I was having a discussion with Corrie about "American Culture", as we've done many times over the years. It has at times drifted towards the "does America even have a culture?" topic. Is a lack of culture really a defining characteristic?
Maybe when you're brought up in the middle of a culture--of a society, really--it's quite difficult to step outside of it and take a long, thoughtful gaze back at it.
Here, in America, people were directed and encouraged to focus on skin color, rather than class, to 1) drive the myth of upward mobility through acquisition of wealth; and 2) to keep the poor majority distracted from the gulf between the holders of capital and everyone else. Only in America were the Prussians, the Poles, the Magyar, and the Irish were the same. That assimilation erased the major cultural cues connected with fair-skinned Europeans and their descendants, while dark-skinned Africans and their descendants had their cultural cues forcibly erased. What's left is occasionally described as a lack of an original culture.
In a direct, Frans de Waal way, we obviously have a culture; by which I mean the set of social constructs by which we teach (directly and indirectly) the next generation of people about the world they inhabit exist in Americas as they do everywhere else. This discussion is more about the social cues that make up American-ism.
One way I think about these types of claims--the lack of original American culture--is by remembering some stereotypes the Europeans we met at a hostel in Budapest described as American. They were funny and rather accurate, for the ugly American tourist in Europe anyway, but they led to a small discussion about some of the ways we Americans appear to the outside world: proud, rebellious, falsely cheery, uppity, and a strange brew of humble arrogance.
The music, the braggadocio, the style, the entertainment, the world consuming consumerism...a penchant for leaving the nest as a young person and never returning (a rarity in a global perspective). These are things we take for granted in America.
Other things we take for granted are the archetypes that the social culture we have resemble almost any other culture in history. We have warriors, merchants, gladiatorial bloodsport (male emotional release), and even public-anointed royalty (celebrity).
We seem to lack a perceived aristocracy, due to our mythology of upward mobility (I'm not saying it's not ever possible, but...), which is strange, since the uproar over wealth disparity has finally come to the fore. We also lack an intellectual class. This culture actually disrespects the intellectual.
One class that we do have, in an American kind of way, is a monk class.
When I think of monks, I tend to drift between the Buddhist monks, living off of alms and wearing those cool looking orange and red robes; and the Friar Tuck type monk, brewing beer in the rafters of some Frisian monastery in Bruges.
American monks don't do it like that. Here our monks live a specific lifestyle. It's highlighted by a devotion of their time to their specific spiritual force.
Worship may not be the right word.
Can you imagine a group of Americans that have a quiet connection to a greater force that eventually envelops their life and becomes a lifestyle? Probably, but the main group I'm discussing are the surfers.
Surfers are the American monks, the monk class. They don't brew beer in the attic in between studying scripture, and they don't lead a life of example by not obtaining cash for a living.
American monks live a monastic lifestyle revolving around the ocean. The waves are their pages of study, their brew pots of discovery.
The surfer exists in a certain place in the American consciousness. I believe the inherent connection to nature around which their lives revolve is the reason for that complex position: part sneer, part jealously.
The ocean gives many cultures many different things of cultural relevancy, and this case is no different.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Thursday, January 26, 2012
2500+ Words and Too Many Bummers
I completed two out of three planned pieces the other day for a total of something like 2514 words. An old friend came over to visit, which stopped short the last, uplifting piece. What was left was two rather downer pieces, one about a tough day I had and the other about the revolutionary talk, actions, and plans of the black portion of this country in the sixties and seventies.
I wrote both of those pieces always in mind that the third would follow, and not necessarily leave the day with a sour feeling in the brain of the few readers of these longer things. The third piece wasn't exactly "turning your farts into rainbows" kind of cheeriness, but it wasn't about me getting screwed over by my day or about the (ultimately financial) subjugation of an entire ethnic group.
It was a little more, well, like I mentioned before, a moreover uplifting discussion about odd observations about...well I don't want to ruin it. I'll get to it soon.
One funny thing for me, though, is that those two pieces that I consider "downers" were written before I learned that my bike was stolen.
Oh yeah, my fucking bike was stolen. The savages. There are only a few people who have access to the area were it was kept. I'm pretty sure it was my idiot neighbor's idiot drug addict son who jacked it. I've never met him, but I've heard her lecture him many times about how the reasons he's struggling in life is because he doesn't know god. She plays the 700 Club radio shows on her radio so loud every day that I stopped reading out on my balcony last summer just to avoid having to block it out.
She told me once, "Oh, be careful, somebody stole my bike from out here just last month." Yeah...it was your sumbitch kid, dumbass.
I had a lock on my bike, but it wasn't such a huge chain-wire. The faith I had in the few people who had access to the area was stronger than the lock.
Oh well. I'm going to plaster pictures of it all around Long Beach with a notice of a $1000 reward, and then kick the ass of the first person who brings it back to me. I'll put it like "$1000* REWARD", then at the bottom have something like "*Not a real reward" in really small print, just to keep me legal.
I'm kidding, I won't be beating anybody up. But I may word the missing poster just like that though.
Shout out and special thanks to Norm for recognizing my entire Against the Day theme on the "Off Day" piece. It was only intentional for the random people who could possibly make the connection. I briefly thought about that as the title for the piece, 'Against the Day', but it didn't have the double entendre factor, and, seeing as how much I love the novel itself, it seemed...I don't know, almost insulting.
So, keep an eye out for the next post. If all goes as planned, it should be the lost third piece, the bummer-counter-punch.
You be the judge.
I wrote both of those pieces always in mind that the third would follow, and not necessarily leave the day with a sour feeling in the brain of the few readers of these longer things. The third piece wasn't exactly "turning your farts into rainbows" kind of cheeriness, but it wasn't about me getting screwed over by my day or about the (ultimately financial) subjugation of an entire ethnic group.
It was a little more, well, like I mentioned before, a moreover uplifting discussion about odd observations about...well I don't want to ruin it. I'll get to it soon.
One funny thing for me, though, is that those two pieces that I consider "downers" were written before I learned that my bike was stolen.
Oh yeah, my fucking bike was stolen. The savages. There are only a few people who have access to the area were it was kept. I'm pretty sure it was my idiot neighbor's idiot drug addict son who jacked it. I've never met him, but I've heard her lecture him many times about how the reasons he's struggling in life is because he doesn't know god. She plays the 700 Club radio shows on her radio so loud every day that I stopped reading out on my balcony last summer just to avoid having to block it out.
She told me once, "Oh, be careful, somebody stole my bike from out here just last month." Yeah...it was your sumbitch kid, dumbass.
I had a lock on my bike, but it wasn't such a huge chain-wire. The faith I had in the few people who had access to the area was stronger than the lock.
Oh well. I'm going to plaster pictures of it all around Long Beach with a notice of a $1000 reward, and then kick the ass of the first person who brings it back to me. I'll put it like "$1000* REWARD", then at the bottom have something like "*Not a real reward" in really small print, just to keep me legal.
I'm kidding, I won't be beating anybody up. But I may word the missing poster just like that though.
Shout out and special thanks to Norm for recognizing my entire Against the Day theme on the "Off Day" piece. It was only intentional for the random people who could possibly make the connection. I briefly thought about that as the title for the piece, 'Against the Day', but it didn't have the double entendre factor, and, seeing as how much I love the novel itself, it seemed...I don't know, almost insulting.
So, keep an eye out for the next post. If all goes as planned, it should be the lost third piece, the bummer-counter-punch.
You be the judge.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Destroying a Revolution
Question 1: How do you destroy a revolution?
Question 2: Who said: "You can jail a revolutionary, but you can't jail a revolution."
If you know who that quote comes from then you'll know the direction this piece is headed.
Setting a scene: the American Civil war has ended, but not much has changed over the intervening years. "Sharecropper" is the new term for the newly "freed" black Americans, but wild inequities still confront them in nearly every facet of life. The slow churn of time progresses, and after black soldiers returned from Europe after WWII, they started grumbling about their treatment at home.
That it had to be grumbles says a lot about a country that professes its love of liberty, freedom, and equality. Civil Rights becomes a thing.
The general acceptance of the deplorable conditions of how black people were treated lead to the organization of two types of black American groups. The first are the vocal leaders of a movement, which every movement needs, and the second were the armed patrols.
The most revered vocal leader of the Civil Rights movement in white America today is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I can tell you the reason why: his was a stance of non-violence.
It's easy to forget, or wipe away from American history, the fact that there were plenty of fiery, militant Civil Rights leaders that professed revolution. They were taken seriously enough to have been pushed into exile in Algeria.
In any case the armed patrols were meant to provide protection in the black neighborhoods, protection from roving bloodthirsty gangs of white folks--police included--who'd get ginned up and head across town looking for somebody to beat up. The violence meted out on the black people of America throughout the history of the country is also white-washed out of the books.
Angela Davis' father belonged to a group of one of the armed patrols in Birmingham, Alabama. Davis herself studied philosophy with Marcuse (!), did her doctoral thesis on Kant's reaction to the Spanish Inquisition, and was arrested because guns she'd purchased and registered were used in protection actions in Oakland's ghetto.
Angela Davis, today seen as a Civil Rights treasure, is an outspoken leader of the right black Americans have to protect themselves against violence.
Answer to Question 2: Huey Newton, one of the co-founders of the Black Panthers.
The Panthers started out in Oakland as a more organized armed patrol group. The entire name of the organization was the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. The leaders of the Panthers became more visible to black Americans, and their rhetoric became ever so much more dangerous.
Speakers like Stokely Carmichael were more subdued in delivery than the recently killed Malcolm X, which made him harder for white leaders to dismiss. The mood from the era, if you pay attention to interviews with common black citizens in the newly unearthed Swedish documentary "The Black Power Mix-tape", is one of "there is no America, it has no future...it's over..." Their connection to the idea of America was completely gone, and the emergence of rampant consumerism being the new force keeping the status quo intact was still a few decades out.
This was a serious problem. Discontent in the masses, armed guerrilla infrastructure, and a largely charismatic group of militant leaders calling for revolution. The government took this revolution talk very seriously. There were riots in Chicago, Watts, Memphis, Baltimore...it was a tinder box.
Answer to Question 1: easy, Heroin.
The draft helped, sending young men off to Vietnam, where the availability of dope was wide, and when they returned, if they were men of color, they found their neighborhoods flooded with it. Heroin gave poor people with little prospects in the business or political or civil world, with very little connection to a perceived culture that didn't want them around, a modicum of good feeling and easy distraction from revolutionary leanings.
An armed resurrection that you have to violently stomp out in your own major cities would not look good for America on the world stage. Turning over portions of those major cities to a battle zone of narcotic trafficking is something easier to hide, and maintains that all important status quo.
An added bonus of heroin trafficking for the terrified white government was getting to lock up some very bright young people who'd never get to be leaders in any movement.
Before crack cocaine, heroin ruined revolutions.
Crack never ruined any revolutions, though. That was just a business deal.
The rioting ended, the militant leaders were either jailed, killed, run off, or given tenure, and the struggle of the underclass and under-privileged were the stuff of Pulitzer photo-journalism, not insurgency reporting.
I would argue that a real revolution wasn't ever going to happen, but armed fighting surely would have had things gone differently. Did cooler heads prevail?
If you're of the opinion that America is better off without having had an armed insurgency homegrown of its disconsolate citizens, then yeah. The real question is how different political and civil society today would be had there been an all out organized armed guerrilla insurgency action.
That's an exercise for another time...
Question 2: Who said: "You can jail a revolutionary, but you can't jail a revolution."
If you know who that quote comes from then you'll know the direction this piece is headed.
Setting a scene: the American Civil war has ended, but not much has changed over the intervening years. "Sharecropper" is the new term for the newly "freed" black Americans, but wild inequities still confront them in nearly every facet of life. The slow churn of time progresses, and after black soldiers returned from Europe after WWII, they started grumbling about their treatment at home.
That it had to be grumbles says a lot about a country that professes its love of liberty, freedom, and equality. Civil Rights becomes a thing.
The general acceptance of the deplorable conditions of how black people were treated lead to the organization of two types of black American groups. The first are the vocal leaders of a movement, which every movement needs, and the second were the armed patrols.
The most revered vocal leader of the Civil Rights movement in white America today is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I can tell you the reason why: his was a stance of non-violence.
It's easy to forget, or wipe away from American history, the fact that there were plenty of fiery, militant Civil Rights leaders that professed revolution. They were taken seriously enough to have been pushed into exile in Algeria.
In any case the armed patrols were meant to provide protection in the black neighborhoods, protection from roving bloodthirsty gangs of white folks--police included--who'd get ginned up and head across town looking for somebody to beat up. The violence meted out on the black people of America throughout the history of the country is also white-washed out of the books.
Angela Davis' father belonged to a group of one of the armed patrols in Birmingham, Alabama. Davis herself studied philosophy with Marcuse (!), did her doctoral thesis on Kant's reaction to the Spanish Inquisition, and was arrested because guns she'd purchased and registered were used in protection actions in Oakland's ghetto.
Angela Davis, today seen as a Civil Rights treasure, is an outspoken leader of the right black Americans have to protect themselves against violence.
Answer to Question 2: Huey Newton, one of the co-founders of the Black Panthers.
The Panthers started out in Oakland as a more organized armed patrol group. The entire name of the organization was the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. The leaders of the Panthers became more visible to black Americans, and their rhetoric became ever so much more dangerous.
Speakers like Stokely Carmichael were more subdued in delivery than the recently killed Malcolm X, which made him harder for white leaders to dismiss. The mood from the era, if you pay attention to interviews with common black citizens in the newly unearthed Swedish documentary "The Black Power Mix-tape", is one of "there is no America, it has no future...it's over..." Their connection to the idea of America was completely gone, and the emergence of rampant consumerism being the new force keeping the status quo intact was still a few decades out.
This was a serious problem. Discontent in the masses, armed guerrilla infrastructure, and a largely charismatic group of militant leaders calling for revolution. The government took this revolution talk very seriously. There were riots in Chicago, Watts, Memphis, Baltimore...it was a tinder box.
Answer to Question 1: easy, Heroin.
The draft helped, sending young men off to Vietnam, where the availability of dope was wide, and when they returned, if they were men of color, they found their neighborhoods flooded with it. Heroin gave poor people with little prospects in the business or political or civil world, with very little connection to a perceived culture that didn't want them around, a modicum of good feeling and easy distraction from revolutionary leanings.
An armed resurrection that you have to violently stomp out in your own major cities would not look good for America on the world stage. Turning over portions of those major cities to a battle zone of narcotic trafficking is something easier to hide, and maintains that all important status quo.
An added bonus of heroin trafficking for the terrified white government was getting to lock up some very bright young people who'd never get to be leaders in any movement.
Before crack cocaine, heroin ruined revolutions.
Crack never ruined any revolutions, though. That was just a business deal.
The rioting ended, the militant leaders were either jailed, killed, run off, or given tenure, and the struggle of the underclass and under-privileged were the stuff of Pulitzer photo-journalism, not insurgency reporting.
I would argue that a real revolution wasn't ever going to happen, but armed fighting surely would have had things gone differently. Did cooler heads prevail?
If you're of the opinion that America is better off without having had an armed insurgency homegrown of its disconsolate citizens, then yeah. The real question is how different political and civil society today would be had there been an all out organized armed guerrilla insurgency action.
That's an exercise for another time...
Off Day
Had those days before, have you? Those days where little trivial activities turn out to be nigh impossible, that life seems to thwart you at each turn. I had a day like this a while back, on a deliciously entendre drenched day off from work.
This day started early, when I went to move my car. When I used to get off work so late, I would drive around for nearly a half-hour looking for a spot to leave my car, sometimes significantly far from our apartment. Nowadays I park as close as possible, but need to get up early to move it. That's the trade off. Either park far and add to the stress of searching for a spot and sleep in, or park close immediately and wake up early to move it. I should get up early anyway.
This day, I bounded off for the car, but the spot I wanted to move it to was on street-cleaning hour, so, halfway to the car, I turned back and went home, realizing that the timing of the move would have to wait up until the last moment possible. This was a minor annoyance. I was off and had things to do and wanted to move the car early, but couldn't. I went home and read the paper for an hour (twenty minutes at best--gotta love the LB Press-Tribune). I eventually got the car where It needed to be.
Next I wanted to try out the new coffee shop in the Hotel Broadlind, the Romanesque hotel I've written about before. I went inside--the decor is similar but slightly more subdued than the recently shuttered Sipology--with my own cup and ordered a cup. The baristo said I got a discount for bringing my own cup, I nodded like an ass, and then he charged me $2.19.
$2.19? Shit. I guess we, in America, have become too used to cheap food prices. It probably should cost that much. But at the moment in that coffee shop my blood pressure spiked.
At least the coffee was great.
Back at the apartment, which was frigid, I opened up the balcony door, only to feel how hot it was outside. Neither were completely true--obviously it wasn't as cold as the living room says it should be nor as hot as the balcony--but it was nice enough outside that it inspired me to go and get some pictures taken. I went down to the beach with my Holga (medium-format film camera), and out to the breaker where we went on New Year's. I figured I could get a nice shot of the ocean and city buildings if I climbed down onto the exposed rocks of low-tide.
The moment I got down onto the rocks I slipped and fell, getting a layer of green slime on my brand new shorts. I was wincing and noticed what looked like red slime on my hand, and I began to get nervous that we had a red-tide (a harmful algal bloom) and that I may get sick. I lined up the shot and took the picture. (It tuned out to be blurry.) I looked behind me and checked out the water: it was the normal color, and not red. That's when I noticed my thumb was sliced open, and there was even a shard of mussel shell that I couldn't dig out while standing there, a laughable combo of slimy and bloody.
I made it home and bandaged my thumb and changed my pants. I have some printing projects I'm working on, and that day I was going to go off to Kinko's and take care of some parts of it, namely the binding. I also had wanted to have a seat at that same coffee shop I went to in the morning and work on the "Is the Future a Foggy Street?" blog post, using their free wi-fi and working on this site in a public setting.
I grabbed my paper projects and lappy and walked over to Kinko's. On edge already, I fought with the staplers they provide at our local shop. Corrie called while I was inside, and I tried to let it go and calm myself (I was cursing loudly in hoarse whispers at the printing shop). I finished up the call from Corrie (who was calling on her lunch break), and headed over to the Broadlind's new shop.
I had a seat, and got on the internet just fine. It was just my blog that I couldn't get to. I even followed the intense proscription on how to fix the problem that the lappy gave me, only to see that the switch I was to turn off was already turned off.
My blood pressure spiked again. I closed the lappy and went home. I had some other projects I wanted to do, more digital photography, namely going to the tops of parking structures and taking pictures looking down over the city. It's a little something I like to do. I've hit up most of the structures in Long Beach, but there was one that I still had my eye on.
Biking some of the day's stress out seemed like a good idea at that time, and after dropping off my printing projects and lap-top, I headed out on my bike to the structure. I should have noticed that there wasn't an easy opening on the street level. Maybe I did notice, but I didn't register the importance. As I rode up I noticed an elevator on Level 2. I went inside and pressed the "Roof" button. Nothing happened. I thought that was weird, and started out on my bike going up the spiraling driveway. I was met three-quarters of the way up by the fuzz.
Building security had been on me, apparently, from the moment I brought my beach cruiser into the building. What I took to be a parking structure was actually the parking lot of the otherwise tightly guarded Southern California Edison building, the supplier of electricity out here. They told me in no uncertain terms that I was trespassing and had to leave immediately. I shook my head and turned to leave.
When I got to the bottom of the driveway another security guy was waiting and stopped me to collect my information. I momentarily thought about bull-dozing him with my bike and speeding away. As I approached the trying to block me, the guy I contemplated running over, I remembered that this is in a half-mile semi-circle around my house, and I'm a bike riding character in this neighborhood, and I'm too old to have the cops coming after me for trespassing and assault.
The guy took my name and address, didn't really buy my story ("I like to go to the tops of structures and take pictures..."), and told me never to return.
No...problem.
Feeling like I'd been thwarted all over today, with a sore hip and sliced thumb, with my name and address having been added to the list possible So. Cal. Edison evil-doers, I decided the one thing that would be hard to screw my day up would be my little friends Beer and Whiskey. I rode around angry for a few minutes before deciding to visit the Auld Dubliner, an Irish pub in the vicinity, hoping to find a friendly ear to bitch to over the course of a shot and a beer.
I ordered some fancy beer (it came in a bulby glass with a stem--with a stem!--another thing that has been getting on my nerves)(can't a brother get a regular pint?) and a shot of Jameson. I had a quick talk woth the bar-keep, who did offer a friendly disposition for my stories from my trying day. When he offered a second shot or beer I said no thanks and asked for my check.
It was $16.02.
Excuse me? It was 2 in the goddamned afternoon! I looked at the paper bill and saw that I was only charged for one been and one shot.
As I made it to my bike I looked over my shoulder for a phantom to come out from the shadows just to kick me in the balls.
Being a lightweight now, generally, when I got home I was too buzzed to work on that post I'd wanted to work on earlier, and ended up taking a nap. I slept for a while and fell behind on what I wanted to do for dinner.
Overall, my days are never this hard. I've also gotten better at dealing with stress, even in the interim. I don't let things get to me like they did on that day. To prove it, I guess, I did actually get the foggy-street-metaphor post finished that "day", started right before midnight turned the day to Thursday.
I showed that day: World-7 (car; coffee; fall; stapler; internet; trespassing; drinks), Me-1 (nice little blog post).
All in all, I've been a glass half-full kind of guy for the past few years, only to see the stress from work eroding that goodwill for the world. This day specifically made me realize that that half-empty negative-jerk Pat might be returning. That realization helped me even on the day itself. My car made it where it needed to go with no tickets; the coffee was great and I supported a local roaster; I did get a few usable staples to work; I wasn't actually arrested at the power station; and I should realize the riviera nature of the exact 'hood where the Auld Dubliner lives yields only tourist prices. The outcome: some trials, but a nice piece of written art was accomplished, so I do indeed win the day.
Keep plugging away, baby! It'll turn out right when you make it so.
When you make it so...
This day started early, when I went to move my car. When I used to get off work so late, I would drive around for nearly a half-hour looking for a spot to leave my car, sometimes significantly far from our apartment. Nowadays I park as close as possible, but need to get up early to move it. That's the trade off. Either park far and add to the stress of searching for a spot and sleep in, or park close immediately and wake up early to move it. I should get up early anyway.
This day, I bounded off for the car, but the spot I wanted to move it to was on street-cleaning hour, so, halfway to the car, I turned back and went home, realizing that the timing of the move would have to wait up until the last moment possible. This was a minor annoyance. I was off and had things to do and wanted to move the car early, but couldn't. I went home and read the paper for an hour (twenty minutes at best--gotta love the LB Press-Tribune). I eventually got the car where It needed to be.
Next I wanted to try out the new coffee shop in the Hotel Broadlind, the Romanesque hotel I've written about before. I went inside--the decor is similar but slightly more subdued than the recently shuttered Sipology--with my own cup and ordered a cup. The baristo said I got a discount for bringing my own cup, I nodded like an ass, and then he charged me $2.19.
$2.19? Shit. I guess we, in America, have become too used to cheap food prices. It probably should cost that much. But at the moment in that coffee shop my blood pressure spiked.
At least the coffee was great.
Back at the apartment, which was frigid, I opened up the balcony door, only to feel how hot it was outside. Neither were completely true--obviously it wasn't as cold as the living room says it should be nor as hot as the balcony--but it was nice enough outside that it inspired me to go and get some pictures taken. I went down to the beach with my Holga (medium-format film camera), and out to the breaker where we went on New Year's. I figured I could get a nice shot of the ocean and city buildings if I climbed down onto the exposed rocks of low-tide.
The moment I got down onto the rocks I slipped and fell, getting a layer of green slime on my brand new shorts. I was wincing and noticed what looked like red slime on my hand, and I began to get nervous that we had a red-tide (a harmful algal bloom) and that I may get sick. I lined up the shot and took the picture. (It tuned out to be blurry.) I looked behind me and checked out the water: it was the normal color, and not red. That's when I noticed my thumb was sliced open, and there was even a shard of mussel shell that I couldn't dig out while standing there, a laughable combo of slimy and bloody.
I made it home and bandaged my thumb and changed my pants. I have some printing projects I'm working on, and that day I was going to go off to Kinko's and take care of some parts of it, namely the binding. I also had wanted to have a seat at that same coffee shop I went to in the morning and work on the "Is the Future a Foggy Street?" blog post, using their free wi-fi and working on this site in a public setting.
I grabbed my paper projects and lappy and walked over to Kinko's. On edge already, I fought with the staplers they provide at our local shop. Corrie called while I was inside, and I tried to let it go and calm myself (I was cursing loudly in hoarse whispers at the printing shop). I finished up the call from Corrie (who was calling on her lunch break), and headed over to the Broadlind's new shop.
I had a seat, and got on the internet just fine. It was just my blog that I couldn't get to. I even followed the intense proscription on how to fix the problem that the lappy gave me, only to see that the switch I was to turn off was already turned off.
My blood pressure spiked again. I closed the lappy and went home. I had some other projects I wanted to do, more digital photography, namely going to the tops of parking structures and taking pictures looking down over the city. It's a little something I like to do. I've hit up most of the structures in Long Beach, but there was one that I still had my eye on.
Biking some of the day's stress out seemed like a good idea at that time, and after dropping off my printing projects and lap-top, I headed out on my bike to the structure. I should have noticed that there wasn't an easy opening on the street level. Maybe I did notice, but I didn't register the importance. As I rode up I noticed an elevator on Level 2. I went inside and pressed the "Roof" button. Nothing happened. I thought that was weird, and started out on my bike going up the spiraling driveway. I was met three-quarters of the way up by the fuzz.
Building security had been on me, apparently, from the moment I brought my beach cruiser into the building. What I took to be a parking structure was actually the parking lot of the otherwise tightly guarded Southern California Edison building, the supplier of electricity out here. They told me in no uncertain terms that I was trespassing and had to leave immediately. I shook my head and turned to leave.
When I got to the bottom of the driveway another security guy was waiting and stopped me to collect my information. I momentarily thought about bull-dozing him with my bike and speeding away. As I approached the trying to block me, the guy I contemplated running over, I remembered that this is in a half-mile semi-circle around my house, and I'm a bike riding character in this neighborhood, and I'm too old to have the cops coming after me for trespassing and assault.
The guy took my name and address, didn't really buy my story ("I like to go to the tops of structures and take pictures..."), and told me never to return.
No...problem.
Feeling like I'd been thwarted all over today, with a sore hip and sliced thumb, with my name and address having been added to the list possible So. Cal. Edison evil-doers, I decided the one thing that would be hard to screw my day up would be my little friends Beer and Whiskey. I rode around angry for a few minutes before deciding to visit the Auld Dubliner, an Irish pub in the vicinity, hoping to find a friendly ear to bitch to over the course of a shot and a beer.
I ordered some fancy beer (it came in a bulby glass with a stem--with a stem!--another thing that has been getting on my nerves)(can't a brother get a regular pint?) and a shot of Jameson. I had a quick talk woth the bar-keep, who did offer a friendly disposition for my stories from my trying day. When he offered a second shot or beer I said no thanks and asked for my check.
It was $16.02.
Excuse me? It was 2 in the goddamned afternoon! I looked at the paper bill and saw that I was only charged for one been and one shot.
As I made it to my bike I looked over my shoulder for a phantom to come out from the shadows just to kick me in the balls.
Being a lightweight now, generally, when I got home I was too buzzed to work on that post I'd wanted to work on earlier, and ended up taking a nap. I slept for a while and fell behind on what I wanted to do for dinner.
Overall, my days are never this hard. I've also gotten better at dealing with stress, even in the interim. I don't let things get to me like they did on that day. To prove it, I guess, I did actually get the foggy-street-metaphor post finished that "day", started right before midnight turned the day to Thursday.
I showed that day: World-7 (car; coffee; fall; stapler; internet; trespassing; drinks), Me-1 (nice little blog post).
All in all, I've been a glass half-full kind of guy for the past few years, only to see the stress from work eroding that goodwill for the world. This day specifically made me realize that that half-empty negative-jerk Pat might be returning. That realization helped me even on the day itself. My car made it where it needed to go with no tickets; the coffee was great and I supported a local roaster; I did get a few usable staples to work; I wasn't actually arrested at the power station; and I should realize the riviera nature of the exact 'hood where the Auld Dubliner lives yields only tourist prices. The outcome: some trials, but a nice piece of written art was accomplished, so I do indeed win the day.
Keep plugging away, baby! It'll turn out right when you make it so.
When you make it so...
Friday, January 20, 2012
Riviera Living
Originating during the middle ages as a term about a pleasant coastal vacation area on the Mediterranean, the term riviera now generally refers to any coastal areas popular with tourists.
The most famous riviera setting nowadays, at least in the imaginations of Caucasian Americans, is the French Rivera, or as they call it, Cote d'Azur (Blue Coast). Monaco, a sovereign principality with its famous capital Monte Carlo, and Nice, lie in close proximity to each other on the Riviera, along with Cannes and Saint Tropez (which many Americans would recognize under the pronunciation san tro-pay).
Everyday I get down to the sand, everyday I ride my bicycle to the other side of town, everyday I get to bask in the sun and smell the salt water from my stoop I convince myself a little bit more:
I live in a riviera town.
We've got nearly constant sun during the days; nearly constant warm weather; palm trees everywhere; plenty of tourists; even an Indy Car Grand Prix race on our palm tree lined streets. What else do we need? Separate identity from the LA-megopolis: check. Insular little art-deco riddled neighborhoods: check...
One night as Corrie and I walked to the beach we started talking about the costs of living on a riviera, like it was a tangible thing outside our own heads. We weren't discussing financial costs, since coastal areas are pretty well established, especially in California, and especially in los Diez Sur.
We may be in very close proximity to the ocean, but rare is the day you may want to take a dip...unless it's hot, you've had some libations, and you're me. Then it's rather cool and novel that the ocean's right there.
We have a thriving port...and by "thriving" I mean $140 billion worth of merchandise comes through it annually, which means our blue-meeting-blue horizon is beset by tankers full of cargo even when it's dark out. Seriously 24/7 is the line of tankers into our port.
We also have a thriving petroleum-based industry. Maybe this is one cost that's more an American addition to a riviera concept. We also do aviation pretty well here, but that's a tad bit farther from the sand and diving pelicans.
I've been to the French Riviera. We spent a short time in Genoa, the capital of Liguria on the Italian counterpart, then sped through Monte Carlo with a head full of hash and spent a relaxing three nights on the stony beaches of Nice.
This...this is our little riviera, our Brooklyn-meets-Pismo-Beach...our little slice of SoCal paradise...paradise that has days that waver between the odor of bilge water and that of refinery...
This picture summarizes "Riviera Living" for me. It's a picture of me and my father-in-law taken on the day before Thanksgiving:
During that conversation with Corrie on that night's beach walk, I, with a laugh, asked how we came to live in such a place, and if we deserved it.
Her response summarized how we've been feeling, or how we always felt maybe: we've done some crazy things, like moving to New York without jobs or a place to live, then moving to Texas in a similar spot. We've lived in as many places as some people visit in their entire lives. We finally found a place that is kind of the ideal place for us: beautiful weather; beach close by; urban, but with good pedestrian rhythm; everything (besides work) is within walking distance; not so sanitized that reality is missing (mixed groupings of socio-economic backgrounds and drug-addiction levels).
This neighborhood isn't for everybody, but it is for us, and we spent a while looking for it, and by that I mean it took a while learning what we wanted from our living environment.
That's the kind of nerds we are: we describe it as "wanting a specific kind of living environment".
To the question of whether we deserve it or not...well, shit, we went and made something happen and we didn't trample anybody doing it. If that's not the manifestation of deserving something, then I'm not sure I understand the question, or even the importance of the sentiment.
The most famous riviera setting nowadays, at least in the imaginations of Caucasian Americans, is the French Rivera, or as they call it, Cote d'Azur (Blue Coast). Monaco, a sovereign principality with its famous capital Monte Carlo, and Nice, lie in close proximity to each other on the Riviera, along with Cannes and Saint Tropez (which many Americans would recognize under the pronunciation san tro-pay).
Everyday I get down to the sand, everyday I ride my bicycle to the other side of town, everyday I get to bask in the sun and smell the salt water from my stoop I convince myself a little bit more:
I live in a riviera town.
We've got nearly constant sun during the days; nearly constant warm weather; palm trees everywhere; plenty of tourists; even an Indy Car Grand Prix race on our palm tree lined streets. What else do we need? Separate identity from the LA-megopolis: check. Insular little art-deco riddled neighborhoods: check...
One night as Corrie and I walked to the beach we started talking about the costs of living on a riviera, like it was a tangible thing outside our own heads. We weren't discussing financial costs, since coastal areas are pretty well established, especially in California, and especially in los Diez Sur.
We may be in very close proximity to the ocean, but rare is the day you may want to take a dip...unless it's hot, you've had some libations, and you're me. Then it's rather cool and novel that the ocean's right there.
We have a thriving port...and by "thriving" I mean $140 billion worth of merchandise comes through it annually, which means our blue-meeting-blue horizon is beset by tankers full of cargo even when it's dark out. Seriously 24/7 is the line of tankers into our port.
We also have a thriving petroleum-based industry. Maybe this is one cost that's more an American addition to a riviera concept. We also do aviation pretty well here, but that's a tad bit farther from the sand and diving pelicans.
I've been to the French Riviera. We spent a short time in Genoa, the capital of Liguria on the Italian counterpart, then sped through Monte Carlo with a head full of hash and spent a relaxing three nights on the stony beaches of Nice.
This...this is our little riviera, our Brooklyn-meets-Pismo-Beach...our little slice of SoCal paradise...paradise that has days that waver between the odor of bilge water and that of refinery...
This picture summarizes "Riviera Living" for me. It's a picture of me and my father-in-law taken on the day before Thanksgiving:
During that conversation with Corrie on that night's beach walk, I, with a laugh, asked how we came to live in such a place, and if we deserved it.
Her response summarized how we've been feeling, or how we always felt maybe: we've done some crazy things, like moving to New York without jobs or a place to live, then moving to Texas in a similar spot. We've lived in as many places as some people visit in their entire lives. We finally found a place that is kind of the ideal place for us: beautiful weather; beach close by; urban, but with good pedestrian rhythm; everything (besides work) is within walking distance; not so sanitized that reality is missing (mixed groupings of socio-economic backgrounds and drug-addiction levels).
This neighborhood isn't for everybody, but it is for us, and we spent a while looking for it, and by that I mean it took a while learning what we wanted from our living environment.
That's the kind of nerds we are: we describe it as "wanting a specific kind of living environment".
To the question of whether we deserve it or not...well, shit, we went and made something happen and we didn't trample anybody doing it. If that's not the manifestation of deserving something, then I'm not sure I understand the question, or even the importance of the sentiment.
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Out of Context
Politicians and athletes and other folks who give interviews tend to be concerned with context, or, more specifically, the context in which their words will appear and how it will make them appear.
It's rather easy to take almost any speech by people in the public eye and chop it up and twist it and make it sound ridiculous. This is the ultimate in context destruction. Thankfully all we really have to deal with on grand terms in political life here is misrepresentation of facts and outright lying, whereas total context destruction in making opponents appear foolish is not considered appropriate.
Context is also the basis for feminist epistemology, but that's a fruit for another snack.
This morsel is about the history of a line taken out of its context and my own personal censorship and editing philosophy. The line in question is one I wrote for a previous piece.
At first the sentence was not a sentence, rather it was a minor treatise in the middle of a separate discussion. I found myself getting a little out of hand right in the middle. I slowly edited it down to a paragraph.
The sentiment still seemed too heavy handed for the piece it inhabited, as well as bordering on cruel. I've never used this medium to personally attack people, and I wasn't going to start there, especially with persons in my family. I trimmed the paragraph until it got nice and small and succinct.
Still not satisfied, I finally was able to pare it down to the brass kernel. It wasn't even that important...just important enough to be included in the discussion, but not dwelled upon or even elaborated upon.
The post was Quinine and Pine, my discussion of alcohol, learning from your DNA, and personal preferences in reference to alcohol. The sentence, buried near the end and easily skimmed over was:
"I noticed that nobody would drink my gin."
Even in the context of the piece itself the context of who the particular "nobody" is is vague.
Deliberately so. What eventually turned into that sentence started off as a diatribe/treatise on the awkwardness of having roommates after having been living alone for nearly six years and having been married for a third of that time.
Really, the theme of that first rant that got cut into a long paragraph, was the amplification of that awkwardness by the amount of alcohol that was being consumed. Being transported back to an age when you'd write your name on food in the fridge is almost what it felt like, only here the commodity wasn't food.
What's not important or essential to the "Quinine and Pine" piece is the context of the line I've highlighted in this piece: one of the reasons that gin and tonic became an important drink for me in the near recent past is simply because it would be there. The gin would be left alone. Rum, whiskey, tequila, Lone Star, wine...if these were open they were seen as communal and wouldn't last more than a day or two. Being present was enough for Lone Star; I admit I drank my share of Lone Star that I didn't purchase, but I "replaced" plenty as well. Needless to say this caused strife when meager earnings are spent on alcohol that wasn't getting consumed by the original "collector" of that liquor.
As the editing of the context of a rant about alcoholism continued, I realized that I was still angry at aspects of the awkwardness, and that being cruel in the piece was not what the piece was about, and frankly that wasn't an aspect I wanted from this collection of pieces in total.
There was a smattering of unpleasantness involved in the house before we left for an apartment, and I never wanted to torch the ground as we left. I still care for everybody involved.
So, in a strange irony considering the theme of this piece being "context", it's the context of the line from "Quinine and Pine" that itself got excised, and was specifically and deliberately left out after a solid chunk of editing time. It was specifically not important to that piece.
In a different irony--or is it the same?--that context itself is specifically at the heart of this piece.
An entire brief history lived, edited because the context relevancy, and later revisited becasue of the opposite context relevancy.
Only in los Diez Sur?
It's rather easy to take almost any speech by people in the public eye and chop it up and twist it and make it sound ridiculous. This is the ultimate in context destruction. Thankfully all we really have to deal with on grand terms in political life here is misrepresentation of facts and outright lying, whereas total context destruction in making opponents appear foolish is not considered appropriate.
Context is also the basis for feminist epistemology, but that's a fruit for another snack.
This morsel is about the history of a line taken out of its context and my own personal censorship and editing philosophy. The line in question is one I wrote for a previous piece.
At first the sentence was not a sentence, rather it was a minor treatise in the middle of a separate discussion. I found myself getting a little out of hand right in the middle. I slowly edited it down to a paragraph.
The sentiment still seemed too heavy handed for the piece it inhabited, as well as bordering on cruel. I've never used this medium to personally attack people, and I wasn't going to start there, especially with persons in my family. I trimmed the paragraph until it got nice and small and succinct.
Still not satisfied, I finally was able to pare it down to the brass kernel. It wasn't even that important...just important enough to be included in the discussion, but not dwelled upon or even elaborated upon.
The post was Quinine and Pine, my discussion of alcohol, learning from your DNA, and personal preferences in reference to alcohol. The sentence, buried near the end and easily skimmed over was:
"I noticed that nobody would drink my gin."
Even in the context of the piece itself the context of who the particular "nobody" is is vague.
Deliberately so. What eventually turned into that sentence started off as a diatribe/treatise on the awkwardness of having roommates after having been living alone for nearly six years and having been married for a third of that time.
Really, the theme of that first rant that got cut into a long paragraph, was the amplification of that awkwardness by the amount of alcohol that was being consumed. Being transported back to an age when you'd write your name on food in the fridge is almost what it felt like, only here the commodity wasn't food.
What's not important or essential to the "Quinine and Pine" piece is the context of the line I've highlighted in this piece: one of the reasons that gin and tonic became an important drink for me in the near recent past is simply because it would be there. The gin would be left alone. Rum, whiskey, tequila, Lone Star, wine...if these were open they were seen as communal and wouldn't last more than a day or two. Being present was enough for Lone Star; I admit I drank my share of Lone Star that I didn't purchase, but I "replaced" plenty as well. Needless to say this caused strife when meager earnings are spent on alcohol that wasn't getting consumed by the original "collector" of that liquor.
As the editing of the context of a rant about alcoholism continued, I realized that I was still angry at aspects of the awkwardness, and that being cruel in the piece was not what the piece was about, and frankly that wasn't an aspect I wanted from this collection of pieces in total.
There was a smattering of unpleasantness involved in the house before we left for an apartment, and I never wanted to torch the ground as we left. I still care for everybody involved.
So, in a strange irony considering the theme of this piece being "context", it's the context of the line from "Quinine and Pine" that itself got excised, and was specifically and deliberately left out after a solid chunk of editing time. It was specifically not important to that piece.
In a different irony--or is it the same?--that context itself is specifically at the heart of this piece.
An entire brief history lived, edited because the context relevancy, and later revisited becasue of the opposite context relevancy.
Only in los Diez Sur?
Thursday, January 12, 2012
I Couldn't Stop Myself
This post is just to announce the fact that I couldn't resist keeping the little ideas from being posted.
In this new year I had decided to focus on longer and more involved posts. It turns out that I couldn't ignore the daily ramblings that would make up the bulk of the posts of this blog of the past.
So I started a second blog, specifically for the tiny, rambling minutiae that make up the majority of my posts.
I call it the Observatory of the Subconscious, because I'm a pompous ass. I even have a link on the side of this forum for it.
Corrie asked me why I didn't start a second site for the longer-form posts that I'm putting up on los Diez Sur. My only response was...because.
I'm difficult like that, I guess.
In this new year I had decided to focus on longer and more involved posts. It turns out that I couldn't ignore the daily ramblings that would make up the bulk of the posts of this blog of the past.
So I started a second blog, specifically for the tiny, rambling minutiae that make up the majority of my posts.
I call it the Observatory of the Subconscious, because I'm a pompous ass. I even have a link on the side of this forum for it.
Corrie asked me why I didn't start a second site for the longer-form posts that I'm putting up on los Diez Sur. My only response was...because.
I'm difficult like that, I guess.
Monday, January 9, 2012
Maintaining on the Queen Mary
The tickets were freshly printed on our wobbly printer and safely folded twice and jammed into my back pocket with my ID fold. That way I could feel secure that I still had them in my possession when I felt them rub on my ass with every step I took.
In a bit of a rush, we headed to a local spot where I had been used as an idea man for the owner's editing of his establishment's offered fare. Once an appropriately twisted state of consciousness had been attained, we lit out for the two mile trek over to the permanently moored erstwhile luxury liner.
We were heading to the thee-ayter.
It was part of the local university's program, a play about a scientist who through his own arrogance wound up accidently killing himself by way of radiation poisoning. It took just nine days for him to die. Gnarly. These were the facts I knew before boarding the ship and feeling a little out of place.
In New York so many people feel out of place that it feels like home, but in Austin at the college age bars someone like me feels really wrong...my entire world view and life experience list had me saying things like, "What's with all these dorks and their hair?"
It was the same on this old vessel. Besides the dorks from the university in attendance, you could feel strange vibes the moment you stepped on board. The ship had been painted to look like a merchant ship during WWII just so they could run secret supply missions. Or something...but it had been painted for subterfuge.
But there I was, in a cramped theater in the bow of a seventy-year-old vessel, appropriately twisted, and my brain nearly overwhelmed with the idea that an extremely smart man could have killed himself through trying to show off. Deadly bravado of the worst kind, since he also affected other folks.
The show started. The scene of the macho bravado and the accident itself shrouded behind a sheet of plastic. Neat, I thought.
Memory as a layer...the true events of history are separated from our experience by being in a different immediacy.
Then the accident, and soon after the layer of plastic is removed. Something begins to set in for me...the permanency of arrogance in dangerous situations. I think quickly to our bed fire in 2004 or me telling that stupid Bed-Stuy kid "You don't have a gun" when he was demanding money and had his hand in black bodega bag and pointed at my head.
In the theater my attention returned to the main actor addressing the crowd directly, castigating himself. The scene progressed and my neck started to sweat.
I had to start stretching my neck and found myself breathing out of my mouth. My scalp started to sweat, and then crawl, and then I was on to deep breaths.
Not good, Patrick...not...good.
I took whatever jacket thing I had on off quickly as the show dissolved from my world. I had to adjust how I was sitting, which had been back and relaxed. I rolled forward and placed my elbows on my knees. I think I was quietly hyperventilating.
If someone had been sitting in front of me my chin would have been on their head.
My mouth started to water while my stomach churned. I was wiping my profusely sweating brow and eyeing the theater's exit door.
The goddamn thing was behind the protruding stage. It was about here that I fully regained consciousness of the performance being held all around me.
We were sitting in the second row, and I remember thinking I could probably leap over the empty chair in front of me and bolt for the door if I needed to.
Just maintain, dammit!
For what was probably only five or six minutes of other people's real time, that patch of my life was focused on simply maintaining. "Minutes" is not a word I would use to describe that patch. More like a few hundred "hold-your-shit-togethers".
It reminded me of summer evenings past where myself and my partner in crime, after ingesting various things by various means, would jabber endlessly at the young people of Roseville, and occasionally get twinges that could interrupt stories in mid-sentence.
Once the show got to intermission after an over one-hundred-minute first act (no fucking joke), I had a laugh and told Corrie, "Wow. For a few a minutes there I had a hard time maintaining."
Her response was the same heard countless times by heads who, after having a rough time on a psychedelic or after having been in some other twisted state, tried explaining those rough moments to squares (a breed of folk to which Corrie does not belong):
"Rilly? Crazy."
Not really. Just the way it goes sometimes.
In a bit of a rush, we headed to a local spot where I had been used as an idea man for the owner's editing of his establishment's offered fare. Once an appropriately twisted state of consciousness had been attained, we lit out for the two mile trek over to the permanently moored erstwhile luxury liner.
We were heading to the thee-ayter.
It was part of the local university's program, a play about a scientist who through his own arrogance wound up accidently killing himself by way of radiation poisoning. It took just nine days for him to die. Gnarly. These were the facts I knew before boarding the ship and feeling a little out of place.
In New York so many people feel out of place that it feels like home, but in Austin at the college age bars someone like me feels really wrong...my entire world view and life experience list had me saying things like, "What's with all these dorks and their hair?"
It was the same on this old vessel. Besides the dorks from the university in attendance, you could feel strange vibes the moment you stepped on board. The ship had been painted to look like a merchant ship during WWII just so they could run secret supply missions. Or something...but it had been painted for subterfuge.
But there I was, in a cramped theater in the bow of a seventy-year-old vessel, appropriately twisted, and my brain nearly overwhelmed with the idea that an extremely smart man could have killed himself through trying to show off. Deadly bravado of the worst kind, since he also affected other folks.
The show started. The scene of the macho bravado and the accident itself shrouded behind a sheet of plastic. Neat, I thought.
Memory as a layer...the true events of history are separated from our experience by being in a different immediacy.
Then the accident, and soon after the layer of plastic is removed. Something begins to set in for me...the permanency of arrogance in dangerous situations. I think quickly to our bed fire in 2004 or me telling that stupid Bed-Stuy kid "You don't have a gun" when he was demanding money and had his hand in black bodega bag and pointed at my head.
In the theater my attention returned to the main actor addressing the crowd directly, castigating himself. The scene progressed and my neck started to sweat.
I had to start stretching my neck and found myself breathing out of my mouth. My scalp started to sweat, and then crawl, and then I was on to deep breaths.
Not good, Patrick...not...good.
I took whatever jacket thing I had on off quickly as the show dissolved from my world. I had to adjust how I was sitting, which had been back and relaxed. I rolled forward and placed my elbows on my knees. I think I was quietly hyperventilating.
If someone had been sitting in front of me my chin would have been on their head.
My mouth started to water while my stomach churned. I was wiping my profusely sweating brow and eyeing the theater's exit door.
The goddamn thing was behind the protruding stage. It was about here that I fully regained consciousness of the performance being held all around me.
We were sitting in the second row, and I remember thinking I could probably leap over the empty chair in front of me and bolt for the door if I needed to.
Just maintain, dammit!
For what was probably only five or six minutes of other people's real time, that patch of my life was focused on simply maintaining. "Minutes" is not a word I would use to describe that patch. More like a few hundred "hold-your-shit-togethers".
It reminded me of summer evenings past where myself and my partner in crime, after ingesting various things by various means, would jabber endlessly at the young people of Roseville, and occasionally get twinges that could interrupt stories in mid-sentence.
Once the show got to intermission after an over one-hundred-minute first act (no fucking joke), I had a laugh and told Corrie, "Wow. For a few a minutes there I had a hard time maintaining."
Her response was the same heard countless times by heads who, after having a rough time on a psychedelic or after having been in some other twisted state, tried explaining those rough moments to squares (a breed of folk to which Corrie does not belong):
"Rilly? Crazy."
Not really. Just the way it goes sometimes.
Saturday, January 7, 2012
Modern Magic
You've got a metal, specifically silver. You've got a halogen, specifically one of the elements on the periodic table that starts with fluorine and moves down that specific row--chlorine, bromine, iodine, and two other less common elements. Silver and a halogen, and we'll call it a silver halide. When a silver halide molecule is struck with a packet of energy, say, a photon, it has the unique property that one of it's electrons gets bumped into a different orbit. This different level of electron orbit causes the silver halide to be attracted to a silver ion, a positively or negatively charged atom of silver, and a silver "metallic spec" is created when the juiced silver halide combines with the silver ion.
That's a lot of scientific talk. To sum it up: one molecule is hit by a photon (light particle), it then becomes attracted to a charged atom of metal, and the meeting of the two produce what's called a metallic spec, an effect to the silver halide's crystalline structure.
Switching gears, imagine an ice-cube tray that's painted in an alternating pattern of green, red, and blue, and imagine if you were to throw green, red, and blue marbles at the ice cube tray and also that the marbles would only land in their associated color's slot. Make sense? A red marble can only go into a red slot, green to green and blue to blue.
The ice-cube tray is more mechanical than magical, while the silver halide is scientifically magical.
This modern magic of which I speak is simply image capture--photography.
When photography was in its infancy it was a very intriguing time to be involved in heady subjects. The line between "scientific" and "magical" was as blurry as a poorly focused lens. It seems silly now to think of almost anything as magical...maybe I'm just a cynic, or a realist, or a "science guy" who believes that the large portion of experiencable things can be explained through study and tests and equations and expressions.
But try to imagine what the discovery of photography would have sounded like to you the first time someone would have tried to explain it. In essence you mix metal and light and get an image, an image of whatever the metal was facing.
How absolutely fascinating. This is something we folks living in the second decade of the twenty-first century take for granted. We can go to any grocery store or drug store and get disposable apparatuses that will mix metal and light and give you images.
Metal and light, man!
One of my favorite novels, if not my favorite novel ever, Against the Day, has this time period, the period of the blending of science and magic and psychology and mathematics, as its main time frame. Another thing from earlier in my life covered this same basic time span, with it's ever increasing search for the Next Big Thing, a television show called The Adventures of Briscoe County Jr.
Anything's possible if you can mix metal and light and get images.
The first actual permanent photograph was made by a French guy using not silver halides, but rather bitumen, an asphalt like material. Whatever photosensitive material you use, the act of taking an exposed surface and turning the image from latent (ie invisible) to permanent (the picture of the captured image) is to wash the unexposed light sensitive material away from the exposed material. With that first picture on the bitumen the French guy used linseed oil.
When photography as we recognize it today really got going was when they discovered the "wash", hyposulfite, a chemical that could fix the latent image (by forcing all of those tiny metallic specs to solidify into silver metal) and then wash off all residual silver halide crystals and keep the thing from getting ruined by overexposure.
Color photography on light sensitive film is basically the same, but with different elements mixed into the gelatin bonding agent that fixes the silver halide crystals to the paper/film. They also tend to be at different depths, different layers on the film paper, to represent the different levels of energy, and thus the penetrating ability, of the light. Higher energy, blue light, is under the lower energy layers (red and green).
Switching gears, let's look again at that color coded ice-cube tray. That's essentially how all digital camera sensors work. There are many more green slots than red or blue, which are at the extremes of the visible light spectrum, and how the photons are turned into images, how each picture element, or pixel, is digitized into an image is what literally separates the different companies. It's really how well does a camera guess at the actual image, since it can't get the full spectrum that silver halides suspended in a substrate of gelatin can.
In fact, sadly or ironically, our eye works more like a digital camera; our retinas with those rods and cones are closer in function to that color coded ice-cube tray.
A century ago taking pictures was still novel and amazing. It wasn't brand new anymore, but it was available to everyone just yet. Today, plenty of people in this country carry a camera in their pocket and take it for granted, retrieving it to snap a picture of something funny or silly or endearing or maddening. That that camera can also contact other people and allow the holder to speak with, or simply write to instantly, another person anywhere on this planet is another wonder that's largely taken for granted.
If you get a chance, check out The Light Farm. They're not so much a company as a clearing house for data on making your own silver halide gelatin and putting it onto glass plates. They've recreated the dawn of the amateur photographer. If anything, I'd suggest looking at some of their gallery links. Old timey, for certain.
Also, Hercules Florence. Besides having a very cool name, he is the Leibniz to Herschel's Newton. He independently discovered the negative image method that is still used today and even chose the word photographie for the same reasons Herschel chose virtually the same word (from the Greek photo meaning "light" and graphie meaning "to write"). He just had the misfortune to be living in Brazil at the time of his discovery and has been largely ignored. He happened to be before Herschel but after the French bitumen guy, Niepce.
And, for full collections of my blatherings on the topic of picturing, see:
Photographic Vignetting
Camera Follies
Holga Realizations
The Light Field Camera
That's a lot of scientific talk. To sum it up: one molecule is hit by a photon (light particle), it then becomes attracted to a charged atom of metal, and the meeting of the two produce what's called a metallic spec, an effect to the silver halide's crystalline structure.
Switching gears, imagine an ice-cube tray that's painted in an alternating pattern of green, red, and blue, and imagine if you were to throw green, red, and blue marbles at the ice cube tray and also that the marbles would only land in their associated color's slot. Make sense? A red marble can only go into a red slot, green to green and blue to blue.
The ice-cube tray is more mechanical than magical, while the silver halide is scientifically magical.
This modern magic of which I speak is simply image capture--photography.
When photography was in its infancy it was a very intriguing time to be involved in heady subjects. The line between "scientific" and "magical" was as blurry as a poorly focused lens. It seems silly now to think of almost anything as magical...maybe I'm just a cynic, or a realist, or a "science guy" who believes that the large portion of experiencable things can be explained through study and tests and equations and expressions.
But try to imagine what the discovery of photography would have sounded like to you the first time someone would have tried to explain it. In essence you mix metal and light and get an image, an image of whatever the metal was facing.
How absolutely fascinating. This is something we folks living in the second decade of the twenty-first century take for granted. We can go to any grocery store or drug store and get disposable apparatuses that will mix metal and light and give you images.
Metal and light, man!
One of my favorite novels, if not my favorite novel ever, Against the Day, has this time period, the period of the blending of science and magic and psychology and mathematics, as its main time frame. Another thing from earlier in my life covered this same basic time span, with it's ever increasing search for the Next Big Thing, a television show called The Adventures of Briscoe County Jr.
Anything's possible if you can mix metal and light and get images.
The first actual permanent photograph was made by a French guy using not silver halides, but rather bitumen, an asphalt like material. Whatever photosensitive material you use, the act of taking an exposed surface and turning the image from latent (ie invisible) to permanent (the picture of the captured image) is to wash the unexposed light sensitive material away from the exposed material. With that first picture on the bitumen the French guy used linseed oil.
When photography as we recognize it today really got going was when they discovered the "wash", hyposulfite, a chemical that could fix the latent image (by forcing all of those tiny metallic specs to solidify into silver metal) and then wash off all residual silver halide crystals and keep the thing from getting ruined by overexposure.
Color photography on light sensitive film is basically the same, but with different elements mixed into the gelatin bonding agent that fixes the silver halide crystals to the paper/film. They also tend to be at different depths, different layers on the film paper, to represent the different levels of energy, and thus the penetrating ability, of the light. Higher energy, blue light, is under the lower energy layers (red and green).
Switching gears, let's look again at that color coded ice-cube tray. That's essentially how all digital camera sensors work. There are many more green slots than red or blue, which are at the extremes of the visible light spectrum, and how the photons are turned into images, how each picture element, or pixel, is digitized into an image is what literally separates the different companies. It's really how well does a camera guess at the actual image, since it can't get the full spectrum that silver halides suspended in a substrate of gelatin can.
In fact, sadly or ironically, our eye works more like a digital camera; our retinas with those rods and cones are closer in function to that color coded ice-cube tray.
A century ago taking pictures was still novel and amazing. It wasn't brand new anymore, but it was available to everyone just yet. Today, plenty of people in this country carry a camera in their pocket and take it for granted, retrieving it to snap a picture of something funny or silly or endearing or maddening. That that camera can also contact other people and allow the holder to speak with, or simply write to instantly, another person anywhere on this planet is another wonder that's largely taken for granted.
If you get a chance, check out The Light Farm. They're not so much a company as a clearing house for data on making your own silver halide gelatin and putting it onto glass plates. They've recreated the dawn of the amateur photographer. If anything, I'd suggest looking at some of their gallery links. Old timey, for certain.
Also, Hercules Florence. Besides having a very cool name, he is the Leibniz to Herschel's Newton. He independently discovered the negative image method that is still used today and even chose the word photographie for the same reasons Herschel chose virtually the same word (from the Greek photo meaning "light" and graphie meaning "to write"). He just had the misfortune to be living in Brazil at the time of his discovery and has been largely ignored. He happened to be before Herschel but after the French bitumen guy, Niepce.
And, for full collections of my blatherings on the topic of picturing, see:
Photographic Vignetting
Camera Follies
Holga Realizations
The Light Field Camera
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
Is the Future a Foggy Street?
The real question might be "Is there such a thing as the future?" Relativity is a cool brain bend of a thing. The equations that have been tested and proved as "accurate" for our universe don't have any problems with the "past" and the "future" all happening simultaneously with what we observe as the "present". That the "present" is a thing that is observable is what life is, the mystery of it all anyway, why we observe the flow of life in one direction. The fact the the "present" is relative only to the person experiencing it is the first step to seeing that it's all weird and the connections are deeper and more dimensional than we conceived.
The metaphor of the future and a foggy street--one direction ahead with a limited visibility, the direction behind's visibility being clear in the immediacy but blurrier and blurrier as you get farther away, was floating around my head on January 1st, 2012.
I was somehow scheduled to be off work in the hour before our California clock was to ring in the New Year. I raced home, snatched up Corrie and we went to a local dive to obtain some libations in a social setting.
Afterwards we decided to enjoy the fog which had descended the previous evening and only lasted those two nights. But that second night, being New Year's Eve/Day, inspired us to take a walk to the beach.
Once there we traveled out onto a man-made breaker that separates a water parking lot and the sandy beach proper. The paved over breaker almost reaches one of our few oil-islands. Then very end wasn't visible until you were almost on top of it.
It was out on this paved breaker that I was thinking about metaphors.
Is the future a foggy street? Can you see pretty clearly what the immediate future will be, but down the way, it's a little murky?
That seems like a reasonable conclusion, like a well formed metaphor, practically perfect in an annoying way.
Can that metaphor work if we accept the conceit from physics that the "present" is just our observation of the Ganzebilde, the totality of all that was, is, and will be, having "occurred" simultaneously and now exists like a loaf of bread.
And how does this effect our human notions of free will?
Now, I'm no determinist, in fact, I spent a few solid months trying to work out a consistent existentionalist ethics scheme, but it almost seems like if "time" is our observation of the Ganzebilde, and that that physics is correct, then it almost has to follow that everything we'll do in our life has already been done by us.
Like I said, I'm no determinist, and I think that it's pretty obvious that one would have to believe in free will to be inspired to do Great Things. It makes sense that the people who did Great Things in history (or are doing them right "now" in their own time, if all "time" is happening simultaneously) would have to have been inspired to do those Great Things, and that this inspiration would have to come from their belief that they could do things.
None of this diminishes the foggy street metaphor. Despite whatever current scientific dogma controls the parameters of the discussion, the experience of the molecular ocean of deoxyribonucleic acid-controlled matter is still a murky one-dimensional thing.
"Time" goes "forward". As of now, we can only effect our own bubble relative to other bubbles, and even then, it's not more than a few milliseconds. The "future" is certainly a foggy street.
The metaphor of the future and a foggy street--one direction ahead with a limited visibility, the direction behind's visibility being clear in the immediacy but blurrier and blurrier as you get farther away, was floating around my head on January 1st, 2012.
I was somehow scheduled to be off work in the hour before our California clock was to ring in the New Year. I raced home, snatched up Corrie and we went to a local dive to obtain some libations in a social setting.
Afterwards we decided to enjoy the fog which had descended the previous evening and only lasted those two nights. But that second night, being New Year's Eve/Day, inspired us to take a walk to the beach.
Once there we traveled out onto a man-made breaker that separates a water parking lot and the sandy beach proper. The paved over breaker almost reaches one of our few oil-islands. Then very end wasn't visible until you were almost on top of it.
It was out on this paved breaker that I was thinking about metaphors.
Is the future a foggy street? Can you see pretty clearly what the immediate future will be, but down the way, it's a little murky?
That seems like a reasonable conclusion, like a well formed metaphor, practically perfect in an annoying way.
Can that metaphor work if we accept the conceit from physics that the "present" is just our observation of the Ganzebilde, the totality of all that was, is, and will be, having "occurred" simultaneously and now exists like a loaf of bread.
And how does this effect our human notions of free will?
Now, I'm no determinist, in fact, I spent a few solid months trying to work out a consistent existentionalist ethics scheme, but it almost seems like if "time" is our observation of the Ganzebilde, and that that physics is correct, then it almost has to follow that everything we'll do in our life has already been done by us.
Like I said, I'm no determinist, and I think that it's pretty obvious that one would have to believe in free will to be inspired to do Great Things. It makes sense that the people who did Great Things in history (or are doing them right "now" in their own time, if all "time" is happening simultaneously) would have to have been inspired to do those Great Things, and that this inspiration would have to come from their belief that they could do things.
None of this diminishes the foggy street metaphor. Despite whatever current scientific dogma controls the parameters of the discussion, the experience of the molecular ocean of deoxyribonucleic acid-controlled matter is still a murky one-dimensional thing.
"Time" goes "forward". As of now, we can only effect our own bubble relative to other bubbles, and even then, it's not more than a few milliseconds. The "future" is certainly a foggy street.
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
Happy 2012 and a New Direction
Welcoming you, my fair readers, to 2012 I am. Writing like Yoda deliberately I am not. Well, that sentence I was. I've changed the name of this blog for the fourth time to kick off the fourth calendar year that I've been working on this program.
In my own brain I tend to break this blog up easily into rigid temporal and spatial compartments, and the name of the blog, the title that appears at the very top of the posts, has tried to reflect that. I hope you understand how serious I take every little change to the appearance of this presentation, this presentation of my brain's rather constant flow of thoughts.
The first compartment is 2009 and Brooklyn. That's where I started this whole endeavor, and the strain/wonderment of weary caliboy living Back East was the observatory's view. The second compartment was 2010 and Austin. I know we moved to Texas right as 2009 ended, and didn't leave until April of 2011, but for me 2010 will always be my Texas year, with cynical caliboy giving the what? eye to that strange breed of American that is the Texan. The third compartment was 2011 and Long Beach. This was our triumphant return to California, finally Making it Home for all intents and purposes, but there was still things to interest me (and us--you--my fair readers...at least that's my idea), there was still wild and weird history and visceral experiences to be had.
2009, Brooklyn, 223 posts. 2010, Austin, 217 posts. 2011, Long Beach, 272 posts.
Austin caught up to Brooklyn in number of posts for the very same reason that Long Beach had so many more than both predecessors: my monthly quota. In my preparations to train myself to write often for my fiction in 2011, I inadvertently bumped up my number of Texas posts (there are only 132 posts from 2010 alone) and created a whole lot of content from the sunny Left Coast.
My aim in 2012 is to keep posting, but not with the focus on sheer quantity of posts, like 2011. Rather, as I spend time working on my stories, I have some ideas for posts that I'd like to focus a little more attention on, possibly turning them into something more.
2012 is about quality over quantity. I'm resisting the urge to write about the movie Corrie and I watched the other night that I really enjoyed (The King's Speech). I'm avoiding the post about a crazy billboard or cool sidewalk crack pattern I took a picture of. These posts I want to coddle and nurture.
There may be less of them, but they should be of a higher stock. That's probably just my normal sense of pretension. Like the new title.
"Living in los Diez Sur" is how I'd really like it to look, with the Spanish portion italicized, but Blogger won't allow me to use HTML code in the title block, wysiwyg I guess.
Los Diez Sur is Spanish for "the southern ten". I like the idea of the poetic title for my ostensible new direction. If you look at a map of the state of California with the county lines visible, there appears to be a nearly horizontal line from the Pacific Ocean to Nevada, a line nearly parallel to the Equator. It's the combined northern borders of San Luis Obispo, Kern, and San Bernardino counties.
That line is the traditional demarcation--our very own rolling golden hill of a Berlin Wall--of the boundary between Northern and Southern California. I often break the state up into three separate identities: Southern, Northern, and Upper.
In any case, the things south of that line are Southern California. Any guesses as to how many counties there are down here? If you guessed diez, you're correct. SLO, Kern, San Bernardino, Santa Barbara, then the LA mess--Ventura, Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, and then the border counties--San Diego and Imperial.
Since my Caliboy identity is NorCal bred, I still feel like a wide eyed outsider, so the analogy of my fish-out-of-water title-naming philosophy is still sound.
Quality over quantity. You be the judge.
I might even start a movie-only sight, or a sports-only sight...I just have so much time to write...
In my own brain I tend to break this blog up easily into rigid temporal and spatial compartments, and the name of the blog, the title that appears at the very top of the posts, has tried to reflect that. I hope you understand how serious I take every little change to the appearance of this presentation, this presentation of my brain's rather constant flow of thoughts.
The first compartment is 2009 and Brooklyn. That's where I started this whole endeavor, and the strain/wonderment of weary caliboy living Back East was the observatory's view. The second compartment was 2010 and Austin. I know we moved to Texas right as 2009 ended, and didn't leave until April of 2011, but for me 2010 will always be my Texas year, with cynical caliboy giving the what? eye to that strange breed of American that is the Texan. The third compartment was 2011 and Long Beach. This was our triumphant return to California, finally Making it Home for all intents and purposes, but there was still things to interest me (and us--you--my fair readers...at least that's my idea), there was still wild and weird history and visceral experiences to be had.
2009, Brooklyn, 223 posts. 2010, Austin, 217 posts. 2011, Long Beach, 272 posts.
Austin caught up to Brooklyn in number of posts for the very same reason that Long Beach had so many more than both predecessors: my monthly quota. In my preparations to train myself to write often for my fiction in 2011, I inadvertently bumped up my number of Texas posts (there are only 132 posts from 2010 alone) and created a whole lot of content from the sunny Left Coast.
My aim in 2012 is to keep posting, but not with the focus on sheer quantity of posts, like 2011. Rather, as I spend time working on my stories, I have some ideas for posts that I'd like to focus a little more attention on, possibly turning them into something more.
2012 is about quality over quantity. I'm resisting the urge to write about the movie Corrie and I watched the other night that I really enjoyed (The King's Speech). I'm avoiding the post about a crazy billboard or cool sidewalk crack pattern I took a picture of. These posts I want to coddle and nurture.
There may be less of them, but they should be of a higher stock. That's probably just my normal sense of pretension. Like the new title.
"Living in los Diez Sur" is how I'd really like it to look, with the Spanish portion italicized, but Blogger won't allow me to use HTML code in the title block, wysiwyg I guess.
Los Diez Sur is Spanish for "the southern ten". I like the idea of the poetic title for my ostensible new direction. If you look at a map of the state of California with the county lines visible, there appears to be a nearly horizontal line from the Pacific Ocean to Nevada, a line nearly parallel to the Equator. It's the combined northern borders of San Luis Obispo, Kern, and San Bernardino counties.
That line is the traditional demarcation--our very own rolling golden hill of a Berlin Wall--of the boundary between Northern and Southern California. I often break the state up into three separate identities: Southern, Northern, and Upper.
In any case, the things south of that line are Southern California. Any guesses as to how many counties there are down here? If you guessed diez, you're correct. SLO, Kern, San Bernardino, Santa Barbara, then the LA mess--Ventura, Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, and then the border counties--San Diego and Imperial.
Since my Caliboy identity is NorCal bred, I still feel like a wide eyed outsider, so the analogy of my fish-out-of-water title-naming philosophy is still sound.
Quality over quantity. You be the judge.
I might even start a movie-only sight, or a sports-only sight...I just have so much time to write...
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