Some Fantastic Place

Banquo's ghosts all shuffle in
Take their chairs and we begin
They whisper things incessantly
Beyond the ken of men like me

I want to speak but I am mute
So they continue in cahoots
Or I can speak but never dare
To make a squeak while they are there

They hold a mirror to my face
While drawing marks to prove their case
Regret is limned in every one
Perish crosshatched when they're done

The statue's broke, there's no repair
But broken now it cannot wear
But I am worn down -- there's the rub
Until I join their shady club

There's one among them I can't stand
I've felt the touch of his right hand
If he ever looks me in the eye
I'll lay down on the ground and die

It's worst than that; he does not linger
Or look my way or lift a finger
I turned my back on him you see
Can't help but turn his back on me

Now I wander all alone
The seconds tick by like a loan
I'll sit and murmur in my turn
While children fill my leaky urn

There Are Only Two Kinds Of People In Los Angeles

Dick Dale or the Ventures; Von's or Ralph's.

That's it. There is no use dividing people up by race, color, creed, gender, sexual orientation, height, weight, IQ, or any other way.

Don't Be A Jerk (From 2005)

[Editor's Note: It's been colder than a car salesman's heart all year this year. ]

[Author's Note: It's always the same temperature in a concrete bunker underground: some version of cold. I gave up trying to explain wearing a turtleneck in July if I leave the house during the day. There is no editor.]

It's been hot here. Sticky hot. The Queen takes the children to the beach each day. It's at the end of the street we live on, just a few miles. The beach in our town is an afterthought, really; the town's anima is centered around being on the water, not in it. But the Big One has swimming lessons at the beach, and the Wee One sits in the gentle lapping waves, up to his waist, and dredges sand through his fingers, and is content.

The beach has a lot of rules. I think the beach should have one rule: DON'T BE A JERK. That would about cover it. But things are never that simple anymore. People get together and start laying out the rules landscape, and forget when to stop. After a while, the rules, and especially the impetus behind the rules, starts to conflict with itself. And after a while, you could sum up the rules as: DANGER -WARNING -NO FUN ALLOWED. GAMBOLERS WILL BE CHASTENED.

Safety is paramount, to an idiotic degree. There's a float you can swim out to, and rest a spell, and swim back. Woe be it to anyone who dives off the float into the water. This is strictly impermissible. A few years ago, a youngster broke his neck diving into the water, and the town, with an eye towards lawsuits, forbade diving. But as I understand it, the poor fellow that hurt himself did so because he didn't dive off the float, he dove off a rock near the shore, into shallow water. If he had done what is now proscribed, he would have been fine. It's curious.

Judgement and reason are assumed to be beyond the capabilities of the average person here. And the idea that children should be policed by their parents is apparently no longer current.
Any plastic device for amusing yourself is not allowed. Now, I understand why the sign says: No Glass. Accidents happen, and broken glass at the beach I can live without. But glass is easily replaceable by other containers, and so no ox is gored. But the interdict against boogie boards, and inner tubes and so forth extends to water wings. They're plastic, so no dice. In other words, safety is paramount to the nth degree- someone might get hurt!, so everything is banned, but taking a chance on a tot drowning for the lack of two little rings of airfilled plastic is preferable to allowing some barbarian to show up with anything so declasse as, well...plastic anything.

Dogs are banned, of course. But why? It's not because the dogs really can't go to the beach and coexist with bathers; it's because civility has broken down to the point where people can't be expected to take responsibility for their animals. People bring really mean animals to public places now, and take pleasure in menacing people. They always put you off with a "My dog doesn't bite," if you ask them to restrain their pit bull named "Satan" because he's menacing your children. And he leaves the brown, cylindrical objects in the sand that smell disagreeable when you step in them, and his owner can't be bothered to clean it up, or bring the dog off the beach when he's in the grunting mood. So no dogs. More rules, because no one remembers the Golden Rule. No not that one, the one I just coined, the new one: DON'T BE A JERK.

The beach is mostly empty these days, although the steamy heat has driven that Demosthenes of Boston, Hizzoner Mayor Tom Menino, to the radio each day announcing a weather alert and telling us in mumbled spoonerisms to drink lots of water and look in on shut-ins. Thanks for that, really. I was planning on sitting in front of the open oven door all day in a ski parka until you warned me off it.

Note to Tom: After Demosthenes cured his faulty speech by filling his mouth with pebbles and yelling over the sound of the surf, he took the pebbles out. You seem to have left a few in there.
I read in the paper that eleven people have died of heat related causes in Phoenix this week, and it reached 116 degrees on the thermometer there. If you investigated a little further, you found that ten of them were homeless people, and you can't force them to stop drinking dehydrating liquor and come in out of the sun, there's a rule against that, and they died of heatstroke. The eleventh person was an elderly woman who was found in her apartment, which was equipped with air conditioning, which she had turned off. Waste not, want not got her.

So maybe mumbling Tom has a point. But people who used to look after the elderly, like their friends or relatives, did so because it was the right thing to do, not because the Mayor told them to. We live in a time where the national legislature feels the need to pass legislation called "Good Samaritan Laws," making it a crime to see someone in distress and refuse to help. But isn't it all the other laws and rules and codes and statutes that they passed, and the insane litigation that they turn a blind eye to, and sometimes encourage, that made us so distant from one another in the first place? People are afraid to interfere in anybody's affairs, not through an aversion of being a busybody, but because they're afraid of being sued. Or assaulted.

The Queen and the Wee One and the Large Child settled themselves on the blanket in the sand yesterday, and tried not to break any rules. Another party settled down beside them. They had brought a nuclear powered boom box, and felt no compunction to respect the wants or wishes of others a few feet from them, and blared rap music at flight deck volume. No one ever seems to blast Respighi at that volume, I've noticed.

Now my wife could go to the authorities in town, and dutifully, in a few days, the DPW would come on down to the beach, and add another line to the "Prohibited" sign, to specify music. And so the worst of us will make it impossible to have any music at the beach, which is unfortunate. That's not the way it should be done, and they'll find another way to annoy everybody next time, anyway. Because rules are for squares you know, the people who don't need rules on civility and parental probity in the first place. You know, people that don't want to listen to hateful misogynist singsong or death metal at the beach. Rules only apply to the people that need them least.

I say: Take down the sign with the laundry list of real and imagined threats to civility and safety. Replace it with a smaller one:

DON'T BE A JERK

And give the lifeguard a pistol. Problem solved.

We're Sargent Pepper's Lonely Pleasant Sunday Afternoon Club Band

My Intertunnel compadre Gerard is a wag. I met him once. Someone asked him how to make a website pay. He said the only way he knew to make a website pay was to make it a website devoted to advice on how to make a website pay.

I looked at the Intertunnel over the weekend on someone else's laptop. I don't have a laptop. They asked me what I was doing; what are you looking at on that thing? I wasn't looking at anything, really. I was looking at everything and nothing, to see how it looked. What impression I might get from it.

People talk a lot about how the Intertunnel has upended the applecart of commerce in writing. True dat. But not in the way you might think.

I was amazed when I used another man's laptop, because I saw all sorts of stuff I never see. It was an Apple, so everything was exactly wrong and backwards, and so was easy to figure out. I had no idea all that advertising was on the webs. I never see it. I can't imagine how the average advertiser thinks they're getting any bang for their buck buying advertising by the impression.

We used the laptop to display video that was advertising. It's not sneaky. It was de facto advertising, we looked for it, and we watched it. I'm not sure it was efficacious either, as we never use the service being advertised, but we at least looked at it. It's a start. Apparently there's a Progressive Insurance ad on the page that displays the statistics for my blog. Apparently they charge someone to not show it to me, because I'd never seen it before.

It's all broken except it works somehow. I don't see any starlets missing any meals even though every kid with a computer knows how to steal movies. They've still got more than cornflakes and peanut butter in the company lunchroom at the New York Times, I imagine.

One of the mistakes being made by everyone is thinking that there is any kind of line between news and entertainment. I don't read any newspapers because I can't find out anything useful from them, and they are deuced poor entertainment. They remind me of watching a Health Class short film warning you about Polio. The topic is irrelevant and so the information is useless and so all that's left is the entertainment value in it. If you're a hipster doofus you can make a website devoted to how wry watching pointless stuff is, but that's about the sum of the entertainment you can get out of it.

It's not fun to collect and distribute real information. It's hard work, but you can charge for it. Dun and Bradstreet collects all sorts of real, hard information about companies. If you read their gathered information about those companies, you could make real, hard decisions about how you might interact with those companies, as a investor or a consumer or a competitor. And if you want D & B to tell you what they know, they'd like $139, right now, up front, no fooling.

Amuse yourself on the Internet. There's nothing else to do here but howl gigantic curses into the ether, or post pictures of your cat. If you think your content is worth money, charge for it and reap the tumbleweeds or the treasure. But for god sakes, stop whining.

Do Flowers Grow On Pork Chop Hill?

[I Hope You Have A Pleasant Memorial Day Weekend. I wrote this back before I had a blog. Uncle Bobby Stays 'til Tuesday.]

He gazes out of the photo, mute, enigmatic, not quite smiling, and speaks to me across the decades.

When I was a little boy, amusements were few and far between. Television was still in black and white for us, and after the reruns of Gilligan's Island and The Three Stooges, not much was on the idiot box, as my father called it.

I remember my father and me trying to watch a hockey game broadcast from the west coast featuring the California Golden Seals, who were setting a new low in sports sumptuary and getting pasted by our mighty Boston Bruins -- Bobby Orr and Phil Esposito and Pie McKenzie and... well, I can still recite all their names down to the most obscure, even Garnet (Ace to his friends)Bailey. On a thirteen inch black and white TV with rabbit ears. We might as well have used the Etch-a-Sketch.

Eisenhower's X-Box, the Etch-a-Sketch was.

And so it always seemed a real treat when we could wheedle our mother to drag out the elegant but battered silverware box, left from some set our family never owned, filled with the family photographs. The pictures were mostly black and white too, the current cutting edge of photography being Polaroid's prehistoric b&w instant photos. They'd come out of the camera, and you'd count to a now forgotten tempo, and pray, and pull off the cover paper to expose the image and stop the developer, and smear your clothes, and hope the picture was vaguely done.

We'd see the usual babies on the shag carpet, buns up; confirmation and communion suits that fit like either a tent or a rubber glove, never any degree in between; little girls in their Easter jumpers and patent leather shoes, with their mothers wearing a hat, a real hat, ready for church. Father, grim, unsmiling in his workday suit, a little shiny at the elbows and knees.

Those photos were only the littlest bit interesting after a while, because they were for the most part, well -- us. The exotic ones were always deeper in the pile, instantly recognizable as special by that magnificent sepia tone that photos used to have, and spalling and cracking like a fresco in damp cathedral.

There they'd be, the southern Italian or Irish immigrant faces, looking stoically at the camera, surrounded by extended family on a stoop in Cambridge or Dorchester or Roxbury Massachusetts, or perhaps Antigonish, Nova Scotia. They had their hard lives written all over their faces. But always calm looking. Serene, really; not introspective or egoist. And they looked into the lens in a way that we never do. Not at it, but through it.

Our parents would strain to remember all the names, and who did what and from where, and why and when. And I figure, with the small wisdom that I've accumulated with age, that when we pestered them too much about someone obscure, they made stuff up.

And then his face would turn up. Handsome, mysterious, forever young. Forte.

Who's that?

That's my brother Bobby, my mother would answer. And that was that.

I was young, and still in the thrall of my parents, and sensed it. Here is a place you do not go.

The years passed, and the TV was in color, and my wrists and ankles began to show from my hand-me-down cousins' clothes. And the box came out less often. But when it did, the tantalizing face, handsomer than all the others, undiminished by time or care, resplendent in a uniform, always caught your eye. He died before I was born I learned, by osmosis I think, I don't remember ever having the nerve to ask, and I'm sure it wasn't offered.

In Korea.

And the earth spun, and the seasons changed, and then I was a man.

One day, my mother came to me. She had a picture. it had lain stored and untouched for fifty years, coiled, and she couldn't unroll it without destroying it. We slowly, ever so carefully unrolled it, the flecks of black and white popping off, as I stared at the faces. Hundreds and hundreds of faces. Five rows, stretching right off the page, four feet long, all in identical infantry uniforms, except the six cooks dressed all in white. C Company 506- Infantry, 101st Airborne Division. Camp Breckinridge, KY. December 27, 1952.

And there was only four ways to stand out in that mob of faces. The cooks, of course. One man in the hundreds wears an officer's hat, and looks ten minutes older than the rest. One man is holding drumsticks over a military style snare drum. And in the very center, in the very front, one man holds the company colors on a lance. Two crossed muskets, a Capital "C" and a "506."

And he has the face that speaks to me.

Now when I was in college, on a lark, my friends and I went skydiving. We trained all day in a sweltering hangar in upstate New York amongst the farms. They strapped army surplus gear on us, hung us on straps depending from the hangar roof, and shook us around violently by our heels until we demonstrated that we could unbuckle our main chute from the straps on our shoulders, then pull the cord on our belly chute. Fun.

We climbed resolutely into a DeHavilland Beaver, which now seems to me an odd name for a plane, and knelt in rows in the fuselage. A few long minutes later we launched ourselves, some with difficulty, out the open hole in the side and into a whirlwind far over the patchwork quilt of the fields. A tether pulled our chute for us, and we drifted down and found a place with a liquor license.

I called my father, and told him what I had done. Expecting praise, I guess, or some such. And he called me, gently, the fool I was.

I protested: but you were in a bomber plane. They must have made you jump. And he told me, son, if that plane was on fire, filled to the brim with rabid rats, and piloted by a dead man, I'd still take my chances in the plane. And to jump from a perfectly good one, he said, is foolish. Click.

My father was in the Army Air Force. Ball gunner, hanging in a plastic bubble under a B-24J, Les Miserables, over the Pacific. Air Medal. Distinguished Flying Cross. After I pestered him enough, he once told me a sort of a story about the war. He reeled off the names, Tarawa. Pelelau, Kwajalein, Tinian. He mentioned, in an offhand way, that after some island had been bombed flat, they later landed on it. It looked like the island had been picked up ten feet, he said, then dropped. His CO told them that some planes were coming. On these planes were some people. They were coming from somewhere. They were going somewhere else. When the planes landed, my father and his compatriots were instructed not to talk to these men, or even about them; and if he said so much as hello to one of them, or said "boo" about them to anyone else, he would spend the remainder of the war in a military prison, incommunicado. My father lost his desire, if he had had any, to speak about those men. He surmised some of them later flew a plane named the Enola Gay.

My father seldom talked much about being in the military.

And my mother never talked about the brother in the photographs.

Now the picture, the coiled picture, was ruined. But then, we don't watch black and white TV any more, do we? My mother took that picture, and a bankroll, and had a necromancer or an alchemist or something at a digital photography studio restore it, perfectly, and make copies for all of us nephews. Mine hangs today over my kitchen table.

He watches over me.

I was forty years old. My mother told me, Uncle Bobby hated his real name.

His real name?

Francis, she said.

My middle name is Francis. I never knew.

50 State Ring-And-Run Crime Spree Continued: All The Way To The Virgin Islands (From 2007)

Here's the final installment of our Fifty State tour of American front doors. We've thrown in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands too. Now you all know what's it's like to be a Fuller Brush Man.

South Carolina:
South Dakota:
Tennessee:
Texas:
Utah:
Vermont:

Virginia:
Virgin Islands:
Washington:
West Virginia:
Wisconsin:
Wyoming:

50 State Ring-And-Run Crime Spree Continued: Mostly New, Some North, It's Not An Island (From 2007)

We're continuing our fifty state tour of old front doors. It tells us a lot about our front door heritage, which is to say: not very much.

New Jersey:
New Mexico:

New York:

North Carolina:
North Dakota:

Ohio:

Oklahoma:

Oregon:

Pennsylvania:

Puerto Rico:

Rhode Island:
I'll run out of states soon, so I'm contemplating "Drainage Ditches Of The Near East," or perhaps "Garden Gnomes Of The Marianas Islands" as a theme for next week. I'm open to suggestions, of course.

Fifty State Ring-And-Run Crime Spree Day Three: MMMMMMMNNNH (From 2007)

It's day three of our quixotic quest to codify a pack of portals from fitty states. Today we linger over the M's a good long while. Beware the arm. Ask not for whom he holds the door. He holds for you.
Maryland:
Massachusetts:
heh
Michigan:

Minnesota:

Mississippi:

Missouri:

Montana:
Nebraska:
Nevada:
New Hampshire:
New letters being added daily! Get fresh alphabet tomorrow!

Fifty State Ring-And-Run Crime Spree Part Two (From 2007)

We're trying to find a doorway worth looking at in all Fifty States, at least fifty years old. So far so good. Pretend you're the paper boy.

"Collecting!"

Georgia:
Hawaii:

Idaho:
Illinois:
Indiana:
Iowa:
Kansas:
Kentucky:
Louisiana:
Maine:

And just because we love Maine, a two-fer -- because I want to spend every possible waking hour of five eternities lingering at a doorway that looks like this one in Wiscasset, Maine:More tomorrow, and until one of us gets bored.

Fifty State Ring And Run Crime Spree (From 2007)

(Working around the clock at this point. That means you get re-runs from 2007. You have Internet Alzheimer's anyway, so anything more than a year old is new again anyway. Anyway. )

I wondered if there was a way to visit every state in the Union without actually going there. Those rectangular ones with two time zones and one congressman are sort of daunting to a denizen of the coast. Mysterious. But every state has a vibe, more or less; and no matter what anyone tells you about how uniform the culture is getting, I've always been struck by how different the same thing can be depending on where you are. So, we offer humbly, the same thing in fifty places at least fifty years ago. Not sure what it's all like now. That would involve leaving my house.

Alabama:
Alaska:
Arizona:
Arkansas:
Californi-ay:

Colorado:
Connecticut:
Delaware:
Washington, D.C. :
Florida:More tomorrow, and until one of us gets bored or I get to Samoa.

Whose House Lucky Thirteen

(In the comments: Happy Acres gets it right away. Happy wins an Intertunnel cookie. A very cool room, n'est-ce pas?)

I Feel Good -- You Should Too (From 2006)

(Editor's Note: I really don't feel that good today. I felt better after I read this)

(Author's Note: The boat was dismasted and made a total loss by Hurricane Katrina. Anyone that doesn't think that was a pretty big storm should keep in mind the boat was moored in Massachusetts. There is no editor, and there is no boat, and I'm hitting my thumb all day. My point stands:)

The world is a wonderful place. It's hard to see the forest for the trees sometimes, and the fellow weaving in the next lane jabbering into his cell phone while eating a submarine sandwich and occasionally nosemining can distract us, no doubt. Many things intrude. But sometimes, if you're available for wonderment, you can have a moment of clarity.

On the ocean is a place for moments of clarity. You cannot be in a motorized anything, unless the motor is turned off, because you're just a commuter if the engine is running. Sailing's better; contemplative.

You can't sail like the kind of people who always want to tug on the lines to get an additional half a knot out of their breeze bucket. You need the kind of sailing where you set the sails, fix your course to nowhere to allow the fewest interruptions, then lay your leg over the tiller, trail your hand in the water, and consider your situation. Coronas with limes never hurt, either.

You have nowhere to go, and nowhere to be, and after the second time you take them, your sailing companions must lose the urge to talk about the process of sailing in an enthusiastic fashion and simply enjoy it, and the company. With the sky arrayed overhead, and the sea below, you are content to examine the world dispassionately. The beauty and simplicity of the clouds that drift, the terns that swoop, the wavelets that tap their gentle knuckles on the windward side, the feeling of motion snatched without struggle from the endless breezes that massage your cheek and sail alike allow you to enjoy the world and all its wonders, and everybody in it, if just for a moment.

That's a complicated and unusual apparatus to distill the elixir of life, ain't it? We need to find ways, every day, to get the simple flavor of the sublime, in an espresso dose -- short, fast, concentrated; ephemeral but available.

Two minutes of pop music can do it for you. It has to be good. It can't be serious. Serious pop music is an oxymoron. You're not saving the world, Bono, you're just a preening middle aged man in a ridiculous getup who's first job is to entertain, but you never got around to learning how. I'll raise my hand when you're Woody Guthrie. Don't hold your breath. On second thought -- do.

My bad. We're filled with love for our fellow man today. Our fellow Irishman too, last paragraph notwithstanding. Maybe's he's trying hard but failing. I'll leave him be. You too, if he makes you smile.

It's not supposed to sound like you're trying hard, even if you are. Try hard in rehearsal. It's generally best when it's a melody that sounds about fine whether played by a chamber orchestra, a busker, or a chicken pecking it out on a toy piano. The lyric is generally best about as complex as a nursery rhyme, a little obscure maybe, but with a hint of the recognition of the sublime percolating in the background, and hints of the whole daft fabric of shared human experience like a breeze blowing over your face.

It should be over in one minute fifty eight seconds, and comprise one third of your quarter's worth of selections in the DiMeglio's Pizza jukebox in 1968, too.

Vinyl Is Final

When I was young, there was no vinyl siding. Many people in semi-urban areas had aluminum siding, and the burbs and anything rural were all painted. I remember the first time I saw the stuff. The fellow that sold it had a slogan: Vinyl is final!

He was right, you know. Just not like he meant.

The World Is Some Fantastic Place

It's got Squeeze in it.



There has always been an inverse relationship between the quality of Letterman's band and the number of personnel in it.

Bleg

Anyone else having trouble with Google and related sites today? Took ten minutes+ to open my blog. Gmail, search, analytics won't even display, just tries to load forever.

The rapture? Zombie apocalypse?

Is this thing on?

The Very, Very White Tornadoes

If wanting to live in a world where aliens from another planet -- one where heating and ventilation contractors fashion all the spacesuits -- are welcome to come and cavort with women they're manifestly not in the least bit interested in -- including women who appear to have a sack of dead mice where the back of their upper arm is supposed to be -- all the while playing roller-rink music through some sort of transmogrifier that only gendarmes and german shepherds can hear is wrong, then I don't want to be right.

And to think we settled for the Beatles when The Tornadoes were available. Pshaw and harrumph!

The View From The Trenches (From 2006)

[Editor's Note: First run in 2006. I'm always amazed when anything interesting is still around on the Intertunnel when I go back to it later. Any interesting YouTube video disappears before your bookmark cools off. Slideshow is still fully operational, though; enjoy!]

{Author's Note: I've been writing this dreck for almost four years? Egad. And there is no editor}

Someone's got to play in the lounge in the chinese restaurant.

(Click to see Flickr photo sideshow. Don't worry, that's the raciest one.)

Well, that's not fair, really -- at least around here in New England. I'm a little out of the circuit, and have been for a while; but if memory serves, the lounge in the chinese restaurants in these parts have really good Country and Western cover bands in them. There aren't any lounge singers that look like 150 pounds of ground chuck in a 100 pound satin sack in there. And maybe it's not fair to the people in the photos, either; maybe they're more fun than a picnic for people with delirium tremens would be for a hungry ant. And even though some of them seem to have attended too many picnics for their spandex, we really have no idea who any of them are. Maybe they were swell.


I don't remember where I first saw these photos, but they lead back to something called Sharpeworld, a place where someone definitely has an eye for the obscure and odd. And if this isn't obscure, and odd, I don't know what is.

These photographs were found in the trash and rescued from oblivion; the oblivion that time will bestow even on entertainment much more popular than the people on the photographs. These people seem to be equipped with a sort of instant oblivion, like they're black holes for charisma. They're the lounge entertainment version of Men in Black :In a flash, you've forgotten you've seen them, and even forgotten what you yourself were doing when you saw them. Some have faces that can stop a clock, all of them make the clock run backwards.

It's a wonderful array of the people who were playing at the wedding of your distant cousin -- you remember, you got food poisoning from the chicken and shells; the comedian hired for the Rotary Club Medal of Achievement dinner you missed because you had the flu; the combo on the deck (in the rain) at the golf tournament banquet from that course under the high tension power lines -- where you got poison ivy; and the stripper that wouldn't take any of her clothes off from that lounge your college buddies from upstate took you to as a hoot. You may have been too drunk to fully appreciate them, or maybe the acts were too drunk, who knows? Anyway, everybody draws a blank here.


It's not the photographer's fault. The pictures were taken by James J. Kriegsmann, who by all accounts was no slouch. I went looking for Kriegsmann, and was astonished by what I saw.

He died in 1994. He was born and educated in Vienna, Austria, and in 1929 came to New York and started photographing celebrities.

And what celebrities! Michael Ochs Archives has a wonderful set of some of Kriegsmann's work, and the people in them are astounding. Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Stevie Wonder, Eartha Kitt (rowr) Cab Calloway, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis; dozens and dozens of the most famous acts in the world for decade after decade.

I imagine that Kriegsmann's notoriety among the glitterati brought the lumpen people to his doorstep, thinking that if they plunked down the cash, some of the leftover celebrity might still be in the lens. And so Kriegsmann worked, and worked hard, and made the same attempt to portray these subjects as sympathetically as he could. It boggles the mind what they must have looked like when they walked in his door.

The proprietor of Sharpeworld put these on Flickr hoping that someone would remember something about these folks. It's a fool's errand, I'm afraid. Would you remember who was singing O Sole Mio in the Terminal Lounge in 1979 in Trenton when you went in to get out of the rain for five minutes to use the pay phone?

Though we laugh, the camera was kind -- in that it captured them as they wished to be, and maybe as they were, at least for one or two brief shining moments: Somebody.

They Got An Awful Lot Of Coffee In Brazil, Except When They Don't

You know, I've warned you repeatedly here that you don't want to go back to the seventies. But you don't listen.

The news today is dire. Coffee costs more, and is likely to cost more still:
Caffeine addicts face higher prices for their daily fix as the wholesale cost of both coffee and sugar rise sharply because of poor crops and robust demand.

It's a subscription site, but don't worry, if you're like me, you would stop reading after that first sentence anyway. That is supposed to be a NEWS item on a NEWS site. I know if you go to real school they tell you to write everything in the overwrought style of the novel you wish you were writing, but out here in the real world where we're interested in getting real information in a hurry, we've got no patience for this style of writing. And it's a particularly trite style of boilerplate about drinking coffee, isn't it? Trite squared.

It doesn't matter what analysis follows the plea for registration, because it's bound to be wrong. "Analysis" in these matters is like an intellectual boat adrift on a sea of sensations, looking for any dock to bump against. The same opinion fits all situations. Bush did it, or Obama did it; take your pick.

If you don't have a memory based on your brain stem instead of the bigger, damper part, you'll remember that the scare chart above is absolutely nothing compared to 1977. In 1977, the price of coffee went from $0.50 a pound to $3.50 a pound. That is not a typo. The coffee in my kitchen right now costs about $3.50 a pound, thirty two years later. I had a job in 1977, and it would have taken me an hour and fifteen minutes to make enough money to buy that pound of coffee then. And I was supporting myself and putting myself through school on that wage.

I've talked to academics about the seventies, people who were living right down the street and a world away from me in Boston, and they all tell me what a blast they were having then. If you're well north of forty maybe you were partying at the disco or something. Rich people often have fun in the ruins of civilizations. Others not so much.

I could find some ax I'd like to grind and blame expensive coffee on it. I could blame the weather or global warming or global cooling caused by global warming or Hugo Chavez or greedy coffee barons or FARC or bad mojo or fiat currency or whatever floats your boat in the "Illuminati are spoiling my summer" sweepstakes you find in any blog comments section. But I'm going to say something more disquieting instead.

There's no rhyme or reason to it. There's a general breakdown in almost every formerly functioning economic and social process I can think of. The intellectual and economic version of delirium tremens rules the day. Bizarre things, with even bizarrer explanations offered for them will happen every damn day for quite a while. And by "explanations," I mean unreasoning blame -- a headwind which does not shift but comes from all points on the compass.

It's the seventies again, baby. You wished it on yourself, but now we're all going to get it, good and hard. Been there, done that, got the straightjacket. Trust me, you're not going to like it.

Nuestra Senora de los Dolores

We all have one. We borrow money and steal to buy more swords.

Good Work. But Not Forgotten; Abandoned

Spring Potatoes (From 2007)

-Pa, how do you get the coverin' disks to hit the furrow?

-They jest do, son.

-But you never look, pa.

-Keep your eyes on the horizon, boy. Sound advice always.

-But how do you know?

-Waste of time to tend that which tends itself, son. Got to trust to God and yourself. Who else you gonna trust, exactly?

-Did you learn what goes on behind you?

-Same as you, son, riding and asking a lot of damn fool questions. My pa said that if the nattering ever stopped in his wake, he'd know enough to turn the rig back towards the house and arrange a funeral. Nothing else would shut my piehole.

-You've gone quiet now, pa.

-What a man says has meaning, son. Gotta choose your words careful. Can't get two drinks in you and start a ruckus with a neighbor you might need someday. Makes a man pick through his words like picking through the taters looking for eyes. Don't pay to plant them if the seed ain't there, or the ground is like to be barren. Children can talk as they like.

-I'm a man now, pa.

-Shaving don't make a man, son. You'll go quiet in your turn. Don't rush it. Talk to that girl, the one from away, at the Grange Hall fetes a bit first. Or you'll never get anyone to hound you from the back of the tractor for your own.
And sakes; keep your prayer handles between the hoppers or you'll muck up the line of the pickers and the furrow opener. I can feel it.

Kindred Spirit? Dunno

It's an interesting picture.

I've never had a job that I can recall that was pure art. Most of my handwork has been based off architecture, and that inhabits a shadow world between art and utility. The furniture business is like that, too. Am I trying to make functional things in an visually interesting way, or visually interesting things that are functional? I don't know.

I take things that I just made and I beat them with chains, among other abominations. It's an odd sensation, especially the first time you do it. The purpose is to mimic a real kind of use. It's not real, exactly, but it's the representation of a kind of reality. It's as if you're trying to capture a point in time, and an artist can never really be in a moment in time. It's gone by and he tries to recreate it, or it's in the future and he's trying to predict it. And he's editing that moment in time, to include what is necessary to express the feeling about the subject that is desired. Even a photographer does this, because what he leaves out is as important as what is left in, and how things are composed is still subject to the subjective.

People need a hook to hang me on in their intellectual cupboard, and search for one from time to time. I've had people box the compass of comparison from Norm to Richard Brautigan. None of them ever seem to fit, at least to me.

The picture at the top is a painting called Safeway Interior, by an artist named Ralph Goings, from 1974.

Why do I make a brand new table and try to make it look old? I don't know. To capture something. Writing fiction is like that, too, but I'd have a deuce of a time explaining how an end table and Huckleberry Finn are blood brothers to anyone not living in my cobwebbed mind.

Why does Ralph Goings paint a picture you mistook for a photograph of a mundane thing? I don't know, but I suspect it's somehow similar. He's just better at his job than I am at mine.

Lookin' Out For My Peeps

Psst. You didn't hear this from me, but if you were to go to this page right here, and you were to select Woman's World Special Ten Finger Stepper from the first drop down list, customize your item to your heart's content from the colors and finishes dropdown lists, then type sippicanblog into the coupon code box, you'd get 50% off on your purchase of a Sippican Cottage Furniture Super Ten Fingers Stepper.

$24.99? That's twenty-five soul-stirring, headspinning, epiphany-producing, wallet-gorging bucks off the regular price, which is too damn cheap in the first place. And if enough people purchase one, we can start feeding our younger son regularly again. After we fetch him off the ice floe, of course.

Treasure (From 2007)

I sat for a long moment at the end of my little boy's bed last night. It struck me how much of the stuff he truly treasures is little more than trash. He struck me quite a bit, too, with many of the items he keeps at hand.

It's all marvelously bright and tasteless and kinda shoddy. It never was much, and now it's all mostly busted up and in a sort of exquisitely arranged jumble. He picks through it all in an exact manner, each thing his friend and companion. They talk to him, and he talks to them.

I don't think it would be possible to arrange his things beforehand. You could not go to a store and pick them out. The things he cannot live without are usually some off-handedly chosen present from someone who barely knows him, if they know him at all. How would you know he'd want to play with a two inch tall Spiderman figure that has lost his lower body? Forty people, me included, gave him stuffed animals when he was born, and out of all of them he chose a Winnie The Pooh and chewed its ear off, a little at a time, while he was falling asleep. His mother had to perform a radical earectomy on the little little bruin, and our son just sort of placed the spot where the ear used to be near his mouth and carried on falling asleep with it. The other thirty nine still have tags on them.

In a thousand years, I could never part with that ratty doll. My boy will lose interest in it altogether, as his older brother did with the things of his infancy. Any stranger would just see a mangled, dirty ball of stuffing and give it the heave-ho.

Like all treasure, it's buried.

The Weasel Word du Jour: Updating

I watch the shelter shows. It's out of a sense of duty. It's my business, and I need to understand the zeitgeist.

I yell at the television. I literally yell at the television. That is a warning sign, like purchasing leather pants. I need to tilt at this windmill, or shut up.

It's a huge mistake for advice about housing to devolve to the unholy troika of realtors, hamhanded interior decorators, and building material shills.

The realtors really get me. If you get your advice about the liveability of your house from a realtor, you're plain nuts. They are clerks of a very particular kind. It's like asking your accountant for dating tips. They're unlikely to give you any advice other than save your receipts. After what's happened in the last two years to the bank accounts of homeowners following the cult of the realtor, I'm amazed they're not shunned liked lepers at this point. But no, they're experts about housing, and I'm yelling at the television.

How did interior decoration get thrust front and center in house design? Not interior design, interior decoration. Interior decoration is a proud profession, but it's the tail that wags the sticks and bricks dog now. Shelter shows are fascinated with soft goods. The soft goods move with the homeowner. A motley assortment of people come and place pillows around your house and then you sell it. Who is taken in by staging of real estate at this point? People that listen to realtors, I guess. It's the housing version of used car dealers putting sawdust in transmissions near death to quiet the grinding while the sucker takes the car for a test drive. I was so busy looking at the throw pillows I didn't notice the fish store dumpster under the bedroom window, dear.

You don't have time to read the 140,000 words I could dump on you like mulch right now about this topic, so let me save us all some time, and just point out the weasel words you should be on the lookout for. There's a hearty handful of them, and if you spot any one of them being used in any context on a shelter show, I hereby grant you dispensation to ignore every other word emitted from the mouth of the offender, about everything, forevermore. Here's one that' s fresh in my mind:

Updating.

They rattle this one off about everything. After a while, the poor prospective homebuyers start saying it if the realtor says it a few times, like a jerk at work that whistles The Candy Man to see how many people he can infect with it.

What everyone is referring to is having a Home Depot flyer explode inside the house. If you tear out the crap these same brigands told the previous owners to install three years ago, and replace it with stuff they'll be telling you to rip out two years hence, you're "updating." Put in bamboo floors, stainless steel appliances, granite coutertops, and glass subway tile, and your house will be state of the art! At least until next season.

Updating used to means something. People would take out their 50 amp service and put in a 200 amp that a modern family needed to run air conditioning and two 50 watt light bulbs at the same time. Hot water heaters that had enough capacity to actually fill the tub would be installed. The kitchen would have enough convenience outlets for all the appliances. Services to the house like fiber optic lines would be installed, or existing lines buried. People would add a bathroom, not fart around endlessly with the appearance of the existing one. Stuff like that.

Tile, wood flooring, a lot of woodwork, and many other items used to be considered more or less permanent installations. A house has a useful life measured in hundreds of years. If it's not useful, it's still going to be around for a very long time, a blot on the landscape and a waste of the owner's money.

Run from the updaters. Try this instead: put something in or on your house that another person -- a stranger -- would hesitate before they would tear it out or cover it up.

Now up the ante. The aforementioned stranger is living there after you're dead, and you didn't die young.

Laurie Does The Show

We used to call doing whatever was necessary to amuse the audience: "Doing the show." Laurie always does the show. When necessary, it means eating the scenery. Things are going well when the residue of your prior efforts allow you to sort of coast like a duck on a pond, but real showmen are always ready to break into the "seltzer bottle down the pants" when all else fails.

I have no idea what the recycled Marcus Welby MD show is like, but I imagine there's some "show" in it somewhere. The guy sheds it.

The Cure For The National Malaise Has A Banjo And Does The Lindy Hop

Since I don't speak Ikea, for all I know these fellows are singing about establishing themselves as the new master race, then building concentration camps for Irishmen, feebs and dwarves.

Then again, probably not.

More Housepainting (From 2006)

Here's another housepainter of note. John Singer Sargent. The "house" is the magnificent Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. John Singer Sargent is the Greatest. Painter. Ever.

Of course art is not a competition, or shouldn't be. American Idol and throwing people off an island one by one is about the process, not the end result, after all. The world is no smaller or crabbier if I tell you I saw Michaelangelo's and DaVinci's and Sargent's daubs, a foot from my face, and it's Sargent hands down for me. The rest don't go on the bonfire after such a statement, I just look at them in a different order. Picasso shows up later on that same list, right after all of my children's efforts, and several of my dropcloths.

Anyway, Sargent, like many of his brethren, got the urge to eschew the canvas altogether, and just start painting on the walls behind them. It's a different animal, and he approached it differently than his other work. He painted this, on a tympanum above a doorway at the MFA, around 1920. It's marvelous.

Well, AIN'T IT?

Sorry. You're entitled to your own opinion about it, of course. It's just that, if it differs from mine I don't want to hear it.

Lots of people didn't like this particularly when he painted it, along with a few acres of additional plaster at the MFA. They all sound like stooges now; Sargent sleeps serene.

It's in what would be called Neo-Classical form, and some called Neo-Wedgewood eclectic, because of the chaste color schemes and themes, no doubt. It's a testament to the train wreck in the art world that was going on at the time that those were hurled at him like epithets.

The Danaides is the theme. They are a Greek allegory, whose story is variously told. They were the fifty daughters of a king, ordered to marry the fifty sons of the king's brother. Woody Allen doesn't have anything on the ancient Greeks, does he? At any rate, they agreed to wed their cousins, while conspiring to murder them on their marriage bed. Only one of the brides declined to kill her spouse, as he was the only one to decline his marriage prerogatives.

The Danaides were consigned to Hades, and as their punishment, they were made to try to fill a vessel with water, but the vessel had holes in the bottom, and their chore could never be completed. The thankless task is a recurring theme with those crazy Pelopponesians, isn't it?

Sargent knew what he was doing. That which we call art, or sophistication, or civilization, is the continous attempt to fill a bottomless well. You must strive always, or the urn will be quickly emptied. This artist is acknowledging perhaps that his work, no matter how famous or well regarded, is ephemeral; and that the process of trying to capture the beautiful, or the important, or the sublime, and hold it up like a roadmap -- or better, a mirror -- must always press forward, lest we slide backwards. There is no point of stability between barbarism or civilization; it's just a matter of which way we are heading.

Sargent was cursed to pour it, over and over again, into our urn. We are grateful for the water, for as long as it lasts.