Running After My Hat

The Awakening

August 16, 2013 by John 2 Comments

[Video: magician Rob Zabrecky helps The 88 make a point about opening your eyes. Which is to say,
I assume The 88 is making that point… ’cause I have no idea what the lyrics of this song are. People,
people — is it really that hard or copyright-threatening to make lyrics available when you release a
new song/video?]

From whiskey river:

The physical reinvention of the world is endless, relentless, fascinating, exhaustive; nothing that seems solid is. If you could stand at just a little distance in time, how fluid and shape-shifting physical reality would be, everything hurrying into some other form, even concrete, even stone.

(Mark Doty [source])

…and (italicized paragraphs):

“The sense of justice is an enemy to prayer.”

I remember coming across this — what would you call it? — an assertion, an observation, a statement, thinking out loud, whatever it is that it should take up a whole page in Unattainable Earth, another later-career book by Milosz…

I have heard this line now so many times in my head that it has become something like a mantra. It turns me inside out and back into the world as it is and might be, and it does not cancel either justice or prayer but calmly evokes both. That is how I hear it now, today, at the moment I am writing this. As something I wish to hear. As something, in order to hear, I must say out loud in a way. Science now tells us that reading literally activates many of the same facial muscles that speaking does. Speaking and listening at once, each the same and ever the other — poetry can call both into being.

My favorite line of Whitman is from his long song of the earth “The Compost”:

Now I am terrified of the earth, it is that calm and patient.

As one ages, perhaps there is happiness only if, as Lowell puts it, there is a “terror in happiness…”

I now imagine I can hear some of that calm and patience, and even perhaps the terror, in the little bit of Milosz that takes up an entire page.

(William Olsen [source])

…and (from whiskey river’s commonplace book):

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked — as I am surprisingly often — why I bother to get up in the mornings.

(Richard Dawkins [source])

[Read more…]

Midweek Music Break: Jherek Bischoff and David Byrne, “Eyes”

August 14, 2013 by John 6 Comments

The pop-music landscape sometimes to me resembles coarse fabric — fabric with lots of weight and substance, which distracts you from the fact of all the holes in between: “holes” as in “opportunities,” for artists with just the right sort of corkscrew sensibilities. Jherek Bischoff is one of those odd-duck musicians who periodically poke through the surface.

Unlike most singers and songwriters, Bischoff seems to work in no particular niche. For his 2012 album, Composed (also released in a straight instrumental version, called Scores), Bischoff composed all the songs on a ukelele, with the idea that they’d eventually be performed by an orchestra. Then (in his own words):

This record was recorded with one microphone, an Mbox and a laptop. I recorded each individual musician of the “orchestra” in their very own living rooms. I then layered each instrument (sometimes one violinist playing one part twenty times for instance) until it was the size of a huge orchestra. I spent the summer bike riding from house to house recording each musician. I then took a road trip and recorded all of the singers except Caetano and David.

(“Caetano” there is Caetano Veloso, a Brazilian multi-genre performer, composer, and activist; Wikipedia describes his genre as a blend of Música Popular Brasileira, tropicália, psychedelic rock, folk rock, and bossa nova. “David,” of course, is David Byrne.)

I have no idea if Bischoff is exaggerating the makeshift elements in this description of the album. (And when he says he went “bike riding,” I sort of hope he meant via motorcycle.) However he did it, this song is a gorgeous, many-layered thing. Bischoff’s site includes some photographs shot during the video’s recording, among them what seems to be a set of choreographic instructions for Byrne’s on-camera contribution:

(In some respects, you might regard this as a catalogue of Byrne’s standard on-camera repertoire. It does not, however, seem to correspond to the actual sequence of movements in the video.)

And here’s the video itself:

[Lyrics — as you can see, there’s some uncertainty about a portion of them; this is how numerous lyrics sites handle the matter. If I ever get any other interpretation, I’ll update the lyrics here.]

Lacking Focus

August 9, 2013 by John 1 Comment

[Image: cover from the catalogue of the “Focus on Imaging” exhibit of 2010. Photo by artist Nick Veasey, who specializes in X-ray photography; found it on Flickr, uploaded by user Karen Roe. The image seems straightforward at first, but the more you look at it the less plausible it seems. For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

People don’t do what we want, things don’t happen quickly enough, the weather doesn’t cooperate, our bodies don’t cooperate. Why are these moments so painful? Because our minds are focused on a static, unchanging, me-centric picture while the dynamic unfolding of a broader life continues around us. There is nothing wrong with expectations per se, as it’s appropriate to set goals and work, properly, towards their fruition. But the instant we feel pain over life not going “my way,” our expectations have clearly taken an improper turn. Any moment you feel resistance or pain, look for the hidden expectation. Practice giving yourself over to what “you” don’t want. Let the line at the store be long. Let the other person interrupt you. Let the nervousness make you shake. Be where your body is, not where your mind is trying to take you.

(Guy Finley [quoted everywhere, but unsourced anywhere that I can find!])

…and:

To the Happy Few

Do you know who you are

O you forever listed
under some other heading
when you are listed at all

You whose addresses
when you have them
are never sold except
for another reason
something else that is
supposed to identify you

who carry no card
stating that you are—
what would it say you were
to someone turning it over
looking perhaps for
a date or for
anything to go by

you with no secret handshake
no proof of membership
no way to prove such a thing
even to yourselves

you without a word
of explanation
and only yourselves
as evidence

(W. S. Merwin [source])

[Read more…]

From the Outside In: the Golden Treasury‘s Endpapers

August 8, 2013 by John 3 Comments

[See the previous entry in this series here.]

Adult readers know unambiguously what it means to “read a book.” They have an image of someone — most often themselves? — sitting somewhere in a comfortable chair, on a commuter train or in an airport terminal, good lighting from over the shoulder… The book lies open in their hands or lap, somewhere in the middle, with a sheaf of pages pinned in place behind each thumb. Because, y’know, whether the book in question is a potboiler or a metaphysical treatise, that’s where all the action is — in the middle. It’s the heart of the book.

But just inside the front and back covers? Those “pages,” the endpapers, serve a purely physical function; they’re where the dynamic stresses are greatest, where the tension between spine and glued contents would most likely result in tearing and/or separation. In a book, they’re the analogue of a painting’s picture frame: they physically hold it all together, hence are important, but they have no real point otherwise. They’re to be gotten through.

But kids harbor fewer clearcut preconceptions. From their perspective, the very first spread of paper and the very last might well be places to expect the most drama, the most meaning. And in a book or elsewhere, when faced with a large two-page spread of blank paper, few kids could resist the temptation to scribble, to color, to fill. Leaving them empty would be such a waste, no?

I don’t know, but can guess, that artists and illustrators love having the freedom to fill whole tabloid-sized sheets of whitespace, too, free from the constraints of story and the rigid geography of text on the page. Bill Watterson, creator of the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, hated the tedium of the daily strip format: day after day, year after year, working within the same narrow rectangle. (It especially had to frustrate him as the creator of such an undisciplined protagonist.) If I remember correctly, he stipulated in his contracts that if you wanted the daily strip, you had to give him a half-page on Sunday, to fill with whatever layout he wanted. His Sunday strips dazzled, even before you’d read any of the text in the speech balloons.

The publishers of kids’ books, especially illustrated ones, know all this. And the publishers of great kids’ books pull out all the stops.

[Read more…]

Midweek “Music” Break: The Perhaps Non-Musical Sister

August 7, 2013 by John 6 Comments

For the last couple of years, I’ve been sort of walking backwards in time through my siblings’ birthdays, via Mid-Week Music Breaks. In 2011, I covered the Warren-Zevon-loving Kid Brother; and in 2012, The Musical Sister.

Which brings me to this year’s entry on the last of the three, although she was the first to arrive on the scene: the person whom (parents aside) I’ve known longer than anyone in my life.

Maybe I’ve known her a long time — she’s also the only sibling I’ve ever lived with once we’d moved away from home — but I don’t really know much about her musical tastes. Oh, I know she listens to music, at least sometimes; certainly back in the ’70s, we went to a number of concerts together for performers we were both into at the time: John Denver, James Taylor, Gordon Lightfoot, Sha-Na-Na (!)… She’s alerted me to unfamiliar music every now and then, too; I’d never even heard of pianist George Winston, for instance, until she gave me his December album (still one of my favorites to listen to, regardless of season).

But unlike the other three of us, she’s never really focused on music to any great extent. I don’t remember that she ever took lessons of any kind — not even dancing lessons — or ever expressed any desire to play music. I’ve never heard her whistle or hum. I have never been driven mildly nuts by her playing a particular album over and over and over. I think the only real preference she ever expressed in anything resembling (faintly) a musical debate was My favorite of the four is Paul.

Part of it, no doubt, is that she is (has always been) just one of the busiest damned people any of us knows. As a kid, she was one of those natural-born escape-artist busybodies who keep their parents’ nerves in a constant state of high alert, and she anchored a half-dozen student activities in high school while maintaining an energetic social life. Now semi-retired — after two careers in teaching and HR, which themselves bracketed a couple decades of raising three boys — she’s self-employed, travels a lot, keeps in touch with lots of old friends, coordinates a lot of family “events”… On long trips, she tends to listen to audiobooks rather than music while driving/flying and during idle periods — because (I guess) otherwise it would just be time wasted. (It exhausted me just to type this paragraph; it really needed to be presented, though, as a single unpunctuated sentence.)

So no, I don’t know what sort of music she listens to “recreationally,” if I ever did. But I do know that one sort of music she’ll at least sometimes talk about is music in the service of comedy. She used to love Mark Russell‘s political songwriting and performances on PBS, for instance. When we talk after she returns from a trip to, say, Chicago, she’ll tell me about some hilarious cabaret act she saw while in town. She laughed as much as any of us at Belushi and Ackroyd’s Blues Brothers routines.

And then there’s a whole sub-genre of comic music about things meaningful to us about growing up when and where we did…

Comedian Robert Klein‘s stand-up act as recorded on his 1973 album, Child of the ’50s, offers a few such musical treats. Klein must be something of an aspiring musician himself; he wrote and performed a couple of songs for the album, and even in the nominally non-musical bits he incorporated many musical touches — especially acting out musical instruments vocally.

In the clip below, Klein recreates the voices and the musical palette which underlay the old “Our Gang” comedies from the 1930s and ’40s. We didn’t see them when first released, obviously, but they were being shown quite a bit on television in the ’50s and ’60s, especially on kids’ programs (where they’d been repackaged as “The Little Rascals”), so they were hard to miss. I think we all sort of envied the unstructured, small-fry-adventurous lives which the Gang seemed to live.

I think I do remember The Perhaps Non-Musical Sister laughing at this routine. (Say it with me, in a straining-larynx little-kid’s voice: I don’t feel like goin’ to school today!) It took me a while to pull it together for inclusion here: I couldn’t find the album available as a set of MP3s for purchase. But I did manage to grab the whole thing online, as a single giant 50MB+ monster. From that, I pulled this three and a half minutes.

So happy (a few days belated) birthday, Sis. I know you don’t spend much time online — no! (pant) time! (pant) to! (pant) waste! — but maybe you’ll land here some day, some time. Probably then only by mistake, and probably for just the four minutes or so it takes you to read and listen to this post. But I’ll take it: those little such bursts of quiet are, for the rest of us, always worth waiting for. (Not just because all of us can finally take a breather, but yeah, that too.)

[Below, click Play button to begin Child of the ’50s: Our Gang. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:39 long.]

[audio:robertklein_childofthe50s_16ourgang.mp3|titles=’Child of the ’50s: Our Gang’|artists=Robert Klein]

_________________________

Aside: For the first time, I just looked closely at that table in the photo. I’m close to 100% certain it ended up in the apartment the two of us shared in the mid-1970s, holding the Dracaena marginata plant I dubbed “Marge.”

Weekend (Something Like) Music Break: The Lake House Band,
“Five Dollar T-Shirt Blues”

August 4, 2013 by John 4 Comments

[Image: “laundry day,” by user eleanor ryan on Flickr]

You’d think a computer professional who got new computers both at work and at home within a few days’ time would be in a shuddery ecstasy of geek excitement. More power! More speed! More software! More… cool!

Speaking only on behalf of the computer professional nearest to my heart, however, I must disagree. Along with all the exciting new-new-new stuff comes quite a bit of drudgework, frustration, and uncertainty. Drivers have to be downloaded. Entirely new versions of favorite software have replaced the old — or gone out of existence altogether, or never been upgraded to match more recent hardware and OS realities and conventions. Old peripherals suddenly don’t even connect to the new boxes, because (say) “I’m sorry, but we no longer build PCs with parallel ports.”

Still, in the process of restoring old and often forgotten data from one computer to the next, you do come across some gems.

[Read more…]

When You Insist on Finding Limits, You Always Find Them. Why Is That?

August 2, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Theory of Boundaries,” by Mel Bochner (photo by cliff1066 on Flickr). Click to enlarge. Each of the four rectangles contains text arranged like fractions, respectively: at/in; over/in; (blank)/in; and at/out. For the artist’s comments, see the note at the foot of this post, or visit cliff1066’s Flickr page.]

From whiskey river (which offered a particularly rich array of ruminations this week):

Day Dream

One day people will touch and talk perhaps
easily,
And loving be natural as breathing and warm as
sunlight,
And people will untie themselves, as string is unknotted,
Unfold and yawn and stretch and spread their fingers,
Unfurl, uncurl like seaweed returned to the sea,
And work will be simple and swift
as a seagull flying,
And play will be casual and quiet
as a seagull settling,
And the clocks will stop, and no one will wonder
or care or notice,
And people will smile without reason,
Even in winter, even in the rain.

(A. S. J. Tessimond)

…and:

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tent show whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a muddied field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.

(Cormac McCarthy)

…and:

The Long Road

It’s one of those highways you come across late at night. No signs. No arrows. Just a road running north and south. You pause. You look one way. Then the other. Nothing. Only the hum of the engine, the chirping of crickets confirm you are here. You can’t remember where you’ve been. Where you are going. If it weren’t for the lines drawn through the middle, you’d think you were drifting down a river. Or stumbling upon a path through the sky. Remember. It is a moonless night. You are tired. Hungry. No one to talk to. Afraid what you were thinking might have come true. You look to your left again. Perhaps you see a mountain. An ocean. A lover you wish you hadn’t lost. Spirits that seem so familiar, drifting in from the dark. You wait in that silence. It may be years before it is safe to proceed.

(David Shumate, The Floating Bridge: Prose Poems)

…and:

Do You Know Who You Are

O you forever listed
under some other heading
when you are listed at all
You whose addresses
when you have them
are never sold except
for another reason
something else that is
supposed to identify you
who carry no card
stating that you are —
what would it say you were
to someone turning it over
looking perhaps for
a date or for
anything to go by
you with no secret handshake
no proof of membership
no way to prove such a thing
even to yourselves
you without a word
of explanation
and only yourselves
as evidence

(W. S. Merwin)

[Read more…]

Ugly Phrase on First Bootup: ‘CPU Fan Failure’

July 28, 2013 by John 6 Comments

The new PC I’ve been salivating about arrived yesterday — yes! on a Saturday! I did all the necessary last-minute backups and so on, exported various programs bookmarks/favorites and settings, and even burned a new installation CD for the correct version of Ubuntu (Linux), since I can’t use quite the same version that I’ve gotten used to for the last few years. All I had to do was set up the new PC, hook up the backup drive, and go.

Except…

On the very first startup of the new PC, before it even booted into Windows (which it came installed with, although I don’t expect to use it much), a message appeared at the top of the screen:

CPU fan failure.
Strike the F1 key to continue or F2 to run the set-up utility.

Hoo boy.

[Read more…]

Take a Good Look

July 26, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: Publicity still featuring Edie Adams and Ernie Kovacs for the latter’s comedy game show, Take a Good Look. (Adams was a regular panelist.) For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

The moon shines on the river,
the wind blows through the pines —
whose providence is this long beautiful evening?

(Yongjia Xuanjue)

…and:

Speak, memory, that I may not forget the taste of roses, nor the sound of ashes in the wind; That I may once more taste the green cup of the sea.

(Daubmir Nadir)

…and:

Start with a blank surface. It doesn’t have to be paper or canvas, but I feel it should be white. We call it white because we need a word, but its true name is nothing. Black is the absence of light, but white is the absence of memory, the color of can’t remember.

(Stephen King [source])

…and:

You think when you wake up in the morning yesterday don’t count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothing else. You might think you could run away and change your name and I don’t know what all. Start over. And then one morning you wake up and look at the ceiling and guess who’s laying there?

(Cormac McCarthy)

[Read more…]

When TV Commercials Verge on Art

July 25, 2013 by John 2 Comments

The Missus’s and my favorite between-the-films bumper/promo on the Turner Classic Movies (TCM) cable/satellite TV network:

For those not familiar with it, the network specializes in films — mostly Hollywood-made — from years ago. They’ve been showing this occasionally for years. It so dreamily evokes bygone days, without overt sentiment. It doesn’t include any clips from old movies. (Indeed, the only reference to film at all is the shot of a guy selling tickets from a theater booth.) It keeps the locale(s) non-specific, although it’s hard not to assume they’re all in New York City. It uses jazz effectively, and even references Edward Hopper. But somehow — even without the TCM logo at the very end, probably — it unambiguously tells you what you can expect to find featured here.

It is, we think, a masterpiece of the form.

[Found it, while looking for something else, at the YouTube channel for the AJ Ross advertising agency — the firm which produced it.]