Good Stuff

Meme me

If this blogger links to it, and this blogger links to it, heck, it's got to be a good idea.

I'll be there. And Liz will be a panelist. I always go to these things planning to keep quiet and learn something, and I always wind up shooting off my mouth. So if you want to see someone speaking in tongues outside of a Pentecostal church, go down to CAPA High on Saturday.

Become Part of a Plague

The viral plague of joy, that is.

This past Friday I heard an interview with Peter Mulvey on NPR. He talked about those wonderful epiphanic moments when you know your alive. That they happen every day. For instance, that day he had one when he saw a flower stuck in the barrel of a town square cannon.

The Super Secret Dance Society reminds us that those moments of joy and awareness can be made by any and all of us. They call themselves a "viral plague of joy." I might say I wish we had such a plague in Pittsburgh, but we probably do, and if not, we should probably just make one. I ran across their web site after checking out an anthology of Amanda Congdon's Rocketboom work.

It makes me want to build dribble sandcastles on the sidewalk. Or at least join the Cacophony Society.

Make Piles of Money

If you are an undergraduate, or know an undergraduate, Sarah Rich points out an interesting EPA competition in World Changing. Details can be found at People, Prosperity, and the Planet.

Do You Have the Goods?

The only goods for him are "good states of mind" . . .
-- Van Wyck Brooks on Lewis Mumford, from The Writer in America

Links to Like

Just some things I've seen in the NY Times in the last week:

An op-ed on BP. The writer is elated that a corporation is willing to talk the talk, but is disappointed that they are not willing to walk the walk. Surprise!

Good piece of cultural criticism on That Girl. I particularly like the description of Greek dancing. It reminds me of Doug Englebart, who sought out Greek dancing establishments.

The flashlight of Jimmy Wales.

David Pogue makes me want to buy a hi-definition video camera.

Another Day Another Function

After I said that I mostly ignored spreadsheet functions, I just found another one that I can use. I'm currently tallying zipcodes on a list, so I found out how nifty the "countif" function is.

No thanks to Irving Berlin, here's the formula: =COUNTIF(A1:A6;"Blessing")

Schenley Plaza

Have already visited Schenley Plaza twice since its opening last weekend. I'm still a little nervous about whether will people will take to it or not. The grass is lush. The food stands have decent hoagies. The carousel is delightful because of the strange statuary rides -- my favorite is the rabbit, the weird, Edwardian rabbit. We also saw Zany Umbrella Circus, fewer acrobatics in the current show, which I didn't miss. The circus has a great grasp of certain unconscious resonances, in this case a kind of gypsy, shtetl, East European-ness that's evocative but doesn't get in the way of the circus-y stuff and the narrative-y stuff.

With continual programming, the Schenley Plaza could attract people. I hope it continues to attract people without programming (or formal programming, that is). My only two criticisms, is that I wish they'd made room for the food vans, and that there should be some places of refuge. Prospect and refuge are two things that people want in a park.

In a previous post, I'd written about my doubts about the park, and one of my main concerns was the need for Pitt to do something about the sterile Forbes Quad area. They've done something, created some greenery, added some tables and chairs. I still am not sure if it's messy enough. There's still a lot that says "Keep off the grass." For instance the metal angles on the planters that keep skateboarders off. Then again, I think those metal angles are an elegant solution to what could be a problem. The changes at Forbes Quad and Schenley Plaza will surely be worth a case study.

Technorati Tags: Schenley Plaza

The Diffusion of Walmart

Walmart

Goin' to Pop City

Jennifer Barron just had her article on Pittsburgh blogging published in the webzine Pop City, complete with a picture of Liz and her blog.

Come on and Take a Free Ride

I always thought that "Free Ride" was a Foghat tune, but I think maybe it was Edgar Winter's.

Anyway the whole family went to Free Ride, which is located in Construction Junction in Point Breeze, this past Saturday. We brought a bike in to fix, one to drop off, and looked for bikes to buy. Thomas got a 15-speed for twenty bucks. I found a ten-speed, which I'll have to learn how to fix myself. Actually, the folks at Free Ride are very generous in their assisting. Work for them for four hours and you can have the bike for free.

In my mind, it's all very eutechnically correct, and the whole arrangement reminds me of possibilities of alternative economies, alternative manufacturing, alternative thinking, etc., especially when you see a dozen enthusiasts tuning bikes, picking out and putting back tools. Sure, the people are younger and hipper looking than me(Perhaps an updated version of the Dazed and Confused cast), but Free Ride has a very welcoming environment, especially since they had Dock Boggs playing on the CD player.

Eat Nature

I took this on the way back from dropping my daughter at school. I usually listen to WDUQ's Sean Doherty and Bob Studebaker banter about sports. But today I was busy trying to take pictures out the window.

On the way to picking up my daughter from school, I usually listen to Terry Gross on Fresh Air. Yesterday she interviewed, Michael Pollan, author of The Botany of Desire, and the more recent The Omnivore's Dilemma. Pollan discussed the industrial methods which produce the foods we eat and some of the alternatives. At any moment, I thought Wendell Berry would sprout out of Pollan's chest like something in Men in Black and start reciting to Gross chapter and verse the problems with our techno-industrial agricultural system. Pollan did a pretty good job on his own. I'm going to have to check out The Omnivore's Dilemma; and I might even have to add him to my pantheon of non-fiction writers, which stands as follows:

Fernand Braudel
Finley Peter Dunne
William Whyte
Jane Jacobs
Daniel Kemmis
Lewis Mumford
Stewart Brand
Kevin Kelly
Wendell Berry
Jerry Mander
H. D. Thoreau

Here, There, and Everywhere

. . . is the name of a Beatles song and a recently published book by Geoff Emerick, one time sound engineer for the Beatles. I haven't read the book yet, but I've ordered it from the library. Elvis Costello wrote the foreword, and he writes about the conditions that Emerick worked under and what those conditions gave rise to. One of the great lines in the foreword is where Costello talks about how George Martin, Emerick, and the Beatles were struggling with the technology, how some of the great technological advances were made with chopped up audio tape, rubber bands, and whatever they had on hand. As Edwin Land said, "The problem can be solved with the materials on hand in the room at the time." Few of these tricks, so to speak, have been superceded by much more powerful technologies. At one point Lennon was looking for a certain vocal sound on "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite." Emerick's solution: have Lennon sing through a loudspeaker.

Emerick traces the advances of recording through a milieu that went from Abbey Road engineers wearing white coats to wearing Nehru jackets. The spirit of Zen comes to mind, moving from strict discipline to la la, and it probably gave this music its sense of endless possibility.

The teachers say "Learn the fundamentals first." What if the fundamentals are Sgt. Pepper's, the Banana Splits, Doonesbury, and Kerouac's "Dr. Sax"? -- which by the way, would make the foundation for a great multi-media mash up. I see that someone has already tried their hand at it.

Faith in a Seed

Have been reading H.D. Thoreau's Faith in a Seed, edited post-humously. The book reflect's Thoreau's growing interest in scientific endeavors, and the culture's growing interest in the theories of Darwin and others.

Compared to other Thoreau work, it plods. Nevertheless great nuggets await those who work their way through. Just wait till you get to the part about the squirrels. In Faith in a Seed Thoreau observes more systematically and thoroughly and, in some ways, much more explicitly demonstrates how great a teacher Nature can be.

I don't know how an acorn got into our ficus planter. It could have come from me using some compost to mulch the ficus. It could have been the acorn I brought home one day from Schenley Park, subsequently lost, and may have been planted by one of my children. It could have even have been deposited by the mouse that I have seen scurrying about the house. In any case, it is one more example of how seeds and trees have an inexorable will toward covering our planet. Thoreau would have been pleased, I think. I'm not sure he would have had the same designs on the mouse that I do.

If You Can Make It There . . .

Enjoyed this morning's Post-Gazette feature on Pittsburghers on Broadway. The photographer/videographer Curt Chandler told me there would be some video accompanying the story, but I haven't seen it yet. Some interesting audio clips, including 238 of the congregants singing "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood." Many of those singing sound like accountants and set builders rather than tenors and sopranos. But you definitely get the picture that a lot of Pittsburghers make Broadway happen.

Blowed Up Real Good

Click to see the Garfield Heights Hi-rise implosion.

Find What You're Looking For

Just found blog entry about finding video on the web. Truveo has a search engine that looks specifically for video. Who's got a clip? Who needs a clip?

The More Memes Change . . .

I'm enjoying John Markoff's book What the Dormouse Said and having wonderful mondo moments, such as when I open my browser to write about the personal computer revolution I get a prompt from a piece of software to update itself.

The invention of PCs was one of those "don't try this at home, kids," exercises. Mix together lots of Defense Department money, a bunch of nerds, inflated egos, LSD, Grateful Dead music, and electronic circuits, and these wonderful machines and wireless technologies is what you get. You can also see why a blue state lifestyle is something to warned against. Bill Gates' counter revolution may have calmed us down and got us to work on Excel and Minesweeper for a while, but the whole open source and scripts and content management for the rest of us is about to jiggle us to another level. Some telling snippets on fascinating people, such as Stewart Brand (More Stewart Brand!). Some disturbing parts, like when a group of 25 engineers eat LSD to have a product creation session. Not a whole lot of level three revelation, but enough level twos to create a bangup map of intersections between sociology and technology.

Quote of the Week

Hendrik Hertzberg's "Talk of the Town" piece has a gem which requires a little bit of lead up, but here goes . . .

In The Damn Yankees, the Devil helps the Washington Senators win the pennant.

The Senators' successors after thirty years, the Nationals, are up for sale.

One of the possible buyers is George Soros

Republicans and conservatives say some harsh things about Soros: Bill O' Reilly, "as far left as you can get without moving to Havana," Dennis Hastert has insinuated that some of Soros' fortune could be drug money and Jeff Gannon's GOP.USA, has called him "a prolocutor in the congregation of Moloch" and "Hungarian-born descendant of Shylock."

Get ready, here's the quote . . .

"Given the plot of "Damn Yankees," you might think that a prolcutor in the congregation of Moloch would be just what the Nats' front office needs."

Posted by mastr at 08:45 AM | Comments (0)

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.

The Road to Wellville

Just finished T.C. Boyle's The Road to Wellville. Not laugh out loud funny, but humorous. I guess the description "Dickensian" comes to mind. Boyle displays what is large and small about all of us in different characters. The story centers around Dr. John Harvey Kellogg's sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan. Along with high-minded ideals, Kellogg espoused a lot of quackery and exhibited a significant amount of showmanship. Think Donald Trump, but instead of real estate and casinos, Kellogg sold people on the benefits of vegetarianism and enemas.

Boyle's writing is rich, erudite, and sometimes evocative. Even the villains of the story are portrayed sympathetically. You do, however, get a residual feeling of despair when examining his characters.

Anyway, good read. Highly recommend it. Would be interested in seeing the movie.

Plugging Acoustic Music

I had a great time Saturday night at the Star-Lite Lounge in Blawnox. On the first Saturday of the month, Robert Wagner puts together the Three Penny Opry, a melange of mostly acoustic musicians, who usually have a lot to say, and are always worth hearing from. I usually do a little work as the emcee and I play a song or two. At the end of the evening we trade songs and generally mix things up. One of my favorite moments this past Saturday was being part of a improvised doo-wop chorus for Randy Hoffman's song about a perky goth girl.

Robert just sent me an e-mail that said there's more fun in everyone's future, especially if more people participate:

I was speaking with Ron Esser, owner of Moondogs and The Starlite Lounge, and he said that he wants to make The Starlite his "acoustic" club. Moondogs would be devoted to rock and blues, and The Starlite would be devoted to acoustic folk and blues. Thus far, we've been doing The Threepenny Opry on a monthly basis. And every Tuesday night The Starlite is home to the Calliope Bluegrass Jam.

To do a show in the backroom at the starlite, it takes about 20 minutes or so to move tables and chairs and set up the p.a. It's not hard at all. As you know, the backroom is non-smoking, but people can smoke and buy drinks at the bar. (The lighting isn't ideal, but we're not movie stars...) Moondog can't GUARANTEE us anything other than a few drinks and a sandwich, that kind of thing, but at least we wouldn't be expected to pay anything. We'd make what we earn "at the door," something we're accustomed to.

So I'm volunteering to facilitate the scheduling of shows at the starlite and to help set up the p.a. and that kind of thing. I think we should just start booking shows every friday and saturday night, do it and do it and do it and stick with it till the general public gets the idea that if they want to hear good acoustic music on friday or saturday night, they should go to blawnox.

Leave me a comment or send me an e-mail if you want to join in.

The Tangled Mind

The New Yorker has an interesting article on "tangle diseases" -- Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and A.L.S. Paul Cox, an ethnobotanist, and not a professional neurologists, hypothesizes that those who suffer from tangle diseases -- classified because of the similar ways that neurofibrillary matter is tangled -- is the result of absorbing neurotoxins in our diet. Mainstream scientists have significant problems with Cox's research, written up with Oliver Sacks. But it makes for a good story, and I'm always a sucker for a good unified theory.

Existence

When you think about where we come from and where we are going sometimes you come up with a solution that makes you gloomy. The whole "Descent of Man" was a pretty depressing story for a lot of people, hence the need to suppress the teaching of the theory of evolution, and has bred increasingly impressive attempts to weave new stories which don't have a foundation in much besides wishful thinking. Billions of years before us there will be nothing and billions of years after us there will be nothing. At least that's what the Dragon says in John Gardner's Grendel.

How do you go on with that idea in your head? Must you create illusions to carry on in the face of that bit of information? Of course my ideal of working through nihilistic arguments was the Woody Allen character in Radio Days who felt that if an asteroid might strike the earth at any moment, it was a good reason to not worry about your homework.

Now here's where it gets tricky and I become inarticulate — if I haven't been before. I really think that life or the will to life and then to consciousness exists apart from this particular brew we have on earth. What got me to think of this was watching Rivers and Tides a documentary about the artist Andy Goldsworthy. Goldsworthy's a sculptor who tends to natural media: twigs, leaves, rocks, even evanescent forms like icicles. One of the media that you can see him playing with in the documentary are iron stones, which he crushes and uses as pigment or merely as dust. Goldsworthy illustrates and explains iron's fundamental role in life and its manifestation in our own blood.

I think the color is an expression of life. I am in continuous pursuit of the red. That something so dramatic, so intense, could at the same time be so hidden, underneath the skin of the earth.

From thinking about iron in myself, my mind wanders to the idea of iron in every living thing. Iron-sulfur world theorists imagine iron's nature, iron's will, has taken us on a trip from there — underground cauldrons of methane, steam, and sulfur — to here. From self-replication of non-living things, to the replication of living things, to sex, to consciousness is not such a long trip. We might have started out out in a mid-ocean ridge, moved ourself to a tide pool, climbed down a tree in Africa, and now find ourselves trying to buy some coastal real estate before it's too late, but the ideas were there first. In the blackest of black holes lie the concepts of iron, life , and thought.

May I See Your Papers?

Dennis Roddy wrote a great article on John Gilmore, a guinea pig for freedom. The article shows how some fundamental issues of freedom and security are at stake, and includes this important question: "Since the 9/11 terrorists had drivers' licenses, why do airlines want to see mine?"

Telling Tales

On New Years' Day I heard a great wintertime story by Garrison Keillor. Improbably enough, the 13-year-old Keillor finds himself driving on the frozen ice of the Mississippi River, with Crazy Eric skiing alongside on 2x4s with shotguns in both hands and wearing coyote leg traps for bindings. Eric gets in the car and they head toward Minneapolis:

I just drove along with my head outside the window so I could see where I was going. Boy, I felt good. I never drove a car this far before . . . it was beautiful. [Crazy Eric] was all excited. He was talking a mile a minute in Norwegian. Then he was talking about New Orleans. I could tell he enjoyed it. How he'd come to New Orleans, I had no idea. That was the first I'd heard about New Orleans, hearing an old drunk Norwegian talk about it in Norwegian, snot frozen to his moustache . . . You know you ought to venerate people like me because I remember things that no one else remembers.

You can hear the whole thing here.

This Week in Sex

Oh sure, New York Times Week in Review used up a lot of space with the current administration's attempts to undo the New Deal.

Whatever.

More column inches, however, were spent dealing with sex and sexuality. In total, five articles covered the antics of Harvard President Lawrence Summers and SpongeBob Squarepants. No they weren't seen frolicking together. Although Summers could probably use a friend like SpongeBob right now.

Apparently Summers misspoke or spoke in what he thought was a private club room.

He suggested at an economics conference that the low representation of women scientists at universities might stem from, among other causes, innate differences between the sexes.

Charles Murray says that Summers' critics will have a chilling effect on scientific inquiry. To prepare for this, maybe we should have hired Jimmy the Greek to run an Ivy League School?

Olivia Judson's essay is a little more rounded and thoughtful.

More importantly we need to find out why SpongeBob, as the Council on Family's James Dobson says, is a threat to our children. John Leland has a short backgrounder on cartoon bad behavior, and Maureen Dowd tags our President with the name SpongeBush Square Pants (Dick Cheney is Mr. Krabs). I like Dowd's stuff, but I must say I'm glad I never met her in the schoolyard.

I've already written some about cartoons reflecting our psyches, and our internal struggles, but I think someone should parlay our need for a cartoon synthesis into a best-selling book. Dave Hickey's essay "Pontormo's Rainbow" in Air Guitar would be a good example of such an analysis.

Forty years ago crusaders set out to tame the world of animation. In this case, the puritans saw that the problem was not sex but violence in animated cartoons, and attempted to survey its effects. Hickey was one of the surveyed and describes his interlocutor from the point of view of a twelve-year-old:

. . . Did I like Donald Duck? Yes, I liked Donald Duck, I told her, although I withheld my opinion that the Duck was the only Disney character who had any soul, any edge, that he was sort of the Dizzy Gillespie of Disney characters. This was not the sort of insight one shared with June Cleaver.

Well then, she said, what did I think about Donald's relationship with his nephews, Huey, Dewey, and Louie? Did this frighten me? Did it, perhaps, remind me of . . . my mom or dad!? She looked at me solemnly, expectantly. I wanted to tell her that, first, Donald Duck was a cartoon. Second, he was an animal, a duck, and, finally, he was only about this tall. But I could tell from the penetration of her gaze that she wasn't really interested in ducks, and I felt my face getting hot. My inquisitor smiled faintly, triumphantly, taking this blush as a tell-tale sign of guilt, which it wasn't. I felt like a downed American pilot in the clutches of the Gestapo, determined to protect the secrets of his freedom.

'Twas ever thus. Big Brother has always watched us watching cartoons. Cartoons are subversive. They reveal a world of possibility. The great thing about cartoons is that if people start a witch hunt against them, the witch hunters will just be made to look silly. And by the way, it's witch hunter season.

For further reading, here are some links from BoingBoing:

• An article covering the original flap.


• The transgressor himself


• What's up with this?


• Keith Olbermann weighs in.

Off My Desktop on to the Web

Rebecca Blood writes about citizen science efforts, people working outside the conventional institutional framework. You could also check this out for the great posies.

If you're an intelligent designer you might want some of these stickers for your textbooks.

Wired Magazine provides a great introduction on BitTorrent a peer-to-peer-like method for transporting very large files.

BitTorrent transforms the Internet into the world's largest TiVo.

The People in Our Neighborhoods

Fred Rogers Lives!

Check out this site and join the fun.

Congratulations Cynthia

I just found out that fellow Pitt Writers' Workshop student Cynthia Kadohata won the Newberry Award. I'm not surprised, she's a terrific writer.

What I remember most about Cynthia is that along with pen and pad, she always wrote with a box of Kleenex nearby, just like the Kathleen Turner character in the first scene of Romancing the Stone. Her writing showed that she was that intense. Now I'm going to go out and buy the book. I'll have to remember to keep a hanky handy.

More Mysteries of Pittsburgh

From Stewart O'Nan, author with Stephen King of Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the 2004 Season, an alphabet of Pittsburgh goodies (some of them fairly obscure).

If It's Not Food, Don't Eat It

Marilyn McDevitt Rubin has an interesting article in Sunday's Post-Gazette about American eating habits and how to make some radical changes. Rubin interviews Will Clower who advocates removing faux food from our diets.

To begin your diet the Clower way, remember this rule: "If it's not food, don't eat it." Meaning: "If it's processed, don't eat it."

I'm pretty much with him until you get further down in the article and Rubin describes Clower slowly eating his food, putting his fork down between bites even. I'm all for slow food. But I can't eat fifty-five.

A Photopost

Computer acting strange. Posting an item in my journal from Hannah Hinchman's A Life in Hand

Get Your Engines Running

The next time I get stuck — can't think of anything, can't write anything —maybe I'll think about one of these two methods.

One is from Twyla Tharp's The Creative Habit, who occasionally brings up anger as a good motivator:

The tantrum, judiciously applied, is a great wake-up call to get people to do something. It's the same for you when you're alone and scratching for an idea. Throw a tantrum at yourself. Anger is a cheap adrenaline rush, but when you're going nowhere and can't get started, it will do . . . When you're scratching for an idea, you don't need to think ahead. You have to trust the unconscious rush and let it hurtle forward unedited and unencumbered. Let it be awful and awkward and wrong. You can fix the results later, but you won't generate the ideas at all if you cool down the white hot pitch.

The other is from the story "Westbound Tanker," from The Most of A.J. Liebling. In it Liebling describes the tanker's steward, who had once been a gymnast.

He spent a good deal of time composing letters to English and American girls on a portable typewriter he had in his cabin, and when he was at a loss for an English phrase he would get up, face his berth, and jump high in the air, twisting in time to land in a sitting position. Usually three or four jumps would bring him the phrase he wanted and he would return to his typewriter.

Infographic Treats

Just found out about Funnel Inc. from Kottke. Funnel has loads of ways of looking at things that simplify, collate, illuminate how things are made, how things work, how to show detail in a map, how web sites are designed, and how people can work together.

I Have Seen the Future of the Web . . .

If you want the stickman to do something, click here.

Turn Your Radio On

I'm finding lots of good stuff on the Scitoys site that I ran into yesterday, including this page on how to make an AM transmitter. Was just reading in Wired about an art project using FM transmitters. I also need to get around to reading this article on podcasting.

Google Scholar

This is so good, I almost can't believe it. Just this morning I was wondering why you couldn't google for refereed stuff. And now here it is. I also hope they come up with something to handle more current information, sort of like Google and Snopes and Fact Check combined.

What Fun!

As you can see from the photo, Handmade Arcade was a big success. We got there just in time for piñata to be be broken. A lot of stuff to buy, even more to think about. The crowd and the vibe there just seemed to be one enormous "Amen" to everything. As I mentioned to crafter Al Hoff it reminded me of being in the Strip District at the nadir of the Reagan recession. "Ain't we got fun!"

David Bradley at Homewood Library

I didn't see a lot of the "there's-nothing-to-do-in-Pittsburgh" crowd last night to hear David Bradley speak at the Homewood Library. A decent enough crowd came, though, to hear Bradley read from the The Chaneysville Incident and take a few questions.

In the few pages the audience heard, we were introduced to Bradley's affections for the language, his fondness for Western Pennsylvania geography and kinship, history, and habits, and the difficulty of bearing them in the modern world. One of my favorite parts . . .

. . . takes place after the young historian and protagonist John Washington humiliates his mentor, Jack Crawley. Crawley had been teasing the college-bound Washington for acting white.

Why you know the mayor hisself set up here an' tole me you was a credit to your race. Yes indeedy, that's jest 'xactly what he said. Course I didn't correct him, an' tell him that you wasn't colored no more,on accounta your read enough a them damn books to turn your head clear white. . . ." And then he stopped. Because I had climbed up on the stand and sat on the bench and put my feet up on the supports.

He sat there on his stool looking up at me, his eyes soft and pained-looking. I nodded at my feet. He kept on looking at me. I nodded again, a short, quick nod, as cold and imperious as I could make it. He reached for the polish , taking up the can slowly, slowly dippping his hands into it, slowly bringing them out. He hesitated then, holding his polish-laden hands over my shoes, and he looked up at me. I nodded again. And then he shined my shoes.

When he was finished I got down and paid him, giving him a dollar and turning away before he could offer change. I went back to the car and sat there in silence.

...

Bill looked at me and said, "I pity them."

"Pity who?" I said.

"Those people where you're going. I bet they took one look at that application and saw all those nice tame things you did, and they looked at your picture, and saw a neat, clean-cut colored boy, and that's what they think they're getting, a nice, gentle, shy Negro, won't be a bit of trouble. Only one day these people are going to find out how dangerous it is to fool with somebody who doesn't know how to do anything but go for the throat."

A masterful passage that goes from tension to relief and throws in some foreshadowing to boot. Bradley may or may not have intended for those literary effects to be so apparent. As masterful as he is, he knows the importance of telling a good story, and Bradley is full of them.

One question Bradley took was from a person who wondered if he found such stories and language on the West Coast, where he currently resides and teaches. His answer went something along the lines of, "I'm out there now, but I'll always be back here." I do think, however, that his response reflects as much of a function of time as of place, and wonder if another Chaneysville Incident will ever be written.

How strange to come back home and watch some of the Frontline show on "The Persuaders," about marketing and advertising people trying to build a cult-like devotion to brands. All that talent and imagination going to selling stuff by appealing to our most inmost fascinations. Doubtless David Bradley would have been good at that. I'm thankful that he took another course.

A Joke

Listening to Prairie Home Companion, the special joke edition. One of the guests, Roy Blount Jr., had a great line:

Some people don’t want gay marriage, because they don’t want to imagine those two people in bed together. In that case, none of would have wanted our parents to get married.

Bash It out Now

A link from jill/txt on bloggers in the military in Iraq and Iraqi bloggers led me to the following quote from Army specialist Colby Buzzell:

I had no idea how to write or form a sentence (I still don't) but I figured what the hell, just do it. The Sex Pistols didn't know how to play their instruments when they started jamming, they just played, and that was the mindset I had when I started this blog thing, was to just go ahead and jump in the fire and do it and see what happens.

Finishing the . . .

sentence should be easy sometimes but it's not. Sometimes finishing a paragraph takes longer than it should. And finishing a whole book, well . . .

Yesterday's NY Times Book Review had a great article on the extremely long gestation period of some manuscripts. My favorite phrase is Shelby Foote's "the artist's terrific affinity for the difficult, the thing he cannot do."

So take a break from that work of genius that's twenty years in the making and read the article.

Some Faves

I sometimes think of myself as a middle-of-the-road fellow, but Mark Morford of SFGate reminds me how rational thinking in the cause of left/liberal ideas leads to some wonderful musings. Here's Morford on the California Supreme Court decision on gay marriage:

The court's decision does not really matter. The right-wing sneers and I-told-you-so's do not really matter. The hateful backlash against gays and progressive notions of love does not matter.

Here's why: The die has been cast. The gauntlet has been thrown down. The wheels are in motion. The sea change is under way. The strap-on has been, well, strapped on.

I'm also probably going to be damned for liking this piece in the New Yorker by Paul Rudnick.

I Feeeeel Happy

The above title is a too subtle reference to the "Bring out Your Dead" scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

But I do feel happy, even though I just turned 43 today. Maybe because birthdays lose some of their meaning once you've had so many. Inflation, you know.

In case I need cheering up, I can check this out.

Rosebud

If you do a search for "Rosebud" at the Post-Gazette site, you may not find out what was on Citizen Kane's mind when he died, but you will find a story on the closing of The World (formerly Rosebud), the Strip District nightclub. You'll also find a quote from Jon Rinaldo, owner of The World, that should wind up in the "Block That Metaphor" department:

"It's a tragedy, if you ask me," said Rinaldo. "You line up all of your ducks in a row. Two or three of those go off kilter and you have a runaway train on your hands. Instead of bleeding yourself dry, you say let's stop this now."

Let's.

Prosperity Grabs Every Man by the Neck

Busy today, but I do have time to post one of my favorites from Mr. Dooley, Finley Peter Dunne's turn of the last century Chicago bartender/philosopher/Irishman:

Yes, Prosperity has come hollerin' an screamin'. To read th' papers, it seems to be a kind iv a vagrancy law. No wan can loaf any more. Th' end iv vacation has gone f'r manny a happy lad that has spint six months ridin' through th' counthry, dodgin' wurruk, or loafin' under his own vine or hat-three. Prosperity grabs ivry man be th' neck, an sets him shovellin' slag or coke or runnin' up an' down a ladder with a hod iv mortar. It won't let th' wurrul rest. If Humanity'd been victoryous, no wan'd iver have to do a lick again to th' end iv his days. But Prosperity's a horse iv another color. It goes round like a polisman givin' th' hot fut to happy people that are snoozin' in th' sun. 'Get up, an' hustle over to th' rollin mills: there's a man over there wants ye to carry a ton iv coal on ye'er back.' 'But I don't want to wurruk,' says th' lad. 'I'm very comfortable the way I am.' It makes no difference,' says Prosperity. 'ye've got to do ye'er lick. Wurruk, f'r th' night is comin'. Get out, an' hustle. Wurruk, or ye can't be unhappy; an, if th' wurruld isn't unhappy, they'se no such a thing as Prosperity.'

Tube City Online

Just wanted to say how much I enjoy reading Jason Togyer's Tube City Almanac. News of the greater McKeesport area (including Pittsburgh), commentary on the comics, politics in general, historical photos (some of which I've posted to Pittsburgh Signs), and some amusing thoughts on day-to-day life, including this bit on fixing his car.

This is a totally voluntary endorsement, but if you drive an old heap or are restoring one, like me, and it needs a new carburetor, you may want to try National Carburetors of Jacksonville, Fla. Their service was good, the price was reasonable, the quality of the carb they sent me appears to be very high, and the car started on the first try.

Well, actually, the second try. On the first try, we blew the vent caps off of the battery with an accompanying shower of sparks and flames.

Um, don't try that at home. Do it at a friend's house, like I did!

New Hampshire Gothic

"Do people just walk out the front door one day?"

So asks one of the visitors to the Nason house in a radio story about an abandoned house in New Hampshire. The whole of this week's This American Life was devoted to one reporter's detective work over decades to finding out what happened to the Nasons, owners of the House Near Loon Lake. The neighbors were close-lipped, but Adam Beckman was, in a desultory way, relentless.

Beckman slowly releases the details: a perfectly intact grocery store from the past decade, a dress with a withered rose pinned to it, a $5 gold coin from 1892, a baby doll with a face burned off, and a car with a tree growing out where the engine had been.

"I was thirteen years old and had a crush on a house," says Beckman.

You can see why a past, a family's past, any family's past, should have a story to it. It seems the Nasons' story ended abruptly. "It was so overwhelmingly abandoned . . . It was like leaving a corpse," says Peckney's mother. Having been in the housing rehab business, I've seen my share of abandoned houses, and I've assumed a certain amount of tragedy that went into the abandonment, and worried over household artifacts to understand the lives of the people who lived there. Ira Glass was right when he said "I hope you have a long car trip ahead of you." I spent a lot of time just sitting in the car just to hear the story of the Nason house.

The "House Near Loon Lake" is from April 23, 2004, and you can listen here.

Jean Paul Sartre for Dodge Dartre

"In my journey to the end of night, I must rely not only on dialectical paths of reason. I must have a good solid automobile, one that eschews the futile trappings of worldly ennui and asks only for basic maintenance. My Dodge Dartre offers me this elemental solace, and as interior parts fall off I am struck by the realization of their pointlessness. I might not know if the window is up or down. It is of no consequence."

Lord of the Rings: The Funny Bits

I know that John Rhy-Davies as Gimli was supposed to be the comic foil, and he delivered his lines well: "Certain death. Small chance of victory. What are we waiting for?" and a game line after Legolas does a tour de force stunt of climbing and subduing an elephant-like war machine.

I personally liked the part where Eowyn tells Merry that even though his sword is short that it's admirable, but he's going to need to take it to the smithy for sharpening. Perhaps Eowyn was hoping for a longer sword, but Aragorn gets his sword fixed at the behest of Arwen. So naturally Aragorn owes his long swordedness to Arwen. After a loving pan shots of Aragorn's sword it's off to battle we go.

I'm kind of guessing that there's a lingering sense of Tolkien's world where race mattered, and in the 21st century it's a little embarrassing to see beerhalls of people talking about the preservation of mankind, and all those people are blonde nordic-types (these are supposed to be the good guys). That's not so funny. What's funny is the classism that seems to be magnified in the movie. The orcs all sound like characters from England's industrial north and midlands.

I also liked the scene where Sam, Frodo, and Gollum approach a place with gargoyles, and then you see this great big lightning column. I thought that must have been Peter Jackson's homage to Ghostbusters.

In the future . . .

As corollaries to the pop artist Andy Warhol's bromide that in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes, I present the following:

In the future everyone will be famous in homeopathic doses.

In the future, everyone will be listed on imdb.

I'm glad I got that out of the way. What I really want to do is list a couple of P-G articles that I saw today.

One is a story on empty retail space Downtown. Actually, rather than leaving the space empty, the geniuses (and I don't use the term facetiously, these were the folks that came up with the fountain and the skating rink) at PPG Place decided to fill the space with all kinds of fabulous stuff. Marylynne Pitz covers the story.

After having visited the convention center and the regional showcase last night, I'm convinced that Pittsburgh's task is to come up with amusements that can fill dead space. The convention center is a beautiful building, but filled with foot after foot, yard after yard, rod after rod of dead space.

Perhaps we can't get along in life just making amusements. What about things one actually makes, useful things? One story by Joyce Gannon covers the product development of a carboy scrubber, a carboy being the glass water jugs used by home-based beer and wine makers. Although I think you can get by with using a mild bleach solution for cleaning out most anything in a bottle, the device is both clever and non-toxic.

Resistentialism

A certain amount of intelligence is embedded in things and the accompanying phenomena. I was introduced to this idea in one of my college philosophy courses. Maybe it was from Russell and Whitehead's Principia. For instance a material so dumb as a brick, imparts a certain amount of information upon the floor it falls upon. So why can't a jellied piece of toast have something to say to us.

You can learn more about it in New York Times Magazine column on the subject.

A Proper Cup of Coffee

I need a cup of coffee now, not an ordinary cup, shade-grown, fair-trade, pH-balanced, a cup of coffee that lifts me up but doesn't make me nervous, the kind of coffee that can't be bought in stores and can't fit inside a drip machine, coffee that complements and perhaps even enhances my love life, a coffee...

that is not even offered on late night TV, a coffee roasted to satisfy a visionary, and ground so as not to offend a poet, a coffee that needs to be imported using various ruses including the re-engineering of women's foundation undergarments, a coffee that suggests its own container, the right cup, the perfect cup, small, although filled to imply riches and abundance through its sheen and viscosity, oil-black and with jewel-like reflective qualities, bringing the day to an awakening from which I will never return, and delivering me to the still point in the center of the universe.

That's the kind of cup of coffee I want.

Inspirational Quote

WQED has been playing the American Roots series, and I've been missing it. But I did find this great quote from the Arlo Guthrie interview:

Why do so many artists as well as listeners point to your father as an icon of American music?

    He really made the personal decision that it was better to fail at being himself than succeed at being someone else. That combined with the ability to write and sing about who he thought he was and who he thought everybody else was.

Mark, Mark, the Big Fat Fart?

Fine and fantastic

New Lost City Ramblin'

My friend John lent me a copy of New Lost City Ramblers' Songbook, a compilation of old time, mostly Southern Appalachian songs. It has lyrics, chords, melodies, and old photos from recording company promotions or WPA-type photo projects. During the '50s, 60s, and beyond, the New Lost City Ramblers played and sang these songs and others, discovered and preserved a lot of great music, and -- as noted in John Cohen's foreword -- styles.

More than most others, the three original members (Mike Seeger, John Cohen, and Tom Paley) and later member Tracy Schwartz propagated country blues, bluegrass, cajun, and traditional music. They searched out old masters like Doc Boggs, Roscoe Holcomb and Carribean guitarist Joseph Spence. They also made definitive recordings, to me at least, of songs like "I Truly Understand," "Little Moses," and "When First unto This Country."

When they weren't being earnest purveyors of music and styles, much of their stage patter was vaudevillian, after the old vaudeville, and before the new vaudeville, and they weren't above self-parody. One of my favorite lines was the one about singing "Old Bell Cow" to an old, Appalachian farmer who took out his tape machine to record The New Lost City Ramblers. As the years went by, Mike Seeger sometimes also prefaced a song by saying "We learned this one off a New Lost City Ramblers record."

Design as Writing, Writing as Design

You can call this a wonderful thing found on the way to discovering other things. I was trying to think of examples of advanced technologies that don't really advance anything: How gas barbecues don't really improve on charcoal barbecues; How leaf blowers are a step back from rakes; Perhaps even how writing on-line isn't as satisfying as writing in a journal. How we miss so much, we miss unexpected encounters with beauty, we miss touch, we miss external cues that help us find our place in the world. In place of that we get a lot of shiny, noisy crap. So I checked out Donald Norman's site to see what kind of related information I could find, but instead got to read what he had to say about the connection between writing and design.