Small Streams

(Oedipal) Dream Date

Saw this ad for a dating service in yesterday's paper: "Modern love means your boyfriend graduated the same year as your son." I know the point is to get everyone to loosen up, but my mind couldn't help but complete the picture: "Maybe it means your boyfriend is your son. Maybe your "boyfriend" was in some way responsible for what happened to your husband. Maybe this brings him such pain that he claws his eyes out. Maybe . . . eeeagh." Anyway, I think you could write a nice little blurb for a TV sitcom: "Accidental encounters lead to disagreement with father, swimmingly good arrangements with mother. Hilarity ensues."

Take Time to Stop . . .

And tag the roses. First you load Greasemonkey on to your Firefox browser, then you install the script that allows you to call up a google map, and then you put your cursor over the map and that tags the photo with the geocodes.

If you want, click on the roses and then on the GeoTagged link. You then can see the approximate location of these roses. I'm wondering when one will be able to add the timecode.



I have no idea where one goes with this kind of information and whether it imparts any transcendent meaning at all.

Please excuse the odd format. I blogged this from my flickr site.

It Must Be Bad for You

Had a wonderful time downtown last night at the Three Rivers Arts Festival. Watched the Zany Umbrella Circus. A sort of Mad Max bricolage of bicycle parts, aerialists, jugglers, musicians, sets, scaffolds, etc. Everybody in Pittsburgh should see it. Then become part of it. What impressed me most about the ZUC was the seemingly calm assembly of all the parts. I could imagine the introduction of video and robotic elements. As TV becomes more demanding and, according to Steven Berlin Johnson, we become more adept at absorbing multiple narratives and non-narrative information, I can see real live entertainment making cooked entertainment subservient. I can imagine everyone having their own curtain with their own name on it. I can imagine . . . well, that's kind of the point.

Thought Begets Thought

Here's a little something to get my day going. I was reading Thoreau's journals and came across this nugget:

Having by chance recorded a few disconnected thoughts and then brought them into juxtaposition, they suggest a whole new field in which it was possible to labor and to think. Thought begat thought.

Mondo Pittsburgh

This is posted on a telephone pole by the Quiet Storm along with a few other interesting things. I titled it "Mondo Pittsburgh" because I was inspired to take it by seeing some of the photos on Eye Control a photoblog by Joey Harrison. The connotation of "mondo" for me is something that's bizarre, but also somewhat like a zen koan, a riddle that might not be solved by traditional rational methods.

Fascinations

I took Piper to the Carnegie Science Center yesterday. We had a great time and got a good tour of the coral reef aquarium by a friendly docent named Wesley. I didn't know that all the separate aquariums were attached to the same water system.

Piper wanted to try most everything. She loved the Miniature Railroad and Village and we took two circuits and she probably would have liked taking a couple more just to see everything, including the 100 animations — swingers on swings, farmers chasing pigs, batters at home plate, carousels turning . . .

The outstanding thing about the Miniature Railroad and Village is the layered complexity of it. The display had its origins not in corporate benevolence or well-researched pedagogy but in one man's vision. Charles Bowdish started the display in his Brookville home in 1920. It was in 1954 that the Buhl Planetarium invited Bowdish to bring his trains and miniatures to Pittsburgh. It seems as if the energy comes from within the exhibit, as opposed to the other science center exhibits, which almost have a pandering quality to them. The only thing missing from the Miniature Railroad and Village is some kind of hands on component, although approximately 68 volunteers work on the display. There must be some way to pass on the miniature railroadists' enthusiasm, craft, and ingenuity.

Sometimes I think I'm a socialist and sometimes I think I'm a capitalist, but if I have any kind of economic theory it must be that of the transcendentalist. What I mean is that if all of us hitched our wagons to our own pole stars, built our better mousetraps, or mangled whatever metaphors we could in order to do what we wanted, that somehow it would all work out. And if it didn't we would at least have the works of people like Charles Bowdish and Achilles Rizzoli amidst all the rubble. As John Gardner said, "We are all building castles in the sand. Some of us are just building more elaborate castles."

We Are a Hill People

Imagine you're twenty years old, from a small Pennsylvania town, beneficiary of a fairly good education and good dental prophylaxis, and one of your fellow educated associates brings up a fact that you live in Appalachia. Disbelief and denial follow. You might even make a few well thought arguments for why you don't necessarily live in Appalachia; but the fact remains, just like a rusted washer in the front yard, that you very well might be Appalachian.

Of course, ever since the defamatory name "hillbilly" came about, many were happy to call themselves hill people. Just like cowboys used to be thought of as useless roustabouts, but are now mimicked by lawyers and accountants everywhere, people are laying claim to whatever "hillbilliness" they can. In my own lifetime, I've seen the accents of Western Pennsylvanians become more pronounced not less, more dropped "g's," longer drawls, "oh's" and "i's" sounding more like "oi". Perhaps this is compensatory. The more we do our work on computers, the more we feel the need to get blotto on light beer and watch NASCAR races. Perhaps the urge to connect with our "folkness" is driven by universally latent urges. We all desire a woodpile. We all feel the need to take off our jacket, roll up our sleeves, and chop wood. The light beer and NASCAR races are merely a satisfying extension of a day spent chopping wood and accumulating a wood pile.

Perhaps all this and more is addressed in The Appalachians, which will be on PBS on successive Thursdays this month.

Filmmaker [Professor] Wilbur[n] Hayden was on the Saturday Light Brigade to discuss the film about this 195,000 square miles of the United States. He will also be at the Rex Theatre at 6:30 this Thursday, June 9th, to discuss The Appalachians and to screen the first hour of the three hour film.

I'm not sure if Jesco White will be part of the film, but the soundtrack has two different versions of "Wildwood Flower."

Broadway Musicals That Might Not Make It

Given the unlikely plays that have turned up on Broadway — Spamalot, Avenue Q, Urinetown, the 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee — I'm wondering what won't make it to Broadway. Here's a few that show very little promise:

Pornographic Movie: A Musical Adventure. This has probably been done.

R. Crumb. Would like to see this just for the idea of a production number with a bunch of skinny cartoonists riding on the backs of full figured women.

Dexter. Based on the Cartoon Network character. Dexter takes his project to the Junior Academy of Sciences. Shades of 9/11. Can be seen as a kind of uplifting, Angels-in-America, type of play.

Paintball.

John Leguizamo Cooks. The talented actor does a tour de force by evoking multiple personalities cooking up multiple recipes on a television cooking show.

Delay: The Early Years. Captures how this cunning and charismatic congressman worked his way to a seat of power from the extermination business. Think dancers in jumpsuits waving metal spray wands.

The World of Henry Darger. The Mary Jane girls at the apocalypse. Pre-adolescent girls take on the forces of evil. I think this one has been done also.

When We Were Good

Am in the middle of reading Robert Cantwell's When We Were Good: The Folk Revival, an account of the rise and fall of folk music during the sixties. Cantwell's language is sometimes scholarly, sometimes contorted, but mostly joyful. Some enlightening sociological meaty stuff in among the occasionally post-modernist prose (He does uses the phrase "always already").

In "The Lady and the Tramp" chapter, the author describes the homogenization of life in the fifties and sixties.

The nuclear family to which you belonged, bivouacked in the suburbs with other families more or less like itself, had effectively reduced the generational spectrum to the bipolarity of parent and child, while the consolidated public school you attended was strictly stratified by grade and, in some schools even more scrupulously, by less visible standards like "aptitude."

Then he writes about the resonant margins.

At the same time, though, intimations of a variegated and enigmatic world beyond the suburban street occasionally disturbed the tranquil surface of social reality. There were the desks in the old school building, for example, with their inkwells, and the elderly schoolmarms and schoolmasters, with their old-fashioned discipline. There were the old houses on Main Street itself, whose deterioration would not be complete until all the business had moved out to the shopping mall—a process requiring little more than a decade. Perhaps you had European-born grandparents, still in their stuffy East side flat or out on the farm; or knew a "colored man," born in Mississippi, who came to mow the lawn and played the harmonica; or an Amish farmer who delivered eggs; or had a schoolmate with a southern accent, whose father had come from Kentucky to work at the foundry or the auto plant—and who, to your amazement, brought a giant flat-top guitar to the fifth-grade talent show, playing and singing in a piping voice "Your Cheatin' Heart."

Posted by mastr at 09:48 AM | Comments (0)

P. Diddy Stands Alone

One of the most fascinating things I've seen on TV lately is the Pepsi commercial with Sean "Puffy" Combs. You know, the one where he's standing in the desert and gets picked up by a Pepsi truck. The commercial playfully sends up Combs' image as a trendsetter and people's mawkish starstruck behavior. I've never bought an album produced by Combs/P. Diddy, or any of his clothing line, or his cologne, or what not, but I do find it engaging that throughout the commercial he's by himself. P. Diddy is known, among other things, for the entourage that goes with him — someone to procure the champagne, someone to drive the Escalade, someone to handle the cellphone, someone to take care of the financial transactions, etc.

But in the Pepsi commercials it's just him, no tribe, no inner circle, no handlers. Given P. Diddy's prescient ability to catch the next wave (in some ways, he's like a male version of Madonna or Martha Stewart), I'm wondering whether being by yourself will now be a signifier of being cool. Dave Hickey, writer of Air Guitar, mused that Americans no longer are comfortable being alone. They don't want to be Gary Cooper in High Noon, or James Dean, or Sam Spade. Maybe what people take away from the Pepsi commercial won't be an urge to drink soda pop, or pimp a Pepsi truck, but the ability to face the world around them alone.