Friday, April 30, 2010

Loneliness Part 2

So I didn't sleep that night. I packed up a bag with pretty much what I owned - which still fit into a backpack - and I gathered all the books to go sell back to the bookstore in the morning and then I would go with the Family to get on a bus to Boston.

The truth novelistic approach to telling a good story, would be to sneak the back story in way ahead of time so that by the time you get to the end it all makes sense. But blog writing isn't preplanned - at least mine isn't. So here's what you need to know: I'm very tall. In grade school and high school (in Indiana) there was a whole lot of pressure for me to do sports. I wanted in the worse way to play Little League (we played sand lot ball and I was a bat boy for the IU Baseball Team) but then you had to try out and they didn't want me. I didn't have the skills. My brother took me out back one afternoon, propped up a spare tire against the garage and told me to throw at the whole until I got good. And went away. My father and brother didn't spend any more time with me than they had to. So I knew nothing about any sports. High School came and they wanted me for football and basketball. I cried the first time I suited up because I didn't even know how to put the football padding stuff on and everyone was already on the field. I practiced and sat on the bench and went in about a total of five minutes and I quit after one season. Basketball wasn't much different.You were expected to know how to play. I didn't. I ran back and forth on the court and tried to rebound. I was one of the two guys left over after they formed the 1st, 2nd & 3rd strings. I had watched my brother on the team all through High School and he only got to play a little bit his Senior year. So I quit basketball too. And then for the next three years I was actively recruited to play, and some guy even offered me a chance for the U of Kentucky team because he spotted me working in a restaurant. I told him, he wouldn't make the offer if he saw me play.
To be honest, I didn't touch a basketball again until ten years ago, some twenty years later.

So I went to the bookstore in the morning and sold all my books. The guy was apologetic about the money he could give me, mostly because I had bought most of them from him. I ranted about running off.
So I took the street car and made the house a little before lunch. The guy I had made friends with told me that they had made arrangements for the bus and they would take me over in a little while and I wasn't to bring anything other than my clothing and toiletries and I wasn't to have any contact with anyone outside the Family.
I thought that my mother would need my number and where I had gone, but they said there was plenty of time for that later.

Then, as we sat and had a sandwich, the guy began to tell me how much he liked Mel Lyman and how he was sure I would connect with him too. Mel was real interested in getting his two boys into basketball. Did I know how to play basketball? I told him I knew a little. The guy said he had tried to help teach them, but they really needed a coach who knew the game.

'This is why you wanted me to enlist?' I wanted to ask but didn't.

I did tell him I wasn't any good at sports, and I wasn't really interested in doing sports and all of this was beginning to seem really stupid.

The folks were getting worked up again. Why was I jerking their chain? I excused myself, picked up my bag and left. I went back to my room and lay on the bed all weekend and got up and went back to my job Monday morning. The books were the real stupid part.

http://www.trussel.com/f_mel.htm

This is the link, if you are really interested in seeing how nutzo old Mel Lyman and his Family were. To think, I could have taught basketball to his kids. I bought one of his books afterward, "The Mirror At The End Of The Road" because I thought I might want to fictionalize the experience.

Maybe its not too late.

Thursday, April 29, 2010

Loneliness


I had forgotten. My life is seldom lonely, hasn't been for 20 years. But there was a time, right after I got to New Orleans, that was the bottom for me. I had been a couple of years in college, out on my own at 17, been to Utah and back, married and divorced and was there by choice. Had a job in a print shop, an apartment on Rampart Street. And every night I went over to the bars on Bourbon Street, to Fritzel's in particular. It had just opened then, in 1973, I knew the owner and a couple of the regulars, although I barely spoke to them. I was just getting to know the guys at the print shop where I worked.
There were a couple of bookstore owners over on Royal Street that recognized me when I came in. But I had no friends. I had books to read and food to eat and money for beer. 
One night I started to talking to a guy at the bar. He seemed ok. He wanted to know what I wanted out of life. I told him, I just wanted to walk down the street and know everyone and be able to say hello and ask after their relatives. I wanted to be famous, but didn't really believe in my heart of hearts that would ever happen. I wanted to be a writer. (But I was put-zing at it at that point. I had folders of lots of bad poetry, a couple of short stories I had written and a "Novel" that I wrote a little on here and there.) The guy at the bar told me he was a part of a family down from Boston to try their hand at making some money here. They were living the life I had just described. The group was supportive of each other and respectful of each other and no one was ever lonely. Would I like to come over and talk and get to know them? I said sure. 
It was 1973. There were communes we had heard about, seen in Easy Rider, knew from experience among friends of friends. I thought it could very very cool. I had always wanted to belong, but had never felt I could because of who I was and still am. Maybe this would be different. Maybe I could be accepted in a way I never believed possible.
So I went over one evening. I can't remember if they fed me or not. They probably did. there were about ten people living together in the house. None of them seemed to be partners though. The guy gave me some newspapers that their group had published in Boston. I read the tracts of the guru, a guy by the name of Mel Lyman. He thought he was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ and Abraham Lincoln and Gandhi etc. So I tried to discuss the whole philosophy with my host and after a little while he took me to a girl so I could talk to her. I was giving him a headache. I thought that the whole guru thing was just a metaphor and that they believed in the principles but not the real guru thing, but all these people really believed old Mel was Jesus Christ. Then they stopped talking and started getting mad at me. I was pretty weird myself, arguing with them about what they believed- I think now that I was testing them- making sure that they would reject me for my craziness, because I was sure they would reject me anyway. 
I always meant to write about this, so I could really figure it out, but I never did until now.
So now I and three of the people are in this very heated argument about god and reality and who knows what else and then a couple of guys come in and start to physically push me out the front door. And they are having a hard time of it, cause I'm 6'8" after all. Halfway to the door, I collapse and tell them all I'm sorry and I didn't mean for all of this to happen. And then they convince me, that I'm very confused and I need to go get my bare belongings and come back tomorrow and they will put me on a bus to Boston. I need to give up everything and they will take care of me. I said ok. 

Part two- tomorrow




Wednesday, April 28, 2010

I forgot

He looked like this in France as a young painter

People Worth Knowing #1


A CHRONICLE OF FRIENDSHIPS 1873-1900.
LOW, Will H.

These are a couple of books that are easy and fun to read and you get to meet Robert Louis Stevenson and the Gilders and John Singer Sargent and everyone along the way that was anyone then.



A Painter's Progress: Being a Partial Survey Along the Pathway of Art in America and Europe (1910) Will H. Low



A good guy. And an interesting painter at times- if you like half naked ladies in gowns in the woods. I'm kinda of partial. He even did designs for our currency:

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Alan Sillitoe Gone

He will always be this age, this age was I think when I was five. 

I will always be this age.

A wonderful writer. One of the last of the unwashed.

Any resemblance to anyone living or dead is purely coincidental

Los Angeles Times
Theater's Front-Row Seat to Digital Future
The Pacific Hollywood, built to debut the breakthrough technology of its day -- talkies -- now has a new role: showcase and lab for the high-tech replacement of film at cinemas.
April 25, 2004|Alex Pham, Times Staff Writer
It is said that the ghost of Sam Warner haunts the musty spaces of the Pacific Hollywood theater, snatching cellphones and pagers and Palm Pilots when their owners look away.
The forlorn movie palace, locked behind metal security gates in the heart of Hollywood, was Warner's dream, the first theater built expressly for talking pictures. The second-youngest of the four Warner brothers died at 42, never to see what the Los Angeles Times called the theater's "dazzling" opening in 1928 -- or its long, slow slide into dereliction in the decades that followed.
Charles S. Swartz takes comfort in believing that Sam Warner's spirit, at least, may be watching over the theater's rebirth as a sophisticated test center for the next generation of movie technology.
"The idea that we are now on the cutting edge of giving movies their next life into the 21st century would absolutely thrill him," said Swartz, executive director of USC's Entertainment Technology Center, a research group backed by the major studios as they gird for the advent of digital cinema.
If cinema's tomorrow is taking shape in a relic of its past, it's happening without a lot of glitz. Unlike the other movie palaces along Hollywood Boulevard that have undergone costly face-lifts -- notably the El Capitan -- the theater is to most eyes not ready for its close-up.
Its now-dowdy Spanish Renaissance auditorium looks just as it did when the theater shut in 1994, with faux stars flickering in the ceiling, faded red velvet seat covers worn thin with age and garnet curtains framing the screen. It smells vaguely dusty and damp.
On the roof, though, is the future: a battery of satellite dishes. And along the back wall of the Hollywood's projection booth, a bank of 12 powerful computer servers blink furiously. Peering out at the five-story screen are three projectors: A high-end model by Kinoton able to handle 35-millimeter and 70-millimeter film and two high-resolution digital projectors, all cooled with a dedicated air conditioning system.
The $1 million worth of equipment represents a fraction of the $1 billion the seven major studios believe they can save annually by embracing a future without film, when movies shown in theaters will be the result of streams of 0s and 1s flowing either from a high-speed Internet connection or from optical discs.
That's years away. Many aspects of Hollywood production have already been digitized, from editing to special effects. Capturing and exhibiting the work remain almost exclusively film, though more and more productions are replacing film with digital cameras because it's easier and cheaper.
Converting theaters to digital remains the latest frontier for movies. By doing so, studios could save hundreds of millions of dollars currently spent on printing and distributing film. Plus, picture quality would remain perfect, unlike film, which degrades over successive trips through a projector.
Still years away, that transition is projected to be as significant for the movie industry as "The Jazz Singer" and the introduction of talkies was in 1927.
It was for "The Jazz Singer" that Sam Warner persuaded his brothers to spend their last $1.25 million to build the Warner Hollywood Theater. Sam was fascinated by technology and worked personally with Bell Laboratories to develop the sound technology for movies, technology for which Warner Bros. Pictures held exclusive rights.
The Warner Hollywood Theater was intended to showcase it, and Warner personally oversaw construction. But it became clear in 1927 that the movie palace wouldn't be ready for the premiere of "The Jazz Singer," which instead opened that October in New York.
The night before the premiere, Warner died of a brain hemorrhage. Six months later, when "Jazz Singer" star Al Jolson spoke at the opening of the theater, a plaque remembering Warner was unveiled in the lobby. Over the years, Marlene Dietrich and other Hollywood A-listers strolled past that plaque on their way to countless premieres.
Some of those films are now being premiered anew on the cinema's digital projectors.
"At Christmas last year, we screened 'The Adventures of Robin Hood,' " Swartz recalled. "In 1938, 65 years ago, that movie had its premiere in that theater, shot in Technicolor. Now we're showing the same movie digitally restored and digitally projected."
These days, the theater's patrons are more geek than glam. Instead of bearing diamonds the size of marbles, they bring tiny computer chips that drive $100,000 digital projectors.
Under the faux sky painted on the ceiling of the cavernous auditorium, Paul K. Miller, technical go-to guy for the USC center's digital cinema lab at the theater, held up one such chip recently. Packed on a 2-inch-square piece of silicon were 1.3 million mirrors that pivot on command to reflect light. The mirrors are so minute, and the spaces between them even tinier, that together they appear to be a single, smooth surface.
A single projector has three such chips, each reflecting either red, green or blue light, the three primary colors from which a rainbow of hues is possible. In the fast-moving digital age, though, the chip in Miller's hand has already been eclipsed by a chip that packs 2 million individual mirrors in the same 2 square inches.
One crisp Tuesday evening, the chips were the stars that 100 or so producers, cinematographers, motion picture engineers and directors came to gawk at. The occasion was the screening of test footage created specifically to push both film and digital technology to the limit.
Many in the audience still saw film as the gold standard for high-quality viewing. It has a familiar look and has been around long enough that people are comfortable using it. Still, digital technology is catching up fast enough to begin weighing the cost and benefits of both.
"Film is very good, but it's also expensive," said Swartz of the USC Entertainment Technology Center, which runs the lab. "They're easily scratched, they wear down over time, and they degrade when you make copies."
With digital technology, studios can make exact copies without compromising quality. And, unlike film, each showing doesn't degrade the quality of the movie, Swartz said. "The big question is how we can embrace this new technology and at the same time preserve the heritage of the past?"
On that Tuesday night, the screen was split into two, with film shown on the left and digital on the right. The images were identical, allowing viewers to compare the highest-quality film possible against the digital version.
At times, the digital version seemed sharper. Other times the film version appeared better. One viewer turned to his neighbor mid-screening and whispered, "Which one's digital?"
To the untrained eye, the shots would have been unremarkable -- a tree swaying gently in the wind against a clear blue sky, confetti blowing out of a window, rain pelting cobblestone at night, a bride's face. There was no sound, no dialogue and no plot.
And yet the audience was riveted. The pictures were "crisp" and "snappy," some remarked later during a question and answer session. The colors were "saturated" and "lively," they said.
The event was sponsored by the Digital Cinema Initiative, or DCI, a consortium of seven movie studios: Walt Disney Co., 20th Century Fox, MGM, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal Pictures and Warner Bros.
The studios formed DCI in 2002 to develop a common standard for distributing movies in digital form. Although the consortium is scheduled to release its minimum requirements this fall, it will be years before digital projection hits theaters. Converting from film to digital projection would cost U.S. theater owners billions of dollars, depending on the technology used.
Among the companies whose technologies are being tested for the DCI project are Microsoft Corp., Texas Instruments Inc., Boeing Co., and Sony Corp. With so much money at stake, involving some of the heaviest hitters in film and technology, the DCI project is being closely followed.
Roy Wagner, cinematographer for the television show "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation," is among those keenly interested in the digital distribution of entertainment. "CSI" is among the network television shows shot and broadcast in high-definition digital video.
Sitting in the theater, Wagner said he was feeling a wave of nostalgia: He had been a projectionist there decades ago. Wagner, 57, remembers the first day he worked at the theater in 1970. He came in two hours early to explore the nooks and crannies.
"I found that the ceiling had these beautiful clouds that looked like they were built to move and stars with little lights in them that could twinkle," Wagner said. "It was a magnificent theater, and it really conveys what old Hollywood must have been like. You think of all the films and all the laughter, happiness and the tears shed by people in that theater. It's a pretty organic environment."
He nearly missed his first shift because he was so enchanted "that I nearly forgot why I was there."
Carol Burnett worked at the theater in the summer of 1951 as an 18-year-old usherette, dressed in an ill-fitting black satin outfit and a fez. She was fired from the 65-cent-an-hour job when she tried to persuade a couple against being seated during the last 10 minutes of "Strangers on a Train."
"It had this terrific surprise ending, and seeing it would just ruin the movie for them," Burnett said. "But the manager came along, and he fired me on the spot. So years later, when they asked me where I wanted my star on Hollywood Boulevard, I said, 'Right in front of the Warner theater!' " And that's where it went.
Shortly after Burnett's tenure, a curved Cinerama screen was installed. In the 1970s, new owner Pacific Theatres Corp. blocked off and divided the balcony to make the theater a triplex and replaced the Warner name with its own on the marquee. The theater was shut to the public after the Northridge earthquake and subway tunneling were blamed for making parts of the building unstable.
In 1999, USC leased the movie house from Pacific Theatres for an undisclosed amount. Pacific, which shut the theater in 1994 after the earthquake left the upper balcony unstable, had been using it for storing old seats, projectors and sundry equipment.
USC spent three days cleaning out the dust but did little else to change its aesthetics. Instead, the school focused its resources on creating a state-of-the-art projection room with the wiring necessary to accommodate the flow of computers and equipment that are brought in for testing, removed and replaced.
Although restoring the theater to its original glory would be too costly for USC, the school does plan to continue its high-tech work as long as there's a demand for such services from the movie industry. Given the controversial nature of digital cinema, that's likely to amount to years of work for the school.
"Technology has always been a part of cinema," Swartz said. "And it always will be."
It's a dictum Sam Warner certainly believed as he worked to develop and install the sound system in his theater, a system he never got to see work because of his death. As the decades rolled by, the tale of Warner's unsettled ghost haunting the theater circulated.
Miller -- a no-nonsense, stout man of 59 who speaks in short, direct sentences, acknowledges that strange things have happened there.
"You're standing there alone, and you know no one else is in the building, but you hear your name called," Miller said. "You put a tool down, and it winds up missing. You lose stuff. Lights flash on and off. Doors open and close.
"It hasn't happened in a while, but when we've had screenings for the public, we'd lose gadgets," Miller said. "We think he likes technology."

POC

Origin of the phrase

The Oxford English Dictionary has an example of the use of the phrase as early as January 22, 1967 by the Los Angeles Times.
One of the early uses of the term "proof of concept" was by Bruce Carsten in the context of a "proof of concept prototype". His usage was defined in the November 1989 Power Conversion and Intelligent Motion magazine, in a column "Carsten's Corner", (p. 38) subtitled "Let's Define a Few Terms":
Proof-of-Concept Prototype is a term that (I believe) I coined in 1984. It was used to designate a circuit constructed along lines similar to an engineering prototype, but one in which the intent was only to demonstrate the feasibility of a new circuit and/or a fabrication technique, and was not intended to be an early version of a production design.
Also defined and distinguished in the column were the terms 'breadboard', 'prototype', 'engineering prototype', and 'brassboard'.

 In a universe far far away, before any of us were alive, our guy who bought things was asked to come on loan (as it were) to a nearby kingdom up on the hill to help them buy something very big and expensive and important (to them) and so, with the blessing of his king, he set off on his donkey to the kingdom on the hill. The high wizard he was supposed to meet had sent him a letter explaining all and it told him he was to be engaged in a POC buying thing. Our guy who bought things felt that perhaps he was backward and not up to the challenge because he didn't know what a POC was, so on his way (donkeys are rather slow) he Goggled POC and discovered it was just an industry catch phrase and he knew he was ready.
The grand wizard had rented a wonderful old theater for the POC (mostly because it was cheap, because it had earthquake damage and so they couldn't show movies there anyway) and it would duly impress all the folks that would appear for the POC. (Even in universes far far away, they had movies- see Lucas) So they had the wonderful old screen set up so it would show one half of the movie in the old way and one half in the new way. So they could demonstrate Proof of Concept when they had Proof of Concept, but they didn't have it yet. Our guy who bought things invited all sorts of wizards and captains of industry and brilliant optical guys and computer geniuses, and not so surprisingly, they all wanted to come. It turned that all of them had big dollar signs in their eyes. 
It seems that once the guy who bought things, bought the Proof of Concept, then the king in this kingdom and the king in the guy who bought things' kingdom and all the other kingdoms all over the universe would want to buy a Proof of Concept as well. 
So our guy set up a long table at the front of the theater with microphones and lots of chairs and he played master of ceremonies to a group out in the theater seats of maybe a hundred people all with dollars signs in their eyes. All the wizards and experts of the kingdom sat with our guy, so he didn't have to be an expert at all. It reminded our guy of a Senate hearing. Lots of questions and answers and everyone knew everyone except for a few people no one liked so they all pretended they didn't know them.
And then all the people with dollars signs in their eyes submitted what it would cost for each of them to sell a Proof of Concept and all of them were 2 million and up. So there was a second Senate hearing where the guy who bought things told all the people with dollar signs in their eyes that the king didn't have that kind of money and they could all try again, but it had to be under $1 million. 
So one man from Taiwan resubmitted his proposal to build the Proof of Concept. All the other people shuffled out and grumbled a lot and were never seen again. Our guy who buys things, thought he saw a group of them pushing shopping carts in another kingdom far away by the ocean, grumbling and shuffling their feet and they sung "Off to work we go..." 
So the nice man from Taiwan, who knew all along how to build a Proof of Concept for cheap (He had already made untold riches by selling lots and lots of Proof of Concepts to India, where they had been Proofs of Concepts for years. He had a very nice picture of a tent theater in some remote part of India where the kids were lined up to see his wonderful Proof of Concept.
So our guy who bought things came home on his donkey and discovered a little while later that all of them were famous (except for him) for their wonderful Proof of Concept and all the kingdoms around the universe agreed to only buy the Proof of Concept from the nice man from Taiwan. And everyone lived happily ever after. And someday when someone makes a really fancy movie made out of 0s and 1s, the whole universe can watch it on their 0s and 1s movie screen.

Sunday, April 25, 2010

Saturday At The LA Times Festival Of Books

So I was up there peddling my wares a good part of the day yesterday. I bought space at the last minute with Authors Den, a web service and fair service for self-published authors. $200.00 for an hour, which seems a bit steep but what are you going to do. The set up of the booth wasn't great, and again I was stuck in a back corner and so if I really sat at my little table they gave me, I would have talked to about five people. The booth was set up for people to walk into, but most didn't and there were people in front blocking the strollers access. I really started around 10:00 and wandered up and down the sidewalk giving away my relabeled water bottles. I had made about 150 of them.
It looked like this. By 1:00 all the bottles were gone, as well about 50 bookmarks. I print the "Round The Block Books" Logo on heavy stock paper. Women like the image.
My hour at the table was spent out glad-handing and passing out water. Talked to two or three people about the book.
The sidewalk Nazi appeared early and told me I couldn't pass out promo stuff out on the sidewalk, that I had to be at my booth. God forbid, there's someone there selling stuff that the Fair didn't get a part of. The sidewalk Nazi didn't stop the food vendors from running around all over the fair grounds selling lemonade. The family running the booth were nice people and were out front trying to promote us, so that was a big plus over the arrogant management of G.L.A.W.S. (Though, when I did go by their booth, it seemed a better set-up and there were no recruiters out front like last year, but maybe they were all at lunch. XLibris and  iUniverse were there, giving away their books. You had to pay them for your time and then give away your books. It still doesn't seem like a good deal. I'm going to try to do non-profit next year for sure.
Anyway, I went for the advertising aspect of it. $200.00 wouldn't get to this many people in any kind of print media. 

Friday, April 23, 2010

Lies I've Told And Written Down

One of Vunderkin (the one that's still home) was awake at 11:00 pm late night with no idea what to write for a three page paper that was due the next morning. I gave her all sorts of wonderful ideas, and it clicked finally that she would write about student protests in France versus student protests in America (which doesn't exist any more). The year she was there, the students would march out at a drop of a hat, or at the absence of a hat. The year I was boy journalist at high school paper we had a full blown anti-war demonstration and teach-in (1969) and I wrote a huge long article for the paper, interviewed the protesters, the kids hiding in a building nearby that were going to go beat the protesters up if they tried to take down the flag, the principal, and myself I think. Anyhow, I strolled down memory lane in the morning with the Vunderkin as she drove us to school about the bogus papers I wrote. I once wrote a paper in fifteen minutes before class started which was a ripoff from the Twilight Zone show I had watched the night before.
I don't really remember the particular episode, but as usual the teacher thought I was amazing and read it to the class. I was embarrassed. And was particularly embarrassed when one of the kids called me on it after class and said he had seen the same show last night.
I rewrote the intro to this once, in my own words, for my paper in English and was given a A and was told how brilliant I was. But I knew. I told the Vunderkin, my problem in High School was that I would read the critical studies of things we were supposed to be thinking about and realize that my diddley paper really wasn't going to say anything compared to what I was reading elsewhere.
The very first short story I ever wrote, around sixteen or seventeen, which everyone thought was a brilliant thing, was nothing more than an edited retelling of events of an afternoon and evening leading up to a party where I drank alcohol and acted stupid and it was sort of tied together with a metaphor stolen from Sherwood Anderson.
Fiction is really lying, children, about what you really did. I recently just finished a 70,000 word novel set in 1873 in Samoa, which was really about me in 1980 something in west LA when I was single, well, and a lot of other personal stuff thrown in to make it better.

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

I Can't Catch Fish, But I Can Take You There

Rob & Jake
Out of the southeast corner of Yosemite, last August. Finding my way somehow
Dan & friend
Vunderkin who never got his Fishing Merit Badge
Dinner of lots of fish, we also serve vegetarians.


Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Fishing Stories I Ain't Got

I really wasn't ever much of a fisherman. I went with a couple out of New Orleans and the wife fished with an old kids bow from a bow and arrow set and she caught all the fish that day. My wife and I went when I took her to visit my mother for the first time, didn't really get bites, went out with my brother-in-law in a little boat and drifted around while he tried to get the motor started again. Managed to catch my daughter's lip the first time we tried when she and her brother were about five. Went with boy scouts over and over, and didn't really try and drew pictures while the boys fished. My son needed one more kind of fish caught to get his Fishing Merit Badge and we spent every Sunday morning at a little nearby stocked pond to get him a catfish, but we never did. And he never got that Merit Badge. He still fishes every summer when we go backpacking and usually catches something. We had a regular fish fry last year with all the catch (none of which was mine).

What I do recall is the swimming where you weren't supposed to in Indiana, in the reservoir that was halfway to town, and the limestone quarries that were filled with ice water. The thunderstorms in the Midwest that would drown you. Riding rubber inner tubes down storm drains and creeks that were gorged with gushing water. Swinging out on ropes from trees to sail down into lakes. The Kern River, later out here in California, in rafting and in just laying out in it and letting it take you down around the bend. There was a lake in southern Indiana (that I once tried to walk around) that you could wade out and the fish would come and nibble at you.  Maybe I should have tried fishing there.

This is a song that a group here called Marley's Ghost covers really well. I had, of course, heard it before somewhere, but hadn't really listened to it until they performed it here in LA one night. And I thought it was a Bob Dylan song and was having a wonderful time imagining Bobby having a real childhood back in Minnesota  until I realized it was a Van Morrison song about the best of childhoods in Ireland.

Monday, April 19, 2010

The King's New Coach

In a land far far away in another galaxy our guy who bought things used to buy the royal coaches for the king and his court. The king called one day (actually the king didn't call himself, he had an eighty year blue haired lady call because everyone knows kings are too busy to talk to anyone directly.) and wanted a new coach. The old coach had too many miles and when it was parked in the official parking lot, it no longer looked as shiny and new as the Vice Chancellors' or even as good as the Captain of the Guards' SUV. There were special requirements that made it something only our guy who bought things could probably find. The king had a chauffeur that was a giant. Why did the king have a giant for a chauffeur, you might ask? Well, because he liked the guy and because he could no longer drive himself. So our guy who bought things looked all over the world and found some very expensive large coaches that had GPS and Bluetooth and a ten foot high steering wheel and they all turned out to be too fancy. So then one evening our guy who bought things went to the grocery store and since the grocery store was next to the airport, he spotted all these limo drivers drinking cappuccinos in the grocery store parking lot waiting to go pick up important people at the airport, so he bought the king an airport limo with a conservative black shiny paint job with a top of faux leather and a ten foot high steering wheel and had all the gadgets added. And he was very proud of himself.
Well, he wasn't quite done, because it turned out that every summer, the king went to his summer house and because the king was old and not always feeling well, he had a trailer full of equipment that they had to take with him to keep him alive during the summer. Our guy who bought things didn't want to know what kind of medical equipment was in the trailer, because he didn't think anyone was supposed to know, but also he was afraid if he found out they would want him to buy the king new and shiny medical equipment as well. But what they did need was a trailer hitch added to the royal coach to pull the trailer. So the eighty year blue haired lady requested that our guy come in person and our guy was presented with a shiny cast iron removable trailer hitch and ball wrapped gently in fine tissue paper. It turned out that the king had personally designed this trailer hitch and however the entire hitch apparatus was finally configured it had to accommodate the king's own trailer hitch. So our guy who buys things drove all over until he found a blacksmith that could create an entire new trailer hitch apparatus that would match the king's own trailer hitch. The giant chauffeur did have to drive the coach over himself to have it put on, which meant that the king had to stay home that day, but what are you going to do? When our guy went to return the king's own trailer hitch, they sent the coach for him and he got to ride to the palace with the king's own trailer hitch in his lap and everyone he passed was duly impressed. We will omit the coach's name here out of respect for his privacy and besides, he worked very hard to get our guy and the king's very own trailer hitch back to the king.

Sunday, April 18, 2010

Busy Weekend

This was a photo from the Bluegrass Meetup about a month ago. I'm the blonde ponytail to the left of the bass. This weekend with no photos was a lot of stuff. Our little jug band had a rehearsal Friday night at the house. (We're doing an open mike night at Boulevard Music in May) Then this group Saturday morning at their Long Beach Park and then MoorPark and friends at the Ventura Art Walk and home. And Sunday yoga and then my GLAWS writers group from 1 to 5 in Santa Monica. Great Great music. We narrowed music down for the jug band performance and then the Saturday morning group as always very supportive and friendly and I found myself playing along with a song that they moved up a key, and I could figure it out and sort of play along. I may start a commune with these folks, but I'm sure they all have real lives. The music is just for the sheer hell of it, and that makes it even more fun because there is no real point other than just playing music and learning how to do it. I'm blessed in being able to play with people better than me.
The GLAWS (Greater Los Angeles Writers Society) group has a lot of interesting intelligent writers doing good stuff. Got some good ideas on my current project- a play about a 14 year-old-girl in slum apartment in LA. There is a lady writing a fictional biography of Basho (Japanese Haiku Master), one writing a saga about the poor mixed race folks of Ghana, a guy starting a sea tale of pirates around the turn of the 18th century, and several other projects underway. It makes me feel young again and that anything is possible.
Anyhow, I want to start some other story lines in here- the blog. Have to give it some thought,

Friday, April 16, 2010

Cause The Ole' Man Sung It (Comparative Music 101)

This is another one I play by heart.




Different version below- turns out its only been around since 1920s or so - was written as a children's song by Harry Dixon Loes
 He looks like a Baptist, (which he was)

Thursday, April 15, 2010

New Soundtrack For My Life

A little while back, I got on the subject of a compilation cassette that I had made in high school that was in fact a collection of ramblin' man songs that became a sort of song track for my life between 17 and 25. Well, I got a new songbook now that I'm growing for my little boy banjo playing. This one below I can play by heart with my eyes closed or open and even standing up. These are the Carter sisters if you don't know them. They raised Johnny single-handedly.


Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Fanny & Marie- Well it turns out

Fanny Stevenson (she was Fanny Osbourne in 1876)
 Fanny and her daughter Isobel were in the same classes at Académie Julian
at the same time. Fanny would later marry Robert Louis Srevenson and give up her art aspirations to keep him alive and later to build a plantation for him in Samoa. Isobel had a romance with an Irish painter Frank O'Meara and would later marry another painter Joe Strong (I just wrote a book about him)

This is Marie's painting of the art studio classes, but it's dated much later (1881) than the time her diaries say she was in the classes. The brunette and the blonde in the center could be construed to be Fanny and her daughter, but that's just fantasy on my part.
Marie's major competition in the classes for prizes was
Louise Catherine Breslau
 
who was there much longer and had several years more study time. 
Marie at the time. 
Fanny's youngest boy died in 1876, the year they were both there. Fanny would meet Louis that summer.

Free Water

Picture compliments of http://www.antigravityresearch.com/index.htm

So come look me up Saturday & Sunday, April 24th & 25th over at UCLA. I'm signing the book for an hour at 11:00 am Booth 127A
and will be wandering around giving away free water.

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Marie Bashkirtseff

I'm about halfway through the Diaries, she's 17-18 and seriously enrolled in an art studio doing classes. They think she's gifted and she's already got TB

 
She don't understand love, but likes the attention of men that profess their love for her. (I keep reminding myself to check out where Fanny Stevenson and her daughter were taking classes, but I keep forgetting to follow up. Marie doesn't give names of her classmates, its usually the Swedish girl, or the Italian girl.) She's a doll, huh?


Typical Marie mode, mood. Also found the photo below. Her Crypt, made to look like her studio looked.

Monday, April 12, 2010

Grandma's Porch

My grandmother had a porch that was a spaceship, the Bat cave, the ship on the high seas and the world that Kevin Hutchinson and I saved by becoming all the superheroes that we created ourselves. (I had one that had an invulnerable left leg, so he had to become an acrobat so that he could repel bullets.) It had a porch swing which was perfect for reading books. I remember reading Under Milkwood there. ( Dylan Thomas)  My other grandmother had a high one that you could see down the block, but the cousins and me would be playing hide and go seek under it instead of sitting up on it. The adults all sat out there though, before and after dinner.

No one much sits out on their front porches in Westchester California. Ours isn't big enough to accommodate a chair. This song (below) is about Texas porches, so its got the Texas set of memories and smells. Same spirit of thought, though. I had midwest porches (and one in New Orleans I wouldn't mind having back). I kept waiting for Judy to show:



Sunday, April 11, 2010

Honeysuckle

Did everyone in their childhood suck the nectar out of these? My grandmother was angry and teary eyed the summer we ate all of her flowers.
How do we find these things on our own? Why didn't we try to eat poisonous things? How did we know that rhubarb stolen from a neighbor's garden was good to suck on raw, or the pears from a neighbor's tree were excellent. Forbidden fruit? Were we taught these things before we were old enough to remember? 

To Earthward

by Robert Frost

Love at the lips was touch As sweet as I could bear;
And once that seemed too much;
I lived on air
That crossed me from sweet things,
The flow of- was it musk
From hidden grapevine springs
Down hill at dusk?
I had the swirl and ache
From sprays of honeysuckle
That when they're gathered shake
Dew on the knuckle.
I craved strong sweets, but those
Seemed strong when I was young;
The petal of the rose
It was that stung.
Now no joy but lacks salt
That is not dashed with pain
And weariness and fault;
I crave the stain
Of tears, the aftermark
Of almost too much love,
The sweet of bitter bark
And burning clove.
 When stiff and sore and scarred
I take away my hand
From leaning on it hard In grass and sand,
The hurt is not enough:
I long for weight and strength
To feel the earth as rough
To all my length.

Saturday, April 10, 2010

The Real Place

a performance by the Xylopholks at Fringe, Berkshire at Bard College at Simon's Rock.




She's going in August/

Friday, April 9, 2010

More History for Stockbridge

In case you've forgotten:


Grover Cleveland was a bachelor when he assumed the presidency in 1885. One year later he made history by becoming the first president to marry in the White House. On June 2, 1886 he took Frances Clara Folsom as his bride.
Mr. and Mrs. Grover Cleveland
The ceremony was held in the blue room. Frances, 27 years his junior, was the daughter of Cleveland’s law firm partner. Educated at Wells College, She was a popular First Lady.
The Clevelands were a close and affectionate couple whose relationship was also characterized by mutual respect. Cleveland once wrote of his wife,“I have in her something better than the presidency for life.”



Anyhow, Richard (famous poet and editor of Century Magazine, now forgotten) met Frank (as she would be called by her family and friends) when they were both speaking at a graduation ceremony at a womens' college (Wellesley ?- I'm too lazy to look it up- well, that was stupid, its right up above, Wells) and he praised her and invited her to come visit them. She was engaged to Grover then. Frank and her mother went to see Richard and Helena at their summer house and she hit it off with Helena (almost every intelligent woman in the world thought Helena walked on water) and after she moved into the White House, she started a social life for old Grover who had no friends and no social life. Grover was pulled into spending summers with the Gilders in Marion for the fishing. Joe Jefferson (famous actor) also lived there and the three men went fishing while the wives had fun hanging out. Grover and Richard ended up fishing in Tyringham, while Frank and Helena and grown children and the Twain family hung about.
I had hoped that Frank kept a diary, but I couldn't find one. (All of the Gilder's artist friends got to design the new US Currency that was issued in Grover's 2nd term.) (Richard and wife got to sleep overnight in White House without Grover there, so in the morning Richard slipped into the Oval Office and had his coffee pretending to be President and wrote a funny Proclamation that sadly never saw the light of day) There are privileges to being the fishing buddy.

Thursday, April 8, 2010

History Lesson for Stockbridge


Jean Clemens and her father from PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER, December 26, 1909.
There was never a kinder heart than Jean's. From her childhood up she always spent the most of her allowance on charities of one kind and another. After she became secretary and had her income doubled she spent her money upon these things with a free hand. Mine too, I am glad and grateful to say.
She was a loyal friend to all animals, and she loved them all, birds, beasts, and everything - even snakes - an inheritance from me. She knew all the birds: she was high up in that lore. She became a member of various humane societies when she was still a little girl - both here and abroad - and she remained an active member to the last. She founded two or three societies for the protection of animals, here and in Europe.
She was an embarrassing secretary, for she fished my correspondence out of the waste-basket and answered the letters. She thought all letters deserved the courtesy of an answer. Her mother brought her up in that kindly error.
She could write a good letter, and was swift with her pen. She had but an indifferent ear for music, but her tongue took to languages with an easy facility. She never allowed her Italian, French, and German to get rusty through neglect.
- "Death of Jean"
She died in her bath from an epileptic seizure. 

This is what I found (below) in researching the life of Richard and Helena Gilder. In 1904, Twain's wife died, he and his girls did not want to go home so they spent the summer with the Gilders on their farm 20 miles from Stockbridge and near Pittsfield. Rodman would later marry Louis Tiffany's daughter. His middle name was Drake and had an uncle named Joseph. You wonder if this was caused by a seizure. 


Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Great Barrington

Well, we went and saw and came back. This is Stockbridge and Normal Rockwell and James Taylor and Sweet Baby James and Arlo Guthrie and Tanglewood and even my Gilders (see http://www.helenadekaygilder.org/marion/index.htm ) were a ten minute drive away. I was giving a history lesson to a local about Grover Cleveland and Mark Twain spending the summers in their neighborhood - at the Gilders farm.
Spent a day at Bard College at Simon's Rock and two evenings in "The Gypsy Joint" run by a large family that  has relocated from North Carolina, met Connie and lady friend, and got to hear these two. He is the song writer, they play everything. I wanted to invite them to LA. I want to go to college here, but will settle for a child going if it works out.