My editor-in-chief at National Geographic, Bill Garrett, send me this wonderful cinema clip. I replied with my recollections of it and my reactions to it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfZX-4iQOgQ&feature=related
Thank you for sending this film clip! I’ve seen it before under unusual circumstances but haven’t been able to locate it.
This simple, brief trip down Market Street toward the ever-looming Terminal Building is magical in the way some Civil War photos can reach out of their glass plates to seize your whole attention. Perhaps the long exposure time accounts for the power of those Brady-era photos., Their subjects were staring, unmoving, at the uncovered lens for up to two minutes, enough time to focus on the camera as it focused on them, so that they seem to be consciously murmuring over time, “We were here at this frozen moment – intensely, minutely, hopefully, humanly. Look at us, alive in this slice of time, look at us. We passionately need your collusion, your acknowledgment of our living in your own focus. If you truly see us, we live.”
And in this sense, the film is more than a oddity. The people who looked up at the camera in 1905, a year before most of the city was destroyed by the great earthquake, were almost, almost aware that we would be seeing them now. They didn’t care particularly because they had their own lives – see them rush to appointments, lunches, tasks – but a few seem aware or even amused that ghosts of the future are passing on the front platform of the Market Street Car.
A good number of the folks on the street are aware that the ride is being filmed. They wave, caper dangerously in front of the car, boys hitch rides on car bumpers and carriages to wave. Perhaps they're aware that this film is a bit of boosterism staged to make the city look modern and prosperous. Some careful researcher has noted that the many passing automobiles are really a few autos, circling the route of our car. They pass, turn, pass on the other side, and repass on the right.
The primary impression busy Market Street in 1905 offers us is casual chaos. The number of people wandering on and across the street is remarkable. Many stand in the street, looking about them, apparently thinking of something far from Market Street. Most others seem to be in a hurry; it’s Market Street, after all, and business is booming. Something foreign and even disturbing to us that there is so little demarcation between pedestrian and street traffic. Folks continually bolt from one side to the other or stop to talk directly in the traffic flow. The progress of our time vehicle down Market Street is ponderous to us but of little concern to men and women stepping directly in its path, confident that our car or that carriage or even the nimble internal combustion automobiles will make way for them. It’s faintly amazing; no one is knocked down or run over. There aren’t groups pulsing across walkways, timed by signals; that lock-step rigidity is absent.
The phrase “free-for-all” comes to mind, both in the hurly-burly meaning, and in the assured ownership of common space. The hood-banging, automobile-offended New York pedestrian’s shout is poignantly unnecessary on Market Street 1905: “Hey! Hey! I’m walkin’ heah!”
Women pedestrians are relatively rare. What does this tell us about women in San Francisco before suffrage? They are dressed in dark clothes, probably an artifact of horse dung. Dark fabrics hide dirt and stains We would take Market Street to be a filthy place in 1905. Voluminous, long skirts swept near the surface and picked up a rime of powdered horse dung and dust on a rainy day; on a dry day the entire skirt gathered the blowing, ubiquitous product of horse-transport lodged in the cusps between paving stones.
Everyone wears a hat. It’s a breezy day; we occasionally see men clutching their derbies and slouches with both hands.
There is a significant police presence on Market Street. We tend to mistake cops of this era as ridiculous figures because they wear the dark blue solar-topi helmet familiar to us from Mack Sennet’s Keystone Cops, a burlesque of bumbling and incompetent police officers spilling out of a station house in pall-mall pursuit of nothing more dangerous than a scofflaw. But the police on Market are beefy, serious men who look competent and even formidable. They’re men of quick, practical and experienced judgment; Miranda Rights and civil liberties might be science fiction. These are beat-cops assigned to a specific area, with saps and revolvers on their hips, carrying lead-weighted billies. In 1905 San Francisco was still an exotic port ruffled by tong wars, a hustling Tenderloin District, waterfront brawls, and the usual difficulties with alcohol. Cocaine, heroin and opium were sold over the counter so there is no “drug crime” yet. The Indian Wars and the frontier were recent memories, less than twenty years before, but statistics report that riverine or ocean port cities (San Francisco is both) had much more violent crime than the wooliest frontier towns, including the cattle-droving destinations of Dodge City and her sisters in Kansas and Missouri.
There is a vast fleet of street cars. Our straight-line journey encounters dozens of cars on the Market Street line headed in the other direction, and more crossing Market. One crossing car is an electric trolley, powered by overhead wires. Most are unpowered cars; they move as the grip-man hauls on five-foot handles to seize moving, singing cables beneath centerline steel slots on the street, no more than two inches wide, and they brake by releasing the cable and levering-on blocks of elm against tracks and wheels. A grip man must have had prodigious physical strength and endurance.
We see a lot of bicycles on 1905 Market Street, part of the second wave of “wheelmen.” Bicycles were sensible transportation and a political force in the country, perhaps because they freed great numbers of middle-class citizens from the schedules of trains, the expense and responsibility of horse-transport, and the minor but cumulative expense of metropolitan and intercity light rail. Favored politicians visiting cities were accompanied by bicycle parades, large societies of Wheelmen who were something like the League of Women Voters in their pragmatic, progressive views expressed at the polls. Wheelmen were known as technically apt, educated, liberal groups. On our trip we see one cyclist crossing and recrossing the cable car slot only a few yards ahead of our car. Perhaps there was less danger of sinking his front wheel in the slot than it appears.
The day is fine, the mood is buoyant, the city is teeming and fascinating. Young people can watch this fragment of 1905 as a quaint gleam, inconsequential. As we grow older, however, the life and intensity of experience throughout this journey is almost cruel, a memento mori, reminding us that the twinkling moments that are so real in our memories and so full of dedicated life, are evanescent, shadow-play. It requires age to question the real fabric of time, to ask how a moment in this patently false, transparently-manufactured reality-TV opera we inhabit is more real than the sharply realized moments of our past. It seems impossible that those moments don’t still exist, as temporal stair treads to which we might leap if we held tightly to the banister, or if we somehow seized the opposing cable of a Market Street cars going in the opposite direction with a five-foot iron handle and a grip-man’s tenacity.
It helps, of course to be a little crazy. I benefit from this looseness of logic. There is a sandbar on the Chesapeake I inhabited with a woman I loved on the Glorious Fourth of July in the mid-eighties when I was as happy as I can remember being. Our sailboat was drawn up on the beach. The fireworks were reflected in the water and in that exquisite woman’s eyes. We danced on the sand and needed no music but us. We drank sweet Mt. Gay Eclipse rum. She said she loved me, in French. Life seemed as bright and spectacular and blooming as those bursts of light in the sky.
It all went to hell. The exquisite, rare woman changed her mind, in English, and set a lugubrious and devastating chain of events in motion that tore me out of Eden and away from what I most loved. Life was never that hopeful again. But that sandbar evening is so focused in my mind, like a crystal or a hologram of time, that I can’t believe it doesn’t exist at this moment, somewhere.
I watched this Market Street clip a few years ago, during a piano concert at a church in Noe Valley, in San Francisco. About eight pianists were playing, several of them famous stride piano stylists. My friend Jim Purcell was giving his lecture on the evolution of jazz style at the piano. A remarkable man stage-named Hokum Jeeves also played. He and his partner were trying to restart vaudeville and owned a small theater called Hokum Hall in Portland or Seattle. A few of my friends had acts there. Hokum played a cakewalk in ragtime, and then announced that he would demonstrate a lost skill by playing to a silent film as “professors” had in the early part of the last century. They sat at their keyboards – piano or organ – and played extemporaneously, reacting to the mood and action of the film. I remember Mr. Jeeves blending into “A Bicycle Built For Two” as one of the bicycles wobbled across the screen, and fashioning a clanging bell chord as a pedestrian nimbly stepped out of a streetcar’s way. It was enchanting, and it fit this film beautifully.
Braxinoso Speaks
Himself counts his looseness of mind and his past/present confusion of time as virtues. Perhaps they helped him continue an unremunerative profession past logical limits, but they also inflict enormous pain. I've been with him in the dark times when flashes of hope from the past exact a terrible, ironic toll. Trying to look on the bright side, a real virtue of being able to project oneself into another time is the ability to notice small mechanical or social things hindsight often hides.
Showing posts with label design. Show all posts
Showing posts with label design. Show all posts
Monday, May 10, 2010
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
CHICKEN ART
My dear old friend Dean Torges, whom I met when I was about twelve, is a master woodworker, a philosopher, one of the most intelligent and most thoughtful men I've ever met. He's a world-famous bowyer, and (this is a compliment from the era of Theodore Roosevelt) a woodsman and hunter of consummate skill. But presently he's building a chicken house. It's a mobile chicken house. A chicken's need for new vistas is something I simply never considered. Still, Dean knows chickens. He's raised them on his little Ohio farmlet for donkey's years and enjoys his own eggs, broilers, and smoked whole chickens. I suppose he knows chickens better than most and if a mobile chicken house will help his fowl, who am I to quibble? He's even built mobile outbuildings, mesh-covered bomb-shelter frames that roll on old lawnmower wheels to keep his chicks out of hawks' talons. Fowlopolis.
He's endured a large ration of kidding about the time he's spent with his elaborate, over-built, fanciful main chicken house. It's a wonder, the Colossus For Rhode Island Reds. I admit to being part of the ridicule: I designed an elaborate windvane for a mythical cupola, as a joke. The cupola is in place and he's cutting the windvane out of sheet-copper presently.
After all the jokes and fun, I find that Dean's chicken house approaches the sublime. I would enjoy sitting on his porch and simply watching his busy Fowlopolis. As an antidote to the ribbing he's getting, I sent him this post:
Dean:
There are burghers and builders who would criticize and even ridicule you for occupying weeks of work with this project. Your project would delight them as an opportunity to prove their superiority in the only game they know: appropriate response. Your response is impractical, disproportionate, questionable because it could be done so much simpler and with less expense. Buy a Home Depot shed, have it delivered, cut some holes, you're done. All this farting around with special shingles and overbuilt framing … who needs it? Get 'er done! Don't sweat the small stuff, and don't try for some high-falutin perfect solution because chickens is chickens and they just don't matter that much. And do the chickens care? Hell, no. This Torges guy is just showing off, making a mountain out of a molehill.
I, for one, admire any wizard who can make a mountain out of a molehill. It's not just a great trick, it's Art. Let's admit right up front that the Sistine Ceiling could have been done with rollers and a nice Benjamin Moore bone white in a sliver of the time it took that greaseball to tart up the place. Who looks at ceilings, anyway? They keep the rain off and there's an end to it.
Some folks would call your chicken house as a quixotic task, but that would be a misuse of the word's original sense. What our jolly wild-and-crazy-guy era doesn't recall is that Don Quixote was a psychopath. He was mad, delusionary, senile. The beauty of the Don was that, even in his madness, he saw goodness and beauty around him. The heroes of that story were Sancho Panza, for sticking with the old fellah and caring for him, about him, and the son-in-law, for going to such lengths to bring the old guy home. You're not mad, Dean. You don't hear the chickens talking to you. (Is there something you're not telling me?) You're not creating a portal in time or constructing an elaborate reliquary. You're building something just-so. My hero, Mr. Rogers, reassured his audience of children that it was fine to "take your time and do it the way you want to." You're expressing the essence of art, Dean: choices beyond practicality that address larger, subtler, sometimes indefinable issues. Your chicken house is not practical but, damn, it will be interesting and in its inimitable way, beautiful.
You know I don't have much truck with organized religions but recently I've been reviewing my peevish, self-obsessed elitism about the church. Like the burghers and builders criticizing your chicken house, I've using bits and bobs of religion to prove my own superiority: I pretend that I'm the logical thinker, the spiritually practical guy, and God loves me more because I don't bullshit Him. But the (broad, many-factioned) church has cherished our myths and stories, has maintained our spiritual culture, and for all its pedophiles and anti-intellectual Bible-thumpers and derelict Popes, it's kept our cultural heritage of love and forgiveness as ideals alive. These aren't practical values. They don't get 'er done when we're assailed by bad guys. They're dangerously impractical ideals. At a glance we might say they've been ignored more often than practiced. They've been subverted thousands of times, marginalized, and redefined to suit. Even so, they're still with us. Not even Dirty Harry could blow them away. The church has, probably unwittingly, been a culturally integrating force.
Now that I have Max and Luc to consider, I wonder how I can frame a set of ideals and values so they can carry them early and make them part of their character later. One oversimplified, gross solution is to say that God wants them to be good, and this is what we think is good. Why? Because God told us. Honestly, one can't sell love and forgiveness on practical grounds. They're like your chicken house: who would buy them? They're too costly and too quirky and they don't fit the observed data. The only way to sell them might be magic thinking, which I avoid. "Why?" Because God said so, that's why.
It's a beginning. And it's a continuum. "We hold these truths to be self-evident …" Do we? Is truth self-evident? Was independence self-evident as anything more than personal convenience for our Founding Fathers? It's an article of faith with us that truth is simple and understandable but this isn't always a workable assumption. I suppose that's the catch with ideals: they often confute practicality.
What good accrued to the Samaritan who comforted the waylaid traveler in the parable? Nothing practical. He lost money on the deal and went on his way. The Samaritan's ideals – impractical chicken houses of the heart – obliged him to act in an unexpected, illogical, impractical manner. Qui bono? The waylaid traveler. The Samaritan received, we hope, some thanks but not even bragging rights.
Bless your ridiculous chicken house, Dean. It's impractical and a massive waste of time. But it's just so. It's a work of art like one of those kinetic sculptures at Boston's Logan Airport: they endlessly lift tennis balls to a height and let them follow a rolling random course down a mechanically changeable path. What does it do? Nuthin'. It beguiles. Those sculptures have given me hours of pleasure and contemplation. Bless you and the kinetic sculpture guy and your chicken house and all who sail in her.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
I worry when Himself waxes poetic about impracticality. It's like an habitual gambler extolling the graphic and mathematical beauty of poker or craps. His connection to the practical world is already too tenuous. Would I recommend that he tilt at even more windmills with the mad Don? I think not.
He's endured a large ration of kidding about the time he's spent with his elaborate, over-built, fanciful main chicken house. It's a wonder, the Colossus For Rhode Island Reds. I admit to being part of the ridicule: I designed an elaborate windvane for a mythical cupola, as a joke. The cupola is in place and he's cutting the windvane out of sheet-copper presently.
After all the jokes and fun, I find that Dean's chicken house approaches the sublime. I would enjoy sitting on his porch and simply watching his busy Fowlopolis. As an antidote to the ribbing he's getting, I sent him this post:
Dean:
There are burghers and builders who would criticize and even ridicule you for occupying weeks of work with this project. Your project would delight them as an opportunity to prove their superiority in the only game they know: appropriate response. Your response is impractical, disproportionate, questionable because it could be done so much simpler and with less expense. Buy a Home Depot shed, have it delivered, cut some holes, you're done. All this farting around with special shingles and overbuilt framing … who needs it? Get 'er done! Don't sweat the small stuff, and don't try for some high-falutin perfect solution because chickens is chickens and they just don't matter that much. And do the chickens care? Hell, no. This Torges guy is just showing off, making a mountain out of a molehill.
I, for one, admire any wizard who can make a mountain out of a molehill. It's not just a great trick, it's Art. Let's admit right up front that the Sistine Ceiling could have been done with rollers and a nice Benjamin Moore bone white in a sliver of the time it took that greaseball to tart up the place. Who looks at ceilings, anyway? They keep the rain off and there's an end to it.
Some folks would call your chicken house as a quixotic task, but that would be a misuse of the word's original sense. What our jolly wild-and-crazy-guy era doesn't recall is that Don Quixote was a psychopath. He was mad, delusionary, senile. The beauty of the Don was that, even in his madness, he saw goodness and beauty around him. The heroes of that story were Sancho Panza, for sticking with the old fellah and caring for him, about him, and the son-in-law, for going to such lengths to bring the old guy home. You're not mad, Dean. You don't hear the chickens talking to you. (Is there something you're not telling me?) You're not creating a portal in time or constructing an elaborate reliquary. You're building something just-so. My hero, Mr. Rogers, reassured his audience of children that it was fine to "take your time and do it the way you want to." You're expressing the essence of art, Dean: choices beyond practicality that address larger, subtler, sometimes indefinable issues. Your chicken house is not practical but, damn, it will be interesting and in its inimitable way, beautiful.
You know I don't have much truck with organized religions but recently I've been reviewing my peevish, self-obsessed elitism about the church. Like the burghers and builders criticizing your chicken house, I've using bits and bobs of religion to prove my own superiority: I pretend that I'm the logical thinker, the spiritually practical guy, and God loves me more because I don't bullshit Him. But the (broad, many-factioned) church has cherished our myths and stories, has maintained our spiritual culture, and for all its pedophiles and anti-intellectual Bible-thumpers and derelict Popes, it's kept our cultural heritage of love and forgiveness as ideals alive. These aren't practical values. They don't get 'er done when we're assailed by bad guys. They're dangerously impractical ideals. At a glance we might say they've been ignored more often than practiced. They've been subverted thousands of times, marginalized, and redefined to suit. Even so, they're still with us. Not even Dirty Harry could blow them away. The church has, probably unwittingly, been a culturally integrating force.
Now that I have Max and Luc to consider, I wonder how I can frame a set of ideals and values so they can carry them early and make them part of their character later. One oversimplified, gross solution is to say that God wants them to be good, and this is what we think is good. Why? Because God told us. Honestly, one can't sell love and forgiveness on practical grounds. They're like your chicken house: who would buy them? They're too costly and too quirky and they don't fit the observed data. The only way to sell them might be magic thinking, which I avoid. "Why?" Because God said so, that's why.
It's a beginning. And it's a continuum. "We hold these truths to be self-evident …" Do we? Is truth self-evident? Was independence self-evident as anything more than personal convenience for our Founding Fathers? It's an article of faith with us that truth is simple and understandable but this isn't always a workable assumption. I suppose that's the catch with ideals: they often confute practicality.
What good accrued to the Samaritan who comforted the waylaid traveler in the parable? Nothing practical. He lost money on the deal and went on his way. The Samaritan's ideals – impractical chicken houses of the heart – obliged him to act in an unexpected, illogical, impractical manner. Qui bono? The waylaid traveler. The Samaritan received, we hope, some thanks but not even bragging rights.
Bless your ridiculous chicken house, Dean. It's impractical and a massive waste of time. But it's just so. It's a work of art like one of those kinetic sculptures at Boston's Logan Airport: they endlessly lift tennis balls to a height and let them follow a rolling random course down a mechanically changeable path. What does it do? Nuthin'. It beguiles. Those sculptures have given me hours of pleasure and contemplation. Bless you and the kinetic sculpture guy and your chicken house and all who sail in her.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
I worry when Himself waxes poetic about impracticality. It's like an habitual gambler extolling the graphic and mathematical beauty of poker or craps. His connection to the practical world is already too tenuous. Would I recommend that he tilt at even more windmills with the mad Don? I think not.
Friday, March 19, 2010
NIGHT STUFF
My naps are precious to me: gourmet sleep. Yesterday I had one of my best naps. This flu cycles on and on like World War I, control ebbing and flowing between my macrophages and the viri, so I’m mostly tired. Having completed a piece for WoodenBoat I took my little fleece blanket and walked into the Big House backyard. I rolled into the rope hammock at the far end of the yard, tucked the blanket up under my head, covered my eyes with my battered Panama hat, and slept for an hour in the gently swinging hammock. The air was like wine, the temperature perfect, and breeze light, and the sun was filtered through leaves. God smiled on me and I slept as peacefully as a boy.
This morning I was awakened by the hardest working piece of local equipment I know of – a little John Deere six-wheeled, motorized utility cart owned by Maragus Stables across the road. The Hispanic ostler is up and working before sunrise. I heard him this morning at 0530h and put on my glasses to watch the lights of the cart scuttle around the paddocks. I opened the window by the bed to hear the ragged purring of its engine. He was giving the horses their morning flakes of green-flecked alfalfa hay.
Sometimes they wake at night in their standing sleep and kick the backs of their stalls or ring the galvanized pipe fencing with their iron shoes, peevish for some equine reason. Humph, “reason” isn’t a quality I associate with horses; they’re not intelligent animals like a dog or a dolphin but herd creatures bound by strict codes of behavior. A few of them have been trained against their herd instincts to be useful in ways, and any riding horse has had its natural balance (usually on the forefeet) readjusted to carry weight on four legs. They can be domesticated but not brought into real communication. So I don’t attribute high-jinks in horses to cleverness or spite but merely to herd protocol reasserting itself in some obscure way.
The cart made its dark rounds, and it’s making it day rounds in the full sunlight now, the day-guy picking up horseapples with his plastic mucking rake and tossing the rich, hardly processed dung in the cart’s tipping back. He’ll run it 150 yards up Wildwood Lane and vector off to the north side of the Lane where at least a hundred tons of horse manure – what must be an obscure fortune in nutrient – age. The Maragus property is a long slice from the road to the edge of the woods where the manure heaps are, just where the hills begin mounting abruptly to the ridge behind us, in our southwest. That’s the ridge that separates Novato from Lucas Valley; George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch is just over the long, descending spine stepping down to 101.
The time before sunrise, before that magical time the Prudent Mariner knows as “nautical twilight,” is dangerous territory for reflection. For a person like me with odd sleep habits – and maybe old guys’ sleep habits are always odd – seeing the lights of any job activity actually underscores the alienation of night dwellers like me. It often backs me into acknowledging just how far outside the mainstream of life I am, how little I share with my fellow citizens. If anyone at the bank or the grocery could see my life written on my forehead I suppose they’d be mildly shocked that I’m not one of them. I don’t have a job, per se, but a self-marketing profession with remarkably little paperwork. Much less, I’m sure, than the bank and the IRS would advise. I have digital trails of iteration and reiteration of my designs and my texts as progressive digital files. There’s a big cardboard folder of original pencil drawings that have been scanned as working files to be wrangled with PhotoShop and Illustrator into products. Much of the production work has been done long past the bedtime of sensible citizens who prepare themselves for sleep an hour or two before midnight.
Occasionally at the end of a late session I walk outside and look at the stars. I’ve turned the movement-activated light outside my door off so I’m not greeted with a nasty flash, and I know how far I can walk up or down the side-drive before the backyard lights or the garage front lights see my heat signature and flash on. For some reason I can almost always see Orion in the celestial lane above the black line of roof to my northeast and the ragged line of poplars to my southwest. I’d go farther and even walk down the road but I’m fenced in like the horses by the danger of a disappointing, intrusive, rude glare of suspicion from the who-are-you front lights.
It’s dangerous to feel so alien and hemmed in and uncollegial. I should live in a village where the grocer and hardware clerk know me and anchor me to life with small talk. I think I’d enjoy having a payroll clerk deduct taxes from my paycheck, and have folks tell me what we were doing. I believe I’d look forward to lunches with various people and to jokes and to family news.
The time before nautical twilight reminds me that at my age, at my level of skill, in my profession/s, I’m unemployable in any practical sense. My collegial time is used up. I’ve become a troll keeping odd hours and wondering about other alienated souls in the dark.
My friend Pat Gavin, the cop, habitually preferred solitary night shifts. His view of humanity was a bit jaundiced: he said that after one in the morning a cop seldom meets anyone who isn’t drunk. In DC I often saw him going on shift or coming off. When I hugged him – he was a very dear friend and one of the best men I’ve known – I’d feel the stiffness of his Kevlar bulletproof vest under his uniform shirt. He’d been shot before, almost fatally, and you could expect that Kevlar as part of his hug.
It would be useful to have some “on-line now” notice on e-mail or some social web program, to know how many of one’s friends – cops, painters, writers, designers – were up and about, someone who might enjoy a chat or even a cuppa.
Carl Sandburg captured night people very well in one of my favorite poems, “Psalm Of Those Who Go Forth Before Daylight.”
THE POLICEMAN buys shoes slow and careful;
the teamster buys gloves slow and careful;
they take care of their feet and hands;
they live on their feet and hands.
The milkman never argues;
he works alone and no one speaks to him;
the city is asleep when he is on the job;
he puts a bottle on six hundred porches and calls it a day’s work;
he climbs two hundred wooden stairways;
two horses are company for him;
he never argues.
The rolling-mill men and the sheet-steel men are brothers of cinders;
they empty cinders out of their shoes after the day’s work;
they ask their wives to fix burnt holes in the knees of their trousers;
their necks and ears are covered with a smut;
they scour their necks and ears;
they are brothers of cinders.
CARL SANDBURG, Cornhuskers, 1918
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself is several kinds of fool, as soft-hearted and well-meaning as he is. He should get to bed and get his life into synchronus with life and people. He should get out and avoid reflections on alienation. We're all alone on our own iceberg. It does little good to emphasize that fate.
This morning I was awakened by the hardest working piece of local equipment I know of – a little John Deere six-wheeled, motorized utility cart owned by Maragus Stables across the road. The Hispanic ostler is up and working before sunrise. I heard him this morning at 0530h and put on my glasses to watch the lights of the cart scuttle around the paddocks. I opened the window by the bed to hear the ragged purring of its engine. He was giving the horses their morning flakes of green-flecked alfalfa hay.
Sometimes they wake at night in their standing sleep and kick the backs of their stalls or ring the galvanized pipe fencing with their iron shoes, peevish for some equine reason. Humph, “reason” isn’t a quality I associate with horses; they’re not intelligent animals like a dog or a dolphin but herd creatures bound by strict codes of behavior. A few of them have been trained against their herd instincts to be useful in ways, and any riding horse has had its natural balance (usually on the forefeet) readjusted to carry weight on four legs. They can be domesticated but not brought into real communication. So I don’t attribute high-jinks in horses to cleverness or spite but merely to herd protocol reasserting itself in some obscure way.
The cart made its dark rounds, and it’s making it day rounds in the full sunlight now, the day-guy picking up horseapples with his plastic mucking rake and tossing the rich, hardly processed dung in the cart’s tipping back. He’ll run it 150 yards up Wildwood Lane and vector off to the north side of the Lane where at least a hundred tons of horse manure – what must be an obscure fortune in nutrient – age. The Maragus property is a long slice from the road to the edge of the woods where the manure heaps are, just where the hills begin mounting abruptly to the ridge behind us, in our southwest. That’s the ridge that separates Novato from Lucas Valley; George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch is just over the long, descending spine stepping down to 101.
The time before sunrise, before that magical time the Prudent Mariner knows as “nautical twilight,” is dangerous territory for reflection. For a person like me with odd sleep habits – and maybe old guys’ sleep habits are always odd – seeing the lights of any job activity actually underscores the alienation of night dwellers like me. It often backs me into acknowledging just how far outside the mainstream of life I am, how little I share with my fellow citizens. If anyone at the bank or the grocery could see my life written on my forehead I suppose they’d be mildly shocked that I’m not one of them. I don’t have a job, per se, but a self-marketing profession with remarkably little paperwork. Much less, I’m sure, than the bank and the IRS would advise. I have digital trails of iteration and reiteration of my designs and my texts as progressive digital files. There’s a big cardboard folder of original pencil drawings that have been scanned as working files to be wrangled with PhotoShop and Illustrator into products. Much of the production work has been done long past the bedtime of sensible citizens who prepare themselves for sleep an hour or two before midnight.
Occasionally at the end of a late session I walk outside and look at the stars. I’ve turned the movement-activated light outside my door off so I’m not greeted with a nasty flash, and I know how far I can walk up or down the side-drive before the backyard lights or the garage front lights see my heat signature and flash on. For some reason I can almost always see Orion in the celestial lane above the black line of roof to my northeast and the ragged line of poplars to my southwest. I’d go farther and even walk down the road but I’m fenced in like the horses by the danger of a disappointing, intrusive, rude glare of suspicion from the who-are-you front lights.
It’s dangerous to feel so alien and hemmed in and uncollegial. I should live in a village where the grocer and hardware clerk know me and anchor me to life with small talk. I think I’d enjoy having a payroll clerk deduct taxes from my paycheck, and have folks tell me what we were doing. I believe I’d look forward to lunches with various people and to jokes and to family news.
The time before nautical twilight reminds me that at my age, at my level of skill, in my profession/s, I’m unemployable in any practical sense. My collegial time is used up. I’ve become a troll keeping odd hours and wondering about other alienated souls in the dark.
My friend Pat Gavin, the cop, habitually preferred solitary night shifts. His view of humanity was a bit jaundiced: he said that after one in the morning a cop seldom meets anyone who isn’t drunk. In DC I often saw him going on shift or coming off. When I hugged him – he was a very dear friend and one of the best men I’ve known – I’d feel the stiffness of his Kevlar bulletproof vest under his uniform shirt. He’d been shot before, almost fatally, and you could expect that Kevlar as part of his hug.
It would be useful to have some “on-line now” notice on e-mail or some social web program, to know how many of one’s friends – cops, painters, writers, designers – were up and about, someone who might enjoy a chat or even a cuppa.
Carl Sandburg captured night people very well in one of my favorite poems, “Psalm Of Those Who Go Forth Before Daylight.”
THE POLICEMAN buys shoes slow and careful;
the teamster buys gloves slow and careful;
they take care of their feet and hands;
they live on their feet and hands.
The milkman never argues;
he works alone and no one speaks to him;
the city is asleep when he is on the job;
he puts a bottle on six hundred porches and calls it a day’s work;
he climbs two hundred wooden stairways;
two horses are company for him;
he never argues.
The rolling-mill men and the sheet-steel men are brothers of cinders;
they empty cinders out of their shoes after the day’s work;
they ask their wives to fix burnt holes in the knees of their trousers;
their necks and ears are covered with a smut;
they scour their necks and ears;
they are brothers of cinders.
CARL SANDBURG, Cornhuskers, 1918
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself is several kinds of fool, as soft-hearted and well-meaning as he is. He should get to bed and get his life into synchronus with life and people. He should get out and avoid reflections on alienation. We're all alone on our own iceberg. It does little good to emphasize that fate.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
GREEN BOATING
A discussion in today's "Marina, Boatingbuilding and Dealer Professionals" forum asked if "Green Marinas" were viable. This is a charged debate because the "professionals" depend on big boats for their profits, and the big powerboats get about half a mile to the gallon, if that.
But being on the water is so important, so precious. Watching from shore just isn't a substitute. You see the ocean and its life only beyond the surf. My contribution to the subject was:
The Green Marina is a goal. Even faltering steps toward energy savings and zero-added-pollution should be encouraged. Should Green Marinas harbor sailing craft only? Not necessarily; some motor yachts designed for modest speeds are fuel-efficient. And some small, economically disenfranchised boaters are zero-polluters. How many marinas welcome small scale sailors – kayaks, pulling boats and daysailers?
It's surprising to most wind-sailors how much fuel fast-moving demands. It's a guilty fact that we motor through calms, light winds and even headwinds. We might return to the slip after a trip out to the Farralones and back, motoring for a good part of the day, and use, perhaps, 7 gallons of diesel. The sport-fisherman across the dock has made the same trip at a higher speed, has admittedly covered more bottom by setting and pulling crab pots and trolling for stripers, but has burned more than ten times the fuel. Things change. Oil is no longer a negligible component of boating's future.
Being on the water is a rare privilege most landlocked souls aren't offered. The prime benefit of access to the water life is witnessing and being part of its powerful but delicate ecology. A responsibility comes with the privilege: we're obligated to do as little harm to the water we love as possible.
A Green Marina, even one with some contradictions and drawbacks, is a good start and a good example. Any Green Marina would remind its skippers to think more clearly about how they affect the water. If we saw more Green Marinas, the industry would inevitably push technology (still grounded in its high-ticket, twin-Chrysler, go-fast stage) toward efficiency and sensible conservation. It may not be too early to accept the logical expression of our privileged closeness to the world ocean: reducing fuel consumption at LEAST in proportion to reduction in automobile standards.
We don't want to lose marinas! They're critical portals to the water world, and they're a happy, colorful component of shore life. Marinas can't survive if they can't make money. Big boats make big profits. Fuel markups aren't what they were but they're part of the profit margin. What's the responsible, proactive, progressive, foresighted path? Green Marinas are one part of the answer: they're an institutional commitment to positive change.
The sensible path surely depends on reading the future as wisely as we check the weather forecasts: can go-fast powerboating continue as a highly visible symbol of boating's lack of concern for conservation? Will every big, creamy wake, so visible scarring the Bay, encourage legislators to make the boating industry a sop to Cerberus? Will legislation crack down on boating as a smoke screen for allowing trucking and auto manufacturers to ignore fuel reduction guidelines?
You know that I'm merely a gadfly in this discussion. My dog in this fight is a Chihuahua. But from a journalist's perspective, the boating industry might serve itself best by getting on the Green Barge and making its own changes.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself can offer himself to ridicule pitifully eagerly. One speculates that marine businessmen, boat manufacturers and even small-boat builders would prefer that amateurs simply shut up. But ridicule can be an honorable state for journalists, whose business demands that they step out onto the balcony of palaces and observe aloud that the emperor is wearing no clothes. Ridicule doesn't do journalists much lasting harm, and we suppose they must accustom themselves to the sting of cold water in their faces in order to say the critically important thing when it is, by common consent, ridiculous.
But being on the water is so important, so precious. Watching from shore just isn't a substitute. You see the ocean and its life only beyond the surf. My contribution to the subject was:
The Green Marina is a goal. Even faltering steps toward energy savings and zero-added-pollution should be encouraged. Should Green Marinas harbor sailing craft only? Not necessarily; some motor yachts designed for modest speeds are fuel-efficient. And some small, economically disenfranchised boaters are zero-polluters. How many marinas welcome small scale sailors – kayaks, pulling boats and daysailers?
It's surprising to most wind-sailors how much fuel fast-moving demands. It's a guilty fact that we motor through calms, light winds and even headwinds. We might return to the slip after a trip out to the Farralones and back, motoring for a good part of the day, and use, perhaps, 7 gallons of diesel. The sport-fisherman across the dock has made the same trip at a higher speed, has admittedly covered more bottom by setting and pulling crab pots and trolling for stripers, but has burned more than ten times the fuel. Things change. Oil is no longer a negligible component of boating's future.
Being on the water is a rare privilege most landlocked souls aren't offered. The prime benefit of access to the water life is witnessing and being part of its powerful but delicate ecology. A responsibility comes with the privilege: we're obligated to do as little harm to the water we love as possible.
A Green Marina, even one with some contradictions and drawbacks, is a good start and a good example. Any Green Marina would remind its skippers to think more clearly about how they affect the water. If we saw more Green Marinas, the industry would inevitably push technology (still grounded in its high-ticket, twin-Chrysler, go-fast stage) toward efficiency and sensible conservation. It may not be too early to accept the logical expression of our privileged closeness to the world ocean: reducing fuel consumption at LEAST in proportion to reduction in automobile standards.
We don't want to lose marinas! They're critical portals to the water world, and they're a happy, colorful component of shore life. Marinas can't survive if they can't make money. Big boats make big profits. Fuel markups aren't what they were but they're part of the profit margin. What's the responsible, proactive, progressive, foresighted path? Green Marinas are one part of the answer: they're an institutional commitment to positive change.
The sensible path surely depends on reading the future as wisely as we check the weather forecasts: can go-fast powerboating continue as a highly visible symbol of boating's lack of concern for conservation? Will every big, creamy wake, so visible scarring the Bay, encourage legislators to make the boating industry a sop to Cerberus? Will legislation crack down on boating as a smoke screen for allowing trucking and auto manufacturers to ignore fuel reduction guidelines?
You know that I'm merely a gadfly in this discussion. My dog in this fight is a Chihuahua. But from a journalist's perspective, the boating industry might serve itself best by getting on the Green Barge and making its own changes.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself can offer himself to ridicule pitifully eagerly. One speculates that marine businessmen, boat manufacturers and even small-boat builders would prefer that amateurs simply shut up. But ridicule can be an honorable state for journalists, whose business demands that they step out onto the balcony of palaces and observe aloud that the emperor is wearing no clothes. Ridicule doesn't do journalists much lasting harm, and we suppose they must accustom themselves to the sting of cold water in their faces in order to say the critically important thing when it is, by common consent, ridiculous.
Friday, February 12, 2010
MINE CANARIES
CREATIVE PEOPLE have always lived in the thin ends of the bell curve, out on the fringe, scuttling about and picking at the table scraps of big money. The exhibits I've had a hand in designing, the books I've created, the articles I've written, the films with which I've worked – they've all been secondary fruits of "loose money" freed up for social projects by embarrassingly large profits. When profits dip, artists are the mine canaries of capital flow: we fall dead off our perches before the big guys can feel the pinch. Looking around me I see a lot of empty perches. And there's a bit of a rasp in my throat, as well.
What follows is part of a reply to the director of the Bay Area Discovery Museum, a lovely place for little guys. I proposed we collaborate on some exhibits and he, graciously and reluctantly, confessed that the BADM didn't have the funding to pursue anything new in this crunch. I replied:
Yes, the economy is harsh, but I can’t imagine any other result from our global adventuring. As Shackleton said, “Adventure is a sign of incompetence.” We don’t seem to manufacture anything in the hardware store, now. Many of our best young men and women are scattered across the world fighting and dying for folks who don’t want us there. We’re fouling our nest but can’t seem to stop. The rolling juggernaut of corporate America more or less ignores all our objections and cries. Yet we DO live in a favored land, and our culture IS strong, has a work ethic, and has good roots. The problem could be that our leaders don’t demand much of us, or much more than merely spending. The children you and I try to encourage will reap the whirlwind, and that right soon.
My current book project is Black Bonfire, about the end of cheap oil. It’s inevitable, calamitous, and much, much closer than I imagined when I began the book. The book is directed at young adults, giving them an overview of energy as they enter adulthood, as they become citizens. When you want to do an exhibit on just how deeply oil has become the warp and woof of life, give a shout. If you’re sitting inside, everything you see – from wood paneling to steel shelves to plastic pens – is or was put together by oil. Oil that we won’t have.
So how do we, as creative workers, survive the present economy? Dunno. We’ve always been on the fringe, depending on an upstream flow from the largesse of wealthy patrons, not too far removed from Cosimo de Medici. I suppose we can hope that the wealthy will always be wealthy. I’m not sure that will be borne out in the cultural upheaval. I don’t want to sound apocalyptic but major institutions will change. The hoary dictum, “What good for USSteel is good for the country” isn’t quite so true.
Perhaps we’ll survive like that marvelous soul William Kamkwamba, who built a windmill in his yard from junk and electrified his African village. What do we need with the Incredible Hulk and Batman when we have Kamkwamba? Perhaps we’ll build our exhibits out of local junk, building from the midden pile of Marin society. Our work could come to resemble the ancient trade of the storytellers who traveled from village to village, sitting under trees and eaves to spin out tales that amazed and informed.
[Jon Steward interviews Kamkwamba at http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-october-7-2009/william-kamkwamba]
Artists. We're all canaries trying to survive this oppressive atmosphere, clinging to our wobbly little perches with our feeble claws, and still singing brightly. How many friends do you have who are paralyzed by dread and frustration? On the other side, how many artists do you know who are doing jes' fine? If it weren't for Zoloft, we'd have a mass suicide of artists (something like M. Night Shyamalian's The Happening) and the balance of the population would say, "Whatinhell have they got to complain about? All they do is sing and swing."
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
What Himself neglects to acknowledge is that living on the fringes is a choice, not a profession. I could be demonizing the victim by bracing him thusly, but living on the fringes is inherently dangerous and unstable. The deep, strong current is where the action is, not the back eddies in the reeds. It's artistic hubris to assume the world will pull you triumphant from the edges and proclaim you its darling. Himself has a task: get into the mainstream or perish. This is harsh advice but so is the economy.
What follows is part of a reply to the director of the Bay Area Discovery Museum, a lovely place for little guys. I proposed we collaborate on some exhibits and he, graciously and reluctantly, confessed that the BADM didn't have the funding to pursue anything new in this crunch. I replied:
Yes, the economy is harsh, but I can’t imagine any other result from our global adventuring. As Shackleton said, “Adventure is a sign of incompetence.” We don’t seem to manufacture anything in the hardware store, now. Many of our best young men and women are scattered across the world fighting and dying for folks who don’t want us there. We’re fouling our nest but can’t seem to stop. The rolling juggernaut of corporate America more or less ignores all our objections and cries. Yet we DO live in a favored land, and our culture IS strong, has a work ethic, and has good roots. The problem could be that our leaders don’t demand much of us, or much more than merely spending. The children you and I try to encourage will reap the whirlwind, and that right soon.
My current book project is Black Bonfire, about the end of cheap oil. It’s inevitable, calamitous, and much, much closer than I imagined when I began the book. The book is directed at young adults, giving them an overview of energy as they enter adulthood, as they become citizens. When you want to do an exhibit on just how deeply oil has become the warp and woof of life, give a shout. If you’re sitting inside, everything you see – from wood paneling to steel shelves to plastic pens – is or was put together by oil. Oil that we won’t have.
So how do we, as creative workers, survive the present economy? Dunno. We’ve always been on the fringe, depending on an upstream flow from the largesse of wealthy patrons, not too far removed from Cosimo de Medici. I suppose we can hope that the wealthy will always be wealthy. I’m not sure that will be borne out in the cultural upheaval. I don’t want to sound apocalyptic but major institutions will change. The hoary dictum, “What good for USSteel is good for the country” isn’t quite so true.
Perhaps we’ll survive like that marvelous soul William Kamkwamba, who built a windmill in his yard from junk and electrified his African village. What do we need with the Incredible Hulk and Batman when we have Kamkwamba? Perhaps we’ll build our exhibits out of local junk, building from the midden pile of Marin society. Our work could come to resemble the ancient trade of the storytellers who traveled from village to village, sitting under trees and eaves to spin out tales that amazed and informed.
[Jon Steward interviews Kamkwamba at http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-october-7-2009/william-kamkwamba]
Artists. We're all canaries trying to survive this oppressive atmosphere, clinging to our wobbly little perches with our feeble claws, and still singing brightly. How many friends do you have who are paralyzed by dread and frustration? On the other side, how many artists do you know who are doing jes' fine? If it weren't for Zoloft, we'd have a mass suicide of artists (something like M. Night Shyamalian's The Happening) and the balance of the population would say, "Whatinhell have they got to complain about? All they do is sing and swing."
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
What Himself neglects to acknowledge is that living on the fringes is a choice, not a profession. I could be demonizing the victim by bracing him thusly, but living on the fringes is inherently dangerous and unstable. The deep, strong current is where the action is, not the back eddies in the reeds. It's artistic hubris to assume the world will pull you triumphant from the edges and proclaim you its darling. Himself has a task: get into the mainstream or perish. This is harsh advice but so is the economy.
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