. He did it for his own newspaper that I believe was called The North Briton. Wilkes eventually got himself elected to parliament, took the side of the colonists in the American Revolution, and got his name put all over the place here. I grew up in one of those places.
Then came Benjamin Franklin, then the Constitution and its First Amendment, and so it went from there.
If I may put on my pontiff's tiara (or at least my white skullcap) for a moment: it may be that money and power have become so entwined with the news media that reporters have gotten lost on some basic points along the way. Those early pioneers did stuff that was scary for their day and time, and some suffered as a result. But instead of bearing witness to plagues in cities, could it be that reporters have become a plague on society? I hope not.
11/14/06
It's "Smallville", not "Smallwood", you idiot!
I think the title says it all.
Cool nights, fairly warm days. Clear skies.
Expect something a little different tomorrow.
11/20/06
My Friend Rocky
Cool, cloudy, threatened rain not here yet.
My Columbia SC apartment was nice. It was really meant to house state lawmakers and the like for a few months out of the year, then maybe salesmen traveling. It was built in the 80's, and had a bathroom sink partly in the bedroom, like a hotel room. Back when it was built, you or your company would rent this kind of apartment pre-furnished. So, you'd have a little home away from home for extended stays. Now, in the States, there are entire hotel chains devoted to that purpose alone. So, the apartment was rented to schmoes like me who figured all the one bedroom apartments looked just like the "show sample". No, that one had another few square feet, enough for a real bathroom, for thirty dollars a month more. "Oh, the cheaper one's a little smaller." Yes, and it makes you feel like a tourist year round.
But it had high ceilings, and more room than I really needed. So, it was OK. It had a little deck, too. and the roof line was all wood, and angular. Cool looking from the outside, except for the dumpster just outside my door. Nobody ever wanted to park beside it, so ... hey! An advantage there, too. (Do you know about the boy who was given a roomful of shit for his birthday? He jumps in and starts digging, saying, "There's a pony in here somewhere!" Old joke.)
There were woods just beyond the fence where I parked. It separated us from the nicer (but smaller) apartments that were 50 dollars a month cheaper. See, my apartment complex was the first one on a street that dead-ened into a small golf course. You're new to town, you assume the ones down the street are higher, so you don't go any further. The ones next door were better managed, and they built a full-service gym for residents while I looked on from my palatial-looking digs with doorknobs that came off in your hand and refrigerators that worked most of the time. Next to the dumpster. In the back of the complex, where all the oddballs live. Oddballs like me.
Living in a government town means two things: crazy is normal, and you have no friends. But I had one -- for almost a year. Rocky. My pal.
You see, I had to dress up every working day and go downtown to where laws are made (no, seeing sausage made looks better). Very formal, "Yes, Senator; No, Mister Chairman; I'm just leaving, Mister Sergeant at Arms bigger that my parents' house. And I'm leaving quietly too, see? Bye." Very demanding: "What did he say? They passed what bill? Just now? What was the vote? What do you mean you won't tell me? I squared you on the debate yesterday! What do you mean 'that was then'?" So, you needed a break when you got home. You needed to see or at least hear from a friend who did not judge you, who made his own rules, who lived like (and looked like) a bandit and got away with it, time after time. And that was my pal, Rocky. Rocky, the raccoon.
The odd angular roofline was mostly empty space underneath. It held large support beams, electric wiring, insulation, our ceiling (which made its floor) and not much else. Maintenance could get up there (rarely), but residents had no access. So, hey, a treehouse just right for a raccoon! Also for squirrels. Little grey fuzzy fellows that squeaked. Squeaked when they got scared. Squeaked when they saw Rocky's beady eyes glowing at them in the dark. I didn't realize raccoons liked squirrels so much. But it appears they do. For breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Since Rocky was largely nocturnal, I got to hear his adventures across my ceiling at night. "Go get him, Rocky! He's been driving me crazy up there for a week!" You'd hear silence, then a terrified squeak, and then the pitter-patter of little clawed feet ripping like lightning across the ceiling. Then, a fury of mad pitter-pattering in the corner, and then ... silence. Dead calm.
No smell. Rocky took care of things. He also was fun to watch in the evenings. You see, raccoons like to hang around dumpsters, because they are losing their habitat in the States as "civilization" advances. They can also be a threat to humans, because some of the rodents they chase (not squirrels) can carry rabies. Little bitty mice don't really bite humans unless you corner one and are dumb enough to try and grab him. But they can bite raccoons, and raccoons have fangs that can tear into your flesh very quickly. They are not often intimidated and can be very territorial. I was content to let Rocky peform his nightly drama in my "attic" undisturbed. If you leave them alone, they usually leave you alone.
But then, a good thing, as all good things must, came to an end. It started when Rocky (now quite large) appeared onthe roof to watch his human friends most evenings. He would perch above my apartment and watch us come home from work. We'd open a beer, start a grill, get some meat on it, and he'd know where to go for leftovers that night. One evening, Rocky was bold. He didn't hide behind the fake gable; he was an inch from the gutter! "You'd better watch it, Rocky," I told him silently, and pointed my finger at him with my warning. He looked straight at me and ducked his little bandit's head.
The next week, as I was trekking down the hill to the laundry room (my nocturnal activity), I saw Rocky climbing from one third-story deck rail down to the next one like Spiderman. He was bigger than an alley cat, and twice as muscular. The bigger he got, the bolder he became. I knew it was a matter of time.
Then, on a clear Saturday morning, a white truck parked next to my car, and two men got out with some nasty looking implements. I went inside and closed the blinds. I didn't want to know.
Sure enough, no more squirrel attacks. No more peeking around alcoves and phoney roof gables. No more private communications between me and my secret friend. Rocky, oh, Rocky, how I miss you! (Sob!)
It goes to show you: Whom Fate would destroy, she first makes great. And gives plenty of squirrels.
A footnote: after I moved out a few years later, I learned that new management had come in, and spent time and money fixing up the place. I'm confident raccoons don't have roof entry now, and no doorknobs come off, the fridges are good, everyone knows exactly what they're renting, and the place next door now rents at parity. Things do get better sometimes.
11/25/06
We Gather Together To ...
Thanksgiving is an American holiday that we all know, but it's turned into a forced celebration like Christmas. Everyone knows the story of the Puritans and the Indians who helped them survive the winter, and how it was Lincoln's wife (I think) who insisted ol' Abe make it a national holiday. I guess it made for a good early winter break, coming as the sun enters Sagittarius (I'm no astrologer, I just put on airs), a month after Halloween. And it was still probably a good idea when I was growing up as a boy for family celebrations -- most Americans then still living within fifty miles of their hometowns. Now, we live all over the place, and as our population ages, it gets tougher and tougher every year to pull Thanksgiving off. I love the idea of this unique American holiday -- but we're past the commercialized phase, and now we're down to just slogging through it. The relatives I did manage to meet up with all looked very tired. The interesting thing about it remains for me is this -- the day after. No, I'm not talking about Black Friday (the dreadful shopping madness that retailers used to love), but the celebration given that day every year after Thanksgiving by a Native American tribe I covered as a reporter some years ago. The festival on their reservation includes history, crafts, food, and traditional drumming-and-dancing demonstrations -- all the things you'd expect from such an event. No one ever mentioned to me why it's held the day it is -- until I figured it out myself while covering it one year. It just dawned on me -- there are all these Americans for whom this traditional holiday I'd been brought up to think was so wonderful means the exact opposite of what it does to me. And they choose to celebrate their native traditions at a time that should remind us of that difference -- and we never notice. (By the way, one of the displays they're proudest of was the medals their men have won in war -- the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War I, World War II, the Korean Conflict, Vietnam, and Desert Storm -- all fighting on "our" side! I left the area well before the current Iraq conflict began, though I'm sure their people are likely in uniform in that now, too.).
11/27/06
Some clouds, unseasonably and uncomfortably warm this afternoon. Head stuck in business mode all day, so not much time for reflection. Which is good, because you get in a reflective mode too often or for too long, you stay in that mode for weeks at a time, and it's not healthy, at least for me. Just finished Season Six DVD of Buffy -- my last. For reasons I've entered here previously, I did not see any original broadcast shows except for a few at the very end. I've either watched season-sequenced repeats or DVDs, in order of S4, S5, S1, S2(plus end of S7 original broadcast), S3, full S7, and now S6. So, it's goodbye to that world. And it's a good goodbye, because I think S6 was the overall best, except for the two-hour opener the network wanted and the "invisible" Buffy episode (rumors still abound on that one). The season's theme strikes at the heart of what this journal is all about: had adult responsibilities been dropped on my head suddenly at 21 (a year before I finished college), I would have fallen victim to all the things the characters did in S6, in one form or another. The gift of adult support I received then has helped me survive a life that's since contained what I consider more than its fair share of disappointments, setbacks, and failures. I recall the first one (that I really felt, anyway -- some left me numb). To your basic American male, career is everything -- and I lost my first one at the relatively young age of 29. Facing what I called "the big Three-O" with no real prospects at all was very tough to take. Twenty years later, the same thing happened, and it's actually been tougher, even though I was kind of prepared for its eventuality. To me, the real message in S6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer comes from her ex-boyfriend Riley: "Wheel never stops turnin', Buffy. You're up, you're down -- it doesn't change who you are." I think that says it all
11/28/06
'Scuse Me While I Kiss the ...
Sunny, still unseasonably warm, fat cumulus means change -- doesn't it? We'll see.
Walked my usual route late afternoon and noticed a pair of fighter jets taking off from military installation nearby. Don't know which type, but stopped and watched as they gained altitude, banked hard left, made a generous curve to gain speed and then ascended rapidly as their jets' roar became harder to place -- and then they were just gone. I saw their vapor trails a few minutes later, as they came from an entirely different direction and way, way up. It gave me a feeling of this gentle time warp that goes on all the time, and we're not aware of it. Space and time just bend constantly, and we go our way, completely (at least I am) unaware of the continuing flux. Those jets reminded me of how much power we humans (or a few of us) have in this world. Yes, the jets were beautiful, but they are warplanes, after all. I couldn't help but feel impressed, awed and a little oddly warped-out myself.
Listening to something on AOL called "Pilot Speed" (album "into the west") -- had no idea of the coincidence until I just typed it. I like to listen to music as I type these things, and it truly just didn't occur to me. This happens a lot to me. I'll be thinking of something, utterly random, and a bit later there it is -- on the radio, TV, internet. How did I know I would be looking at that particular object a few minutes before I actually did? It used to weird me out something awful, until I just settled into it once I realized this stuff happens all the time to probably lots of people, maybe everybody, but I just began noticing it about ten years ago or so. That's about when I began reading (actually re-reading) Carl Jung's "Memories Dreams Reflections" as part of some therapy I was doing at the time. I had been turned on to Jung in high school by an English teacher who thought it would interest me. I borrowed his big picture book on archetypes from the local library, then I got "Memories ..." later. I only related to the stories of his early life then, because mine was just starting too -- and the grown-up parts (most of the book) floated over my head. Fast forward almost thirty years and I'm reading it again, in very close detail. My dreams did begin opening up some, but I just really began noticing structure and symbolism in them with the help of the therapist I was seeing at the time. He got me to see that an archetype means the same basic thing in many cultures, but an archetype means something individual to each of us based on the context of what's happening in our lives, and what the dreams infer about it. Getting feedback from somebody you trust is kind of key in realizing what dreams mean, what they mean for us as individuals. Someone who is an expert in them certainly helps even more. I think that life just got better, in the sense of feeling more meaningful, when I began to see dreams as a part of my life, not some random brain artifact I should just ignore. Part of the key to interpreting them is honesty, part of it is creativity, and part of it is a "sensitivity" to context and archetype. By "sensitivity" I don't mean, like, getting all emotionally carried away -- but sensitivity like in your fingers. I think it's developing an intuitive "touch" that tells you a lot about yourself, about your connection to all kinds of stuff going on around you, and why you need to pay attention to it to find that unique meaning to life that's original to you. I was a reflective kid at 21, walking everywhere with my head in the clouds and not knowing why -- I just did it. Now I feel I know -- it's an essential part of what I was born to do and be.
I happened to look up "plasma" in an on-line resource a week ago. I thought space was a vacuum -- but it's not. The universe is now thought to contain some kind of interstellar plasma, with the stars themselves being mostly plasma (ionized gas). It's supposedly thick in parts like nebulae, really thin in others, but it's nearly 99 percent of the universe! I kind of feel our brains are wired like that -- the collective unconscious that Jung wrote about (but did not discover -- I'll let you guys look that one up) is a part of this psychic "plasma" that's everywhere and nowhere at once. I don't mean to freak people out with the word "psychic" -- like it's levitating stuff and predicting the future, the Hollywood stereotypes. To me, "psychic" just means part of our brain activity natural to everyone, but maybe we're just not able to measure yet. (By the way, the Pilot Speed album sounds way too much like U2 at first, but it's gets kind of dreamy/spacey as it goes on. You can hear it affecting my writing -- you are listening while you're reading, aren't you?)
Wow, I really went on, didn't I? Like I was in a dream ... .
12/06/09
Oh, that guy!
Rain, wind, and weird warm weather gone. Now partly cloudy and seasonable temps. Me feel better.
Remember the movie "Moulin Rouge!" a few years back? Some loved it, some hated it. I liked it the first time, disliked it the second time (on vid). No matter. This is about a guy in the movie, where the fake movie curtains open and all this lush orchestral music starts. It's near the opening. There's this guy in the bottom of the screen, a little shadow figure, crazily waving a baton, as if he's conducting the orchestra. But his wild gestures don't always fit the music, almost as if he's going off track deliberately, and we're left wondering, "What is this?"
The movie is about a writer in Paris who isn't doing so well. To get away from his troubles, he drinks some absinthe and passes out. While he's out, he dreams about going to Moulin Rouge ("Red Muslin" -- I looked it up. That's the color and fabric of the can-can dancers' underskirts {Correction: It means "red windmill".}). When the writer first falls off to sleep, that's where the dream "curtain" goes up, and the little shadow guy appears at the bottom of the screen (I'm writing from pure memory here, so the exact sequence might be off, but bear with me).
The little shadow guy is the writer's 'dream director.' When I'm dreaming (and I'm guessing you're the same way), it's like things are happening at random, but not entirely at random. We're not in control of the situation, and it's unsettling to see things shift suddenly, or go spinning off the deep end, or whatever. If you review the dream events later, you'll probably find that there's a character in your dream who is in control -- but may not show his or her hand at first, if at all. This is your dream director. My latest had Captain Kirk, and he was directing the action, but as a character in the dream's story -- not off to the side. That can happen. Other times, a voice is talking to me outside of my visual field, as if he or she is at my shoulder, but I can't see them. That's another "incarnation" of the dream director. Sometimes the director is not present at all -- as far as I can tell. But then, who's directing the action? See if you can spot him (or her) in your next dream.
There's also someone else to look for -- but not necessarily in every dream. I'll talk about her (or him) next time.
12/03/06
Who's That Girl?
Blissfully cool temps gave way overnight to hard rain, colder temps and now heavy fog tonight, but not as cold.
Sometimes in dreams there is this person, or maybe an animal, that is being chased, or even attacked, or crouches somewhere in fear. Or maybe, in less tense circumstances, it's a little girl maybe wanting ice cream or a boy looking in a window. I learned several years ago (in counseling) that this dream character is called the 'dream ingenue' -- an archetypal figure that represents innocence (maybe lost innocence) or something similar in dreams. There was a period (a good ten years ago) where all my dream ingenues were dark-haired girls or young women. I always knew when she appeared who she was, or rather, what she represented to me. In the movie "Moulin Rouge!", Nicole Kidman's character is the fallen "ingenue" of the writer's absinthe-influenced dream. He loses her in his dreamscape, and awakes a different man (grows a beard, gets a job with a newspaper). His waking romanticism was shallow (a struggling novelist in Paris), but his dream romance was real and tactile to him. When he lost "her" in the dream world, he awoke a sadder but wiser, and less innocent, man. I don't know if contact with the dream ingenue automatically means you're about to lose your innocence (I doubt it always means that, but it might), but I do think what the ingenue represents is worth considering when you (if you) reflect on your dreams. (As for animals, some I've met as "nature" ingenues were a small, maybe adolescent fox; a deer; and a dolphin.) Next time, another character you might meet in your dreams.
12/04/06
Your Experience May Differ ...
Cold, clear and winter -- at last. Full moon blazing.
In my experience, there's a third character in dreams that's hard to miss. While the first two I've mentioned -- the dream director and the dream ingenue -- can be subtle, even absent in the dream experience, the dream guide is pretty easy to spot. He or she is the one who "gets in your face" and tells you stuff, or indicates something important (maybe) to you in some way. The character of Toulouse-Lautrec (played by John Leguziamo) in the movie "Moulin Rouge!" represents the dream guide to the absinthe-intoxicated writer (played by Ewan McGregor). The dream guide sometimes "parents" the dreamer, and may even be the dreamer's real-life parent. I've had all sorts of people as dream guides, myself. Some weren't even human.
Based on my experience, these three dream characters I've mentioned may not be in all dreams, and may not be obvious. But, from what I've learned from dreams I've had, they are usually apparent in really lucid dreams. I'm not mentioning all this as a checklist or some set of absolutes -- just something to think about as you dream (yes, you are in control of what you choose to experience in dreams).
As a coincidence, I spotted a real buy on used DVD's at the local rental shop. One of them was "Stay", starring McGregor and Naomi Watts. I thought it was really good -- and much in it to ponder for us dreamers (it's rated R for a reason -- way too intense for children, sensitive teens, etc. in my opinion). The acting was strong and professional, but the real treat is the movie itself -- a high-quality product that didn't 'stay' long in theatrical release. But I really liked it. Even the credit roll was good!
One more thing: if you are reading this and the previous two entries and you are undergoing some kind of therapy or treatment -- do not take what I've written seriously in any way. I am not a licensed anything, just an ordinary human with a Live Journal account and an English lit degree from a US college. And even if you're not in therapy or counseling, do not take anything I've written seriously or literally in any way. The disclaimer "strictly for entertainment purposes" definitely applies to this entry and my entire LJ account. If you are in treatment, it's my hope your therapist or counselor will help you explore any dreams you may have. I have benefited enormously by it, but you may not. Listen to your therapist, not to me.
12/05/06
"Download!" "Auggh!"
Cold, clear, and full moon still blazing. Same weather, two days running!
Tried to make my own business cards, and results were laughable. Wasted three sheets of business card blanks. I don't think it was Corel or HP, think it was me. Know it was me.
Computers are really the ultimate distraction. We all wish for the latest and greatest, as well as the slickest and 3-Dest software and all the iPods, vid cards, smartphones and other gizmos peripheral to the basic process. When all we really need is an electronic typewriter with undo and some editing features, an e-mail program with a built-in calendar and datebook, and maybe a few board games. Throw in some personal accounting software and a calculator, and you'd have all we ever dreamed of 20 years ago.
I remember my first computer experience (cue music: do-dee-do-do, do-dee-do-do, do ... screeech!). The screens were maybe 12 inch deals with default brown as the color (the only color). The typefont was in a bloopy script that I think was called COBRA (Computer Operated Reading Alphabet? I don't remember), at least the English was. The rest of the computer was Greek to me. Literally. My Greek One professor was the son of a world-famous computer-industry giant who brought his computer with him from his sunny home west of where I grew up and went to school. The computer scarcely fit into a large empty classroom of the era. The terminals were in a nearby empty office. He was famous (may still be) for being the first, I think, to get a computer to print the Greek alphabet (computers then had trouble with curvy, non-bloopy typefonts). We would get class instruction on Greek grammar and vocabulary, and then we'd drop by the "lab" later for weekly tests. It was an experiment. I don't know how much Greek we actually learned, but it was fun.
The next computer experience was my second newspaper gig. The screens were bigger, and they featured a default screen color of really dark olive with light yellow type (the only colors). Back then, a cry of "Download!" was very bad news. It meant you had to repeatedly stab the Save button (F8, maybe?) and silently pray that enough of the yellow type would turn grey so you wouldn't have to rewrite your whole story from memory (your brain's memory!). Crashes were common, and downloads (I think) were done to try and prevent a crash somewhere in the system from spreading to the whole system. The memory was tape -- giant reel-to-reel tapes that had data downloaded to them to prevent data loss. When someone yelled "download!" it was a warning that a crash was headed our way.
We had a printer -- a dot-matrix thing that sounded like a ripsaw when it printed. We got our wire updates on it, as well as our own hard copies. You'd be sitting there, typing like mad in full concentration with minutes left before the absolute last deadline, and suddenly "riiiiiiiip! rip! rip! rrrriiiiiiippp!" right behind your head so loud you'd jump and maybe hit the wrong button (F3 I think was "erase") and smoke your whole story. There was no 'undo'. I'm not making this up!
My third experience was in radio, where time stood still. We got our first and only PC in '93, and it was maybe a Windows 2.something with a default blue screen (naturally) and the text was grey in a black window, I think. Messages from the computer to the operator ("your note is printing now" or some such) popped up in little red or green windows. It was mainly a wire server with an early NotePad or something you could, with effort, write a story on, if you were careful with spacing at the end of each line (the text did not "wrap" in those days, automatically or otherwise). It's where I learned how to "reset" the computer -- turn it off, count to five by thousands, and turn it back on again.
It was two radio gigs later that we used the Internet, and an intern had to show me how to do it. I'd taken an (expensive) class in Windows 95/98 before then, but no 'net surfing was involved in the class. The intern was apalled: I truly had no idea.
Fast forward five years later, and I was e-mailing reports to news outlets as a free-lancer, both audio and print, with no idea what RSS or any Internet 'syndication' even was. I'm not sure it existed outside highly technical applications at the time. Currently, we're using syndication daily on LiveJournal, and elsewhere, with a mouse click. So, here we are. Now, where do we go?
(By the way, if you remember Windows 95 or 98, you'll remember the BIOS screen on boot-up. That's what my newspaper 'green-screen' computer looked like, without the BIOS info. If you remember ScanDisk from that era, you have an idea what my first computer in radio looked like. Get the picture?)
12/06/06
Ring-Ding-A-Ling, Ring-Ding-A-Ling, Ring ...
Mix of clouds and sun, a little warmer. LiveJournal's holiday theme is pretty neatly done, don't you think?
I wrote in an earlier post that I think Thanksgiving had become a forced holiday, like Christmas, in this, Our Modern World. But I don't think it has to be that way. Society's expectations can put so much pressure on us to "enjoy" the holidays like Bing Crosby or something (I think the original movie was called "Holiday Inn" and was rechristened -- pardon the pun -- "White Christmas" later, after the famous Irving Berlin song featured in the movie. Or maybe it was two separate movies. I'll look it up.). An old TV series called "Thirtysomething" premiered when I turned -- ulp! -- thirty-two, I think. One of the better episodes (often copied since) had a disastrous Thanksgiving celebration by the Thirtysomething gang, with the women trying to cook a frozen turkey an hour before dinner, and the bird falls out of the oven still frozen solid with a thud. They also broke somebody's mother's china (I think) and the men hurt each other playing "touch" football so badly one had to go to the emergency room. But come Christmas time, the conflicts generated by tension over expecting more holiday pressure prompted one of the lead characters to research her husband's Judaism, and -- with his sister's help -- surprise him with what looked like (to this Gentile) a traditional Hannukah celebration. I'm not necessarily promoting orthodoxy here (I don't want to promote anything), just suggesting a little creative thinking and relaxing into the season.
To me, "expectations" are the real joy killers. They will never be met for any holiday, or any day, unless you set the expectations so low they roll into reverse and you're happy they weren't met. I prefer "anticipation" of what might be good (the better to enjoy a sense of possibility, if nothing else) and what might go wrong (the better to avert it).
So hey, enjoy.
12/08/06
Don't Click That One! Blooey! Aw ...
Cold, cold, cold. Windy, clear, and cold.
I am utterly addicted to Minesweeper. I used to think people who played computer games were wasting their time, and that I was above doing it. I was right about the first point, wrong about the second. I am not above doing that, and I love it.
I used to be addicted to Tetris on my old Win95 box, and that's the main reason I recycled the machine, to try and break me of my habit. It didn't work. I long for Tetris to come back (I still use a widget version -- but it ain't the same as the classic), as well as Mah Jongg (wasn't called that, but ...). But I have Minesweeper, and FreeCell and Spider Solitaire to console me. Substitute addictions, you might say. I got bored with Hearts. Too much like light beer (burp!).
What's odd is that the games I've gotten hooked on have reflected where I am in life, or at least where I feel I am. When I played Tetris over and over, my life (if you could have called it that) was falling to pieces. My entire life "fiction" was being rewritten, and I wasn't the editor. Not even close. But playing Tetris soothed me (a little), because it felt like I was maybe putting back the pieces of life into some order as they fell to me, but I couldn't predict the outcome. Naturally, I had to actually start confronting my life eventually, but I had to see where some of the pieces would fall first, before I could begin the reconstruction project.
Minesweeper is attractive now, I think, because I often feel the insecurity of being in a "minefield" metaphorically, as I test new things and venture sloooowly into uncharted territory. This is hard, very hard for me, because I used work for so long as an excuse to avoid living, that I ... well, fell apart. Now I have to confront who I am (what's left, anyway) and what I need to be doing to be that person. You'd think it would be easy, and it might be, if not for other people. Other people, the relationships we depend on and the community we seek, are factors in that process. And there are people who oppose you in any effort. You have to deal with that too, and not with malice. Sometimes your opponents can teach you more about yourself than your friends can. And friends can teach a lot!
Anyway, that's why I think I'm hooked on Minesweeper. The dual (at least) layer of strategy (the mine patterns themselves, and where the computer is placing them to try and fool you, for instance) is really the attraction -- and the repulsion. Attraction and repulsion? Yes, I think you gotta have both, if you really want to be obsessed, my friends. To me, obsession can be a good thing, or a bad thing. Which one you get certainly depends on what (or who) you're obsessed with, but it may depend also on your attitude toward your obsession. If you are so obsessed with having an obsession, it can swamp you. But if can laugh at yourself while your obsessing (or maybe after a round or two), you may just make it.
Am I right? Heck, I don't know. Isn't that what the experiment called 'life' is all about?
Ooops. Blooey!
12/09/06
Don't click ... no, there, no, maybe ... Blooey! Sigh.
Yesterday I said playing computer games was complete waste of time. (I was talking about so-called "board" games, like Solitaire or Tetris, instead of 3-D games that I have no experience with whatever.) But I don't think they are a complete waste of time. The game I cited as addictive yesterday -- Minesweeper -- is a good example.
In Minesweeper, you have to click on various square buttons laid out on a square grid. Behind each of these buttons lies one of three things: a blank space, a space with a number, or a mine. You hit the mine, and -- blooey! -- game over. In the beginner's version, the grid is 9X9 with ten mines laid along it. The game will automatically reveal all the blank squares in a certain connected series, if you click on the proper one. If you get a number, that's how many mines are on squares touching that numbered square in any of six directions. For instance, if you click on a square and get a "5", that means only three of the adjacent squares are mine-free. When you click on a mine, the game ends and all the mines are revealed, with the one you hit highlighted in red.
What's fascinating about Minesweeper is that most of the mines (in the beginner's version, anyway) are either isolated or are in some symmetrical geometric pattern (a square, a triangle, a diagonal, etc.). But some are laid out asymmetrically, like a constellation. Those are the hardest to fathom, because they are harder to visualize and thus more easily trap the player.
Asymmetric forms in the game remind me of asynchronous experience in human behavior. Most human behavior is phasic, follows a logical pattern, and thus can be predicted or anatomized in some way by, say, therapists or detectives. But some human behavior can't. It's asynchronous, extralogical and perhaps even preconceptual -- 'instinctive' might be a better term.
This behavior is mirrored by nonlinear thinking, which, to me, is the most fascinating kind. It can be the inspiration behind great art, or monstrous criminality. Even more so, when the thinker begins to make connections, symmetrical and logical, among seemingly unrelated events in the asynchronous series. In other words, when great artists or monstrous criminals begin to make order out of apparent chaos, something big is about to happen.
It just seems to me that the more you try to rein this "power" in, to control it, the more monsters you make -- because this nonlinear thinking and asynchronous behavior will squeeze through the cracks somehow, like a poison weed through the concrete. But the more you respect the process in a person, let it develop naturally, the more I think you're likely to get the art. It may be that a lot depends on the person doing the creating (and this is a region in which norms of "good character" may or may not apply -- some bad persons have made great art, some good ones can turn to unspeakable crime) and a lot depends on the environment that person is working in (my qualification about "norms" applies here, too).
It just seems to me we're a very long way from understanding the inner nature the human spirit and how a society can help foster more Ludwig Beethovens than Ted Bundys. I don't know if you can -- or it's even desireable to -- make "more" Beethovens numerically. There's only going to be a certain small percentage with that potential in any given population. But the trick, it seems to me, is to make more of that percentage aim its talents toward creating art and less toward wreaking havoc.
What's that got to do with Minesweeper? I don't know. See what you can come up with. I'll have my (suggested) answer tomorrow.
12/11/06
"Fly me to the moon, and let me play ... ."
Clear for the most part, and still kind of cold.
"What the world needs now, is love, sweet love ... ." Sweet words by Burt Bacharach's writing partner, Hal David. They were written in a time of conflict, like now. But they can be taken a little too literally, and thus kind of overlooked as cliche.
Supposing there is only so much "love" to go around -- that is to say, love is infinite in quality, but finite in quantity. You only get so much of it, and only so much is available to use at any given point in time. That way, it doesn't get wasted. You miss your share, or you hoard your particular amount and thus don't receive any more: love is still there, it's just not going to anyone or anything that's going to use it wastefully.
Let's assume the "love universe" is efficient, like the material universe. Let's say love is like plasma -- the universe it dwells within is infinite, but it exists only in certain finite concentrations -- as plasmatic energy does in stars and other interstellar bodies. The phenomenon of love is apparent, but its origin is obscure. Its power is definite, but love itself eludes precise definition. In other words, you know it when you feel it, but you can't say exactly what it is.
You fall in love, then you fall out again. You wonder where the love went, but maybe it just went to somebody who needed it more than you did. You got your benefit out of it -- you felt love and felt the capacity for feeling it (almost as precious). But it's gone, and you're left with a sense of loss.
Or maybe you aren't. You feel relieved, you're glad it's over. It had become a burden. In other words, you perhaps used your share well, allowed it to improve you and maybe even your beloved. So, your share is moving perhaps in a larger sphere of activity, and you don't feel it as strongly, but it's still there. Like the universe: interstellar space once appeared to astronomers as a vacuum, but we now know that it's got little bits of plasma between stars -- just spread really thin.
We have to study love like we study the universe -- but you can't quantify it with finite-set theory. Remember, its quality is infinite, like light, but only so much of it exists. You've got this grid of space and time, and you've only got so much of it. You have to make the most of your chances, take pains, study your options, examine the possible pitfalls, do the right thing. And if you try to "cipher it down to a fine point" you'll step on a mine. Because the pitfalls are not all symmetrical. You've got to think in nonlinear terms, make some of your choices asynchronously, take your odd chances. Like playing Minesweeper.
That way, we have a chance of making more Beethovens and fewer (Ted) Bundys. In the war between love and hate, the battle just doesn't quit because you want it to. The mines aren't where you want them to be. They exist, and "love warriors" have to deal with them. Call it a test, if you like. To see if you're going to use your share of love wisely and well.
"Love is a Battlefield" ... ? Maybe sometimes. More like "The Game of Love" -- if we make it so.
12/14/06
"Are those the stars?"
Warmed up, sprinkled, almost ran the A/C earlier tonight.
"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." OK, I accept that. But what if the beholder is God? What does God find beautiful? Various scriptures have I suppose various answers, with the answers found in the Psalms pulling at me the most. But it's still worth thinking about independently, don't you think? I mean, we've all got our own answers to the question of what our eyes find beautiful. For me, a beautiful woman draws my eye faster than anything I can think of. I got several eyefulls of beauty earlier tonight (sorry, no details forthcoming!). A sunset on the ocean or over the mountains is also beautiful, so is a flower, a mother and child, stuff we pretty much all can relate to.
But what about rage, violence, torture, death? Don't they grab our eye, albeit in another way? Are they examples of "a terrible beauty" ol' Willie Yeats wrote about? The gospels say Jesus took the brunt of all those things during his Passion. I would imagine it's the second most-talked about story in the New Testament. The first is the thing coming up on the calendar.
What I can say is this: when the eye of the beholder is reflecting your eye, and your eye is reflecting theirs, and both find beauty in the image, that's the power of love. But what happens when the lovers doing the beholding are both holding guns, instead of roses?
I think that's worth some independent thought, too.
OK, let me lighten up a little before I post: I bought myself something with a little found money (found it in an envelope with my name and address on the front) for "light" reading: A Dark Horse graphic novel, "Tales of the Vampires". Ultra-cool comic! But a little dark (and not for kids, either). Next time, a vision of the future for one of the characters from earlier versions of similar tales. The similar tales were from the (mostly) same creative team as "Tales of ...". The future vision is mine(?).
12/15/06
"Gonna hitch a ride, Head for the other side ... ."
Kind of warm, clouds in and out.
Finally looked up "Holiday Inn" and, as expected, I was wrong. The movie did feature the song "White Christmas" as sung by Bing Crosby. But it wasn't the same movie as "White Christmas" (the movie). The second movie was a complete reworking of the first, not the same movie retitled or remade. Apparently, according to one listing, "Holiday Inn" contains a scene with some offensive "minstrelsy" (to put it mildly) as a plot device, which is probably why I've never seen it on TV or anything.
On to tonight's topic: I've spent some time over the last few weeks (off line) wondering "what might have been." I guess that's normal whenever you're facing a crossroad of one type or another: you want to look at previous crossroads and wonder whether you made the right choices: not to get married (just to "settle down"), sticking with journalism (even while unhappy at it), etc. I wonder how much cowardice played a role in those and other "decisions" I'd made. Self-justification played a huge role, that I've known for a while. But the cowardice behind it bothers me more now, because I realize how many possibilities other roads would have opened up, had I positively chosen them. I've stumbled along roads less traveled by, and it has indeed made all the difference, not necessarily in a good way. But there were forks in those roads I took that I also passed up, just basically ignored, because they looked risky, even "dangerous" (to my ego, if I took a chance and lost). But since I've lost at much of the game of life anyway, I can't help but wonder if some of those forks were worth trying, just to see. Yeah, what might have been.
I don't feel like a "loser," and I don't feel that much self-pity (though I am quite familiar with that particular form of cowardice). I feel I've won things like character and self-respect that I actually gained by "losing" this or that "life game". And I've gained enough maturity (mostly through becoming a fairly regular church goer for the last 18 years or so) to see self-pity for what it is (a really sick form of self-righteousness). What's bothering me is that I tried to cut some kind of deal between me and society: I'll try and play your game, world, but I get to be me when I'm by myself. You'd think that wouldn't be such a bad thing: in fact, on the surface, it sounds kind of normal. But for me, it was as corrosive as a Brillo pad on butter.
You're either you or you're faking it: you can't have it both ways, or fake it M-F 9-5, and be "you" nights and on the weekends. Living honestly in society involves compromise, tact, and patience -- among many other things. But, if you think about it, you can't compromise if you have a weak sense of self. You're not compromising anything that way, you're just giving in. And If "giving in" is done bit-by-bit, you just get worn down to nothing. Or, when the corrosion eats its way to your core, and you yelp in protest, suddenly you're a "rebel."
No, you can't lead this kind of life because it's a double life, I think. You've got to be honest, if to no one but yourself. So I guess I end up with a tru-ism: "To thine own self, be true ... ."
While out driving on an errand the other day, heard a song on the radio that was big when I was a senior in college. It was by Boston, and it was a kind of anti-life-plan anthem of that era. I forget the title. A lot of my chums were pretty aimless back then, though others clearly had a professional track laid out but wore messed-up jeans and long hair to look cool. I think I unconsciously cast my lot with the aimless variety, and that has proved to have been a bad thing. If any of you out there are like this now and are interested in my "bloodied but unbowed" opinion, here it is: get some life counseling from somebody competent and trustworthy. If you need some kind of aptitude test, or just some honest feedback on what you have to offer, get it. Cross-check all of it with other sources you trust. Affirm your own sense of who you are, find opportunities to test that as a theory of "who you really are," and accept your own final feedback as the most valid of all. You may lose a starting step or two in the rat race, but if you do it -- and avoid frittering away that time playing phoney "finding yourself" games -- you will gain in the long run by getting some real feedback and making some constructive self-criticism first: I'm confident of that.
12/16/06
Swingin' with Sinatra
The Boston song from yesterday's post was "Peace of Mind." The lyric I used in the title of the post was from the same band's "Hitch a Ride." Oddly, that group was one of the more commercially oriented bands of the era, but its songs had lyrics about "dropping out" of the typical American dream. (Frankly, I was hooked on Joni Mitchell's "Hejira" at the time.)
To try and get the hooks from both of the above Boston songs out of my head (completely from memory, playing over and over like a loop), I'm listening to something completely different: Frank Sinatra's "Come Fly With Me" album from the 50s. Smooth as glass. The cut "It's Nice to Go Trav'ling" is an unexpected gem.
I learned what "hooks" were when I started selling records in the mid-80s. A lot of the commerical music of that time was very "hooky" in the sense that it had a lot of hooks in each and every song. I learned that some hooks are musical. They are slightly off-key notes, slightly offbeat rhythms, or other little gimmicks to keep the song playing in your head, as if your mind is trying to "correct" the music. One of the musicians who worked with us showed me one of the more interesting hooks on a little Casio keyboard we were selling then. I don't want to mention the band's name, but it was a huge heavy metal act at the time. Their biggest song had a chorus with only two chords in it. The musician showed me the chords on the keyboard: they were both two-note chords right next to each other on the keyboard. He said to play it on the guitar fretboard only required moving one finger. It was some minor-key thing with a kind of head-drill effect that was unforgettable, in a bad way. That's why all the kids I worked with (I was older than almost every other employee then) all wanted to hear something completely different once the store's doors closed for the night, or during the afternoons, when the customer traffic was light. I was stuck on the more melodic, easy-on-the ears stuff they all hated. But one time, during an all-night inventory session, I brought one of my Charlie Haden records. They couldn't believe it! (Haden was Ornette Coleman's bass player.)
The Boston hooks that hang me up are more psychological: the lead singer is wailing with emotion at portions of the lyrics that aren't all that compelling. It's odd to hear it, especially in the involuntary-memory-loop-phase thing (Sinatra is doing a good job of killing it with "April in Paris."). In fact, none of the Boston lyrics are particularly compelling, at least to me (I guess I'm comparing them to the likes of Sammy Cahn and Vernon Duke now playing in my ears).
As far as I'm concerned, hooks are OK, if they're not laid on too thick and actually mean something in the song. It's part of the sincerity I like to feel in music. (Billy May's tasty brass sounds are tickling my ears now on "Brazil.") In rock or pop or hip-hop, if you can hook me with something that a) I like and b) fits the music or lyrics thematically, you've got me. The handclaps in "London Bridge" are irresistible, for instance. The entire number is built around them, and it makes Fergie sound like she's in some kind of house party or club romp. So the hook there is part of the overall theme. (The handclaps in Fiona Apple's "Tymps {The Sick in the Head Song}" are even more effective, partly because they're so unexpected.)
Anyway, something to listen for the next time you click on the iPod. ("I Love Paris" -- oh, man!)
12/17/09
Synchro Music (or She Will Have Her Way)
Unseasonably warm and clear. Had to run the A/C!
Synchronicity is supposed to teach us things, I think. What I mean by 'synchronicity' is probably so crudely stated it would make a Jungian analyst blanch, but my definition is that synchronicity is "a coincidence for a reason." In other words, something connects to something else that shouldn't, but does.
Last night's post was a good example. I'm writing away, pontificating about music (again), and I mention handclaps, hooks, and quality lyric writing. So I post the thing, take off my pontiff's tiara (it gets stuck sometimes), go into the living room (if you could call it that), and flick on the television. I'd been so busy pontificating that I'd missed the first half of my Saturday night fave: Austin City Limits. I never look at the paper or watch enough prime-time television to see promos, so I rarely know who ACL is going to feature week to week. So last night, the image flickers to life and I see KT Tunstall leading the audience in handclaps to "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree." But it's not just some showbiz schtick -- the crowd is clapping in time and the band is improvising around it. KT is wailing at all the most effective parts of the lyrics (another gripe from last night), and the whole thing is a flesh and blood extravaganza.
So, in basically two minutes, I get a lesson in my face on what I'd just finished typing. Good lyric writing, effective singing, hookless music and natural percussion DO EXIST! The unspoken assumption in last night's post was that modern pop/rock music is so hopelessly hooky and a wasteland that I had to use Fergie as an example of good pop! (I like the Black Eyed Peas in general.) Three cheers for KT and the band!
But when I tried to play some of her music from her own official website tonight offered on the 'net for free, I couldn't do it. Windows Media Player 11 told me I didn't have the proper "user rights permission" ... guhhh, what? The music is free for listening! The site said so! Earlier in the week, I'd spotted an article on the 'net accusing Microsoft of all sorts of bad things over "Digital Rights Management." I dismissed the whole issue as a tempest in a teapot. Now, I think I get it.
Does this mean I'm going to have to pay someone for rights to play music that an official artist's own site is offering free for listening? Oh, man!
No wonder I'm out of touch with modern music! (Decided to listen to Neil Finn's "Try Whistling This" for background. A CD. AOL's Listening Party ... don't ask.)
12/19/06
The Gift of the Magi
Clear, slightly cooler. Nice breeze.
I ticked some folks off the other night when I was at a holiday gathering, when I said something about the "myth" of the magi. (I think some other things actually did the ticking, but ... another time.) I've said in earlier posts that I'm a believer, so I don't think the magi are mythical. Or do I?
The New Testament has only two "birth narratives" of Jesus, one in Luke and one in Matthew. The one in Luke is by far the better known: it's the one Linus recites in that "Peanuts" animated TV special. It basically has an archangel appearing to shepherds, announcing the birth of the Messiah. The shepherds then go to Bethlehem to visit Christianity's First Family in the stable.
Matthew's account has "some" wise men from the East traveling to Bethlehem to visit the Christ child. They are following a star (also mentioned in Luke) to lead them to the site. Various things happen and then Matthew says these wise men (magi) eventually find Jesus, Joseph and Mary in a "house." It doesn't say anything about a stable, or about shepherds.
These details don't necessarily conflict. Luke doesn't say how long Jesus and his family had to stay in a stable, with the baby Jesus in the manger (which is basically a feed trough for the livestock). So, they could maybe have found better lodging by the time the Magi arrived.
Matthew doesn't say how many magi there were. The account just says "some." There is no mention of their names, either, or what specific kingdom or kingdoms in the East they came from. It also doesn't say which brought gold, which brought frankincense, and which brought myrrh -- or if any of them were individual gifts.
I did a little (very little) research, and I found that "magi" is a Persian word first found in Greek in Herodotus -- once to describe a Persian family of dream interpreters, and again to describe dream interpreters generally. "Magi" is plural -- "magus" is singular. I also found that astrology was a kind of sideline for many of these dream interpreters, some of whom were advisers to kings and sometimes were entrusted with the king's signet ring, giving them the right to transact business in the name of the king.
This jibes with Matthew's account. He says they came from the East, where a lot of this kind of thing went on; they were following a star; they had to check in with the local king, Herod, to follow diplomatic protocol; and they realized Herod was playing them when they had a dream in common.
So the "myth" I was referring to is the manger scene many of us have in our heads -- the manger, the Christ child, Mary, Joseph, animals, shepherds and magi. I'm not saying it didn't happen -- it just probably didn't happen that way. Shepherds had to follow the flocks, and the original group had probably moved on by the time the magi got there. We really don't know.
By the way, there's a Persian miniature (I think it illustrates some kind of manuscript) somewhere, painted by some Moslem artist in the 18th century. It depicts the 'adoration of the Magi', but it has all kinds of people in the scene, women and men, in addition to the Madonna and Child and some magi. Mary is holding Jesus in her lap, just outside a big, boxlike tent-type house. Mary is sitting on a pillow Oriental style, but she's dressed as if she were an English lady in Tudor or maybe Elizabethan times. Magi and others are also in the costume of that period.
Odd.
12/20/06
"What, no rabbit? Gimme that hat!"
Clear, starting a little cooler, then a lot cooler as night fell.
What exactly was the Gift of the Magi for which I titled yesterday's post? It has been suggested (I think on some PBS thing I watched maybe last year) that these guys managed to give Christianity's First Family useful items for the first Christmas Day. They would have needed gold for money to finance a future trip to North Africa. The nasty stable air might have given the baby Jesus some breathing problems, so they brought him some incense known for its medicinal effects. And speaking of medicine, myrrh came in two forms: one as an unguent (or something like that) to use as a topical antiseptic, and one as a liquid for use in the bath. Women used liquid myrrh to heal following childbirth in the ancient world. (This is more of my scant research on the topic.) They were considered gifts fit for a king, because kings always want the best stuff around.
But that's not the gift of the Magi for us now. Their story reaches out two millennia to us for another reason, I think. The few details about their journey and adoration experience are telling details, if we take the time to stitch them together. The story becomes a little course of its own in nonlinear thinking. You have to examine your own mistaken preconceptions about the magi themselves, correct the information with linear research, then start connecting some of the dots missing, but left carefully implied, in the narrative. It also helps to develop an intellectual sensitivity (or "instinct") for context, and how to apply that instinct to the facts at hand.
Modern-day magi probably don't interpret dreams, at least not professionally. But think of CSI on TV -- isn't what I described similar to what they do to solve a crime? Does this kind of thing go on in real life? It may very well, though on a certainly less melodramatic level.
By the way, CSI (the second season, I think) is also where I learned something else about magic -- the true definition of the word "abbacadabra." It's the words supposedly in Aramaic (I think) for "Father, Son, and Holy Ghost" with the final "a" in the first two words and initial "a" in the third combining them into one "magic" word.
12/21/06
The Beat of Black Wings
Clouds rolling in -- back to shirtsleeves. Should be a rainy Christmas.
My first post listed some of my faves (way back in the archives somewhere), and I can't remember if I included one music fave that has just gotten better with time. It's Joni Mitchell's controversial album "Mingus."
It came out in vinyl while I was still pretty much a "cub" reporter. For those of you who remember LPs or look at them in re-sale shops, the artwork on many a classic record stood out. "Mingus" was no exeception. Full of Joni's paintings of Mingus during his last year on Earth, it is probably the best laid-out of any of hers (and she's had many a standout album cover!).
But the music inside was the surprise: it was actually very good. Joni Mitchell took a lot of heat from rock "critics," fans and even other musicians for turning to jazz-rock. But to try to write music for the last lyrics written by an avant garde legend like Charles Mingus was too much for them, and they all panned it. They saw songs like "I's a Muggin'" as cliche and numbers like "God Must Be a Boogie Man" as silly. It sounded to them like she was trying to use a dying jazz great as a prop for her musical ambitions.
But the music is powerful. Much jazz dates quickly because times and tastes change. Only the best performances survive the test. And Joni Mitchell's "Mingus" is still good -- check out "The Wolf That Lives in Lindsey" on her greatest "misses" CD. Just open you mind and listen.
"Hejira" was my college senior year fave. Dynamic and different, it featured lyrics designed to impress English lit majors like me. It also featured Weather Report's Wunderkind bassist -- the equally legendary Jaco Pastorius -- playing bass guitar like it was a lead guitar! The music is very inventive, but people like my dorm roommate thought the lyrics were all very pretentious. In later years, I came to agree, at least to a point.
The album the guys freshman year borrowed to seduce their dates was another Joni fave of mine: "For the Roses." This is the sound that made Joni Mitchell a standard among her female fans, but I could relate to it as well. Her song about Beethoven (the title track) included some orchestral and piano writing by the songstress. It was a first for her, I think. But not the last.
My first working year was 1977. That year, local FM radio played albums every Wednesday night, without interruption (unheard of in today's commercial environment!). I remember taping Joni Mitchell's "Don Juan's Reckless Daughter" all the way through. They even played a commercial between sides, so you could flip your cassette and not miss a note! Jaco's on this one, too, and, if anything, he's even better. But Joni's songs were uneven -- some really good, and some leaving you wondering why they were recorded at all. One entire side of the double album includes a kind of "concerto" written by Mitchell, as, in the concept of the album, she's asleep and dreaming while on board a transcontinental flight.
The concept was pretty good, but the album was not up to it overall. Here are some tracks I liked: "Cotton Avenue" "Dreamland" and "Off Night, Back Street." I also thought "Silky Veils of Ardor" was great at the time. But I don't think it wears well today.
Oddly, I never bothered to look at the sleeve art in stores, because I was satisfied with the cassette I'd made. Several years later, I found the album in a bin of remainders. We called them "cut-outs" because the sleeve always had a little notch cut out of the corner to tell retailers to get rid of it for a dollar. I bought it merely because the cassette tape had worn out. When I got home, I noticed there was a picture of a thin black "pimp" caricature on the cover! Poor taste, thought I. Then, I realized it was Joni herself in black body makeup and men's clothes! I'd had no idea (I didn't read the music mags) that people had slammed the cover art years before as a kind of slur. Joni said it was her alter ego named "Art Nouveau." OK ... .
The best is last: "The Hissing of Summer Lawns". A college chum and rabid Joni fan hated it so much, he refused to even talk about why. Most of her fans absolutely loathe the record. One year, again flipping through the "cut-outs", I found a copy and bought it. It has the best overall work on it, and it wears well through the years. No confessional love lyrics in this one, but sharp and even handed observation of the LA scene of the day.
Joni's 80s and 90s work was mostly done with synthesizers. Her voice does not go well with that, in my opinion, and I either sold or gave away all my copies after a listen or two, and then stopped buying her music altogether. I missed some of her best songs on religious themes: "Passion Play" and "The Magdalene Laundaries." I caught them later, again on her "misses" CD.
I've heard it said kids of the 60's were either Beatles fans or Stones fans, never both. I was Beatles, myself. And the same could be said about Dylan or Mitchell. I was obviously Mitchell. My odd reason why in another post.
By the way: her "hits" album has a little secret. If you listen to "The Urge for Goin'" "The Circle Game" and "Both Sides Now" in sequence you'll hear a theme developing, both musically and lyrically. Insert "Little Green" from her album "Blue" in the sequence, and you'll have the complete story, all neatly developed. I'll let you rip your own tracks and figure out where to insert "Little Green" and what the story's about. If you listen on good headphones, you can even hear Joni's voice cracking and choking back sobs. Hard "hit"ting, and heartbreaking.
12/22/06
OK, so I can't pawn my gold watch, but ...
One mistake in last night's post: Joni Mitchell's song about Beethoven was obviously not the title track to her album "For the Roses." It's "Judgement of the Moon and Stars" on that recording. You'd think I'd do my homework, before ... . Oh, well.
A good reason to give somebody something is to thank them. That is, the gift memorializes the emotion of gratitude. When we give someone something because we think we're obligated to do so, then the gift is poisoned just a little with a hint of resentment. A better way to give is to express gratitude by it, so that it will not bear that taint. I don't think you necessarily have to thank the receiver for a lot (though you may, of course), but you can perhaps find some reason to thank even your worst enemy ("Thank You for Making Me a Fighter"). Of course, if you just make up something to tell them thanks as you present your gift, you're just flattering yourself as a selfless giver and you then become a hypocrite (as if I'm not! as if I'm not ashamed of it, at least when somebody else points it out to me). Sometimes, all you really have to do is thank them sincerely, and that may be gift enough. But it's nice to have something material to remember the gratitude by, and so the gift just "keeps on giving," as an old ad slogan ran.
The magi wanted to thank Jesus with their gifts. Part of adoration is gratitude, because it acknowledges the adored's genuine "charisma." It's been a major long time since I had any Greek, but I think "charisma" comes from "charis," which can mean a "favor" or a "gratification." To possess real "charisma" is, I suspect, the ability to inspire the emotion of gratitude in someone else. A true leader has charisma, because we're really glad he or she's around to tell us what to do, because we sure don't know. And, a true sacrifice inspires gratitude, for obvious reasons.
In any case, whatever you do, however you may worship, I hope you find sincerity and laughter and love this Christmas -- regardless of what we Christians may have done to try and mess it up. (What can I say? It's what happens when a bunch of sinners get together and try to do something good!).
I also hope the thoughts I've been typing in these posts this season may help you find those beautiful things in some way. If so, I'm grateful.
12/26/06
Gathers no moss ... ?
Gone for a few days for Christmas with the family, which was very nice. On return, windy, cloudy and fairly cold.
I can't speak for other places, but radio is a big deal down South. At least it was growing up. We had TV, but it was in a rudimentary state when I was a child, compared to now. Radio was a fully developed medium, and each little hamlet had its hometown station. They were the "media" for the area, since daily newspapers were only in the cities. Your parents subscribed to one or more, but they rarely had much local news. The hometown radio provided that, at least on a daily basis. Plus, there was only AM radio back then. And that's where you got your music, except for the Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday nights.
The Beatles at first were the main phenom, but the Stones were big, too. But, somewhere along the way, the Stones stopped appearing on my hometown radio station, so much so that when a local "band" formed (this was maybe, eighth grade, they were awful -- their high school version was much better) they played Stones songs I'd never heard, ever. I guess the Stones were too raw for the local gentry, I don't know. All the eighth-grade "band" members had older sibs to bring records home for them to hear.
Another artist largely missing from the local airwaves was Bob Dylan. We all knew "Blowin' in the Wind" and the like from Peter Paul and Mary, but his own recordings never made the local airwaves at all. I based my LP purchases (when I got old enough to earn enough money working for my father to buy two or three a year) on what I heard on the radio -- so I never bought any Dylan at all. When Rolling Stone magazine got passed around in high school, I knew it was named for a Dylan song, but it was one I'd never heard. I'm serious. His LPs were hard to find in local shops (there were only two). When I heard electric Dylan in college, I flipped. I couldn't believe the whole rest of the country had heard this stuff years before, and I'd never ... I felt not so much like an idiot (my normal feeling), but just ... deprived.
So, the whole concept of Rolling Stone(s) was utterly lost on me as an adolescent. If Dylan played Ed Sullivan or Mike Douglas, I never saw it, or it was not memorable. I don't know if the local affliliate just didn't air it, or what. I had little or nothing to reference to him. I'd read (somewhat surreptitiously) some articles about how controversial his switch to electric was -- but, again, he'd never appeared on any "family friendly" medium as an acoustic artist, so I had no idea! As I reached teen years, people would make jokes about his voice, and I'd just go along, smiling and say, "Yeah, it's bad ... ." with absolutely no concept of what they were talking about.
It's true, I could have made this heavy search and turned up an LP somewhere, or borrowed one (not done in my neighborhood as a boy) somehow, but without older brothers or sisters to bring "controversial" LPs home, I really was left out -- at least as far as Dylan the artist was concerned -- and the better Stones stuff that wasn't on the Top 20 of the era, either. When I reached high school age and improved my earning power, it was Allman Brothers, Joe Cocker, Traffic, etc. The 60s stuff just wasn't the latest and greatest anymore, so I bought and played what other kids did -- until (as posted some months ago) somebody mentioned Ornette Coleman. (To be fair, I had a pal in high school who turned me on to 70s post-Sticky Fingers Stones by his generous loans to me -- LPs are scratchable, so loaning out was a big deal).
So, when I say I was a Beatles and Joni "man" in the 60s, (as opposed to a "Stones and Dylan man"), there is a reason beyond my nascent tastes in music. It just goes to show how powerful the media is, especially to children and adolescents. It can almost completely shape your world view.
But there was another reason, too. I'll go into that in a future post.
12/27/06
"OK, look up 'rant' ... Oh, shoot! I have to log off first!"
Clear and somewhat cold. Beautiful day, which I spent all of indoors, trying to get things done.
Used some Christmas money from my generous mother to buy the latest Compact Oxford English Dictionary. Fifty dollars US for the book and CD combined. My word processor (Corel) once offered an update to the Compact OED for its WordPerfect, but that seems to have expired. So I thought the book and CD would be a nice thing -- I have not had a new dictionary in any form since the second edition of the American Heritage Dictionary in '75 -- also a Christmas gift.
What a disappointment! The definitions are all really short in the book, and the CD will not work in user accounts (I do not surf or do general work in administrator mode on XP), much less load into WordPerfect. Also, installation was that odd "leave-the-CD-in-the-drive-after-restart" Win95 stuff. I suppose it's for error checking. Can't they just add some "search for errors" right-click radio button after restart? OpenOffice will let you check for possible errors that way. Why won't something that amounts to 20 dollars US?
I'm becoming wary of paid software these days. Except for the software that came with purchased hardware (and that has quirks sometimes), everything I use on my PC is free. Audacity, Winamp, OpenOffice, etc. all work right off the download, assuming you know what you're doing. That's the catch with free software -- it's DIY, for the most part. But it just works! I'm writing this on free software courtesy LiveJournal. Yes, I've had a few issues with it, but I like the DIY nature of the Basic account. I'm a more-than-satisfied customer, and I owe them zip.
This situation is counterintuitive, to say the least. Software makers, it would seem, need to get serious about being customer-friendly, or there's going to be a major turnaround in consumer attitudes. I think the CEOs need to start taking a copy of their new products home with them, installing and running and using them without any "extra" help, and if there's a screwup or major short-circuit, they should get their staffs cracking on making their software products work as users need them to work, out of the box. Forget the old "user friendly" scam! If an English major like me can get his free software to work off the download with no questions asked, hey, anyone can!
(To make matters worse with my new dictionary, I stupidly assumed the plastic CD sleeve was stuck on the book's endpaper with a modern removable glue. Nope! It tore the cheap endpaper almost in half when I tugged at the sleeve, so the dictionary and "companion" CD are not returnable. Yes, clerks do check for that.)
I don't mind paying a reasonable amount for things that work well and reliably. And it's nice to have some free things, too. But to have the paid software be clunky and stupidly designed (if a parent can install the Compact OED on the administrator account but then not be able to allow his or her children to use it on their accounts, too, that's idiotic! What good is a dictionary on an administrator account? What word am I going to look up while running Defragmenter? On? Off?) and then have free software work like a song ... no, this is crazy.
12/28/06
"Who Could Ask For Anything More?"
Very nice temps, clear and I got out and enjoyed it some -- also nightwalking downtown. Man, things are changing down there!
OK, I take back the carp in last night's rant over the definitions in the Concise OED. They're "concise" -- OK, I finally get it: lots of words with concise definitions. I like the book, though I still think it's cheaply made. I hope the UK editions have those nice "flex-back" bindings with good paper inside. The (assumedly -- is that a word? Hey, I need to log off to look it up!) US hardback edition has average-feeling paper and a cheap feel to the binding. It looks like the pages were stuck to a huge glue block like an ordinary paperback and a little red bit of fabric was tacked on the top to make it look "fascicle-bound." But there are no fascicle strings anywhere I see.
I'm not that much of a bibliophile, so I'm probably using the wrong words to describe elements of a quality binding. And I guess I was spoiled in the 70s by OUP's pioneering use of quality paperback bindings -- they felt as good as some well-made hardbacks of the era. Even in modern times, the OUP's runs of those little books (I forget what they're called -- quick summaries on some deep topics. I especially liked the Introduction to the Koran -- yes, I have three translations -- liked it so much I gave it to a friend, and that's why I can't remem ... . Oh, well.) So, count me still disappointed by the Concise OED print quality.
I've found no support line or anything else to guide me as to my problem with the OED software. It appears to work, but just not the way I need it to. Again, I may have been spoiled by the free software I've been using -- all of which I installed as an administrator and all of which had their little icons waiting for me when I logged into the limited account I use for internet surfing, word processing, etc. All of the free software did, without exception. Well, OK -- Open Office didn't, but a drag and a drop fixed that. The resulting OO desktop icon is not actually a shortcut -- it's part of the Desktop itself, like My Documents and IE, offering a menu of shortcuts to the individual OO programs. Neat. Wish I could say that about the Concise Oxford English Dictionary. I feel stupid, and I feel guilty that I wasted my Christmas money on it.
On to a brighter topic: why the Beatles and Joni Mitchell appealed to me more than the Stones and Dylan. Yes, Joni's and the Fab Four's music was easier to access in the mid-60s, but local radio quit playing all Beatles music after John Lennon's famous remark about Jesus' popularity relative to theirs. Also, Joni's "Blue" got no airplay around me -- and I was listening!
No, there's another reason. When I was selling records retail in 84-85, the musicians there schooled me on something: nearly everybody has musical "preferences" for melody, harmony, or rhythm. My preference is clearly for melody, so the more melodic writing of Joni Mitchell and the Beatles appealed to me instantly.
Dylan and the Stones are strongly rhythmic, so my "beat-friendly" pals in school went more for their music. Yes, Dylan can write melodies very well ("Like A Woman"), and the work of Jagger/Richards can also be tuneful ("Wild Horses"). But listen to their best-known songs, such as "Like a Rolling Stone" or "Let's Spend the Night Together". They hammer away at you with their chomping, thundering rhythms that almost force you to start stamping your foot or bouncing away on your car seat (I'm sure none of you absolutely civilized people do that, but, just pretend you do.). "Blowin' in the Wind" is another example, as is "Paint It Black." The effect can have mesmeric intensity, when paired with the right lyrics.
Harmonic rock or pop? Try the Beach Boys or Three Dog Night as examples from my youth. The Wreckers or Switchfoot, nowadays.
Classical music can have the same appeal, to a lesser extent because the truly great composers do it all well. But quickly compare Beethoven to Bach to Schubert, and you get the idea immediately.
There are a few people who dislike all music, all kinds. And there are even fewer who love it all equally: melody, harmony and rhythm. Can you guess one example of the latter from the classical world?
Think "A Little Night Music."
12/31/06
A new testament
Warm, cloudy, and storm squalls this morning.
This is normally the time we all take stock and see where we've come in the past 12 months, at least those of us who use the Common Era calendar (as I think it's now called). It's odd, though, since it's only in how we mark time that we measure it. Still ... .
This year could easily have been the worst of my adult life. I lost my "second" journalism career as a news broadcaster at an age when, in my parents' time, a man would be planning to steer his life's work into the home stretch before retirement. Instead of spending time saving, I've had to dip into the "retirement" account a little early -- dipping with a large bucket.
It was a recipe for the end. But something different happened. After wasting about three months of futile "resume roulette," I decided to use the time a bit more wisely. I began a journey into my memories, really taking apart my entire life and examining it as objectively as possible. It was an autopsy of the past, really digging into the archive of one failure after another -- and learning how to measure success.
I probed the course of love: looking at it from every angle possible within my own psyche, and looking at its potential effects on others, as much as possible within my limited social framework.
I examined manners and morals, my own and those of others. I looked at the state of the world, my inner world and the world around me. I sought not so much to find the "meaning of life" -- but instead, the meaning of my life.
And I discovered it had one: me.
Now that sounds pretty egocentric, doesn't it? Strictly speaking, it is -- but that's not exactly what I found. I decided that many of my "failures" had been the result of me holding myself back, getting in my own way, making life much harder for me. I seemed to think I deserved it, and I'd apparently decided that there was no one better to sabotage me than me. So, to the task I'd bent, my unconscious mind tripping me at every turn. But during this year of self-analysis, I tried to teach myself a different course. I learned that if you can't help yourself, you can't help anyone else. If you can't forgive yourself, you can't forgive anyone else. And if you can't love yourself, you can't love anyone else: the Golden Rule assumes no less.
I still hate myself sometimes, but not nearly as much as in the past. The deep self-loathing I felt during my first life "crisis" in my early thirties left when I returned to church, but to a denomination of my choosing. It had made all the difference in the decade and a half that followed. But it wasn't enough. I had learned to lean on something, as if it were a crutch. And I saw this year that I had to learn to throw away the crutch, before I could truly learn to walk again.
That didn't mean ending religious life. To the contrary, the process deepened it. But I had to learn to put the "religion game" in its proper place: not depend on it for my life's ultimate meaning. I had to go deeper. I had to probe the philosophy of my own religion (the philosophy, not the theology -- big difference), I had to probe the nature of my own ethical calling, I had to enter into a contract with myself to be true to myself and thus never be false to myself ever again.
I discovered anew the religious theories of Spinoza and Leibniz (derided in my college days), I found the writings of Cassirer and Heschel, and I learned which was better. I wrote my own essays on the subject, I "journaled" an entire series of more than forty poems on the inner nature of love, I made entry after entry into the past and the possible future in both prose and dialogue, just to try to make sense of myself to myself.
I now have a body of work I can use to steer the course ahead. I now have an inner sextant to guide me. And now at last I know what I'm here for: to do what I just did, and much more besides. I have a potential future I could not have imagined 12 months ago. I began the year thinking my productive life was over, when, in fact, it may have only just begun.
I have received unbelievable support during this time from family and friends: I've so far tried to thank those I could in my own stumbling way. But if I've left anyone out, I hope they know my contract with myself includes them, too. I owe them the rest of my life, and I intend to make the dividend worth far more than I imagined possible when I was one and twenty, and just starting to be a man.
01/02/07
Doom and Goo
Much cooler, after rain, wind and mess New Year's Day. High, thin clouds rolled in later. Full moon so bright the horizon looked like dusk. Huge ring, with refraction "streamers." (Is it refraction, or reflection? I dunno.)
It's called "A Very Short Introduction to ... ." The Oxford University Press mini-book series, that is. The more I dig into the Concise OED, the more impressed I am. The software version still sits, unused, in administrator mode.
While surfing the 'net (in this mode), I went looking for news about the Buffy S8 comic. As many may already know, it's due later this year. The series could take two years to complete! I'll try to stick the link I found here ... oh, forget it -- the URL is a mile and a half long. Just go to tvguide.com and search "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" from the search bar at the top of the homepage. The article is dated Dec. 7. There are also some (apparent) sample pages at the website. I'm not sure I'm ready (at my age, in particular!) for fanboy nail-chewing every month or so for two-plus years. I'm also not sure I'm ready for Buffy and crew wearing armored space suits and brandishing ray guns. I guess they're on Earth, otherwise they'd all have big bubble helmets with little antennae sticking out! (I'm kidding! No, really!) If I'm still around and still interested, maybe I can lug home the graphic novel(s) in 2010. I can put them beside the Cerebus and Love and Rockets volumes I hope to get someday.
Speaking of "bubble helmet" science fiction and comics, one of the weirdest of the so-called Silver Age was The Doom Patrol. Conceived (I think) as a DC competitor to Marvel's Fantastic Four, the Doom Patrol were an elastic woman, a man with a negative-energy self, and a robot-man. Their arch-nemesis was a talking brain in a portable tank. His partner (later, I think) was a talking gorilla. I realize the concept sounds stupid, and the hokey covers reinforce that impression. But the way Bruno Premiani (the artist) and the writer (Arnold Drake) did it, it was a very strange comic for the era. I always wondered how they got the talking brain through the super-strict Comics Code Authority: it was in some really gooey-looking fluid that grossed me out when I saw it for the first time in my older cousin's comic collection. The talking gorilla villain was a snob who (I think) spoke French. The negative guy was emotionally unstable and not always in full control of his negative self, which zoomed around the page in weird black and yellow electro-flame. The stretchable woman was always whining about something, and the robot guy (he also had whatever was left of his brain exposed in some episodes, I think) was always having mechanical problems, but was the sanest of the three. The Doom Patrol was led by an eccentric genius in a wheelchair, whom the three members blamed for turning them into freaks while in outer space. (Some say the handicapped leader and the immature behavior of the Doom Patrol were in turn imitated by Marvel's early X-men -- I can say the two companies competed fiercely back in the day.) The Doom Patrol story edge was 1950s horror gimmicks, and the backgrounds looked like The Forbidden Planet or The Day the Earth Stood Still. It was fun to read, once you acquired the taste.
My cuz loved the early Doom Patrol (he also had a taste for horror movies -- the color ones he took me to when I was 8 or so really freaked me out: the screens were huge then -- and horror fiction that was truly gruesome, at least for an 8 year old who read them utterly aghast.). But the comic's style was considered dated, so the sales must have slumped something awful around 1968, and DC actually killed off all the characters in the last issue. (That never happened in comics back then -- well, almost.) To go out on a still weird note, the last comic ended with drawings of the artist and editor pleading with the fans to write in and save it! That didn't happen. My understanding (I haven't seen any) is that attempts to revive the Doom Patrol in the modern era have all flopped. It was one of those "you had to see the original to believe it" kind of comic. I hope some get re-published in decent quality someday. It was a kind of classic -- in a class of its own.
01/04/07
Cue the Carly Simon CD ...
Cool clear night turned humid, cloudy and very warm by morning. Rained like mad all morning. Then cloudy and still warm and damp.
I hope any readers of yesterday's post noticed the ironic FanBoyDenial double-talk: of course I'll buy the Buffy comic! I was chewing my nails just looking at the sample pages the other night! Anticipa-a-a-tion ... .
01/06/07
The List
Clear blue sky, temps for April, only slightly cooler at night with a breeze.
Bought used Bonnie Raitt CD: "Silver Lining." Been a long time since I'd bought one of hers -- mid 90s, I think.
It was 1975. All you had to do was ask. There was this guy at college who had a good album collection, and -- if he invited you to -- would let you listen to any of them while he wasn't in. I guess he had an ulterior motive, but he had a private room as a kind of proctor (they used a different word then) and, as long as he knew you were there, you could just walk in and start playing a record (This was a different era, readers -- a very different era.). The ones I liked most of his were his Bonnie Raitt records -- he had all of her early work (which was her current work, back then) and I just loved listening to that beautiful lady's passionate voice sing the blues and -- then, uniquely, for the era -- play them just as well on slide guitar. Her song selection was excellent, and her delivery actually told you the songs, like a griot unveiling an ancient legend to your untutored ears. So sweet, so powerful.
Fast forward about ten years. I'm out of the newspaper business, working in a record store. I worked with a pal who was a maniacal "singles" collector -- singles being those little vinyl records with just one song on each side -- and a recording industry maven in general. One day, he came walking toward me, almost staggering, exclaiming in real horror: "They just cut out Bonnie Raitt! Bonnie Raitt!! Just cut her out!" I thought some violence had taken place, but when I got my friend calmed down, he explained: Bonnie Raitt's record label at the time had not only declined to renew her contract, they also removed her name from their back-order catalog. The Bonnie Raitt records sitting in the bin of our store would be the only records that store, or any other, would ever be able to get from a distributor. For a label to "cut out" an artist meant the end of their recording careers. Major labels rarely re-signed an artist that another label had "cut out."
This was an era when major labels owned the recording process, because the production of vinyl records was expensive and complex, so much so the production process was considered something of a "black art." A few minor labels existed, but they only signed radical artists like Black Flag or Husker Du and had very limited distribution. At our store (and other major chains), these "indie" records were kept in their own section, well away from the majors.
I heard nothing from Bonnie Raitt for a year or so, until I moved to another town and got a job running a comic book specialty store. I didn't have a lot of money (familiar story), but I did manage to get to one concert that spring. Bonnie Raitt was playing this place that had been a tobacco barn, converted into a smallish concert hall with sawdust on the floor and draft beer served in plastic cups. Bonnie and the band played their hearts out -- a real big-city concert going on right in front of your nose! Unheard of in tobacco town, or any other place like that (this was still the era, though waning, of stadium concerts for major-league musical talent). Bonnie filled out her jeans a little more than she did before (or since), and she clearly had the look on her face of one undergoing a struggle. But her music did not show it -- she was superb to watch and to hear. Another artist opened for her -- a strange, unknown songwriter from Texas with a bizarre "angular" haircut that stuck straight up on one side, apparently without hair gel! He was so stage-shy that he sat partially behind a speaker, so that, even though I was pretty close to the front, all I could see of him was the top of his odd haircut. The stage lighting was muted in blues and purples, and when he finished, he asked if there were any audience requests! One came, which I could not hear -- the singer stood and thanked the man as if he'd just saved his mother's life, and then sang the requested song he wrote: "Closing Time." His name was Lyle Lovett.
Fast forward another year or two: I'm living at my parents' -- trying to learn broadcast journalism at a tiny radio station, part time. When I could, I'd switch on the music channel (not MTV, still then a cable "add-on") and see what was new. Bonnie Raitt had a new label, and a new CD, and a neat looking vid. I forget the name now, but it was her "comeback" record that sold millions of copies, with several hit songs. She's recorded I guess a good dozen CD's since, and has a stellar music career. Once, she was a 70s folk blues artist from the Woodstock era with only one Top Ten hit, a cover of "Runaway." Who'd been cut out by her old label. Now ... .
It just goes to show you: the majors can do what they want, but they can't stop the power of the blues. Or that of a survivor. Ever.
OK, just one footnote: Bonnie is said to have learned her craft from a bluesman known as "Mississippi Fred" McDowell (he pronounced it Old Southern style: MAC-dowel.). One of the records I bought while I was a newspaperman was his "I Do Not Play No Rock and Roll." He had a kind of rap at first on one of the tracks, in which he says the blues began as a "reel." It was something I could not figure out: a reel? You mean a dance? Yes, a West African little girls' ring-a-rosey dance: the only music that slaves were allowed to play. But something in that music held transformative power. And it still does today.
01/07/07
Staying Power
Warm, humid, sun, then rain, then sun, then rain again at nightfall.
Got a few things wrong in last night's post: Bonnie Raitt's single "Runaway" (a cover of a Del Shannon song) only hit number 57 in the US, and she has recorded eight albums so far with her current label.
What my online research also reveals adds more to the story, but makes it all the more remarkable. I forgot she'd released an album with her old label in 1986, some two years after I'd heard she'd been "cut out" of that label's catalog. Seems this album was the end of a contract, and its perceived quality was the subject of a dispute. She re-cut part of it, and the label released it around the time I heard her in concert in tobacco town. It didn't do too well, but (I'm surmising here) its release might have been enough to re-instate her back catalog with the label, only this time on CD.
Her next recording with the new label was called "Nick of Time." (An interesting title. A good song,too.) It rose to number one on the US album chart that year. She won three Grammys for it, and she got a fourth for a duet with John Lee Hooker on a retrospective album of his (more on John Lee in an upcoming post). Her next record hit number two on the US album charts in its year of release and won her still more Grammys. The third album also went to number one in album sales the year it was released.
There may have been late-blooming careers more stellar in the history of American recorded music and comebacks more dramatic. But I can't think of one, personally.
01/08/07
Blues Hypnosis
Much cooler, cloudy early, then clearer.
On a tip from a friend, I started buying records at the Western Auto store. Now defunct (I think), Western Auto went from being an auto parts store to general hardware to home appliances, which eventually included TVs and stereos. So, if you're selling stereos, you're selling records too! I'd never realized this, but once I started walking to work (my dad's department store), I used to hit the local newsstand/book/record store first. The record buyer was the owner's wife, who let her tastes (country, bluegrass) dominate the store's small collection. Rock and soul were added just to make some extra money. So, much of the really good records, I learned from the friend, were actually at the Western Auto store. Plus, they were eager to make special orders -- something the other place (as I recall) refused to do, except for bluegrass records.
So, that's where I got the "rap" of the 60s. I don't mean the late James Brown's inventive forays into his genre, but the type of music that white teenage boys bought at that time to secretly rebel against the authority of their elders. Chess Records (the late 60s/early 70s incarnation) hopped on this trend by packaging "greatest hits" of their biggest acts of yore. They were sometimes known as the "aka" series, after the police abbreviation for aliases -- it stood for "also known as." There was "McKinley Morganfield -- aka Muddy Waters" and "Chester Burnett -- aka Howlin' Wolf" among others. But there was one that didn't have an "aka" in the title. It was simply "John Lee Hooker."
While most of the other Chicago bluesmen fronted bands, John Lee Hooker played solo. The only accompaniment he had, besides guitar, was a warped board he stomped on. He played electric guitar so loud it just about tore the needle off the track, and he would roar rather than wail the blues. Or sometimes just mutter.
The records were always in double sets, with a fold-out full of commentary and history about the blues artist. The guy who wrote John Lee Hooker's liner notes went to great lengths to explain why he was a solo artist: but it basically was that nobody either wanted to play with him or could. I remember trying to figure out what the liner note writer meant by John Lee's "modal" blues. What it meant in fact was that a bluesman like John Lee was a kind of house entertainer, and he had to keep things interesting. He would play something, then change it, and then play something else, and then change that, and then maybe "rap" some, and then go back to what he was doing before, but different -- or just suddenly stop. On a chord you don't normally expect anyone to stop on. Kind of like me ending a sentence with ... .
Hooker did have some accompaniment on some cuts -- but it sounded like they were playing on tip-toe, waiting for John Lee to just up and change something without any cue or warning whatsoever. John Lee was all about the "folk blues" -- stuff so ragged and raw that most kids wouldn't listen to it. I couldn't get enough of "Boogie Chillun" or "Don't Turn Me From Your Door." One cut, his version of the traditional "Sugar Mama" was reportedly recorded in a bathroom to get an echo effect. With John Lee's guitar turned all the way up, it sounded like he was singing (more like yelling) from the gates of Hell. The effect was hypnotic and chilling (or maybe "chillin'").
The refined "club" blues of today makes its artists more money, I'm sure. But they simply don't compare to the raw power of Delta folk blues with the guitar plugged in. I didn't buy the retrospective album of John Lee's recorded near the end of his life, but I heard a few cuts. Respectful and sincere, but not the intensity of John Lee from that Chess compilation.
01/09/07
Clear, windy and cold. A quick night walk revealed stars gleaming through bare tree limbs -- a rare sight in this hazy atmosphere.
Rock and roll is dead. I don't think there's much argument about it. Everyone knows the rock of Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry, or the Beatles and the Stones, is history. But also the many incarnations of that sound through the 70s (prog rock), 80s (U2, Nirvana), 90s (host of groups), and early 00s (alt metal) have all seem to run completely out of gas. The "top hits" format (whatever it's called nowadays) I hear is basically rap/dance alternating with power pop. There's no rock beat at all. A few groups keep the flame (Foo Fighters, U2 still), but it's almost like listening to Tony Bennett compared to what else is out there, at least of what I hear.
I don't think this is bad. The genre was invented by black artists after World War II as a kind of novelty sound. The baby boomers picked up on it, as white artists tried variations on the basic rock'n'roll beat (rockabilly, essentially). And the sound has made many different fans over the years, but after the boomers' kids matured out of the market, it died.
There is one sound that I'm hearing good examples of nowadays. Can't always name the artist or tune, but the sound is utterly distinctive. It used to be called "rhythm and blues" -- but I just call it the "rocking blues." The great thing about this sound is that it can be permutated almost endlessly, just like the blues itself. It can turn into jazz on a chord change, it can go basic and gutsy on a bridge, or at any point in the number. It can be used with brass, or it can be done nearly solo. It can fuse with many of the dance rhythms from Africa with its basic sound, it can be used harmonically, melodically, nearly any way at all.
When I was in high school, the masters of this sound were The Allman Brothers Band. A group of real musicians, they stomped the heck out of almost any other sound out there at the time. Though one of the brothers died in a motorcycle crash at the peak of the band's fame, the other brother is still carrying on, and I continue to hear good things about his work.
As far as I'm concerned, you can bury "rock." The blues just keeps on going -- rocking, rolling, stomping, shouting, whispering, crying. It is what it is, and there is nothing quite like it anywhere.
Except maybe samba. More, next time.
01/10/07
Still clear and cold. Light wind. She was a cutie. I forget her name. She got her start on the Ed Sullivan Show doing a goofy lipsynch to "Blame it on the Bossa Nova" -- a mid-sixties novelty tune. She later turned to acting and starred in some famous ABC ensemble show that I never saw (in a much earlier post, I attempted to describe the effects of a mountain landscape on 1960s-70s TV reception. In short, for us, no ABC.). But the effect of her "Blame It ..." lipsynch had a permanent effect on me. This bossa nova thing, I had to hear more. The local radio did not play rock 'n' roll all day long. They played "easy listening" music in the afternoons. Most of it was very dull. But that's where you could hear "Tall and tan, and young, and lovely ... ." I don't remember Astrud Gilberto doing Ed Sullivan -- somehow I missed it. She was a young mother, married to one of the heros of bossa nova, and she had a shy, whispery voice and was also a cutie. So they dressed her up like she was a little girl -- little dresses, pixie cut and big hair bow behind her head. She had come with her husband, Joao, to watch the recording sessions among him, 60s tenor man Stan Getz, and the immortal Antonio Carlos Jobim for a Brazil-American music collaboration. It brought together the music evolving out of the blues and the music evolving out of samba for the first time. Astrud ended up singing on the record, which sold millions and won a Grammy. What had happened to spark the interest was this new music that came out of the folk samba of upper coastal Brazil. It had been featured in a film called "Black Orpheus" that was "hot" for its day and sparked international interest in this "new beat." For some reason, the music just grabbed me from the first and has never let go. I wrote some months back about my reading Sue Mingus' "Changes" magazine for jazz info when I was in high school. One of the articles that stood out to me was about a guy named for the founder of the Boy Scouts -- Baden Powell deAquino. I finally found an LP of his music I still have -- "Solitude on Guitar." This has got to have been one of the all-time great recordings of this kind of music, and Baden Powell has recorded many excellent ones. The easiest CD to get would probably be "Personalidade -- Baden Powell," which has his instrumental version of "Girl from ..." on it. But if you can find "Solitude on Guitar" somewhere -- I absolutely recommend it. If you want something a little more modern, try "BossaCucaNova." It's three guys who take old bossa nova classics and remix them with samples and everything. They don't just mess with the music, they take it apart and reassemble it -- but all listenable and maybe even danceable (I wouldn't know). If your thing is harmony, try old recordings of "Os Cariocas" -- a five-part vocal group that took bossa nova songs and reworked them for a capella harmony vocals, twenty years before Take Six or Rockapella. They're all in Portugese, though. No, I do not speak or read the language. I love blues and jazz, but I'm obsessed with samba. Even though I was raised in a place where Dolly Parton was queen and Johnny Cash was king. How? Next time.
01/11/07
Miss Dolly and a Boy Named Sue
Still cool, light clouds. It was always on at my mother's parents house on weekend afternoons. Flatt and Scruggs sponsored by Martha White Flour followed by the Porter Waggoner Show, featuring Dolly Parton. That's where "Miss Dolly" (at best half the height of the lanky, spangle-suited Waggoner) first became known as a performer. Later, Dolly split with Waggoner and created the "crossover" persona most everyone in America knows. But when the "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" phenomenon took over popular American music, Dolly Parton returned to her roots and recorded at least two (I think) albums of mountain ballads, delivered with the clarity and candor she is known for. We heard it all the way through at least once a month. One of the football coaches in high school also supervised one of three gargantuan (for our town) study halls to accomodate our equally gargantuan freshman class (The high school was built to accomodate around 800 students total. Our freshman class alone had twice that many). To keep us entertained on Fridays, Coach G would bring a portable record player with a built-in speaker and play a Johnny Cash record. His favorite was "Live at Folsom Prison." A classic country record, it contains Cash's recording of Shel Silverstein's "A Boy Named Sue." We kids roared with laughter every time, no matter how familiar the song was. I had it memorized. I had no choice. During the same "O Brother ... " phenom, Cash recorded his own set of Appalachian ballads. I forget the name, but I've heard it and it's good. If you listen to these more traditional songs and ballads of Southern Appalachia, you may better see why bossa nova also grabbed me. The rhythms are many miles apart, but the down-to-earth lyrics and the apparently simple, yet infinitely subtle, guitar-based musics have much in common. And both have been clearly influenced by the music of slaves brought from Africa. In a deep and broad sense, the "blues" permeates both. Don't believe that about "country" music? Get the CD by Darrell Scott titled "Aloha From Nashville." Try the song "Banjo Clark." By the way, "Martha White" is an advertising creation, like "Betty Crocker." Scott's "The Ballad of Martha White" is a real "hoot," as we used to say.
01/12/07
Oh, My Head! My Aching ...
Warm, high clouds, a bit muggy -- a sort of Southern "wintermuggy" thing.Every time the barometer really does a swing, my sinuses go bad, and I lose sleep from the pressure between my eyes. Money low, and I'm cranky as all get-out most of the day, so if you saw me during the day and I ticked you off, that was why. Poverty, insomnia and a sinus headache bring out the crank in me every time.Got enough head crud to drain to make it to my poetry club's open mic night. Good time had by all, and I really enjoyed hearing great stuff read. I read a dumb one of mine. It was easy to pick: all mine are dumb.NOTE: From here on out (after this note, anyway), I'll be writing as me in italics. Mercurius_21 will be in regular type, with "his" stressed words in boldface. I've been looking at old entries, and it's not clear when I'm speaking as me, and when I'm speaking as Mercurius_21. If you're confused about the difference (and there definitely is one), read my bio under User Info. For instance, Mercurius_21 still loves the blues: I haven't bought or listened to a blues recording at home in more than 20 years. (There is one exeption: I have a Blind Willie Johnson CD. He sang spirituals in a blues format.) If you're wondering which persona has been which heretofore, about 90 percent was Mercurius_21. I, as me, made a few editorial caveats on the side. I'll try to stick to that formula henceforth.Don't you love LiveJournal's Rich text editor? I'm not the sort who "loves" software. I don't think Mercurius-21 is, either. But that's where I'm getting these typeface effects quickly. I certainly don't know how through HTML.
01/13/07
Roses are Red ...
Still kind of warm, less humid-feeling, clouds and sun mix. Sinuses clearing a little.I was not a poetry buff growing up. I liked sports. I couldn't play much because of a congenital heart defect, early. It healed (we think) later, but by then, I hadn't developed the coordination and other stuff you need to play sports. I remember when I lost interest in football. I went to see friends at my new "to be" school for the Super Bowl, and got pretty drunk the night before. I went in to a dorm meeting hall to watch the big game on a fairly small TV set, head pounding and stomach not at all well. Just a look at a pizza or sub made me ill. The game was a defensive contest that dragged. I'd never hated watching a game before. I remember trying to get interested in sports once I got working, but I put my competitive instincts into journalism, and just lost interest in sports nearly altogether. (I still watch parts of games -- the NFL semis were pretty good today. I think I watched two full quarters' worth of football.)What had happened? The spring before, at my old college (where I spent two years), I took a poetry class. I thought it would be easy, and, hey, spring was in the air. We had really nice weather that year, and some cute girls were in my class. But something weird happened. Our first assignment was to write a short English ballad. Mine worked as a little story, and I even worked in a slant rhyme (like rhyme and home). The professor (who was really critical of stuff) kind of liked mine. For some reason, the class just hooked me. I became fascinated with rhyme and meter -- unlike most kids who stuck with free verse. I got on the school literary journal, and became its resident traditionalist. One of the things that really grabbed me was a modern poet who had one or two poems in the anthology we were using (Norton), and who avoided sounding "scholarly" and actually had written a sonnet on "modern love." Ezra Pound was an iconoclast of his era, who edited The Waste Land and promoted all kinds of modern art. He later turned to fascist politics and apparently rooted for Mussolini in WWII. His super-obscure Cantos was the opposite of his early work, which was actually fun to read. Hard to tell whether he went nuts or was just an eccentric egomaniac. After a few years, I learned to forget about Pound (still have his Confucius to cummings anthology in paperback), but my interest in rhyme and meter stuck with me.I liked writing free verse, too, but assumed if it just occurred to you out of the blue, it must be no good. I trashed all the stuff I'd jotted in my first few years of work once I decided to focus on my journalism career -- which turned out to have been something of a joke. Now I kind of wonder what might have happened had I just kept doing those off the cuff poems back then. We'll never know.When I got into radio news, I found I could do that and still have some headroom left for poems on the odd weekend. There wasn't much to do in the town of my first full time gig, so I spent time writing stuff. I kept at it when deregulation changed the broadcast industry the year two national stories broke "in my backyard," as we'd say back then. I found writing poems helped me deal with stress. It's helped this past year, too, when I really needed it. I learned after a few years not to bother sending stuff to poetry journals. Poetry clubs and things like that are better, because you get to meet interesting people, who are probably just as intimidated as you are about getting up and reading one. I don't have a point to all this, except to say, if you're scribbling poems, don't stop, if you like it. You never know.
01/17/07
Call Me ... ?
Very warm weather suddenly ended yesterday. Now cold and raining. You could literally have worn shorts on Monday. Now you're scrambling for the electric blanket ... .
While driving around on an errand, heard a fave from college senior days: Steely Dan's "Deacon Blues" from the "Aja" album. Back then, it was another smooth jazz-rock hit with puzzling lyrics by "the Dan." Now, except for the part about learning to work the saxophone, I could be the guy singing the song, for real.
The lyrics are the kind of one-side-of-a-dialogue thing Robert Browning was famous for in Victorian England, like his "My Last Duchess" poem. "Deacon Blues" is about a jazzman who doesn't have a recording contract or a steady gig, is mostly a loner, etc. etc. He's a "loser" in the game of life, like me. When I'd hear the song back in college, I'd wonder how on Earth anybody could live with themselves knowing everyone thought that about them, much less admit it. Now, I know.
What's also odd is that, going to school in the Atlantic Coast Conference, I knew right away what "Deacon" referred to: Wake Forest University. The "Demon Deacons" were then perennial losers in college football. A fairly small school, it is best known for its academics, not athletics (except basketball). In my day, they were always at the bottom of the list in conference football. The reverse would have been the University of Alabama's "Crimson Tide," where its legendary coach, Paul "Bear" Bryant, ruled supreme. The "Tide" were almost always in college football's Top Ten in those days.
The song's chorus, "They gotta name for the winners in the world/ I, I want a name when I lose ..." is sung quite plaintively. But, now (with CDs and digital remixes) you can also hear outstanding scoring for brass and wind instruments going on in the background. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker knew that many heroes of modern jazz (like master orchestrator Gil Evans, among others) labored in obscurity for most of their careers, and the background arrangements seem to allude to a sad fact that the most creative often are the most copied by the "winners in the world."
But there's something else to think about: Alabama has had such a miserable football record of late that the school spent a record sum to hire away someone else's coach, who then lied about it when asked point-blank by reporters. Even if he's successful, his career with the Tide may remain clouded by that. (The NCAA has in the past frowned on such tactics, preferring its schools' coaches not appear to have been ''bought" by another school.)
Meanwhile, Wake Forest remained nationally ranked in football most of this past season and won the ACC Conference championship game. Though they lost in the Orange Bowl to Louisville, the Deacons marked history: no school the size of Wake Forest had even been in a Bowl Championship Series game before that. Also, the team's coach won coach-of-the-year honors, both in the conference and nationally.
Sometimes, things turn completely around. And, although the "narrator" in "Deacon Blues" admits he's a loser, he also can play the way he wants to and otherwise go around being himself. Is that losing? Is being a successful fraud winning?
1/19/07 ???
State of My Union
Cloudy and cool all day, then a little sun late afternoon and warmer.
Bought a used CD by Michael Franks for a dollar the other day. He made it in the late 80s, "The Camera Never Lies." Typical of what I used to call "yuppie jazz." Ripped it to my computer just to see if I could get WMP 11 to work. It did, and very smoothy. If you go on line afterward, a track list with a picture appears in your "Library."
Franks was big on the college scene when I was 21. I remember the chorus from a song he got a lot of airplay with at my school (Think bossa nova beat, "smooth jazz" chords and a kind of James Taylor-y melody) "Daddy, he likes Coltrane/Lady, she likes Miles/Baby looks like heaven/When she smiles." I was in a dorm my last-ever semester when that was playing. It was a co-ed dorm, with males and females at opposite sides of an X-shaped brick tower. The girls from different floors had their graduating guys all picked out (law school, med school, etc), while those who weren't into that kept to themselves (no, nobody came out back then, not where I went to school. You just sort of knew, I guess). I was the odd man out. I really liked the opposite sex, but I rarely dated. I thought I was missing something, psychologically. Some "component" of my head was missing the part that "hit" on women, or that "got" how I was supposed to respond to a "come-on." (A "come-on" is 60s-70s slang for a flirtation.) I saw who I wanted, or I noticed the "come-on," but I usually just didn't do anything, except maybe smile back, or something.
I felt bad about it for years and years, because I didn't change. That "component" of my head never showed up. Then, I thought I was just shy. No, I'm not: I can be outgoing when I feel I need to. In fact, I can be utterly brazen. That's not it.
Then, I thought I must be "out of the loop" sexually -- a misfit. No, I'm pretty normal. I don't have "weird tastes" or stuff like that.
"What's wrong with me?" I'd cry to the heavens (quietly, of course. No need for the men in the little white lab coats to show up at my door.).
I finally found The Answer: nothing. Nothing is wrong with me. So, what gives?
I didn't realize it when I was younger, of course, because, well, I was young. Not understanding stuff goes with the territory. What I learned by experience was that I see men and women as they are. Not merely "friend/foe" or "mewant/medon't want." I see that, too. But what I didn't realize I saw was their essential humanness: expressions, emotions, motivations, fears, feelings. I didn't realize it because it came naturally.
I found out I was "psychic" -- I was what's known as an "empath." Telepaths read thoughts, empaths read feelings. Now, I tend to think people in general are misinformed about so-called "psychics," because some (maybe most -- I don't know) you see in the public arena are probably frauds. You'd have to be, almost, to try and make a profit from it, because such unconscious impressions don't just glibly fly out of your mouth on demand. They're rarely that clear, either -- and you certainly can't bank on them. So, you wouldn't be able to turn it into a business, without some showbiz thrown in, at least in my experience. Others may certainly differ.
The other thing people in general are misinformed about is that so-called "psychics" are rare. I don't think they are. If you're reading this, you may have something rattling around in your head you don't realize is "psychic" -- just as I did when I was younger. Maybe, when science gets more information together, more sensitive instrumentation developed, we'll see "psychic power" as more normal. Maybe then, we'll quit looking at it as a "power" -- more as something like having opposable thumbs. Maybe we'll understand each other better. Maybe then there will be more peace on earth. You think?
So, my unconscious "empathic" ability interfered with the mating dance. Yes, you could use it to do the opposite, couldn't you? But that would be unethical, so I didn't.
By the way, "empathy" is not (Bill Clinton accent) "I feel your pain." Here is the definition from the eleventh edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary: "the ability to understand and share the feelings of another." Simple, huh?
Another "by the way" and then I'll post: I griped in an earlier post about not being able to get the OED software to work in a limited account on Windows XP. How did I eventually do it? In Administrator Mode: Start>Run> type Documents and Settings\(limited account username). Right click and hold on the shortcut icon of the program you want to use in the limited account, then drag and drop into the Documents and Settings window.
01/21/07
I Wish I May, I Wish I Might ...
Warmer today, then clouds rolling in, much warmer and drizzling.
The reason I try to start with the weather is that weather affects moods. It can really swing you around, or it can be quite subtle. But weather changes do affect our emotional states and mental outlooks. If you read some of my archive, you'll spot some of my own meteorological mood swings.
(Watched pro football late afternoon and evening, and really enjoyed it. But I was rooting for New England because I wanted to see a traditional match-up for the Super Bowl and was disappointed. That may have more to do with a downbeat mood now than just the rain coming in. In other words, many factors influence mood, not just weather.)
I think a case could be made for anger, but really, I think envy is worse. I don't necessarily mean in a "seven deadly sins" kind of way (a new commercial for a phone that flips into a handheld computer uses the seven deadly sins to hilarious effect), but in terms of how you feel about yourself and how you relate to the world around you.
Anger is bad, no doubt about it, and trying not to get angry in This Modern World is almost like trying not to think of a cow (mine's always Holstein, for some reason). Envy is much worse these days, in my opinion, because so much energy is directed toward it, and it's a complete waste of human potential. How so? If you are going around envious all the time, or even some of the time, you are directing your attention away from what you already possess, and toward what you don't. This is bad, because you may posess finer things in reality than the object of your envy does, but not realize it. Worse, you may be ignoring potential value in what you already have that you could be developing, instead of chasing after something or someone that you think you want. And worst (I think), you may become consumed with creating envy in the eyes of others, that is, making yourself the object of others' envy as much as possible. At that point, you've become another Paris Hilton. (At least, that's Ms Hilton's image in the public eye. She may have other motives that are better, but if so, she seems to be good at hiding them.)
What's wrong with becoming the object of everyone's envy -- or at least trying to? If you take my aforementioned premise regarding intrinsic value, you can see why. Working to become the object of envy not only ignores intrinsic value (in other words, value that you already possess), it destroys it. You have become so shallow and obsessed with others' opinions at that point, you have nothing else to offer anyone. You can only offer whatever you can think of that will promote envy. Usually, those are only appearances.
I am guilty. OK, when I'm walking downtown, I always stop and look at the latest Carreras and Kompressors parked on the street. I don't just look, my head whips and, as I stare while walking slowly past, I imagine what it must be like to be able to get in one and turn the key (legally, of course). Then, I realize I could never (as far as I know) even afford the insurance on a car like that, much less the payments and maintenance (the latter, by the way, is steep). I'm getting better: I actually envied a late-model (but newer, nicer color and trim line) of the modest compact sedan I own now. That was as late as last week!
I used to envy other guys' girlfriends. That was when I was a lot younger. I don't now. I love to look at beautiful women (who doesn't?), but I guess age has taken away that envy edge for good. So, I can't claim the "getting better" on that score, just the "getting older."
(Mercurius_21 is a little self-deceptive on this issue: he's merely wistfully envious, at this point in life. Also, he refuses to admit his own computer envy: that's why he found the commercial mentioned above so funny.)
But just because I'm as guilty as anyone doesn't negate my point. I think it makes it all the more true, in fact. There clearly is no point in envying anyone's anything. What you already have, or may possess right around the corner, may be better -- better for you or just better, period. To me, self-respect is the "greatest love of all" (there's a gospel version of the song out there that predates Whitney's by some years -- I heard it on the radio on a business trip circa 1986). The very modest amount of self-respect I've managed to acquire (largely through adversity, by the way) leads me to assure you it is the most valuable thing you can possibly possess. It's hard to describe self-respect -- it is related to confidence, but that's not it, really. It's not self-love, in the typical egocentric definition, anyway. And it's not obviously not pride, which is (we're told) the deadliest sin of the seven. But I can tell you how to begin acquiring this most valuable of possessions: you cannot earn respect until you give it. Until you begin to respect others, you will get no respect for yourself. The more you respect abstract virtues like love and compassion in others, the more you will respect them in yourself. The more you respect what's good in its own right, the more you will respect your own essential goodness.
The key that unlocks this treasure trove? Ask yourself this: How can any of us say we own any of these things? If we are endowed with our very lives, then we own nothing at all.
01/22/07
One More Thing ...
Rained like mad all morning and drizzled much of the afternoon. Winds picked up after dark, and striated cloud levels visible in the night sky.
There is one thing I'd like to add to yesterday's post, as a kind of "post script." I can't say it better than Andrew Vachss, novelist ("Down in the Zero") and child advocate. I think it applies to victims and non-victims alike:
"Salvation means learning self-respect, earning the respect of others and making that respect the absolutely irreducible minimum requirement for all intimate relationships."
copyright 2000 Andrew Vachss All rights reserved (From an article originally published in Parade Magazine, August 28, 1994.)
01/24/07
Umm, Wait a Minute ... Take a Deep Breath, Let it Out ... Better?
High, heavy cloud cover and fairly cold all day.
It's probably a good idea to remind any readers of a kind of disclaimer I introduced in a much earlier post. It's that you should not take anything seriously or literally in this journal, because it is being done largely to express thoughts and ideas I've wanted to for a long time, but also for fun and for just getting some chip off my shoulder. Most of these entries are typed directly into LiveJournal's Rich text editor window, previewed, and then posted. They are written, for the most part, completely off the cuff. I make mistakes, and I try to correct them. I also try to be honest, but I often lie to myself. That's probably worth considering, especially when my "pontiff's tiara" gets stuck on my head.
01/25/07
There I Go Again ...
Nice and sunny day, a little cool. Supposed to get downright cold later tonight.
Speaking of cold, I have this little problem. Being cold, that is. I like to think of it as being frank, but I have been told more than once (twice, three times ... a jerk-off) that I am too blunt. I tell myself that you're supposed to "say what you mean, and mean what you say," but that's really just a cover story. Truth is (OK, be careful ...), I like telling it like it is. It's refreshing to just get it out there, and be done with it. But unasked for, it's rarely appreciated, if ever.
You need tact in dealing with people, especially involving their feelings (OK, just figuring this out?). And I suck at it. There, that's more like it. I feel better: "I suck." Yeah, that's blunt.
You can be blunt about yourself, of course, and do no damage. You might even get a laugh or two. But you can't be that way about other people and expect no repercussions. When you hurt feelings by something you do (mistake, misdeed, etc.), people may eventually get over it. But words cut to the quick; they impact our consciousness more completely. Deeds must be interpreted ("Did he really mean to do that? What for?"), but words, especially from someone who's a little too good with them, go much more directly to one's inner being. They can be downright traumatic. It's been said a child can be abused just as badly by hateful words as by an angry fist. The bruises may heal, but scars to the mind are indelible. They last forever.
You've got to be careful talking, or writing, to people. Hold your fire, think things through first. If you must speak, ease your way into it. Because once you fire that mouth cannon, you can't take back the shell. How I wish I could truly learn this, once and for all.
An English writer named E.V. Lucas has written: "The art of life is to show your hand. There is no diplomacy like candor. You may lose by it now and then, but it will be a loss well gained if you do. Nothing is so boring as having to keep up a deception." The difference between Mercurius_21's mouth history and Lucas's recommendation is that your hand must be called, before you're allowed to show it.
01/31/07
Where Dreams Are Born
Mercurius_21 would want you to know it's been clear and cold the last few days. The forecast is for rain and even ice tomorrow.
I've set up a new LiveJournal account for my next on line journal project. It's {now a Google Site}
https://sites.google.com/site/visionsfromdaniel/home
Feel free to visit at any time. This project will explore collective thinking, that is, thoughts apparently similar to what other people are thinking, too. Mercurius_21 sometimes commented that this "synchronicity" happened to him frequently, and, of course, it does to me, as well -- since we're the same. (This sounds a little schizo, doesn't it? It's meant to.) The voice of the new journal will be a little more formal than the breezy, optimistic but slightly melancholy Mercurius_21 (who, of course, was my Peter Pan Syndrome persona). The new journal will be also be a little darker in tone, because I'm anticipating exploring darker modes of expression and thinking -- dark as in chthonic, not diabolical: cave exploring of the soul's labyrinth, you might say.)
As for Mercurius_21, he won't entirely go away -- after all, he's "forever young." I'll keep these posts up for a week or two, then cut them down to just a few favorites among his entries. And, you never know, he may return again someday ... from Never Never Land. (I'm sure J.M. Barrie realized a double negative can also mean a positive. Does that mean Never Never Land actually exists?)