Writer's Lament

One of the pitfalls of a personal blog is to slip into some bombastic superlative and then run with it. It might start with a situation like getting lost in unfamiliar town and having lunch in the only restaurant that was open. Suddenly you're an impromptu food critic, in the blog you write -My Father's Igloo is the world's best Inuit restaurant, the whale blubber platter is to die for.

The next three or four paragraphs  describe the meal in minute detail but it's also in very careful and diplomatic language. You don't want to give the management any reason to hitch up the huskies to the sled and come hunt you down. To add some feeling of authority you add some factoids like the Native Americans who live above the Arctic Circle don't like being called Eskimo. Eskimo is a pejorative term that translates to -eater of raw fish. Only somebody who is too stupid or lazy to make a cook fire would have to eat raw fish. I wonder if feuding Inuit pass each other and shout -your Mother is an Eskimo.

I wanted to start this blog post by saying Russell Bittner is the best poet in Brooklyn New York. That might not be true but it's always fun to ruffle feathers of the chronically hip in the Williamsburg. Williamsburg is that section of Brooklyn where everything part of the kabuki theater of irony and artistic expression.     

Hipsters love poetry because poetry is personal and it's so difficult to honestly rate one poem better than another. Really good and really bad poetry is obvious but all the stuff in the middle lends its self to endless subjective discussions where even an average mind can be bumped up to the level of a pseudo-intellectual.

Russell Bittner is a published author and award winning poet. I like to compare his work to the French poet Ballade. Both have dark undertones though Ballade poems seemed to have a narrower scope in subject and style. I'm the kind of person who tried to read James Joyce's Ulysses but only got to page three. Both Ballade and Bittner are a lot more accessible.

With Valentine's Day coming up poetry is an excellent gift to include with the roses and chocolates.

Be hip buy poetry.

During World War Two there was a movie Why We Fight, it was an explanation of why sacrifice was so important obviously poetry is not as dramatic as war but still comes the question of why we write.

Hung over from last night’s praise

Of himself, the young poet

Suffering from the euphemism

Of young, not as in youth

But as in undiscovered

Yet to be published

He opens his apartment door

To the homeless man

Who believes he is Walt Whitman

Living rough on the building stoop

Ragged and gap toothed

He bows to the aspiring writer

The young poet shivers in fear

The dread of a problematic future

A vision of his probable fate

That shakes him to the core

The old man knows the unspoken

Fear not, fear not, oh pioneer

Look at me, poetry has been my all

My blanket on the coldest nights

And bread when my stomach grumbles

The poet stands in tortured silence

Midway between all extremes

He knows he can go down every street

In Brooklyn –or any town on the map

And find no shortage of sad stories

Every step a reminder, close at hand

Failure walks a half pace behind

The world panders the Devil’s deal

Your life for the trinkets of success

And just when the deal seems struck

The young poet breathes deep

And as normally as exhaling

The first lines of his next poem

Comes to him, ready to be written

   

A Young Man's Fancy

The weather is awful and while I'm here at work I'm dreaming of spring.  Right now the worst winter is almost over and we're entering a transition period, four to six weeks of cold near freezing rain. This is the season of mud where everything is damp, dirty and depressing.

Last year I did some voice work at the local radio station. One ad had the background sounds of birds and nature and the script went "it's almost spring and a young man's fancy turns to...MOTORCYCLES."  It is true, men might talk about women but they are really thinking about motorcycles.

Once the roads are free of ice it's time to get your machine ready and running. I have had  a couple of motorcycles but never was a serious rider. Soon to be free of dependent child it might be time to indulge those open road fantasies again. This time make a real commitment. Looking at the advertisements of motorcycles for sale I found this gem. It's a Simplex and it's the only motorcycle manufactured in the American Deep South, down in Louisiana.

The design is classic though it's totally impractical on today's roads. In the 1950's it boasted a fuel economy of 100 miles per gallon with the advanced feature of a belt driven automatic transmission, otherwise it looks like it was a pretty primal experience riding a Simplex. It was least amount motorcycle you can own without it becoming a moped. But it's not difficult to imagine puttering down a country road lined with Live Oaks draped in Spanish Moss on a Simplex.   

If money was no object I would shop for style and design and hire a good mechanic to keep it all working. There is something beautiful in the old, the odd and not quite successful.  When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 one importer immediately jumped at the opportunity to bring IMZ / Ural motorcycles into the United States. For less than $5,000 you could buy a 750cc motorcycle - a Russian copy of the BMW R71 with a sidecar. The downside was the all came in a crate, you had to pick it up at the docks in Philadelphia and assemble the bike yourself.

One person I knew second hand took up the challenge. Just about every major part had to machined, filed or finished so that they would fit properly.  As he said -"it had the quality of a Fiat built on a Monday morning by hung-over workers ready to go on strike".  Once the IMZ was running it prove to be solid and bullet proof; and it would not surprise me if it was still on back roads of South Jersey today. The IMZ / Ural was the standard motorcycle for the Soviet Red Army.

Big touring motorcycles with or without sidecars are excellent for the long road trip but I'm kind of interested something smaller, something that would force me to travel light. A side car would be too much temptation to collect a lot of extra stuff and bring it home.

Another small motorcycle that comes to mind is the old DKWs from Germany. In the 50's and 60's they made a 175cc model that was very popular on the international racing circuit. One of those odd childhood memories comes up, around 1968 a group of motorcyclists up in Finland try to promote winter motorcycle racing. The track was on a frozen lake and to maintain any traction the tries had two and a half inch spikes sticking out of them.  The DKWs dominated the track.

Supposedly only two races were held. The second one was recorded by ABC Wide World of Sports. What wasn't shown on TV was one the one of the racers falling off his bike and being run over another. Sadly the accident was fatal and that ended the sport.

The local Honda dealer has recently purchased a Royal Enfield franchise. These are small and mid-size motorcycles with a classic retro look and a promise that with the most up to date manufacture techniques these motorcycles will not have the problems that made other British bikes legendary for being temperamental.

I'm told with the new Enfields you only need one set of wrenches. One collector of BSAs talked about certain transitional years and models where you needed three or four sets of wrenches to do all the repair work. You would think that a wrench is just a wrench but in England it's a spanner and there they have British Standard sizes, Whitworth sizes, Metric and once and a while an American Standard comes in handy.

Well it's nice to dream.  And someday when I'm liberated from my parental obligations I hope to be cruising down an empty road on a motorcycle in search of adventure. All I have to do is get through another season of mud and see what happens next.

Girls and Guns

One of those volatile arguments that keep everyone angry and agitated is the private ownership of guns in America. While doing research it was a shock to find out that the biggest growing group of new gun owners isn't the crazed patriots in camouflage warning us government cabals   -no, it's women. And I don't mean Sarah Palin type women who need to shoot a moose from an airplane... no I mean ordinary women like the single mom next door.

More than ever the odds are your new girlfriend is packing heat. Now for twenty years gun shops have been marketing the Lady Smith & Weston line of side arms. They have smaller grips, lighter weights and a decorative touch of pink. Other gun maker have followed that lead, letting women know that they can't always expect the police to arrive in time or their old ex will always respect a restraining order.  With more woman owning guns there's a strange undertow in the gun community, the whole thing makes some men nervous. A gun is great equalizer  

From an artistic stand point violence and conflict are major elements of storytelling. But a story is a story and when you close the book or watch the ending credits of a film roll by the conflict is over; as in the real would violent acts lead to lifelong traumas. There is some genetic link to violence and pleasure. One of the best demonstration I saw was when a first person shooter video game was hacked and the pistol was changed into an arm throwing cream pies. The splatter of blood was replaced with whipped cream but all the other features of the game stayed the same. When gamers were given a choice between the original or the hacked game, the original was like a thirty to one favorite.

There also is that odd connection between violence and the erotic. Fantasy artists have always understood the commercial possibilities of an image that combines a scantily clad woman with a large edged weapon. Of course girls and guns have a comical side too. As one man said -it's funny the same way a dancing dog is funny, it's not that a dog can't dance or a woman can't have a gun but you don't expect either.       

In past blog posting I've written about my friend Tom the Collector of Everything. About ten years ago he had a girlfriend Ivy -and she hosted a website that featured herself barely clothed and provocatively posed with a number of large caliber guns.  The rest of us thought it was tasteless and tacky until Ivy told us the proceeds of the website had paid off the mortgage on her house. As George Takei would have said -"Oh my".

Knowing what violence looks like has made me very cautious about firearms.  I like antique ones and building guns from kits. Having an operating gun in the house only increases your risk of being shot. Because of a few very targeted budget cuts by Congress -the DEA , Department of Health and Human Services as well as the Centers for Disease Control can not collect information on accidental shooting, nor do any safety studies or even report on the numbers. Like Genetically Modified  Organisms in our food, if guns are really safe then why is the information being suppressed?

In the history of guns, women have lent their images to advertise and sell them. Other woman help create a sub genre of porn matching together the power of sex and lethal force. In the mainstream more women might not buy into the gun as the icon of male dominance but actually purchase one because family, friends and society don't protect women that try to live a life on their own.     

So this coming Valentine's Day will you be giving or getting a box of ammo with that heart of chocolates?

It was once said that God didn't make all men equal it was Sam Colt who did. And today Sam Colt might be the feminist hero. Or maybe to paraphrase one of Beyonce's songs "if you really love her put a holster on her hip".

Freedom of Choice

Just got an invitation to an Oscar party. The whole academy awards thing is weeks away but if I can make, I'll go. It's nice to be with a group of frustrated and opinionated independent film makers.  There will be plenty of alcohol which almost guarantees a very animated discussion or two. You have to expect that among artists and would be artists.

As Joe would say -Hollywood has reached its high point and it's all downhill and nostalgia from here.  Joe bases that on the box office gross and attendance at movie theaters, over the last few years growth has slowed and flattened.  As Hollywood is like every other business, investors will be more cautious and conservative as the money flowing in decreases.  You can't be too provocative or challenging if every film has to pull its own weight.

Joe has been to Sundance and still harbors the dream of selling one of his films but hope is fading not just because he's getting older but also because the world really is changing. One art college is dropping its screen writing class for movies and revamping it for video game production. It's a cliché to say computers are changing everything but not only have they changed everything -the biggest changes are yet to come.

It's still fun to guess how the 5,800 members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will vote. The last time I checked it was 77% white men with less than 3% African-American membership. The majority are between 50 - 60 years old with an average age of 62, only 14% are younger than 50. It's interesting to see how out sync that is with the rest of the world.  In a generation, maybe less, will this ritual be irrelevant or will it become a faded icon like a copy of Life magazine?

With a good internet connection and a big screen TV people are already giving up on the movie theater experience.  Movies, TV, radio, mail, news, shopping and socializing have always been available online -and these services are only getting better and easier to use. One of my sons was confused when I was going out to meet a friend at a local cafe, he suggested I should talk to them on Skype or Facebook. He couldn't quite understand why I was taking the time and trouble to see my friends in person.

My God... I'm starting to become the old codger that goes around saying "I remember when".

Sadly a few months ago the local radio station closed down. Part of its downfall was its broadcast frequency was on the AM bandwidth. The few AM stations that are still commercially viable are often religious, rural or talk radio formats. AM radio is disappearing, you can not buy a radio that solely receives AM and some manufacturers of AM / FM radios have dropped AM entirely. The same creeping decay is happening in FM too. My last trip to New York City and North Jersey was kind of strange as old stations try to fit into smaller and tighter niches so they could stay on the air. This is not earth shattering or even bad. On any wireless device there's access to thousands of other stations with an internet feed or thousands more who broadcast on the internet only. 

Don't misunderstand me -the internet is great but when everything is only few mouse clicks  away... well I feel something is lost in all that convenience.  

The internet has given everybody the opportunity to be a movie mogul, a TV producer, a radio broadcaster, newspaper or information service. The price of set up and entry is ridiculously low, making it a wide open market but it also creates a revenue stream that lavishly rewards a few stars and starves everyone else. Like in newspapers, the New York Times has become a global newspaper with more people around the planet reading it online and in print.  The New York Times has never been better but most local papers can't compete because they lost a third of their income when Craigslist made free classified ads available online.

  One concern I have is for news -I mean real news reporting. News is expensive to produce. At one time the FCC use to set up minimum rules for radio and TV news. This way one station couldn't have a economic advantage over another by skipping the news.  Each station had a civic and legal duty to broadcast it.  Without these rules news has become more opinion and gossip than investigative reporting and the blogosphere is a piss poor substitution for professional reporting -not because it's less sincere but because it has so much less resources. 

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Within 24 hours of posting this, I was sent an email how in the new I-Pad there are several lines of code for a planned "radio" app. In the next 6 months Apple will up and running a worldwide wifi radio network to promote I-Tunes over Spotify and Pandora. So in five years maybe there will only be three or four music services and actual broadcast radio will go the way of buggy whips. 
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One of those silly party games is to pick a category and ask each player to name as many things that would go in it. Most people have trouble getting beyond three things and it's very rare to get past five.  When the internet makes a handful of brand names, products, political ideas, entertainers  or anything else into  global icons -then what happens? Does it end up globalizing mediocrity and capping off new innovation? Do we really have a choice if no alternatives are offered?

The internet is making the global village possible but it's also eroding away local individuality. Maybe that is inevitable. All the benefits the online world provides is just too good to pass up.  As people have a natural need to socialize, the internet might not eliminate social contact but just change the texture of it. A new individualism could rise up to subvert  the internet and be a counterbalance to the 800 pound cultural gorilla we now invite into our lives every day.

    

Meaningful Work

As we grow up there are cornerstone, keystone and capstone events in  building a life. I have two sons, one who is finishing up engineering school and the other who is planning to go to college next September. Now my older son is ambitious, he has worked hard, done well and next year should have his degree in Computer Science . The future is always scary but I think he's prepared.

Now my other son is just as smart but not a scholastic star. His interests is in the arts and that sends an icy chill of anxiety down my spine -maybe because I know too many talented artists that live barely above the poverty line.  Now he's been accepted to two different colleges with very prestigious and extremely expensive degree programs.  

Last week one of the colleges hosted an open house. I had never seen my son this enthused and the trip was kind of a family bonding event. We drove whole day through a snow storm and back home in a second wave crappy weather. It wasn't a blizzard but we saw plenty of cars and trucks that slid off the highway and needed to be rescued.

We also had some time to talk about "meaningful work". It's an important part of life -like love. And like love, meaningful work is difficult to describe.  There is that physical need to make our daily bread but also a deeper need to give that work a purpose, to have it become part of a narrative we use to identify ourselves. After we're introduced to any stranger the question of "what do you do for a living?" is the first or second thing we ask out of habit.

In the past I would have a bunch of playful, vague and deflecting answers. It was a surprise to see how many people were nervous around somebody they couldn't identify. I had one neighbor, a very nosy insurance agent,  who was so rattled by my lack of a job title he actually went through the trouble of investigating me. When he was unable to find anything significant (because he didn't know where to look), he convinced himself that I was part of the witness protection program.  Of course I'm not but his misconception had a side benefit because it kept him out of my hair. He gave up on trying to sell me insurance too.  

In the minds of most people we are what we do. As my two sons try to settle on a career path they are also creating a big part of their adult identity.  Along with that identity, their career path should lead them to finical security and a sense of purpose. That not only what they do should bring in the money but shouldn't crush their souls and grind down their humanity into dust.

Unfortunately there are not enough opportunities for everybody to be the Captain of their own ship (always a shortage of ships).  For a bunch of different and conflicting reasons most of us end up as on the crew of somebody else's enterprise.  Our labors and intellectual properties are an open market commodity and though slavery has been abolished there are many creative minds working hard on how to make free people as close to slaves as possible without actually clamping on the shackles.

Even if a new world without exploitation should ever evolve what would be the nature of work and its meaning as the world continues to automate?  In Fritz Lang's movie Metropolis the future could be better when the managers and workers (the mind and heart of the city) recognize their mutual interests to help each other. Metropolis was a futuristic world of big machines and heavy industry, it was the utopia of a 1920's understanding of the world.

Kurt Vonnegut in his book Player Piano saw early on the darkening shadow of a post-industrial society back in 1952. Sometime in the near future World War Three had created a terrible labor shortage and ten years after the war the last few craftsmen have their physical skills recorded so that computer driven machinery can do the work safer, cheaper and faster. Large pools of people eke out a living where all the basic needs are met but it's a world of drab and tacky  emptiness. Maybe that's one of the cruelest things you can do to a person, make them a dependent consumer and never let them be an active contributor.

In the book Player Piano and the movie I Robot you have a rebellion of former workers replaced by the machines.  There's almost a subtext saying that even a job where you're under appreciated is still better than living a society that does not need you. Meaningful work is a necessary part of life and without it you become as socially stunted as trust fund baby that has nothing to look back on their lives except a pile of receipts from a perpetual vacation. Like slavery it's the control of the population when they are nothing but reserve labor and talent. 

 I like this because people believe this but it so not true. Ancient Egypt was never a slave society. Over and over again archaeological evidences shows the great pyramids were built with voluntary labor. Many of the stone blocks even have 4,000 year old graffiti of workers bragging about their abilities. 

 Not the best recording  -so I included a copy of the lyrics to follow along with.

Lyrics to The Day John Henry Died by the Driveby Truckers.

I watched the rain; it settled in. We disappeared for days again.
Most of us were staying in, lazy like the sky.
The letters flew across the wire filtered through a million liars.
The whole world smelled like burning tires the day John Henry died.

We knew about that big machine that ran on human hope and steam.
Bets on John were far between and mostly on the side.
We heard he put up quite a fight. His hands and feet turned snowy white.
That hammer rang out through the night the day John Henry died.

When John Henry was a little bitty baby nobody ever taught him how to read
but he knew the perfect way to hold a hammer was the way the railroad baron held the deed.

It didn't matter if he won, if he lived, or if he'd run. 
They changed the way his job was done. Labor costs were high.
That new machine was cheap as hell and only John would work as well,
so they left him laying where he fell the day John Henry died.

John Henry was a steel-driving bastard but John Henry was a bastard just the same.
An engine never thinks about his daddy and an engine never needs to write its name.

So pack your bags, we're headed west and L.A. ain't no place to rest.
You'll need some sleep to pass the test, so get some on the flight
and say your prayers John Henry Ford 'cause we don't need your work no more.
You should have known the final score the day John Henry died.

And one more song, this one by Utah Phillips. What are we at the end of a working life? 

Have a Beer

In writing about some of my past history and anthropology classes I began to wonder what were the greatest milestones of civilization.  Even in the earliest days of the Bronze Age when mathematics, writing and civil law developed people already had agriculture, small permanent settlements and beer.

Beer never gets the respect that it should. There is no God of Beer though beer was probably made before wine. In one book of cuneiform translations it's easy to see that the local economies of the fertile crescent ran on beer.  There are hundreds if not thousands of contracts and transacts that had specified payment in bowls of barley beer. Beer was currency that was easy to trade in a barter economy. The clay tablet to the left is a 4,000 year old poem to the joys of drinking it.

Now saying beer might seem misleading because 3,000 years before common era beer was not the clear golden pilsner most of us drink today. The recipe for Pilsner is less than 200 years old. As you go back in time beer got darker and cloudier. And before that, in Medieval Time, most beer was ale and without hops to make it bitter it was really a sweet tasting drink.

The early Sumerians drank a beer that would look like thinned out oatmeal.  The first beer was a bowl of barley porridge that was left to ferment. So the next day somebody tried that funky breakfast and something special was discovered.

It's funny how most songs and stories about beer are happy or comical. Of course not to make light of alcohol abuse or the fact that many people with drinking problems drink beer exclusively. The features that make beer so easy to consume also make alcohol so accessible to people who would be better off without it.

On the left - possibly the first "don't drink and drive" public service announcement  

On the right - just an beer from my youth from a company that no longer exists. The consolation in the brewing industry still continues but to counteract that trend there has been a revival in locally brewed craft beers.

The controversy over beer is an old one. At times beer has been declared a food and not an alcoholic beverage -which meant lower taxes and easier distribution  At one point there was almost a compromise with beer during the prohibition of alcohol in America in the 1920's.  Beer would have been made legal for the workers and all other alcoholic beverage (except Communion wine) would have remained illegal.  As history is full of twists it was actually the bad behavior of the breweries that made people mad enough to ban alcohol.  There was a time when breweries either owned or franchised the bars and taverns that served its beer (something that is now illegal in the US). That created a lot of pressure to get people to drink more and more, finally the public got tired of the predatory business practices and maybe over reacted.

My favorite beer story had to do with a Belgium school distinct  that wanted to serve its students beer instead of soda. Belgium does make some of the best beer in the world but the beer the school district had in mind was a very light beer brewed with a special yeast that left the finished product with less than 1% alcohol. Honestly I think that this kind of beer is a better and healthier drink for kids than soda sweeten with high fructose corn sugar. Ten years ago when this story was in the news, it was easy fodder for comedians that made jokes about tipsy students and irresponsible school boards. The Belgians quietly shelved the idea.

Here's a couple of songs in tribute to this universal malt beverage. One song goes out to one of my cyber pen pals in Australia. So have a beer Nicole.

To everyone else -I hope you have a nice weekend and you get to enjoy the drink of your choice with a few close friends.

Beer, beer, beer -and no shortage of songs about it.