29 Sep 2010

I recently bought a Bruce Springsteen VHS tape at a yard sale because it has the Tunnel of Love video on it.

I realize that to some I may be committing heresy by admitting this, but Tunnel of Love and One Step Up are the only two songs by Springsteen I like. I just don't get him. There are a few artists that are widely popular whom I don't care for (another is Bob Dylan); this puts me at odds with nearly everyone I talk to.

A New Jersey friend once explained to me that Bruce Springsteen is the quintessential Jersey songwriter, and that I'd like his stuff - even admit that he's the greatest, the "Boss" - were I raised in, say, Asbury Park or Bayonne instead of Burbank. I'm too much of a Los Angelino to appreciate Bruce Springsteen, I guess.

Tunnel of Love is, however, a great song! The lyrics are nicely metaphorical and mature, the chord structure is good pop and that frenzied, chaotic guitar solo fits perfectly.

I recall one night in 1988, walking along some train tracks in a grotty neighborhood in Berlin, New Hampshire with this song buzzing in my head, and the thought shot into my head, this is the Eastern United States. It looks like this, people think differently and they do different things here. This is a big country. Perhaps that's when I more or less gave up being a Westerner.

I don't think of myself as being a Californian anymore, or even an expatriated Californian. But I don't really think of myself as being an Easterner, either (my parents were). I think of myself nowadays as being a Virginian - which is a different thing entirely. Of course, whenever I visit my hometown I easily fall back into being a Burbanker. I think everyone does, in the place he or she was raised.

Getting back to music, while I can't say I have a single favorite song, there are a number of songs that are great favorites of mine, songs that I don't think I'll ever tire of listening to:

Tunnel of Love - Bruce Springsteen
Comfortably Numb - Pink Floyd
I Only Have Eyes for You - the Flamingos
I've Got You Under My Skin - Frank Sinatra (a favorite of my dad's as well)
Quiet Village - Martin Denny
Hey, Bulldog - the Beatles
A Man Needs a Maid - Neil Young
Hurdy Gurdy Man - Donovan
Ashes to Ashes - David Bowie
So Early in the Spring - Judy Collins
Our Day Will Come - Ruby and the Romantics
The Circle Game - Joni Mitchell
Unforgettable - Nat King Cole
MacArthur Park - Richard Harris
How Long Has This Been Going On? - Julie London
Hello Hooray - Alice Cooper
What a Wonderful World - Louis Armstrong
Is That All There Is? - Peggy Lee
Hurt - Johnny Cash
Wedding Bell Blues - Fifth Dimension
Gimme Shelter - Rolling Stones
Monday, Monday - The Mamas and the Papas
Quicklime Girl - Blue Oyster Cult
El Paso - Marty Robbins
Snowfall - Claude Thornhill
My Many Hurried Southern Trips - Porter Wagoner
Message to my Girl - Split Enz
Oh Yeah - Roxy Music
Voodoo Chile (Slight Return) - Jimi Hendrix
God Only Knows - Beach Boys
Let's Stay Together - Al Green
Ringo - Lorne Greene
Bell Boy - the Who
Day of the Eagle - Robin Trower
Shake Some Action - Flamin' Groovies

There are others...

My daughter Julie is coming out for a visit - she arrives later today. Hooray! I'm taking a couple of days off and we're doing malls, museums (she wants to see D.C.'s four Vermeers) and places to eat. Maybe a drive to Richmond. Watch a few artsy movies, too. And very probably yard sales! So there won't be any blog updates tomorrow or Friday.

So... have a great weekend!

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28 Sep 2010

I'm now watching season three of Tour of Duty; a distinct improvement over the disaster that was season two. The writers got back to what made the show good in the first place: the men, the missions, the Nam.

The shark attack book I'm reading is a good read. I'm on page 90 - the preceding pages have been mere set-up for the first attack. The Great White - the "apex predator" - has been hunting around in the deep ocean but his sophisticated battery of sensors have detected the next meal off the coast of Beach Haven, New Jersey. It is 1916, and young men, spurred on by Teddy Roosevelt's endorsement of the strenuous life, are flocking to the ocean to assert their manhood. We shall see who prevails in this match up!

Reminds me of a quirky 1975 song by the Sensational Alex Harvey Band (shown above), "Shark's Teeth." Just reading the lyrics, however, doesn't give you the full sense of the song - you have to hear Alex's decidedly oddball Glaswegian dialect. One of the joys of listening to this very theatrical rock act was hearing the way Harvey pronounced words. For instance, in the lyrics linked above the line "He got - shark's teeth" is sounded "He-got-a-ma, SHARK'S TEEF!!"
Hold on! Could it be I've never blogged about The Sensational Alex Harvey Band? That can't be. They were one of my favorite bands of the Seventies (I discovered them in 1975 and introduced them to my friends), but I see no topical tags for them. Very well, then. You need to see these videos, courtesy of youtube:

"Next" (a song by Jacques Brel) on the Old Grey Whistle Test (1973) - His clown-faced guitarist is Zal Cleminson, an underrated player. As you can see, Alex had a totally unique style...

"Midnight Moses" at a 1974 festival in Iceland - Lots of subtle humor in this one. One gets the impression the audience has no idea of what they're looking at, and the band is amused by this. Either that or they're stoned out of their gourds - which was probably the case. And yes, that is a topless female. One of the many odd things about this video is that you have to look twice to be sure.

"Delilah" on the Old Grey Whistle Test (1975) - The Tom Jones hit, transmogrified. I love the little dance routine the bassist and guitarist do at the 2:25 mark. They were a great live act - I saw them in Fall 1975 at the Roxy on Sunset Strip. One of the best rock concerts I ever attended!

"The Boston Tea Party" (1976) - One of Alex's enduring traits was that he did songs about history; this is one of them. Another good one is the Tomahawk Kid, based on stories by Robert Louis Stevenson. The YO-HO-HO refrain is memorable; we used to scream it out of our cars at the top of our lungs during the Cruise.

I am sorry to say that Alex is long dead. He died of a heart attack in 1982 at age 47; his rock star life of booze and drugs couldn't have helped.

I had an interesting little encounter in my car the other day. I've driving my minivan back from the gas station, rounding the curve towards my neighborhood when I see two kids, one about nine, the other about eleven, standing just off the sidewalk. One is holding a bag, the other has something in his hands - a rock, perhaps, I couldn't tell. Thanks to my long experience as a scout leader I am suspicious. Just as I drive by the youngest flings whatever it is he has in his hand at my car and laughs. I don't hear a bang or a clunk but I stop anyway and get out. I am surprised to see the kids aren't running like hell. (I would have.) When I got out I noticed they were throwing water balloons.

The following monologue took place:

Me (delivered in my loudest, deepest voice): YO. WHERE DO YOU GET OFF THROWING THINGS AT MOVING CARS? WHAT MAKES YOU THINK THIS IS A GOOD IDEA?
Kids: (Stunned expressions.)
Me: NEVER, EVER THROW THINGS AT CARS! HAVEN'T YOUR PARENTS TAUGHT YOU BETTER THAN THAT?
Kids: (Stunned expressions.)
Me: WHERE DO YOU LIVE?
Older kid: (Points.) Down there (in a tiny voice).
Me. GET HOME! AND YOU'RE LUCKY I'M NOT FOLLOWING YOU HOME TO REPORT TO YOUR PARENTS! (They sheepishly trudge home and I drive away.)

Reminds me of a stunt me and some neighborhood kids pulled circa 1965 (I was nine) near the neighborhood park. We emptied a paper carton of milk and filled it full of water, and then suspended it by a string in a branch which hung over a street near the park and waited. We were safely hidden in the bushes near the horseshoes court. When a car arrived we let the milk carton drop on the car, spilling the water. This was fun until we happened to drop it on an aggressive male teenager who chased us all the way down the street yelling at the top of his lungs and scaring a year or two of life from us.

Boys will be boys.

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27 Sep 2010

I wish there were such things as dream recorders. (Perhaps there will be someday.) I had a dream last night that I've had before; or the dream refers to something I did earlier in my life or a place I've been to, but I just can't call it up in enough significant detail to remember what. Perhaps I'm trying to tell myself something - if I am it would be nice if I was a little more clear about it. (Must not be important.) I wonder if there is any value to writing down what these recurring dreams are and fleshing out the details each time I have a recurrence...

After I have a dream that sticks with me I try to analyze it when I awaken in terms of what I was doing or reading that may have inspired it (you are your own best dream analyst), but I'm drawing blanks with this one.

I visited the National Botanic Garden in D.C. on Saturday. I've lived in the D.C. suburbs since 1984 and have never been there. (Not much into plants.) An interesting visit. My daughter Julie is coming out for a visit later this week; perhaps we'll go there.

After 43 years I finally found out why poor Ferro Lad had to die! Go here and scroll to the very bottom of the article.

The Mythbusters people cut down a tree with a Dillon minigun. Very cool!

Over the weekend I finished the Michael Wood "In Search Of..." series with the episode about Eric Bloodaxe, Viking King of Northumbria. The last shot was interesting - Wood stands next to the remnant of an old stone cross that may or may not have been built to commemorate Bloodaxe's fall in battle on the plains of Stainmore. So, curious to see if I could find this exact spot in google maps, I did some research. This is the result. More text about the Rey Cross is here.

I think it's cool one can use online tools to "travel" to a place to find things in this fashion... I sometimes use google maps street view to check out places I have been and would like to visit. Check out this Google sightseeing page.

Finding the legendary place "where three roads meet" in Oedipus Rex where the title character murdered his father is more difficult, however. 1.) It's a place in a myth. While the intersection did and does exist and Sophocles may have known of the spot, nothing really happened there. 2.) There is no assurance that the road today follows the same route as the road 2,500 years or more ago, 3.) The Greek presents a language barrier 4) Confusingly, there's a stone in the little village of Daulia that claims the intersection was there - which makes no sense. I wish the author of the classics page I linked to above had left coordinates...

I finally gave up on that novel I was reading about Marines, the Mohave Desert and Murder: "Twentynine Palms." My wife has the exact term for what was wrong with it - it is overwritten. Does anyone really care that the mother of one of the murder victims once put her cigarette out in an ashtray, sighed and made a (speculative) world-weary comment to a biker friend, years before the murder? One amazon.com reviewer nailed it: this book seemed to be written about everything BUT the murder. So into the trash it went.

I am now reading "Close to Shore - The Terrifying Shark Attacks of 1916" by Michael Capuzzo. I think this describes the actual historical background to Jaws (1975), but as I didn't like that film much I don't really care. (Ah, yes, I see this incident inspired Peter Benchley to write Jaws, which inspired the movie. Huzzah.)

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24 Sep 2010

Friday at last!

My wife has to work on Saturday, so I'm unsure of my plans after yard sales. Visit a battlefield or a museum? Advance the Great Garage Project? Simply putter around the house?

Media ditz Kelly Ripa holds a High Heel a Thon, and guess who wins? High heels or rugby boots with 1" aluminum studs - same thing, just a difference of degree. Kind of makes me think of a prom dress match.

Yesterday I mentioned the inevitability of a Tour of Duty VC sniper perched on a tree branch getting killed (moral: mobility is good), but I forgot to mention my own experience of this. It was at my first reenactment in early Spring, 1983, up Provo Canyon in Utah. Muskets in hand, me and the other four or five Yanks were awaiting the arrival of the squad of four or five Rebs up a road. To be Mister Picturesque and emulate Winslow Homer's Yank in the tree in the Sharpshooter, I shimmied up a tree and perched myself on a branch where I could get a clear shot at the road.

Eventually the Rebs showed up and I fired off a (blank) shot. With stunning clarity I then realized why it was a bad idea to be up a tree just after having fired at shot at five Rebs. "What now?" I thought. Reloading my 1863 Springfield muzzle-loader was very difficult, and there I was in a tree which had not yet had time to leaf out, a big fat target. I then realized why mobility was good and, unless you are behind impregnable walls, being static was bad. (And even if the walls are impregnable, the enemy can simply flank them - which is what the Germans did with the Maginot Line.) The Rebs fired back at me, I pretended that they all missed and climbed down, never again to take up a tragically flawed strategic position in a tree.


For some reason, I don't know why, I found myself fondly remembering the super hero try-outs in the 1960's Adventure comics featuring the Legion of Superheroes. Don't know what I'm talking about? Look here. It formed a subplot for not only the Tick, but also Mystery Men (1999). (I wonder how Bouncing Boy ever made it... pretty lame super power, if you ask me...) Anyway, as literature for kids it made perfect sense and played upon schoolyard social anxieties: If you tried out as a super hero, would you make it? I would audition as the endearingly goofy N-Man, the only original super hero I ever created (the others were knock-offs of real comic book heroes). I used a #2 pencil ground into the paper to represent his "nutronic" beams. Eat graphite, evil doers! Drawing him was a smudgy mess, but that's okay - as an eleven year old I was a smudgy mess, too.

I am now reading "Twentynine Palms - A True Story of Murder, Marines and the Mojave" by Deanna Stillman. It is absolute crap; pure sensationalism - all the literary quality one would find in a Weekly World News article. Everything is over-explained (you learn that the mother of one of the protagonists once owned a "scratchy" George Strait tape), and I was almost ready to pitch it into the trash this morning. The only reason I am sticking with it is to read descriptions of Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Base, California, my first duty station after boot camp. I was stationed there from January to June 1975. My days there are marked by memories of rubella quarantine, a hit and run incident and Alice Cooper's "Welcome to my Nightmare."

Last night I watched an entertaining short film noir, Club Paradise (aka Sensation Hunters - 1945). A Poverty Row quickie, it was cheesy and poorly paced and directed, but with 1940's style to spare. One reviewer called it "pungent," which is as good a description as any. It alternated between hard-boiled tough dame talk (the world-weary blonde has a cigarette between her fingers in every scene) and that "Gee, you're swell!" enthusiasm that Hollywood injected into wartime films to keep every one's spirits up. The plot: a good girl from an unbelievably dysfunctional family takes up with a cad and falls into nightclub dancing, disgrace and murder. The scene where a line of tough women adopt fake smiles and take their places in a can-can line is memorable. All in all, it was fun. You can watch it for free as I did via the Internet archive!

Have a great weekend!

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23 Sep 2010

Last night I watched another Michael Wood "In Search of..." episode, this one about Offa of Mercia. Who was Offa? Well... he was very highly regarded in his time and is considered the greatest English king before Alfred the Great. His most enduring legacy is a 64 mile earthwork line that runs roughly north to south between Wales and England called "Offa's Dyke." He also minted unusually elegant looking coins. From wikipedia: "Coin portraits of Offa have been described as showing a delicacy of execution which is unique in the whole history of the Anglo-Saxon coinage." However, just because you were king didn't necessarily mean yours was the only name on the coins. Here's a coin of Offa, but with the moneyer's name, Ethelnoth, in big letters. Remember, that "b"-looking character - a thorn - is "th."

Check out the groovy names in the Offa family. When I was a fifteen year-old, reading book after book about the Anglo-Saxons, I thought it would be cool to have five sons all named things like Aethelred, Beorhtric, Athelstan, Osric and Edward. My son Ethan can consider himself fortunate...

I finished my Vietnam Reader yesterday - an excellent read. I shall give it to my Nam vet (USN) pard Don. In an e-mail Don cited his war experience as the point in his life when he "rubbed elbows with history." Ha! The last chapter of the book was especially interesting: Gen. David Hackworth's visit to Vietnam in 2001. The younger generation, who didn't experience the war, love Americans. And even the vets are friendly and apparently don't hold grudges. Apparently that whole "win their hearts and minds" strategy worked. [Heavy sarcasm]

I was stunned to learn that General Giap, who led the North Vietnamese forces as a principal commander in battle from 1946 to 1975 is still alive! He is 99. He's not especially well known here for obvious reasons, but I imagine in terms of regard he must be something like the Robert E. Lee of communist Vietnam. (With one distinctive difference - he won his war.)

I am now reading "The Bridge" by Manfred Gregor, a German anti-war novel published in 1958. There were two film versions made; I'd like to see one of them some day. I think it exists on the Internet somewhere... somebody tell me where and I'll watch it!

I finished Tour of Duty season two last night, and, watching the entire season, my original 1989 assessment holds. It is greatly inferior to the first season. But the producers figured that out for themselves and started to repair things for the third and final season. I may watch a film noir or two before I begin season three as I'm kind of getting Nam-ed out. The DVD era leads me to the conclusion that television shows weren't designed to be watched episode after episode - their weaknesses become too apparent.

For instance, in Tour of Duty the following holds true 100% of the time:

1.) A Viet Cong rifleman shooting from the branches of a tree will be shot and fall. (The moral here is, stay mobile.)
2.) The new squad member with the wife and or kid will be killed on a mission. (Yes, there were Star Trek style Red Shirts in Nam.)
3.) When the female journalist drives to Saigon she will get into trouble and have to be rescued by one or more squad members.
4.) When an American throws a grenade there is about a half second lag between the explosion and a VC soldier falling (actor reaction time).
5.) When Sgt. Zeke Anderson hits the deck he does a roll to the right and starts prone firing. (I may use this move at Cedar Creek next month.)
6.) When the platoon leader uses his radio to call in for instructions, he will not like what he hears. (Artillery support isn't available, he isn't allowed to withdraw or something like that.)
7.) The company captain is unlikeable and/or untrustworthy.
8.) The sergeants major and the CIA, intelligence or special forces types are absolute creeps.
9.) Any rank of colonel or above are fatuous flag-wavers or ticket punchers.
10.) A lingering image of a helicopter in flight will invariably be accompanied by a 1960's rock hit.
11.) When the squad steps into a stream or creek, a VC ambush takes place.

I'm sure there are more...

I am also still digitizing cassettes; I am now doing the 1983 recordings, stuff I listened to in my senior year of college. For some reason back then I bought the Haircut 100 Lp. Yeeeesh... talk about a gay band. What was I thinking? They make ABBA look macho.

Speaking of haircuts I got one last night.

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22 Sep 2010

We used to have a big cherry tree in our front lawn; it's gone now. A crew came by yesterday looking for work and made me a deal I couldn't refuse. I had planned to take the tree down bit by bit over the winter, but the prospect of paying a little bit of money and having somebody else do this quickly - equipped with multiple chainsaws and workers and hauling the tree parts away - was too good to pass up.

That cherry tree took many years to grow and was down in less than an hour. I am only a little sorry it's gone. It was only pretty, with pink buds, for about two weeks in spring, then it turned big and ungainly and blocked the view of the house from the curb. Phase Two of this process is to grind down the stump, remove some roots from our big willow elsewhere in the front yard, and regrade the entire yard. Our house was built on a poor fill job, and things have been uneven. It's why we had to have a new driveway poured earlier this year - there was about a five inch gap between the height of the driveway and the garage floor! The grade for the walkway is now about four or five inches about the grade for the front yard - it looks weird.

Last night I watched a fascinating segment of Michael Wood's "In Search of..." show. Rural England is a land with very old features. Last night I saw Wood obtain a thousand year-old land charter, read segments of it in the original Anglo-Saxon, and follow the boundaries with topographical features which still exist and can be very clearly made out: streams, Iron Age burial mounds, 1,000 year old hedgerows, Roman walls and earthen banks... fascinating! He also made this point in his book In Search of the Dark Ages. The lines the Romans used for roads and walls were based on older Celtic features. When the Anglo-Saxons arrived they reused a lot of the land features, and built hedgerows to mark out old land holdings - which became subsequent properties of later owners. The lines and features in the English landscape today were often there 1,000 or even nearly 2,000 years ago. Amazing!

The episode I watched was about Athelstan (c. 895-939). Who was he? No less than the very first proper King of England. One of Alfred the Great's able descendants (a grandson), he subjugated the northern kingdoms of Mercia and Northumbria under his rule and consolidated the two kingdoms with his native Wessex into the Kingdom of England - the first Anglo-Saxon ruler to do so. (Alfred the Great was properly only the King of the Saxons, or of Wessex, not a unified realm.) As would be the pattern with later English kings, Athelstan also subjugated the Scots and Welsh. Athelstan is almost unknown today, but I recall seeing him listed as the first King of England in a list of European rulers I accidentally stumbled upon in an almanac when I was fifteen. My curiosity was aroused, and it was the start of a lifelong interest.

Today's image is a coin minted during his reign. (There are no realistic likenesses of him, just later imaginings.) Can you make out his name? You begin with the "A" in the middle, and then go to the "E" at about the one o'clock position and work clockwise. That funny "b" looking thing is an Anglo-Saxon "th." Then follows an "E" and an "L." Those curlicues are an "S," then a "T" and "A" an "N" and an "I" with a cross as a separator: "Aethelstani." (I suppose the final "I" is a Latinization of some kind.)


I'm almost done with my Vietnam Reader - a fascinating work. What a thorough tragedy that whole effort was! Poor planning, hesitant leadership, squandered valor. There were a few chapters by various members of the press claiming that the loss of Vietnam and public disillusionment wasn't their fault - but I agree with the vets and leaders on this issue and hold them culpable.

In fact, one newsie (a former Associated Press bureau chief in Vietnam) claims as fact that when Walter Cronkite went on his celebrated February 1968 visit to Southeast Asia to determine whether or not the war was a lost cause, he had already made up his mind that it was. When Cronkite broadcast his famous post-Tet editorial - "But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could" - he threw up the white flag in so convincing a manner that it caused President Johnson to say, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America." All war is waste, but every draftee and casualty after that point was in a special category, I think.

I can't grossly simplify and say that Walter Cronkite lost us the Vietnam War - but I wouldn't argue strenuously against it, either.

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21 Sep 2010

My Dilbert desk calendar tells me in 4 point font that today is the U.N. International Day of Peace - which seems appropriately Dilbertian somehow. I see there's a broadcast featuring Jimmy Carter and James Cameron. Will I be tuning in? Frankly, I'd rather listen to fingernails scraped along a chalkboard.

Instead I am advancing peace by learning about war, and why and how wars begin. I firmly believe the man (Plato? Santayana?) who said that "Only the dead have seen an end to war."

I am now reading "Vietnam: A Reader" by the editors of Vietnam Magazine. It's quite good and ties in with my current viewing of second season Tour of Duty episodes. I now know the difference between Tet, Ia Drang, Tan Son Nhat, Vo Nguyen Giap, Dien Bien Phu and Hue. It's odd... while Vietnam was going on when I was a teen I was reading about medieval English wars and the American Civil War. I am finally coming around to the more modern stuff.

Last night I saw an especially bad episode of Tour of Duty... I know the producers kill off the female embedded reporter (this being prime time television she's embedded in more ways than one) - I can't wait. There are times she is extremely annoying.

For instance: One well-received episode deals with the feelings of the black troops upon learning of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. Things are extremely tense around the base. The squads go out on an ill-advised mission (come to think of it, all missions on that show are ill-advised), and are marching along, tense and wary of an ambush by Viet Cong. The reporter is dodging around asking the black soldiers if they resent the white soldiers, getting in the way when the firing begins, etc. Any commander worth his rank would have had her left back at base.

And there are the episodes where she goes out to some red light district in Saigon looking for a story. She gets chased/slapped/apprehended/assaulted/held at gunpoint, etc. A bunch of solders chase after her to the rescue, a gunfight with some VC invariably ensues, etc.

Still, I see that we have moved on in terms of racial issues in America - or at least in how the racial issues are covered on television. The King assassination episode is played pretty broadly (in fact, it's a little eye-rolling) and wouldn't be featured in the same way now on a television show as it was in April, 1989 when it first aired. I have now lived long enough to observe how attitudes about race have changed from 1968 to 1989 to 2010 - and I think, on the whole, it's been an improvement.

Thanks to youtube I am also watching episodes of "In Search of..." - NOT the ones that Leonard Nimoy narrated. These are BBC productions from the late seventies/early eighties written and hosted by intrepid historian Michael Wood (shown above). Wood is one of my favorite television personalities... his knowledge about Anglo-Saxon England is wonderfully imparted. (He is an Anglo-Saxon specialist - some of the high points of his broadcast involve his reading of Beowulf or some ancient chronicle.)

His book "In Search of the Dark Ages" is one of the best on the subject I have ever read. He also did a great job with Bronze Age Greece - I have his In Search of the Trojan War on DVD; I re-watch it every now and then. There are eight "In Search ofs..." dealing with Arthur, Athelstan, Alfred the Great, Ethelred the Unready, Offa, Boadicea, Erik Bloodaxe and William the Conqueror. It's interesting seeing him walk around the sites I've only seen photos of in books. Some day I shall walk the battlefield of Hastings as Wood has done. Some day.

I go in for another session of shoulder physical therapy today; I think today is my fifth session. It is certainly helping. I can now move my shoulder with less or no pain than before. Raising my arm or reaching in back isn't the grimace-inducing thing it used to be. I think the therapist does a range of motion test today to see how I've improved from my baseline...

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20 Sep 2010

My pard Don and I went to the Marine Corps Museum as we planned on Saturday and had a great time. (If you haven't visited it yet and you're in the area, by all means do so. It is fabulous.) He agreed with me that the Army, Navy and Air Force ought to have similar facilities. Maybe the other branches of the armed forces will eventually be shamed into building them...

While near Quantico we stopped to drive through the national cemetery, and, as promised, I took a photo of what I think is a notable tombstone, that of Cpl. Christopher L. Weaver, U.S.M.C., who was killed in action in Iraq in 2005. Note the inscription: "Man Myth Legend." Ha! I found a web site that tells more about him, here. He's described as having a sense of humor - this is obviously the case. I am happy to perpetuate his legend via this blog entry. Rest in peace, Cpl. Weaver.

My son sent me the link to this last week: climbing a 1,768 foot tower. Just watching it makes my palms sweat. I climbed a 200 foot tower, once - that was scary enough. This is far worse...

In an article he wrote some years ago about about cartoon animal mascots used in food product ads, James Lileks coined the phrase "quisling pig," that is, a cartoon pig who induced readers to eat more ham and bacon. A traitor to his species, in other words. The original article is here - #394b Cudahy Curly. I believe, however, that I have found the ultimate quisling pig. Here he is from a French ad. Ah, monsieur. You would like some pork, no? I beg of you, have a bit of moi. I am, how you say, tres succulent. It doesn't get more ghoulish than that.

I'm about halfway though the season two episodes of Tour of Duty, and just as I remembered, the shark did a mighty jump that season. Too many romantic relationships with women, too many trips to Saigon, too many drug bust subplots, too many psychological issues, too little combat in the bush. It's M.A.S.H. in Vietnam. In fact, that's another problem - in an effort to save money they moved the production from Hawaii (which is commendably green, like Vietnam) where they shot the first season episodes to an area outside of Los Angeles, which is often brown (like Los Angeles). They reused the M.A.S.H. location, and it shows. I almost expect to see Hot Lips wander down the company street - whoops! Wrong war! And were there power lines crisscrossing the mountains in Vietnam, I wonder? You can see them clearly in some of the shots of the camp.

Still, there was one good second season episode I didn't see in the broadcast run: a sniper who looks like Elvis Presley goes bonkers, and Sgt. Zeke has to go bring him in. That one was pretty good. Otherwise, eh.

As I mentioned, I'm in the process of digitizing cassettes. Over the weekend I came across a curious song I used to listen to on a 1987 cassette, Kate Bush's "Experiment IV." (She is shown above. Her looks didn't hurt her career any.) The lyrics are odd but certainly novel - she describes being involved in an experiment for the military whereby disturbing sounds are collected and used as a weapon intended to kill - "From the painful cry of mothers/To the terrifying scream/We recorded it and put it into our machine." Lyrics here. Now we have the Internet, and I discovered that a 1986 video exists for this song. Even funnier, it includes a very young Dawn French and Hugh Laurie (Dr. Gregory House)!

Do a google images search on Kate Bush sometime (SafeSearch set to "moderate!"). Photographically, she was sort of a female David Bowie. Lots of odd images out there...

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17 Sep 2010

My son Ethan got a short article up on a Best Buy Blog, here. Annoyingly, the article doesn't have a permalink, so I have to direct you to Ethan's Twitter page, which has a link. My son has the makings of a first class tech geek. (Despite the engineering degree I am only a second class tech geek. I still have a cathode ray tube TV.)

I got curious the other day and wondered how many films noir (and noirish associated films) I have seen and provided short reviews for: 431. I hasten to point out that these really aren't complete reviews. The whole point of this page was to assist me in determining whether or not I've seen a particular film with a forgettable title so I don't rent it twice. (Despite my web page I have still done this, which is intensely annoying.)

Films noir have unmemorable, colloquial titles: "Impact," "Framed," "Convicted," "Tension," "Pitfall," "Cornered," "Pursued," etc. And those are just the forgettable one word titles. How is one to remember the difference between, say, "Dark City," "Night and the City," "Night Moves," "Side Street," "Scarlet Street," "99 River St.," "Pickup on South Street," etc. You see the problem.

There are some noirs with unforgettable and distinctive names, of course - "Kiss the Blood off my Hands," "The Strange Love of Martha Ivers," "Christ in Concrete," "Stakeout on Dope Street," "I Was a Communist for the F.B.I.," "High School Big Shot" - but these are the exceptions rather than the rule.

Then there's the Big series: "The Big Heat," "The Big Sleep," "The Big Knife," "The Big Combo," "The Big Night," "The Big Steal," "The Big Clock." I once read somewhere in noir lit that the idea behind putting the word "Big" in title was to suggest an overwhelming fate to which one could not appeal, which is as much a film noir trope as fedoras or a narrative.

Also suggested by some noir titles is an unwilling victimization on the part of the protagonist: "They Made Me a Fugitive," "They Made Me a Killer," "They Made Me a Criminal," "They Made Me a Noir." (Just kidding about that last one.)

Some noir titles directly suggest violence: "Brute Force," "Point Blank," "Blast of Silence," "Under the Gun," "Hit and Run," "Date with Death," "Act of Violence," "The Sniper." There are many more, but you get the point.

Adn then there are the French noir titles, which are just puzzling and somewhat comedic to Anglophones: "Touchez Pas au Grisbi," "Le Samourai," "Bob le Flambeur," "Le Deuxieme Souffle" (no, not about pancakes), "Rififi." Some research is required. For instance, "Touchez Pas au Grisbi" means "Hands Off the Loot" - ah, that makes sense! "Rififi" is almost untranslatable into English; "rough and tumble" or "pitched battle" might be suggestions. (Or "le rugby," perhaps.)

If you emulate a film noir lifestyle or pick up strange women while on the road
("The Devil Thumbs a Ride') your eventual destination is obvious: "Hell Bound," "Hell is a City," "Private Hell 36," "Hell's Island," "Hell's Half Acre." Oddly enough the most hellish road noir I can think of has a much more subtle and forgettable title: "Detour."

There is also an exclamation point series of titles: "Railroaded!," "Please Murder Me!," "Try and Get Me!," "His Kind of Woman!," "Cause for Alarm!" This is film noir! Pay attention!

A funny story about a film noir title involves Dick Powell, a song and dance man of 1930's musicals. When, in 1944, he decided to recast his on screen persona as tough guy Philip Marlowe, he starred in an adaptation of a Raymond Chandler story called "Farewell, My Lovely." Audiences avoided the film, thinking it was a corny musical. When the studio changed the name to "Murder, My Sweet," box office receipts picked up considerably! Powell never looked back and played the hard-boiled type thereafter. You can see Powell's transition from song and dance man to tough guy in the photos I supply above.

I was assigned another dreamy Dennis Alexander piece in an arpeggiated modern style for piano, "Remember When." My teacher says I tend to do well on these. What happens is that she calls them Las Vegas lounge songs, and I try to perform them convincingly so that they don't sound hackneyed. It's my first challenge in interpretation, which is, of course, another ability good pianists must develop for themselves. I suspect the most famous pianists are skilled musical salesmen.

The funny thing about "Remember When" is that towards the end there's a passage that reminds me strongly of the famous Variation XVIII of Rachmanioff's "Variations on the Theme by Paganini." Being the ADHD type musically I started to pick out this melody... I really need to find some sheet music for this. If there's a more gorgeous 20th C. melody I don't know what it is.

Friday! The weekend! Yard sales! This time my Civil War pard Don is attending me; since my wife has to work on Saturday we later visit the Marine Corps Museum, which he has never seen. Have a great weekend!

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16 Sep 2010

The Nam, man!

My dutiful son sent me all three seasons of the Tour of Duty episodes yesterday, so I'll be watching those for a while instead of the somewhat lackluster films noir I've seen as of late. Last night I finished up season one by watching two episodes - season one was as good as I remember.

Now I start season two, where the producers thought to introduce more women into the stories in order to pick up the female viewing demographic - and screwed up the show. ("Jumped the shark," in modern terminology.) How? The season one strength was that the stories involved an infantry squad in the field, which led to some very realistic and gripping episodes. Season two was more base-based - that's how the producers incorporated the women. Well. I shall watch with an open mind and see if I'm disappointed as I was when these were first broadcast twenty some odd years ago.

Ethan - my son - sells cell phones at a Best Buy while he's attending college. That being the case, he always seems to have the latest and greatest. He sent me some images taken with his Apple iPhone 4, which now incorporates HDR (high dynamic range) software. Pretty amazing. See image here. Stated in brief, HDR produces an image that more closely replicates what the human eye can see in terms of exposure control - details in bright light and shadow. I suppose this has or will be incorporated into the line of Canon and Nikon DSLRs - further making my Nikon D100 an antique.

I am presently reading "Blood & Rage - A Cultural History of Terrorism" by Michael Burleigh. I'm on the chapter about the Fenian Rebellion; excerpt here. The author takes this 1867 event as the first modern terrorist activity. I thought the text about nitroglycerin and dynamite was interesting. What's cool about doing yard sales in Springfield is that it's a bedroom community for the Pentagon - lots of military families live there. That being the case, you often find War College subject books among the junk military families unload when they've been moved. I bought this book along with a nice thick volume about the Battle of the Wilderness from an army guy. "Selling the War College required reading?" I asked, and he smiled and confirmed, yes, this was so.

A note about the Fenian Rebellion: After the big 125th anniversary Civil War events of 1986-1990, some reenactors were casting about for an encore. More! More! After all, they watched all those Ken Burns specials and bought all those uniforms and muskets for the 125th; might as well get some more use out of them. The Professional Irishmen (the guys who stick harps on their forage caps and sack coats) thought, "Hey! Let's reenact the Fenian Rebellion of 1867!" After all, many of the Fenians had served in the Union Army. While reenacting historical terrorism didn't seem to go beyond the pale back then, I bet it does now. Anyway, there may have been a Fenian event or not, I'm not sure. I recall seeing one advertised in the pages of the Camp Chase Gazette, the national journal I used to write for. But Fenian reenacting didn't get off the ground. I guess, like the actual events of 1867, it was poorly organized.

Can you imagine 9/11 reenacting? Don't laugh - there is such a thing as Vietnam reenacting. I shall not comment on the availability of personnel to portray VC in the Northern Virginia region...

Perhaps the all time most tasteless reenactment I have ever been made aware of was the Bombing of Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima by the Confederate Air Force. Who thought this was a good idea? Let's face it, there is some stuff that shouldn't be reenacted. American slavery springs to mind...

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15 Sep 2010

I had my piano lesson last night; my teacher is amazed at how rapidly I can memorize pieces. I told her that what I think I'm doing is looking for patterns, or runs. This is how I learned to play the bass, which, as every bassist knows, is all about learning patterns. (I also relied heavily on this ability when I had to take engineering and calculus classes in college.)

She also made the same comment that my bass teacher once made: I obviously have a lot of musical material in my head from which I can draw. In other words, I know how a Baroque or early Classical piece should sound, so it isn't a big deal to replicate that with the Baroque or Classical piece I'm playing in order to make it sound right.

However, she thinks that my easy memorization is also a problem in that once I get the notes learned by my fingers I am no longer resorting to reading the sheet music; I'm looking at the patterns on the keyboard. That's apparently a hindrance when it comes to being able to read music. What I learned last night is that the end result is not to memorize pieces to play back to my teacher and move on to harder pieces. It's to be able to sit down at a piano with an unknown piece of sheet music and play it off the sheet as easily as I can read a page out of a book. Believe it or not, this hadn't occurred to me!

However, she also said that there are advantages in the way I play piano. When she was a girl, for instance, she was asked at a party if she could play "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star." Her response was, "If I have the music." While my teacher was telling me this I picked out the notes on the piano for the song and started to harmonize them. So... I may be the type of person who could benefit by learning with a fake book, since I play so strongly by ear. My teacher is thinking about perhaps a different way to approach teaching to my abilities.

I now have a goal: Ward organist by age 60. That gives me six years to learn how to play music out of hymn books and to learn how to play an organ. (There are significant differences in playing an organ versus playing a piano.) And if it takes me to age 65, well, no big deal. What's the hurry? Piano is something with which I intend to occupy my retirement years.

(I said that I learned how to play the bass. That's a bit of an over-statement. What I did was play bass with a band for four years, which is not quite the same thing. One problem was that the folks I played with were way too forgiving of my occasional wrong notes, which caused me not to improve my game, so to speak.)

Burbank, California - my hometown - is an interesting place. It's funny... when I lived there all I could think about was medieval England or Civil War era Virginia. Now that I've lived in Virginia for 23 years and visited London twice, I now look back on the historical aspects of the place where I'm from and find a continual source of interest. Just when I figure that my friend Mike and I have exhausted all of the material in the place something else pops up. In this case, a Catholic chapel associated with an honest-to-goodness saint, Mother Cabrini (shown above), the first American citizen to be canonized by the Catholic church.

Mike remembered seeing a tiny white chapel in the hills above Burbank when he was growing up, but knew little about the place save the name - the Cabrini Chapel. As I am nowhere as observant as Mike, I don't recall this place at all. But he managed to find old photos of the chapel, and I supplied the supporting articles from the Los Angeles Times. Result: the Cabrini Chapel page for Burbankia.

Funny thing: In 1979, when I was dating the woman who would become my wife, she lived with her parents in the condominiums known as Cabrini Villas. Perhaps her condo was right where the chapel stood. Who knows? The place used to have a great "view amenity" at night - up on the hillside you could see the twinkling lights of Burbank on the valley floor, very pretty. That's gone now, however. The last time I was there I noticed that the homeowners association let the foliage become overgrown, blocking the view.

There is only one home I would like to own in Burbank: 1361 Paseo Redondo, high in the hillside above Burbank. (A google street view is here.) Three bedrooms, three baths, three car garage, 3,100 square feet. I saw the place being built in 1978 (zillow is wrong - it was not built in 1980); indeed, I toured the construction site freely just after I got out of the Marines. The rather breathless real estate page describes it, "Views, Views, Views!!!"; I concur. There is a balcony at the back which has a breathtaking nighttime view. The zillow.com estimated current value of the home is just over one million dollars, with an estimated monthly payment of $4,221. Well, one can dream. Back in late 2006 it sold for a million and a half; in October 2007 it sold for $620,000 - ouch. Perhaps if this economy keeps getting worse I can afford it someday!

By the way, there is a safe built into a wall in the living room. No, I did not get the combination.

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14 Sep 2010

I digitized a bunch of cassettes and while doing so came up with this powerful Art Statement, likening a new technology to an old technology. See, the idea is that one iPod can hold the music that was on thousands of cassettes. (Well, I guess thousands of cassettes. I haven't figured it out.) (Sigh. Okay, let's figure it out... according to Apple my 80 GB iPod can hold up to 20,000 songs. A 90 minute cassette can hold about 30 three minute songs. So that's 667 cassettes.) See, the idea is that one iPod can hold the music that was on hundreds of cassettes.

Oh, never mind.

I am now reading "The Vacant Chair - The Northern Soldier Leaves Home" by Reid Mitchell, a Civil War book I found at a yard sale. In it I came across this provocative question: "Once war becomes the defining experience for manhood, how can sons grow up in its absence?" Quite. I asked this same question in an article I once wrote about my father taking part in the Great American Patio Culture of the 1960's.

Despite the fact that I am in my fifties, been a good husband for nearly thirty years, have raised three kids, held down a job and own my own home, etc., there is a part of me that feels like a mere grown up adolescent because I did not have the war experience my father had. But, let's face it, as many returned Vietnam veterans can well attest, World War II was a hard act to follow. Even after enduring the worst that war could throw at them in the jungles of Southeast Asia, when returning home they received scant thanks (in fact, much animosity) and little credibility from the World War II vets in the American Legion halls, who taunted "We won our war." I despise hippies, anti-war protesters and that whole New Left movement - this is a major reason why. They treated real heroes shabbily. (I believe the judgemental World War II vets have softened in their attitudes.) So... when a John Kerry or a Bill Clinton wants my vote to become commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the United States, am I going to give it to him? Of course not. They are unsound men.

One of the most poignant moments in all of film is when Private Ryan ("Saving Private Ryan" 1998), at a World War II army cemetery in France, tells his wife, "Tell me I have led a good life; tell me I am a good man." Character counts. Always. And we are all Privates Ryan.

This curious little psychology of mine also relates to film noir. When I see a crime film from the 1940's or 1950's I see a production made by, for and about 100% certified adults. In many cases, starring men who served in World War II. Snap brim fedora-wearing adult men. What do we have in movies nowadays? George Clooney, Nick Cage, Brad Pitt... please. Big difference in credibility. At least Tom Hanks honors the World War II vets.

(Bear in mind it is difficult for me to write anything complimentary about Tom Hanks - he badmouths Mormons. Un-American my... foot. But that's a blog write-up for another day...)

Apropos of nothing, I plan to be buried at Quantico National Cemetery because I served in the Marine Corps - an organization that did for more for me than I ever did for it. As it turned out, I served during a period when I can truthfully claim the title "Vietnam Era veteran" (I enlisted right out of high school, as quickly as I could). The rule is that if you served at least 150 consecutive days of active duty before some date in May, 1975, the title applies. However, as a Vietnam combat veteran once mentioned to me in a letter, "You were either there or you weren't." I wasn't. So therefore I will decline to have "Vietnam" engraved below my name on the stone. "Cold War" might be more appropriate, if that's allowed. But the way I figure it, at Quantico I'll be in very good company.

(At Quantico there's one young Marine Corporal who gave his life in Iraq, I think it was, who had "Man - Myth - Legend" inscribed on his tombstone. I love that. Next time I go there I'll take a photograph and help perpetuate his legend...)

Well. I didn't intend to write such a personal, opinionated and political blog entry. Obviously that book quote pushed a button.

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13 Sep 2010

It's Honeycrisp apple time! We bought our first ones of the season over the weekend. Incredible snap and taste. Puts other apples to shame.

My son longboarding (skateboarding) in Idaho. He's the one with the beard. I like the spinning wheel motif. I think this video was made with his iPhone, but I'm not sure.

I digitized a bunch of cassettes over the weekend, and got in some quality time with my turntable. I forgot how nice it is to put a vinyl platter on the turntable, listen to the music (Aaron Copland Piano concerto/Music for the Theatre) and follow along with the liner notes on the back of the record sleeve. Another thing: This isn't a big investment in time because of the restrictions of the medium. Back then new music came in more easily swallowed 1/2 side of an Lp chunks (about 20 minutes). A CD can be 80 minutes.

I watched a noir over the weekend: "Trapped" (1949), one of Lloyd Bridges early tough guy roles before he donned the scuba mask and became a good guy on television. The middle part dragged a bit, but the last twenty minutes or so were pretty good. Lots of shadowy urban and industrial scenes. Somehow a modern city just doesn't look as gritty as a mid-century city seen in black and white.

I also watched a somewhat tedious noir/romance hybrid called "The Green Glove" (1952) with Glen Ford. James Lileks reviewed it. He points out that the female lead, Geraldine Brooks (shown above), was cute and could act. He's correct on both points. Click here and scroll down to the "I think she had it" comment and watch the video. When I saw that sequence I thought, "Great facial expressions" (even though this whole romance sequence dragged on for entirely too long and slowed down the film).

She had a interesting quote: "I have met a lot of dumb actors who were very good. You have to be tuned in emotionally, but you don't need to be intelligent. I don't agree for a minute that you have to be smart to play a dumb blonde." I agree. I do not think actors are especially intelligent, but I do think they have higher than average levels of emotional understanding/empathy and an ability to communicate this, which is not quite the same thing as raw intelligence.

I am now reading "The Thirty-Nine Steps" by John Buchan, an adventure novel published in 1915. What makes this a different experience is that I'm reading it on a Sony Reader Touch, an electronic device my son found me. (Somebody left it in the Best Buy where he works. He gave it to me and I had it fixed by Sony.) I'm not sure whether I like reading books this way or not... there's a tactile experience in reading a real book with covers and pages that is not at all replicated with this electronic device. Plus a book is high contrast black letters on white; this is sort of blackish letters on light gray... I downloaded a bunch of public domain .pdf books onto it. I'll give it a thorough try.

Speaking of books I bought a couple at yard sales on Saturday - there were about ten of them. Nice weather.

But there's something unusually oppressive about this particular Monday. I feel like crawling back into bed for some reason.

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10 Sep 2010

I am finishing up my book about Vermeer art forgery; as I've been saying, it is excellent. Here's another excerpt (with my italics, just so you get the point). It is so apropos about Civil War reenacting I think I'll post it to my JonahWorld! site, with the appropriate introductory text. Certainly, as the article states, authenticity is off-putting. (My article on this very subject is here.)

When the Civil War battle reenactment-going public visits the 150th Anniversary Battle of First Bull Run next year, they won't be viewing Northern soldiers shooting at Southern soldiers just as it was back then. In general, they'll be seeing a forgery. But there will be some puzzlement with the authentic stuff.

For instance, should any of the publics visit the camps they may see soldiers clutching hot pan handles with queer, oversized pastel-colored bandannas - not the familiar red or blue ones you see used as kerchiefs on Labradors. Did bandannas look that gay in the 1860s? Yes, they did. (Or so I'm told by the sutlers who sell them and the reenactors who assure me this is so. I haven't done the research myself.) Or if the publics visit the camps later in the evening they may see soldiers walking about wearing cute little night caps, looking like Elmer Fudd in an old cartoon. Did Civil War soldiers wear those? Yes, they did. (I know this because the Gettysburg Battlefield Museum once displayed a startling and impressive collection of these.)

On the other hand, the public will also assuredly see soldiers with cigarettes in their mouths, wristwatches on their wrists, or one talking on an iPhone - and that's a jolt of the opposite polarity. I, myself, always find the inevitable 450 pound Confederate amusing.

Reenactors like to, as we call it, time-travel. But if the author of my book is correct (and I think he is) when he writes "...even as they try to travel into the past, they bring the trappings of their own world with them," it's impossible. In all the years I have done reenacting I can remember only a couple of occasions when I did something approaching mental time travel, when I kept the current era at bay.

The first was at my very first sham battle/skirmish in 1983, a wretched little affair up Provo Canyon in Utah (yes, Utah - we fought the Civil War in Utah). My squad of four or five Yanks were poised waiting for the four or five Confederates to advance up a trail. When I first heard them coming my stomach tied itself in a little knot. Why? We're only firing blanks at one another - nobody is going to get hurt! (Well, most of the time that's the case.) But for just a moment it seemed real.

The other time was at the 125th anniversary Battle of Antietam (1987), a vastly larger and more authentic activity. The occasion was the Burnside's Bridge scenario, using a lookalike bridge. The bridge was choked with Yankee soldiers - just as it was in 1862 - and we were crowding together trying to advance; we were all excited. It looked, smelled and sounded like combat. However, as I came down a hill and jammed my ankle I thought, "Great... I'll be limping around at work all week." Illusion gone, game over.

In fact, I'm sure I experienced more of the real emotions of the battlefield on the rugby pitch - but that's a different blog entry.

I also liked the comment in the book excerpt about forecasting what the future will look like, a famously difficult endeavor. (Todd Rundgren wrote a song about it with some pithy lyrics - go here and scroll to bottom.) Rundgren mentions the 1964 World's Fair, photos from which I recall seeing plastered all over magazines when I was a kid. Why don't we have video phones, as promised? Generally, because the public doesn't care about them. I once got into an argument with a fellow engineer on the subject, and one of the prized possessions in my "Book of the Weird" workplace binder I maintain is something he wrote on a piece of paper: "I bet we'll have video phones in the same numbers as ordinary telephones by 1995." Ha! (This fellow was a political liberal, so we used to argue all the time. His opinions about how to run the government have proven to be no sounder than his predictions about video phones.)

My "Book of the Weird?" What's that? It's a thick, three ring-binder containing all sorts of odd things - "FAXlore" - I've collected in the engineering workplace in the past 26 years. Some examples:

Mathematical Proof that Girls are Evil
Hertz to Cycles per Second Conversion Chart
Workplace Emotion Checklist

Perhaps I'll run more in subsequent blog entries...

Last night I had my Webelos Den doing clay sculpture - it was a hoot. One kid crafted a bundle of dynamite sticks with a clock attached. Another made a cube with eyes and called it "The Strange Tofu Man." Another made a small piano with a head attached to the top and claimed it was his crinkly old piano teacher. (Subsequent inquiry revealed that she's in her thirties.) I made a finely-crafted snow man that, if it holds together, will be yet another ornament for my Christmas tree.

The last pool weekend approaches. It's open this Saturday and Sunday then that's it - closed until May 2011. I believe I'll eat a farewell pizza or grilled hot dog for Saturday lunch there.

Have a nice weekend!

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9 Sep 2010

I just read the most fascinating passage in the book I'm presently reading (about forging Vermeer paintings); I have scanned it for you to read here. It relates the art of masterpiece forgery with robotics theory, the so-called "uncanny valley," and why a skilled forger should avoid a 99% imitation. I think it's a brilliant insight.

The article also sheds light on a hobbyist culture I am well familiar with, that of Civil War reenacting. I have long insisted that what is missing in the popular Civil War limited edition art prints associated with the culture is emotion and, to be specific, art. (My page on the subject is here.) The article explains what's missing in most of these illustrative prints: The opportunity for the viewer to insert some of himself psychologically into the image in order to lend it emotional impact. In general, the Civil War art prints are too detailed and too photographic - they fall within the uncanny valley. They succeed as illustration but not as art. A nice insight - I'm glad I read this book for that alone!

I checked last night - I see the National Gallery in D.C. has some Vermeers. How convenient! I'll have to go there soon as a result of reading this book to see what all the fuss is about...

Organ recital follows: I am happy to report that I can now raise my right arm without pain. Ever since my last rugby season four years ago when we overdid line out hoisting in a practice session, my right shoulder has been hurting me. My boss mentioned that he had a problem like this and recommended a sports therapy place close by to work; on Tuesday I had my fourth session. I am now seeing results. I must admit, however, I do not look forward to the these. A skillful young woman (whom I mentally refer to as Helga, She-Demon of the SS) always starts with bending and twisting my arm to stretch the shoulder - it's painful, but she claims my pain free range of motion is increasing, as indeed it seems to be.

I watched an oddball film noir last night: "Inner Sanctum" (1948), a Twilight Zonesque production with mystical, otherworldly overtones. It starts with a sort of wraparound story involving an strange and philosophical older man on a train with a young woman, then proceeds to a story. Then you come to find out that the wraparound story melds into the main tale. Very odd - certainly ahead of its time in this respect. It also featured what I believe is the homliest teenage boy I have ever seen in the movies, Dale Belding. (I can't find an image on the Interweb, sorry.) Finally, it has a rather creepy scene where he and an older man are sleeping together in the same room - the older man strips down to his boxers. Kind of pervy.

You know, it's funny. In most ways society has become far more accepting and permissive of sexually suggestive content in the media save in one way, concerning men and boys. I suppose it's due to the various scandals in the Catholic Church and Boy Scouts, but we are certainly more squeamish on this matter than we used to be. Case in point: A Boy Scouts of America memorial in a park across the street from the Hoover Department of Commerce Building in D.C. I stumbled across this one day when I was in D.C. interviewing for a job in the Hoover Building. I was flabbergasted.

It features three figures: an adult male, an adult female and a boy scout. The boy scout is wearing a boy scout uniform and, well... you can view it here. I will point out that what the web site doesn't show is a rear view of the male figure - he has a bare bottom. Most unfortunate. Apparently in 1964, when the statue was produced and presumably accepted by the BSA, nobody was thinking in terms of man-boy creepiness. (The BSA certainly would later - applications as an adult leader now involve police record checks, I understand.) When I first saw this statue I mentioned it to a friend who is a longtime avid scouter - he hung his head and admitted that yes, this monument creates controversy.

High "Ewww" factor.

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8 Sep 2010

Last month you may recall I mentioned the 1971 Stanley Kubrick film "A Clockwork Orange" as part of a Seventies remembrance. In the film there's an interesting shop the protagonist, Alex, strolls through. A reader identified it; it's a rather well-known place in London called the Chelsea Drugstore. (Sad to say, it is now a McDonald's.) As it turns out, however, there are a number of inside jokes and references in this sequence, and this page highlights them all. Best is the comment, "In some ways A Clockwork Orange serves less now as a warning of the future and more as a window on a world that’s disappeared" - which was exactly my comment in my earlier blog!

I was also strolling through wikipedia looking at entries for the various characters in The Endless (the mystical family in Neil Gaiman's "Sandman"), when I followed some links and came across this interesting entry for personifications of death (an especially artful one of which is at left). I learned an interesting new word from it: Psychopomp. Needless to say, it's Greek. This is an entity that guides souls into the world of the afterlife. The Valkyries, for instance, were psychopomps. I always like learning new words. The problem with being middle-aged, however, is that I'll probably forget it...

I posted the Burbank A.B.C. Directory on Burbankia; it shows what businesses were active in town in 1942. While you couldn't obtain a colonic, you could buy a corset. And everyone's favorite bakery (home of the delectable teacakes), Martino's, is listed. It's the kind of oddball thing we like posting there.

I watched a perfectly boring film noir last night: "The Lady Confesses" (1945). The lady confesses... what? The title made no sense with the plot that I could see. It was a 67 minute quickie by one of the crappiest film facilities in Hollywood, PRC (Producers Releasing Company). Hugh Beaumont, later the Beaver's father, was in it. Yawn.

So, looking for some cheap humor I started watching Ed Wood's "Jail Bait" (1954). You know Ed Wood - he's the fellow who wrote, produced and directed the famously bad "Plan 9 from Outer Space" (1959). All the celebrated Ed Wood touches are in this one as well: weirdly-phrased dialogue, ill-advised casting, poor acting, strangely out of context sequences (there's a black face minstrel show inserted for no good reason) and unfortunate incidental music. For some reason Wood thought a strummed flamenco guitar with dissonant piano chords suited a film noir plot. (One reviewer wrote, "It's a pleasant feeling when you reach the end and the flamenco guitar stops." I don't believe anyone will be able to top that review, actually.) You can see it here for free - should you want to do such a thing. I should mention that the title has nothing at all to do with underage girls or boys - of course! It was a title chosen purely for titillation purposes and then casually mentioned in the film in reference to a handgun to give it credence. Ed Wood - a class act.

I am now reading "The Forger's Spell - A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century" by Edward Dolnick. (Have you noticed that book titles nowadays are getting really long?) It has an interesting quote. Holocaust Era Jews speculated that the Nazi Master Race was, "...slender like Goering, blond like Hitler and tall like Goebbels." Ha!

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7 Sep 2010

Ahhhh... that long Labor Day weekend was nice, really nice. Now I'm suffering from the back-to-work blues on this "Terrible Tuesday." (That's what the Newsies call it. The school buses are back out on the road, adding to the traffic woes in the greater D.C. area. Unless I'm mistaken, there are a lot of less than happy children around, too. I hated "Back to School" day... I would lay awake in bed for an hour or two the night before, obsessing over it.)

We did the last big end of summer pool party yesterday. Whenever this time of the year comes around I always think of a guitar instrumental by the Blue Hawaiians that captures the mood perfectly: "The Last Days of Summer." It's one of the first songs I learned on bass back when I was taking lessons. Definitely a September kind of song.

I found a couple of nice Civil War hardcover books at a yard sale Saturday morning - one of them a thick volume about the Battle of the Wilderness by Gordon Rhea that I've been eyeing at battlefield bookstores for years. $1! I'm glad I waited. By the way I finished Gates of Fire (Thermopylae) - an excellent work. I'm sorry they chose Frank Miller's Thermopylae comic book to adapt to a movie ("300") instead of this!

I have decided that Hoplites look cool, really cool. Like nearly everything else they did, the ancient Greeks made great looking armor!

As a result of having to copy an Lp of a very obscure Utah folk group I have on cassette for a friend (admittedly, an older friend who still has a cassette deck with which to listen to it), I undertook a major overhaul of my cassette collection, tossing out the 30 year-old copies of music I have on CD and starting a digitizing of stuff that only exists on old cassettes. I am left with about 250 cassettes.

Digitizing the recordings you want to keep is important, because cassettes don't age well. The first thing to happen is that the little felt pads fall off - which could cause damage to the tape and heads on your cassette deck. (I'm not even sure cassettes will play without the felt pads.) Most notably, the tape loses its high end and begins to sound muddy with age. Finally, the tape becomes more brittle and breaks more easily. I'm not sure what the playing life of a cassette tape is, but I'm sure it varies with manufacturer quality. I have a Maxell UD/XL cassette (top quality, back then) of Blue Oyster Cult songs I made back in the summer of 1976 that still plays and sounds reasonably good. On the other hand, my oldest cassette is a pre-recorded circa 1971 "My Fair Lady" that sounds awful. I have the same music on Lp and CD, but I keep the cassette for historical interest.

I got a kick out of listening to my wife's radio commercials she did as a broadcast journalism student back in the Seventies, as well as her intro and outro announcements ("soundchex") when she was a disk jockey. I also listened to a fifteen year-old recording of my daughters doing "The Reading Culb" (my oldest hadn't figured out how to spell "club" yet). Very cute... and now it also exists in "imperishable" ones and zeroes. I also found a recording of their grandmother, who died last year, reading a book about ballerinas; I just sent a .mp3 of it off to my kids.

I'm also digitizing music cassettes that I'm not going to bother replacing on CD, for instance, the Beau Hunks play incidental music to Little Rascals shorts, early B-52's albums, that sort of thing. Plus a bunch of car use cassettes ("CarTapes") I made from 1976 to 2004; I have about eighty of those. There are songs I like on them that I have no intention of trying to replace with the digital versions; I'll just put up with the lower quality (but still acceptable) cassette sound. Los Lobos' "Will the Wolf Survive?", the Brothers Johnson's "Strawberry Letter 23," Steve Miller's "Abracadabra," Joan Jett's "Fake Friends," Talking Heads' "Drugs," Elton John's "I Want to Kiss the Bride," etc. A plethora of varied stuff I recorded form various sources that I listened to in my car in the 1970's, 1980's and 1990's - I'll listen to them occasionally on my iPod.

Most interesting to me is a project I have put off for almost a decade. I received three cassettes worth of Civil War reenacting satirical tunes by a fellow named "Farby" that I am going to digitize. From what I've heard of these (I have never listened to them all), they aren't bad. Sometimes bawdy and off-color, but rather funny, in fact.

I also had some fun over the weekend when I took one of the church Kawai UST-7 pianos apart - that is, removed the panels. These are what are termed "institutional use pianos"; they're designed to be moved around from room to room and to endure much use. I think ours were built in the Eighties but they still sound great! They're a whole lot louder and fuller sounding without the panels and you can see the action work when you play. Quite interesting. The Kawai UST-7 is a much better instrument than my Spinet from Hell, but then, it's worth at least ten times more than I paid...

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3 Sep 2010

Three day weekend coming - hooray!

I watched a cool little film noir online last night, for free: "Two Dollar Bettor" (1951). It's not a major film by any means, and people think it's camp. What I liked about it was the horse race betting angle. My father was a handicapper and enjoyed driving to Del Mar racetrack to play the horses. Given that I haven't ever seen a noir with a horse racing plot, I liked this one. Do I sound defensive? Well, yes, I am - it wasn't an especially good film, truth to tell. But I liked it. Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer of the Little Rascals comedy series was in it. He played a teenage football star (!). Thank goodness he didn't croon.

My son told me about it and provided a link to the Internet Archive. Nice site! If you search under "film noir" you can find all sorts of great old crime films - all of them watchable for free. Doing a search I found a good twenty I have never seen before! (I've used this site before, but never for finding undiscovered noirs.)

I had a major revelation about that book I'm reading, Gates of Fire, about the battle of Thermopylae: thermopylae in Greek means, "Hot gateway" (describing the narrow neck of land upon which the Spartans fought the Persians). Hence, "Gates of Fire." Duh. Never realized that. Also, the book is on the Marine Corps Commandant's Reading List. I'm not surprised - it's very martial.

One interesting work on the list is "How We Won the War" by (North Vietnamese) General Giap. In it he credits organizations like Vietnam Vets Against the War (Senator John Kerry's bunch). Nice. Another controversial entry on the list is Guerrilla Warfare by Ernesto "Che" Guevara. (For the record, I loathe Che - he was a tyrant and mass murderer no better than, say, Idi Amin.)

Here's some fun: What do Che Guevara, Idi Amin and George W. Bush all have in common? Answer at bottom.

I am looking forward to next July! My high school pal Mike and I will be doing a slide presentation on Burbank history (I think we'll call it "Burbankia") in one of the public libraries on 9 July 2011 in conjunction with the city's 100th anniversary of incorporation. Cool! Even cooler: My wife and I will also probably use this occasion to meet the kids from Utah and visit Disneyland.

Neil Gaiman's Sandman as a television show. Hmmm. Okay, this has some promise. The comic series should adapt well to an anthology type television series. Might tune into this one, just to see who they get to play that gothy Lady Death (see above). I always liked that character. Good heavens! It just occurred to me: My daughter Meredith could play that character really well. This image is really suggestive of Meredith's personality...

Okay, that's it for this week. Yard sales tomorrow morning, of course, but the yard sale season won't last much longer. They start to disappear in late October. In general, it's about a seven month season. People start doing spring cleaning in March or so, and then put stuff out. When school begins in earnest and sports start, etc. people quit. That's my explanation, anyway. But this has been a good season already as I got lots of great CDs. One measure I take at the end of each year is, "What interesting new music have I gotten to know this past year?" I learned a bunch of pieces this year via piano practice, but I also learned to like Miles Davis' modal jazz "Kind of Blue" and Mozart's Piano Concerto #15, as well as a couple of Haydn London symphonies, via yard sale purchases. Neat!

And we'll undoubtedly do the neighborhood pool on Labor Day with my pard Chris and his fam. We have to assemble for the annual Pool Photo for my scrapbook.

...And with such minor pleasures and occupations is life constructed, row, row, row your boat.

Have a great three day weekend!

Answer to question above: All three were rugby players. See my Famous Ruggers article. The write up about Idi Amin is especially good.

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2 Sep 2010

Not only has it been revealed that British Formula One racing driver Ben Collins is the mysterious Stig on Top Gear, but now he has a book coming out about it that the BBC cannot prevent being published. I'd like to read it!

I finished watching the six episodes from Top Gear Season 16 last night. It was good - Top Gear is always at least good - but I felt this was like a minimum effort season. It lacked the zing that better seasons have had. Also, they had Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz as "stars in the reasonably priced cars" segment on one show; I always feel that Hollywood celebrities decrease the quality of the show. They should stick with Brits. I hope the shark hasn't jumped with this production...

I found an interesting quote about war in that novel I'm presently reading about the Spartans and Thermopylae - as is my custom I have included it in my JonahWorld! quotes page. It's at top. I don't agree with it... I think, for instance, my church does an excellent job of inculcating virtue in men and that you don't need the hard lessons of war to do that. But the quote is suggestive of how the Spartans may have felt about the matter.

For the record, I do not especially admire the Spartans, who were history's most thoroughly warrior-based society. True, their system did create high levels of self-discipline and selflessness in their society. And they maintained a fearsome army. But in their enslavement of the helots they resembled the antebellum American South; like the Southerners, they were always mindful and afraid of a slave uprising. And in their cultural rejection of new ideas and customs from outside of Sparta they resembled the now defunct Soviet Union.

I admire democratic Athens far more than Sparta. (While I am a philhellene, I am no laconophile.) Athens was an astonishingly intellectual society who invented democracy, philosophy, geometry, drama and any number of other things and still did very well at war. The saying was that the Athenians never rested and never gave their enemies any rest. When the great classical match up between Athens and Sparta finally happened, the Peloponnesian War, yes, Sparta prevailed. But it took them 27 years and the assistance of their arch-enemies, Persia - the very same Persia who slaughtered the celebrated 300 Spartans to a man at Thermopylae. Not laudable. And, I think inevitably, the Spartans suffered a successful revolt of the helots after the Battle of Leuctra in 371 B.C. when their culture went into decline.

I mentioned laconophiles, people who admire the Spartan ways. Even the Athenians were fans: According to Karl Otfried Müller, the founding figure of modern laconophilia (significantly, a German), "Many of the noblest and best of the Athenians always considered the Spartan state nearly as an ideal theory realised in practice." Ahhhh... but admiring Spartan ways and actually undergoing the agoge (the brutal Spartan warrior school) are two far different things. I, for one, am happy that when the Founding Fathers of the United States looked back to classical Greece for inspiration for the new American state they chose democratic Athens rather than military Sparta!

I posted a bunch of photos to Burbankia, including a breathless 1954 history prepared by the civic boosters of the Magnolia Park Chamber of Commerce. The writing style is notable for the overuse of exclamation marks and the dramatic use of... ellipses!

I don't think I could ever trust anyone who uses multiple exclamation marks. It suggests mental instability.

(Fun fact: According to grammar maven Lynne Truss, the exclamation mark was not incorporated into standard manual typewriters until the 1970's. One typed a period, backspaced, and then an apostrophe. But wait... we bought a manual Royal in 1965 that had a script font. Didn't that have an exclamation mark key?)

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1 Sep 2010

I am now reading "Gates of Fire" by Steven Pressfield. It's a novel about the battle of Thermopylae. I normally only read non-fiction, but so far this one is pretty good and it enhances my knowledge about ancient Greece and Spartan life - IF it's on the level. I'm not sure. For instance, I just read a section where the writer asserts that much hilarity could be found in Spartan training camps. I question this because, 1.) I haven't read this anywhere else and, 2.) It doesn't square with my own experience. Marine Corps boot camp was a lesser, shorter term modern equivalent of the Spartan training camp and I don't recall much hilarity then. Mainly tension.

Perhaps it's a psychological thing. Perhaps when you've pushed men about as far as they can go physically and emotionally laughter is the only outlet. But then... I'm not aware of hilarity being a part of Navy Seal training, either. So I don't know.

Certainly hilarity is a feature of modern Civil War reenacting; that's a large part of why I do it. If an event weekend wasn't worth a belly laugh or two I'd quickly find other things to do. But Civil War reenacting is to real war and training as lightning is to the lightning bug (to paraphrase Mark Twain).

My piano lesson went well last night. It was clear I practiced a lot and my teacher is surprised at how well I can memorize pieces. However, this is an advantage and a problem. It is very unlikely that I'll ever be a concert pianist, so there really isn't a need to memorize. And the goal is sight reading - to be able to sit down with sheet music and play it. I don't set about to try to memorize the pieces, it just comes with the repetition.

I was assigned a couple of pieces that seem very much like Hanon exercises, which is actually a good thing. I like Hanon exercises. It's kind of fun to sit down and mindlessly play note sequences; I get an odd sort of joy out of doing it. So I'm up for these two new pieces.

I watched Star 80 (1983) last night, a bleak work. It's about the rise and fall (that is, murder) of Dorothy Stratton (shown above), the 1979 Playboy Playmate of the Year. Somebody I talked to years ago - I forget whom - endorsed it as an excellent evocation of the film noir loser archetype in Eric Roberts' portrayal of Stratton's Svengali, Paul Snider. Certainly, his is an excellent performance, right up there with Richard Widmark as the eternally hopeful, on the make young huckster in "Night and the City" (1950). Ebert gave Star 80 four stars and points out that while it's about a Playboy pin-up, the film contains not one erotic moment. True enough. Like Hollywoodland (2006) or Mulholland Drive (2001), it is very noir.

I posted some old photos of one of Burbank's trailer courts yesterday. There used to be a number of these in town, and they were all pretty squalid. I recall a high school class where we had the assignment to do a presentation of some kind about some social ill. (Typical 1970's New Left sociological fare.) One painfully earnest girl did a slide show about poverty, and showed images from one of Burbank's many trailer courts while she plead for Federal funds. Ever the class clown, I got a big laugh out of the class when I interjected, "Hey! That's my house!"

Sometimes I have a hard time behaving myself in class. I was at a workplace training session, back in the Eighties, I think, where we had to do a view graph presentation of some kind. I did mine about the battle of Antietam - go with what you know, right? One other guy, who had somewhat comical looks (he looked like a rugby prop), did one on modern meat production (!) entitled, "Where Does Your Hot Dog Come From?"

It started out innocuously enough, but got progressively weirder with each photo of the meat butchering process; his deadpan delivery didn't help. A couple of the women in class started to become upset... it was a really, really, strange scene. When this fellow came to his last view graph I entirely lost it when I saw his clever little images of pig faces under crossed knives and forks, like skulls and crossbones, with the wording Bon Appetit. To this day I do not know if this was brilliantly subversive comedy on his part or if he was playing it straight. A couple of the women in class, however, got really upset with me for laughing. I just couldn't help it.

Another occasion was at a church Christmas banquet, a truly awful venue in which to misbehave. For some reason the woman responsible for the program did the concluding slide show on the Hans Christian Andersen story The Little Match Girl. (Are you familiar with it? In essence, a poor girl freezes to death on a bitterly cold night. Merry Christmas!) I suppose the message the woman wanted to convey was "be thankful for your affluence," but was perhaps being a bit heavy-handed about it. Unfortunately, however, my wife and I were seated at a circular table with some friends, the husband of whom was a fellow former Marine who did not readily succumb to maudlin sentiment. Rather than being touched with the extreme pathos of the story, all of us had a difficult time not laughing. Finally he leaned over to my wife and said, "Well, THAT was a real downer." That remark caused us to have to leave the table.

We probably engendered some resentment that night. Really, I don't seek to alienate myself from my common man with my inappropriate laughter, it's just that I have a generally merry personality and see humor in all sorts of things. (Which is what makes Civil War reenacting so entertaining.)

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