Nice weather after the storm moved out earlier this week.
I guess my memory is completely going, along with all my organizational skills. Now, when I need them ... .
Once
upon a time, I had the neatest desk of any reporter at the second
newspaper I worked for. I also had the biggest (in terms of sheer size)
beat. I started out with the messiest desk, with only me knowing what
was under which layer of pulp. I was literally snowed under by paper --
press releases, budgets, notebooks, the works. People laughed at me. I
laughed at me. I was a joke.
Then,
the person who had the beat before me just mentioned incidentally one
day that she used only pencil for Rolodex entries (this was way long
time ago, folks). It set off a brainstorm in my head. Forward
organization -- what a concept! I flew into a new realm for me: I could
create my own organizational system!
First,
colored pens for different governmental agencies on the folder tabs (no
hanging files -- the desks they had for us were nice, and used drawers
spaced for Manila folders). Then, each agency got a file for the same
subject all had to tackle -- budget, utilities, personnel, recreation,
whatever. Then, each agency got special folders that were individual to
them -- for particular "hot" issues, like "annexation."
Then,
there were miscellaneous files, things I needed for my work. Then,
there were files about general news subjects, and so on. Various colors
or key words linked something in the file to or from something on the
big desk calendar we all got every year. I spent a week when not writing
stories just getting my Rolodex in order, using the same system above.
My
Rolodex began to travel the newsroom; my calendar kept getting
"borrowed" or copied, my desk was riffled regularly. I had to put my
foot down. I got a 'tude about my desk, or "work environment." It won me
no friends, but it kept me sane.
Once
I began learning the broadcast news business, I took those skills to a
new level. I had to: my first news director was a neatnik -- a nice guy,
but a compulsive neatnik. Everything, and I mean everything, had to be
in its place. At all times, unless you were using it, and then you had
to put it right back.
When
I got a job at a bigger station, I faced another challenge -- time. I
had to remember to do certain things at certain times without having
anyone to remind me -- having, in fact, lots of people to distract me. I
missed several "feeds" before I learned the system I'd all but
forgotten -- forward organization, but time-based.
I
went through several jobs at different stations, and I ran into all
sorts of organizational messes -- people just getting by on what little
they could in some personal way that suited them for then, but, if
something hit the fan, they would be lost. I always got the rep of
getting things organized, because, over the years, I'd become obsessed
with newsroom organization and I'd go around to organized people, just
picking up tricks on getting things done. My last real day in the
business was spent taking the entire file of news copy for the year (a
huge pile) and getting them in perfect chronological order!
At home, I've always been the opposite. Stuff was where I laid it last. Or had kicked it. Total slob -- and I mean total. I don't mean I've been a "typical guy" about it -- I mean I've been a complete fracking pig!
Now
that I'm home-based, I've never taken the time or made the effort to
take the essential and basic and really easy-to-understand leap that I
am going to have to get my organizational fetish-freak on, serious big
time, at home! (I don't do slang well. Sorry.)
And I have got a pile of crap to dig out from under. A pile! What am I going to do?
Funny
thing, all my files on my computer are very well laid out -- and my
e-mails related to what work I've managed to get are all where I need
them. But phone and snail mail and clothes and blankets (from the
winter) and books and cards and freebie-gadgets and glasses and vids and
CD's and back-up discs and old bills and receipts and -- oh, my .... What am I going to do? I've never had to actually get my actual life together before. NO NO NO NO NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
BTW:
I looked at my little cache of vinyl LP's I keep as mementos last
night. What I had was more than I thought. One just sat there laughing
at my disorganizational stupor: Songs from Liquid Days by Philip
Glass. Huh. Another one, some Monteverdi music conducted by Nadia
Boulanger, a French music teacher who set up a school just for (I think)
Americans in Paris. Glass, Quincy Jones, and even Aaron Copeland were
among her students. Now, If I'd just kept that Don Cherry thing he'd
done for JCOA and that blank-cover copy of Albert Ayler's Last Album
("Again comes the rising of the sun ... .") Those early Keith Jarrett's
would have been nice, too. *Sigh*
LJ orig.: 05/11/07
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Glen Campbell played twangy guitar on this ...
It finally rained, then the clouds moved out and this high wind started. It feels like March outside.
Just cranked my late-night headphones all the way up to hear the 'wall of sound' on a late-night show music feature. It told me something: I have to write about a record album that haunts me to this day. The first LP I ever bought: Pet Sounds.
The album is on my all time faves list, which was I think the second or third post to this particular journal, back in late October. I still have the vinyl. There are only three or four I kept, just as mementos: Baden Powell's Solitude on Guitar, Stevie Wonder's The Secret Life of Plants, Robin Kenyatta's Girl from Martinique and Julian Bream's first lute record, a live one with Peter Pears. (yes, the same type of thing Sting did last year. I like Sting, but I don't think he gave Pears any competition in the singing-quality department.)
I've actually gone through the masquerade of trying to sell my Pet Sounds to collectors, until one finally told me it was far too battered to be believed, much less collectible. What's a little unique about it is that it's actually in mono. Capitol Records had a huge row with Brian Wilson over his recording Pet Sounds in mono. What's wrong with stereo? Nothing, but you need mono for the true "wall of sound" effect Wilson was going for. Capitol won the argument, but my copy is proof that Wilson actually got what he wanted at first.
Why was he going for the Phil Spector sound in the first place? Wilson's record is about young love, and for him, that meant Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee movies, wall-of-sound soul records like "River Deep, Mountain High," the head on your (if you're a guy) shoulder after the big game on Friday night, the whole late 50's/early 60's middle America bit. (That's why Wilson threw a fit when the label stuck "Sloop John B" on his masterpiece -- it's irrelevant and wrecks the continuity, almost. It actually provided a little needed comic relief before flipping the vinyl over at the end of the first side.)
Wilson was writing Pet Sounds after he retired from active performing with the Beach Boys. (His live-act replacement is pictured on the back of the original album cover, pretending to swallow a samurai sword.) Wilson teamed up with a lyricist who would later quit the music biz and become a psychologist. (A hint of Tony Asher's future career is given in the Pet Sounds number "I Know There's an Answer."*) With all that time to devote to creative work, Wilson set out to make a record that would be a statement, tell a story in songs, and be a real monument to the immense creative talent he'd worked so hard, largely on his own, to develop.
"Pet Sounds" turned most people off at the time. It had quirky songs with non-rock instruments like tympani and glockenspiels, featured dense orchestrations, and even included a strange sounding electronic instrument called a theremin.
When I first heard the song the theremin is on, it was in the family rec room on the family console stereo. The song's called "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times." On hearing the lyrics for the first time, I was immediately seized with uncontrollable sadness, but I held back somehow for hours, until bedtime, when the song kept replaying in my mind. I distinctly recall shoving my head into my pillow to stifle my howling sobs until I fell to sleep. I knew immediately when I heard that song, which is about as good a description of 'existential alienation' as I've ever encountered, that I could relate to that feeling totally, but could do absolutely nothing about it. I was 12 years old.
Since then, the album has essentially stamped its coin on my existence, in many ways. It set me on a course I can't get get off of -- being sort of like caught on the train disappearing into the Doppler effect at the end of "Caroline No." Even now, I write poems about love that are sequenced into stories, I maintain an acute "ear" for the unusual in music, I let my inescapable feeling of existential dissonance protect me from many of life's troubles (sometimes too well), I found in "love lost" a sense of victory that I can't sweep away. I let it sweep me away, instead.
I'm not saying I'm a better person for having bought and essentially absorbed Brian Wilson's masterpiece at such an early age. No way. I am saying this recording became an ineradicable event in my life. And, even though he'll never read it, I'd like to thank Brian Wilson personally for Pet Sounds. This record did not make my life better or worse in some ethical sense -- its music and lyrics just began to give my life a sort of context, essential for finding meaning therein. That's what art is for. Thank you, Brian.
Pet Sounds is on my list of all time faves because of its quality and its enduring effect on me. I'm listening to it now on CD (the modern-day stereo version, which is nice). But the record does not have anything near the grip that held me forty years ago. Now, it's just good music I recall fondly. I think that means growth. I hope so.
Speaking of growth, Brian Wilson has been labeled "the Mozart of Rock" because of his compositional ability. I've long felt that the label, like almost all labels, was misapplied. If anything, Wilson was "the Bela Bartok of Rock" -- as the Hungarian composer was also fond of using unusual instrument combinations, conservatively applied dissonance, and many other things that show up (uncannily, to me) in Wilson's music. One other odd connection: Bartok frowned on "electronic" instruments. But if you listen to one of the movements in (I think) "Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celeste" you'll hear the string section emulate a theremin.
BTW, if you think theremins are strange esoterica (they're the woo-ooo sound in the original Star Trek theme), think again: the late Bob Moog built theremins as a hobby since his youth, and he even offered them (along with an effects pedal called a "MoogerFooger") for sale until he regained the legal right to resume manufacturing MiniMoogs just before he died. There's even someone in California (I forget her name -- hope she's still around) who could apparently play a bass theremin and make it "walk." A theremin basically is a wooden shoebox with some odd antennae sticking out of it that create an electronic field. You play it by (carefully) waving your hands around in the air. No frets, no fingerboard, no nothing. When Wilson put it on rock records, people thought he'd completely lost his mind. No, he was just way ahead of his time. Everybody else's misunderstanding (as a result) is what can drive you crazy.
LJ orig.: 05/07/07
Just cranked my late-night headphones all the way up to hear the 'wall of sound' on a late-night show music feature. It told me something: I have to write about a record album that haunts me to this day. The first LP I ever bought: Pet Sounds.
The album is on my all time faves list, which was I think the second or third post to this particular journal, back in late October. I still have the vinyl. There are only three or four I kept, just as mementos: Baden Powell's Solitude on Guitar, Stevie Wonder's The Secret Life of Plants, Robin Kenyatta's Girl from Martinique and Julian Bream's first lute record, a live one with Peter Pears. (yes, the same type of thing Sting did last year. I like Sting, but I don't think he gave Pears any competition in the singing-quality department.)
I've actually gone through the masquerade of trying to sell my Pet Sounds to collectors, until one finally told me it was far too battered to be believed, much less collectible. What's a little unique about it is that it's actually in mono. Capitol Records had a huge row with Brian Wilson over his recording Pet Sounds in mono. What's wrong with stereo? Nothing, but you need mono for the true "wall of sound" effect Wilson was going for. Capitol won the argument, but my copy is proof that Wilson actually got what he wanted at first.
Why was he going for the Phil Spector sound in the first place? Wilson's record is about young love, and for him, that meant Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee movies, wall-of-sound soul records like "River Deep, Mountain High," the head on your (if you're a guy) shoulder after the big game on Friday night, the whole late 50's/early 60's middle America bit. (That's why Wilson threw a fit when the label stuck "Sloop John B" on his masterpiece -- it's irrelevant and wrecks the continuity, almost. It actually provided a little needed comic relief before flipping the vinyl over at the end of the first side.)
Wilson was writing Pet Sounds after he retired from active performing with the Beach Boys. (His live-act replacement is pictured on the back of the original album cover, pretending to swallow a samurai sword.) Wilson teamed up with a lyricist who would later quit the music biz and become a psychologist. (A hint of Tony Asher's future career is given in the Pet Sounds number "I Know There's an Answer."*) With all that time to devote to creative work, Wilson set out to make a record that would be a statement, tell a story in songs, and be a real monument to the immense creative talent he'd worked so hard, largely on his own, to develop.
"Pet Sounds" turned most people off at the time. It had quirky songs with non-rock instruments like tympani and glockenspiels, featured dense orchestrations, and even included a strange sounding electronic instrument called a theremin.
When I first heard the song the theremin is on, it was in the family rec room on the family console stereo. The song's called "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times." On hearing the lyrics for the first time, I was immediately seized with uncontrollable sadness, but I held back somehow for hours, until bedtime, when the song kept replaying in my mind. I distinctly recall shoving my head into my pillow to stifle my howling sobs until I fell to sleep. I knew immediately when I heard that song, which is about as good a description of 'existential alienation' as I've ever encountered, that I could relate to that feeling totally, but could do absolutely nothing about it. I was 12 years old.
Since then, the album has essentially stamped its coin on my existence, in many ways. It set me on a course I can't get get off of -- being sort of like caught on the train disappearing into the Doppler effect at the end of "Caroline No." Even now, I write poems about love that are sequenced into stories, I maintain an acute "ear" for the unusual in music, I let my inescapable feeling of existential dissonance protect me from many of life's troubles (sometimes too well), I found in "love lost" a sense of victory that I can't sweep away. I let it sweep me away, instead.
I'm not saying I'm a better person for having bought and essentially absorbed Brian Wilson's masterpiece at such an early age. No way. I am saying this recording became an ineradicable event in my life. And, even though he'll never read it, I'd like to thank Brian Wilson personally for Pet Sounds. This record did not make my life better or worse in some ethical sense -- its music and lyrics just began to give my life a sort of context, essential for finding meaning therein. That's what art is for. Thank you, Brian.
Pet Sounds is on my list of all time faves because of its quality and its enduring effect on me. I'm listening to it now on CD (the modern-day stereo version, which is nice). But the record does not have anything near the grip that held me forty years ago. Now, it's just good music I recall fondly. I think that means growth. I hope so.
Speaking of growth, Brian Wilson has been labeled "the Mozart of Rock" because of his compositional ability. I've long felt that the label, like almost all labels, was misapplied. If anything, Wilson was "the Bela Bartok of Rock" -- as the Hungarian composer was also fond of using unusual instrument combinations, conservatively applied dissonance, and many other things that show up (uncannily, to me) in Wilson's music. One other odd connection: Bartok frowned on "electronic" instruments. But if you listen to one of the movements in (I think) "Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celeste" you'll hear the string section emulate a theremin.
BTW, if you think theremins are strange esoterica (they're the woo-ooo sound in the original Star Trek theme), think again: the late Bob Moog built theremins as a hobby since his youth, and he even offered them (along with an effects pedal called a "MoogerFooger") for sale until he regained the legal right to resume manufacturing MiniMoogs just before he died. There's even someone in California (I forget her name -- hope she's still around) who could apparently play a bass theremin and make it "walk." A theremin basically is a wooden shoebox with some odd antennae sticking out of it that create an electronic field. You play it by (carefully) waving your hands around in the air. No frets, no fingerboard, no nothing. When Wilson put it on rock records, people thought he'd completely lost his mind. No, he was just way ahead of his time. Everybody else's misunderstanding (as a result) is what can drive you crazy.
___
*Tony Asher did not write lyrics on "I Know There's An Answer." It turns out the instrument on the Pet Sounds song is actually an Electro-Theremin, played by its co-inventor, Paul Tanner. Ditto for "Good Vibrations". It uses dials instead of hand motions to modulate the instrument's tone. Also, the theremin-like sound on the original Star Trek theme is a vocal emulation by soprano Loulie Jean Norman. Also, the 'twangy guitar' in the title may have been the work of Barney Kessel.
*Tony Asher did not write lyrics on "I Know There's An Answer." It turns out the instrument on the Pet Sounds song is actually an Electro-Theremin, played by its co-inventor, Paul Tanner. Ditto for "Good Vibrations". It uses dials instead of hand motions to modulate the instrument's tone. Also, the theremin-like sound on the original Star Trek theme is a vocal emulation by soprano Loulie Jean Norman. Also, the 'twangy guitar' in the title may have been the work of Barney Kessel.
LJ orig.: 05/07/07
Friday, January 27, 2012
Glassy Eyed
Clouds moved in, then moved out. No rain.
Here where I live, there's this festival every year that draws the art crowd big time. It's called Spoleto, after a town in Italy where founder Gian Carlo Menotti started the thing. A few years after the festival came here (as best I recall -- this was all many years before I moved here), the city started a parallel festival for the rest of us, called Piccolo Spoleto. Anyhow, it's coming up, and downtown stores put up window displays every year in a contest about the festival's (the big one's) theme. The year's theme is illustrated every year by the official poster, and the 2007 poster/theme gave the window-dressers a challenge. It's a portrait (taken from a well-known Avedon photo, I think) of New York composer Phillip Glass. The portrait does not use brush or pen. Instead, it uses the artist's thumbprint -- hundreds of them -- to make up something that actually looks like the sleepy-eyed Glass in his salad days. Some windows just punted, and did something else. At least one got the point. I'll tell you what I think the point is, after this review/reminiscence (did I spell that right?) about one of Glass's recordings that a rock, folk, blues and jazz listener might actually like.
I'd heard a lot about Glass, but his records were utterly unobtainable in the vinyl days, outside of college towns, in my part of the world. And I never dared spend on records at college, unless they were two-dollars-ninety-nine, or something like that. Glass got articles, even in Rolling Stone, as I recall -- but mainly he was for the New York art crowd. A record he put out on CBS (that's right, the Eye had a record label, way back) changed all that. It's called "Songs from Liquid Days." The thing about this record is that, yeah, the songs are Glass's music. But people like Paul Simon, Suzanne Vega and David Byrne are writing the lyrics. No trap sets or electric guitars, but still, stuff you could listen to, if not actually jam to. It honestly sounds like a poetry "open mic" night set to this strange, repetitive music. I'm listening to it now, because the vinyl (which had, as I recall, a great sound) is long gone. I scored the CD (though I really can't afford to, but ...) for a ten, because the copy was old (circa 1990) and the store wanted to get rid of it. (There's a tweak to getting good sound out of old CDs I'll get to in a minute.) Anyway, when I bought the record, my 'cool' cred was shot to hell. I'd let myself go during the newspaper career (cough, cough) because I thought I needed to be that way. I think buying a Bob Seger record was about as far out as I got back then. After that, I got an education later in more edgy material while selling records, but I really didn't dig the stuff the other employees liked that much. They thought I was a hick. (Charlie Haden notwithstanding -- I lied about doing that, anyway. [See much earlier post for evidence of my sin.]) I'm not sure they were wrong. I'm not sure they still aren't. (I can't figure out the double negative I just wrote.) Anyway, I got my groove thang back with the purchase of "Songs from ... ." Too bad nobody but me cared. (They don't care now either!)
Don't my neuroses and insecurity stop you from giving "Songs from ..." a spin. It carries the minimalist thing into the mainstream, as far as that can go, anyway.
Glass is not usually atonal: his thing is to take little elements of music and repeat them in different registers, keys, instruments, etc. And then start another one and roll in and out of the first one. They keep repeating until you get a sense of layers of sound. The best example of this that I can think of that you might have already heard is Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells." This record was a stoner favorite my freshman year in college. (The narrow hallways in that dorm gave "just breathe" new meaning!) I pretty much had the record memorized at one point. You don't have to be "on" anything to like "Tubular Bells." Or "Songs from ... ," either, though lyrics like "We gradually became aware/Of a hum in the room ... /It went ooooommmmm" might make you wonder ... . (I actually think the lyric in "Changing Opinion" refers to early efforts at home recording and the problems you get into.)
BTW: The tweak on pre-1995 CDs is to clean the edges with a bit of water and really mild cleanser (no alcohol or ammonia!), then take a water-based, green magic marker and rim the edge with several coats of the green ink. Get it really dark by letting each coat dry a minute first. This emulates the edge coating on mirror glass. Most CDs from early days (1985-95) need it, because of less accurate mastering or manufacturing at the time. I would imagine doing that before ripping would help, as well. It's a waste of time on modern CDs -- the industry fixed the problem long ago. Oh, yeah, if you've got room on your Windows computer, I think ripping into WMA Lossless is worth it for sound quality. But if you want to transfer WMA Lossless music to a portable, you'll probably need a Zune.
Glass came from a school of composing philosophy that used small pieces of music, not even complete melodies or themes, as elements, and by the composer repeating them in different ways, but changing them slowly, you kind of get sucked into the sound. I recall attending a concert featuring a Steve Reich piece for violins I think was called "Tape Loops." When the music finally resolved into a peaceful chord, you thought you'd hit nirvana (the place, not the band, although ...).
So, this one window display downtown had thumbprints all over the window itself and sheets of music meant for children learning piano that repeat little themes (think "Chopsticks" but better). I think it hit the idea of the poster, which (again, to me) is to translate the aesthetic of Glass and Reich into visual art, and probably add homage to Glass's early big works that were said to be musical portraits of illustrious people ("Einstein on the Beach" etc.).
Glass has written lots of music for movies ("The Truman Show" is one), so maybe that's another way to get into his sound. He's premiering something for Spoleto, so that's the link there.
LJ orig.: 05/05/07
Here where I live, there's this festival every year that draws the art crowd big time. It's called Spoleto, after a town in Italy where founder Gian Carlo Menotti started the thing. A few years after the festival came here (as best I recall -- this was all many years before I moved here), the city started a parallel festival for the rest of us, called Piccolo Spoleto. Anyhow, it's coming up, and downtown stores put up window displays every year in a contest about the festival's (the big one's) theme. The year's theme is illustrated every year by the official poster, and the 2007 poster/theme gave the window-dressers a challenge. It's a portrait (taken from a well-known Avedon photo, I think) of New York composer Phillip Glass. The portrait does not use brush or pen. Instead, it uses the artist's thumbprint -- hundreds of them -- to make up something that actually looks like the sleepy-eyed Glass in his salad days. Some windows just punted, and did something else. At least one got the point. I'll tell you what I think the point is, after this review/reminiscence (did I spell that right?) about one of Glass's recordings that a rock, folk, blues and jazz listener might actually like.
I'd heard a lot about Glass, but his records were utterly unobtainable in the vinyl days, outside of college towns, in my part of the world. And I never dared spend on records at college, unless they were two-dollars-ninety-nine, or something like that. Glass got articles, even in Rolling Stone, as I recall -- but mainly he was for the New York art crowd. A record he put out on CBS (that's right, the Eye had a record label, way back) changed all that. It's called "Songs from Liquid Days." The thing about this record is that, yeah, the songs are Glass's music. But people like Paul Simon, Suzanne Vega and David Byrne are writing the lyrics. No trap sets or electric guitars, but still, stuff you could listen to, if not actually jam to. It honestly sounds like a poetry "open mic" night set to this strange, repetitive music. I'm listening to it now, because the vinyl (which had, as I recall, a great sound) is long gone. I scored the CD (though I really can't afford to, but ...) for a ten, because the copy was old (circa 1990) and the store wanted to get rid of it. (There's a tweak to getting good sound out of old CDs I'll get to in a minute.) Anyway, when I bought the record, my 'cool' cred was shot to hell. I'd let myself go during the newspaper career (cough, cough) because I thought I needed to be that way. I think buying a Bob Seger record was about as far out as I got back then. After that, I got an education later in more edgy material while selling records, but I really didn't dig the stuff the other employees liked that much. They thought I was a hick. (Charlie Haden notwithstanding -- I lied about doing that, anyway. [See much earlier post for evidence of my sin.]) I'm not sure they were wrong. I'm not sure they still aren't. (I can't figure out the double negative I just wrote.) Anyway, I got my groove thang back with the purchase of "Songs from ... ." Too bad nobody but me cared. (They don't care now either!)
Don't my neuroses and insecurity stop you from giving "Songs from ..." a spin. It carries the minimalist thing into the mainstream, as far as that can go, anyway.
Glass is not usually atonal: his thing is to take little elements of music and repeat them in different registers, keys, instruments, etc. And then start another one and roll in and out of the first one. They keep repeating until you get a sense of layers of sound. The best example of this that I can think of that you might have already heard is Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells." This record was a stoner favorite my freshman year in college. (The narrow hallways in that dorm gave "just breathe" new meaning!) I pretty much had the record memorized at one point. You don't have to be "on" anything to like "Tubular Bells." Or "Songs from ... ," either, though lyrics like "We gradually became aware/Of a hum in the room ... /It went ooooommmmm" might make you wonder ... . (I actually think the lyric in "Changing Opinion" refers to early efforts at home recording and the problems you get into.)
BTW: The tweak on pre-1995 CDs is to clean the edges with a bit of water and really mild cleanser (no alcohol or ammonia!), then take a water-based, green magic marker and rim the edge with several coats of the green ink. Get it really dark by letting each coat dry a minute first. This emulates the edge coating on mirror glass. Most CDs from early days (1985-95) need it, because of less accurate mastering or manufacturing at the time. I would imagine doing that before ripping would help, as well. It's a waste of time on modern CDs -- the industry fixed the problem long ago. Oh, yeah, if you've got room on your Windows computer, I think ripping into WMA Lossless is worth it for sound quality. But if you want to transfer WMA Lossless music to a portable, you'll probably need a Zune.
Glass came from a school of composing philosophy that used small pieces of music, not even complete melodies or themes, as elements, and by the composer repeating them in different ways, but changing them slowly, you kind of get sucked into the sound. I recall attending a concert featuring a Steve Reich piece for violins I think was called "Tape Loops." When the music finally resolved into a peaceful chord, you thought you'd hit nirvana (the place, not the band, although ...).
So, this one window display downtown had thumbprints all over the window itself and sheets of music meant for children learning piano that repeat little themes (think "Chopsticks" but better). I think it hit the idea of the poster, which (again, to me) is to translate the aesthetic of Glass and Reich into visual art, and probably add homage to Glass's early big works that were said to be musical portraits of illustrious people ("Einstein on the Beach" etc.).
Glass has written lots of music for movies ("The Truman Show" is one), so maybe that's another way to get into his sound. He's premiering something for Spoleto, so that's the link there.
LJ orig.: 05/05/07
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Down Lonely Street, to ...
Crack Crack went the lightning as the clouds
rolled in -- and then rolled out, leaving nary a drop.
Alas, errors to report in last post: Wikipedia says Jeremy Spencer was the other guitar man in Fleetwood Mac, but joined before Kirwan, wasn't brought in by him. It says her name was Christine Perfect, not Best. (Hey, if you're perfect, you're best, right? So I was close.) Bob Weston was the guitar guy for Mystery to Me. Wiki also says Fleetwood joined John Mayall's Bluesbreakers after Clapton left the band. OK, but I could have sworn was Mick on the cover of that Bluesbreakers album, the one with Slowhand reading a comic book. ("Seems like a dream ... got me hypnotized.")
Now (cue sudsy violin music) we turn to tonight's story: (Music rises emotionally) "Heartbreak Alley" ...
(Read more ...)
I forget her name. I know that's not good, but it was a name I just had to forget ... to hide the pain *sobs* OK, enough of the soap opera thing: I probably did repress her name, but gimme a break, it was 30 years ago this month! What can I say? The brain sand is starting to pile up. (Is that what he's calling it now? Brain sand?)She was very pretty, bright red hair, milk white skin, a little German dumpling. She sang like an angel, studying voice at my old alma mater (Go Heels!). We dated, as only undergrads at a big campus can: on campus. One of the concerts we went to drove us both out of the room at intermission. John Cage (yeah, that John Cage) was premiering some work he'd done for piano, written, as he was describing it, about the zodiac. Cage would explain each piece, then a lady, with a nice blue print floor-length dress (think Haute Earthmother) with long black hair cascading down her back past the piano stool, would play it. Lord the atonality! Remember, I'm the guy who actually liked Ornette Coleman in high school (as he always reminds us!)! Hearing this stuff set my teeth on edge! Starting with the molars! She asked to leave first, and I just said something like the 70s version of "Right behind you!"
She asked me to come to her junior recital. I did, and was she grand! I probably should have capitalized on that at the reception, or something like that (He clearly knows nothing!), but I didn't.
Not too long after that, a guy was chasing me in the co-ed dorm I was living in at the time. It was a brick X tower (how appropriate) with guys on one side of the X and girls on the other. The sides were joined by a reception area/elevator room/mixer spot, with the girls' side locked tight after a certain time at night. This guy, I thought he had something from the toilet in what he was carrying, and so I ran like crazy down the guys' side, into the reception/elevator room, and then into the girls' side (which was what this guy was actually trying to do to him). It was daytime, but on a weekend, when you could get into trouble going there without permission from one of the girls. I was screaming curse words, partly to warn anyone watching that this guy had something in that little bucket, partly to make it look like a joke so I wouldn't get into too much trouble. The door to the far side stairwell (the fire escapes were at each end of the X) was blocked by somebody (one of the girls, Mercurius?), so I turned and got hit with a bucketload of clean water in the face. The girls were laughing their (OK, enough of that!) off. Except for one. Yeah, you guessed it. She was clearly horrified. I didn't even run down her side of the hallway! (She didn't need to, dumbass! Your voice carried plenty ... .)
I later went to my girlfriend's door and apologized, trying to maintain boyish charm (O, brother! Where art thou?). She was gracious, but clearly wanted me to leave. The guy with the water bucket never pulled another trick. He never had before. In fact, I barely knew him. But did he know her? I was way too fracking stupid at the time to ask myself that question.
The following Monday (the water chase happened on a Sunday -- see how it's working?), she cut me dead walking to class. I mean dead. She made sure she avoided me after that. It was near the end of classes, and I was graduating, so that was that. What I'd done wrong was brag (not in a bad way, we had only held hands and pecked goodbyes while "dating") to the guys weeks earlier that I'd gotten some really classy girl interested in me -- and they'd apparently set out to fix that one, and fix it good! None of the guys admitted to it, but I'm sure, looking back now, they were winking at each other behind my back.
Was it love? No, it wasn't head-spinning, earthmoving, mindbending, timestopping (OK, we get it!) stuff ... those experiences are not stories for me to tell here (to protect the innocent -- them!) But it was nice. It felt good. It felt natural.
I should have just stayed on the guy's side to let him hit me in the face with the bucketwater! D*** co-ed dorms!
(return to post)
And that (violins begin to fade) is the end of tonight's story. Tune in again, next time, for "Heart of Glass."
PS: I don't want anyone thinking yesterday's Fleetwood Mac post had any intentional political overtones. It's true, a certain successful political campaign in 1992 used one of the band's songs as its theme. The spouse of the successful candidate then is running for that same office now. How I vote is my business, and it has nothing to do with my musical taste, or political taste, for that matter. (Remember, I covered politics as a reporter for many years. You gotta look past politics on important votes. Maybe I'll post on what I mean by that someday.) Anyway, back to college days: some friends of mine who teased me about liking Fleetwood Mac pre-Rumors actually loaned me a cassette of an early album of theirs: English Rose, I think was the name. Mick Fleetwood was in drag on the cover. I think my 'friends' implied a joke in there somewhere, but I ignored it and loved the music. "Albatross" was on this thing, along with some killer Peter Green guitar on the hard blues tracks.
LJ orig.: 05/03/07
Alas, errors to report in last post: Wikipedia says Jeremy Spencer was the other guitar man in Fleetwood Mac, but joined before Kirwan, wasn't brought in by him. It says her name was Christine Perfect, not Best. (Hey, if you're perfect, you're best, right? So I was close.) Bob Weston was the guitar guy for Mystery to Me. Wiki also says Fleetwood joined John Mayall's Bluesbreakers after Clapton left the band. OK, but I could have sworn was Mick on the cover of that Bluesbreakers album, the one with Slowhand reading a comic book. ("Seems like a dream ... got me hypnotized.")
Now (cue sudsy violin music) we turn to tonight's story: (Music rises emotionally) "Heartbreak Alley" ...
(Read more ...)
I forget her name. I know that's not good, but it was a name I just had to forget ... to hide the pain *sobs* OK, enough of the soap opera thing: I probably did repress her name, but gimme a break, it was 30 years ago this month! What can I say? The brain sand is starting to pile up. (Is that what he's calling it now? Brain sand?)She was very pretty, bright red hair, milk white skin, a little German dumpling. She sang like an angel, studying voice at my old alma mater (Go Heels!). We dated, as only undergrads at a big campus can: on campus. One of the concerts we went to drove us both out of the room at intermission. John Cage (yeah, that John Cage) was premiering some work he'd done for piano, written, as he was describing it, about the zodiac. Cage would explain each piece, then a lady, with a nice blue print floor-length dress (think Haute Earthmother) with long black hair cascading down her back past the piano stool, would play it. Lord the atonality! Remember, I'm the guy who actually liked Ornette Coleman in high school (as he always reminds us!)! Hearing this stuff set my teeth on edge! Starting with the molars! She asked to leave first, and I just said something like the 70s version of "Right behind you!"
She asked me to come to her junior recital. I did, and was she grand! I probably should have capitalized on that at the reception, or something like that (He clearly knows nothing!), but I didn't.
Not too long after that, a guy was chasing me in the co-ed dorm I was living in at the time. It was a brick X tower (how appropriate) with guys on one side of the X and girls on the other. The sides were joined by a reception area/elevator room/mixer spot, with the girls' side locked tight after a certain time at night. This guy, I thought he had something from the toilet in what he was carrying, and so I ran like crazy down the guys' side, into the reception/elevator room, and then into the girls' side (which was what this guy was actually trying to do to him). It was daytime, but on a weekend, when you could get into trouble going there without permission from one of the girls. I was screaming curse words, partly to warn anyone watching that this guy had something in that little bucket, partly to make it look like a joke so I wouldn't get into too much trouble. The door to the far side stairwell (the fire escapes were at each end of the X) was blocked by somebody (one of the girls, Mercurius?), so I turned and got hit with a bucketload of clean water in the face. The girls were laughing their (OK, enough of that!) off. Except for one. Yeah, you guessed it. She was clearly horrified. I didn't even run down her side of the hallway! (She didn't need to, dumbass! Your voice carried plenty ... .)
I later went to my girlfriend's door and apologized, trying to maintain boyish charm (O, brother! Where art thou?). She was gracious, but clearly wanted me to leave. The guy with the water bucket never pulled another trick. He never had before. In fact, I barely knew him. But did he know her? I was way too fracking stupid at the time to ask myself that question.
The following Monday (the water chase happened on a Sunday -- see how it's working?), she cut me dead walking to class. I mean dead. She made sure she avoided me after that. It was near the end of classes, and I was graduating, so that was that. What I'd done wrong was brag (not in a bad way, we had only held hands and pecked goodbyes while "dating") to the guys weeks earlier that I'd gotten some really classy girl interested in me -- and they'd apparently set out to fix that one, and fix it good! None of the guys admitted to it, but I'm sure, looking back now, they were winking at each other behind my back.
Was it love? No, it wasn't head-spinning, earthmoving, mindbending, timestopping (OK, we get it!) stuff ... those experiences are not stories for me to tell here (to protect the innocent -- them!) But it was nice. It felt good. It felt natural.
I should have just stayed on the guy's side to let him hit me in the face with the bucketwater! D*** co-ed dorms!
(return to post)
And that (violins begin to fade) is the end of tonight's story. Tune in again, next time, for "Heart of Glass."
PS: I don't want anyone thinking yesterday's Fleetwood Mac post had any intentional political overtones. It's true, a certain successful political campaign in 1992 used one of the band's songs as its theme. The spouse of the successful candidate then is running for that same office now. How I vote is my business, and it has nothing to do with my musical taste, or political taste, for that matter. (Remember, I covered politics as a reporter for many years. You gotta look past politics on important votes. Maybe I'll post on what I mean by that someday.) Anyway, back to college days: some friends of mine who teased me about liking Fleetwood Mac pre-Rumors actually loaned me a cassette of an early album of theirs: English Rose, I think was the name. Mick Fleetwood was in drag on the cover. I think my 'friends' implied a joke in there somewhere, but I ignored it and loved the music. "Albatross" was on this thing, along with some killer Peter Green guitar on the hard blues tracks.
LJ orig.: 05/03/07
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
The Cadillac of Bands
Bone dry here -- haven't seen a rainy day in weeks, maybe months!
OK, I'm back. Sorry to be gone so long, but Never Never Land is a long way off, and it took awhile to return. Miss me? Probably not. I missed this though. Other things were pressing, so I had to give it a rest. But now ... . It feels great!
The year was either '73 or '74 -- y'know, the Dark Ages. Vinyl records, analog clocks, hardwired phones and big gas-guzzling cars. One Caddy was named the Fleetwood (I think). Supposedly a smooth ride. I wouldn't know. But that was the time (college freshman) I was watching a late-night TV program called The Midnight Special. I was at home for vacation or a break of some kind, and the Special featured a band that a lot of people had all but forgotten: Fleetwood Mac.
It was named for its drummer, Mick Fleetwood, and bass player, John McVie. They were the rhythm section for John Mayall's Bluesbreakers in the late 60s, when Eric Clapton was the lead guitar man. (If you ever lay hands on the CD of that recording -- get it! The Clapton solos will blow your mind, especially if all you know of him was, say, "If I Could Change the World.").
Fleetwood and McVie formed a steady backing team, and when the Bluesbreakers roster changed (as it always did), Mick and John joined up with Peter Green and (I think later) Danny Kirwan to make their own band -- Fleetwood Mac. They were best known for "Albatross" -- an instrumental -- but Green reportedly had some mental problems and dropped out of the music business suddenly. The band was left with Kirwan, who (I think) brought in someone else to help the band recover. They recorded one of the great folk-rock albums of all time: "Kiln House" (Again, get this one!). A shy-sounding vocalist on one or two of the tracks was John's girlfriend, Christine Best.
The band I saw that night on TV blew me away. They'd found a sensational session guitarist to record and tour with them (I forget his name) and were backing their second record with their new lead singer/songwriter, Bob Welsh. The sound was totally different -- something I've never heard before or since from anybody. Atmospheric guitars, deep and melodic songwriting, harmonies from Welsh and now Christine (now Christine McVie), plus that incredibly solid, pulsing backbeat from the band's namesakes. I had to buy the album.
I also had to wait a few weeks for it to come in (record shipments were slow in those days), but I nailed it at the first opportunity. I wasn't disappointed at all. "Mystery to Me" was one of the best records I'd ever heard (at the time, anyway. My vinyl is long gone, and I don't have the CD.) The song that blew me away the farthest was "Hypnotized." (It even mentioned my state! In those days, North Carolina got mentioned by anybody outside stock car racing about as often as Albania does now). The song's about how easy it is to get put under a spell by a tall tale you want to hear very badly.
I kept waiting for the band to hit it big, appear on the national prime time TV, etc. But it never happened. The concert tour is now said to have been one of the biggest business disasters in rock history. Everything reportedly that could have gone wrong, did -- including (as I recall) Welsh's decision to quit the band for a solo career. The articles I read about it in Rolling Stone (by then, easy to get) and the other music mags pretty much wrote off Fleetwood Mac as a band.
Were they ever wrong. The three remaining band members (the lead guitar guy went back to session work, if memory serves) eventually hooked up with a duo experimenting with a new hybrid of contemporary folk, soft rock, and Appalachian "old-time" music. (Old-time music is the "hill country" music recorded before Bill Monroe invented bluegrass. Think "O Brother, Where Art Thou?") This hybrid did not have a name at the time, but it acquired one many years later: Americana.
Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham helped John, Christine and Mick record a very successful comeback album. The follow-up record to it was called "Rumors." It stayed at Number One on the Billboard album chart longer than any previous release in recording history. Only Michael Jackson's Thriller beat it (OK, bad pun) several years later, with the help of Quincy Jones and MTV.
Personally, I preferred the old Mystery to Me band (knowing me, I would). But I was glad all those taunts I had to endure in college ("You like what by who?") came back to haunt the taunters, when they fell all over each other to get a copy of Rumors.
BTW: Remember how I said the song "Hypnotized" is about how easy it is to fall under a spell? I'm sure you've all seen the gimmick about how the mesmerizer waves a gold pocket watch on its chain in front of somebody to "hypnotize" them. It came from old Westerns, where the snake-oil salesman would pull out a pocketwatch and wave it in front of some poor farmer to more easily deprive him of his wallet. You see, in the 1880's, gold watches were about as rare and as desirable as ultraportable computers are now. It isn't the waving of the watch in your face that hypnotizes you, it's your secret desire to have the watch in the first place (or cool, high-end computer, Maserati, whatever).
Next time: Heartbreak City.
LJ orig.: 05/02/07
OK, I'm back. Sorry to be gone so long, but Never Never Land is a long way off, and it took awhile to return. Miss me? Probably not. I missed this though. Other things were pressing, so I had to give it a rest. But now ... . It feels great!
The year was either '73 or '74 -- y'know, the Dark Ages. Vinyl records, analog clocks, hardwired phones and big gas-guzzling cars. One Caddy was named the Fleetwood (I think). Supposedly a smooth ride. I wouldn't know. But that was the time (college freshman) I was watching a late-night TV program called The Midnight Special. I was at home for vacation or a break of some kind, and the Special featured a band that a lot of people had all but forgotten: Fleetwood Mac.
It was named for its drummer, Mick Fleetwood, and bass player, John McVie. They were the rhythm section for John Mayall's Bluesbreakers in the late 60s, when Eric Clapton was the lead guitar man. (If you ever lay hands on the CD of that recording -- get it! The Clapton solos will blow your mind, especially if all you know of him was, say, "If I Could Change the World.").
Fleetwood and McVie formed a steady backing team, and when the Bluesbreakers roster changed (as it always did), Mick and John joined up with Peter Green and (I think later) Danny Kirwan to make their own band -- Fleetwood Mac. They were best known for "Albatross" -- an instrumental -- but Green reportedly had some mental problems and dropped out of the music business suddenly. The band was left with Kirwan, who (I think) brought in someone else to help the band recover. They recorded one of the great folk-rock albums of all time: "Kiln House" (Again, get this one!). A shy-sounding vocalist on one or two of the tracks was John's girlfriend, Christine Best.
The band I saw that night on TV blew me away. They'd found a sensational session guitarist to record and tour with them (I forget his name) and were backing their second record with their new lead singer/songwriter, Bob Welsh. The sound was totally different -- something I've never heard before or since from anybody. Atmospheric guitars, deep and melodic songwriting, harmonies from Welsh and now Christine (now Christine McVie), plus that incredibly solid, pulsing backbeat from the band's namesakes. I had to buy the album.
I also had to wait a few weeks for it to come in (record shipments were slow in those days), but I nailed it at the first opportunity. I wasn't disappointed at all. "Mystery to Me" was one of the best records I'd ever heard (at the time, anyway. My vinyl is long gone, and I don't have the CD.) The song that blew me away the farthest was "Hypnotized." (It even mentioned my state! In those days, North Carolina got mentioned by anybody outside stock car racing about as often as Albania does now). The song's about how easy it is to get put under a spell by a tall tale you want to hear very badly.
I kept waiting for the band to hit it big, appear on the national prime time TV, etc. But it never happened. The concert tour is now said to have been one of the biggest business disasters in rock history. Everything reportedly that could have gone wrong, did -- including (as I recall) Welsh's decision to quit the band for a solo career. The articles I read about it in Rolling Stone (by then, easy to get) and the other music mags pretty much wrote off Fleetwood Mac as a band.
Were they ever wrong. The three remaining band members (the lead guitar guy went back to session work, if memory serves) eventually hooked up with a duo experimenting with a new hybrid of contemporary folk, soft rock, and Appalachian "old-time" music. (Old-time music is the "hill country" music recorded before Bill Monroe invented bluegrass. Think "O Brother, Where Art Thou?") This hybrid did not have a name at the time, but it acquired one many years later: Americana.
Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham helped John, Christine and Mick record a very successful comeback album. The follow-up record to it was called "Rumors." It stayed at Number One on the Billboard album chart longer than any previous release in recording history. Only Michael Jackson's Thriller beat it (OK, bad pun) several years later, with the help of Quincy Jones and MTV.
Personally, I preferred the old Mystery to Me band (knowing me, I would). But I was glad all those taunts I had to endure in college ("You like what by who?") came back to haunt the taunters, when they fell all over each other to get a copy of Rumors.
BTW: Remember how I said the song "Hypnotized" is about how easy it is to fall under a spell? I'm sure you've all seen the gimmick about how the mesmerizer waves a gold pocket watch on its chain in front of somebody to "hypnotize" them. It came from old Westerns, where the snake-oil salesman would pull out a pocketwatch and wave it in front of some poor farmer to more easily deprive him of his wallet. You see, in the 1880's, gold watches were about as rare and as desirable as ultraportable computers are now. It isn't the waving of the watch in your face that hypnotizes you, it's your secret desire to have the watch in the first place (or cool, high-end computer, Maserati, whatever).
Next time: Heartbreak City.
LJ orig.: 05/02/07
Saturday, January 21, 2012
There I Go Again ...
Nice and sunny day, a little cool. Supposed to get downright cold later tonight.
Speaking of cold, I have this little problem. Being cold, that is. I like to think of it as being frank, but I have been told more than once (twice, three times ... a jerk-off) that I am too blunt. I tell myself that you're supposed to "say what you mean, and mean what you say," but that's really just a cover story. Truth is (OK, be careful ...), I like telling it like it is. It's refreshing to just get it out there, and be done with it. But unasked for, it's rarely appreciated, if ever.
You need tact in dealing with people, especially involving their feelings (OK, just figuring this out?). And I suck at it. There, that's more like it. I feel better: "I suck." Yeah, that's blunt.
You can be blunt about yourself, of course, and do no damage. You might even get a laugh or two. But you can't be that way about other people and expect no repercussions. When you hurt feelings by something you do (mistake, misdeed, etc.), people may eventually get over it. But words cut to the quick; they impact our consciousness more completely. Deeds must be interpreted ("Did he really mean to do that? What for?"), but words, especially from someone who's a little too good with them, go much more directly to one's inner being. They can be downright traumatic. It's been said a child can be abused just as badly by hateful words as by an angry fist. The bruises may heal, but scars to the mind are indelible. They last forever.
You've got to be careful talking, or writing, to people. Hold your fire, think things through first. If you must speak, ease your way into it. Because once you fire that mouth cannon, you can't take back the shell. How I wish I could truly learn this, once and for all.
An English writer named E.V. Lucas has written: "The art of life is to show your hand. There is no diplomacy like candor. You may lose by it now and then, but it will be a loss well gained if you do. Nothing is so boring as having to keep up a deception." The difference between mercurius_21's mouth history and Lucas's recommendation is that your hand must be called, before you're allowed to show it.*
___
*As best I can recall, the original version of this post went on to announce this journal was finished. Of course, it wasn't. The next post left that possibility open.
LJ orig.: 01/25/07
Speaking of cold, I have this little problem. Being cold, that is. I like to think of it as being frank, but I have been told more than once (twice, three times ... a jerk-off) that I am too blunt. I tell myself that you're supposed to "say what you mean, and mean what you say," but that's really just a cover story. Truth is (OK, be careful ...), I like telling it like it is. It's refreshing to just get it out there, and be done with it. But unasked for, it's rarely appreciated, if ever.
You need tact in dealing with people, especially involving their feelings (OK, just figuring this out?). And I suck at it. There, that's more like it. I feel better: "I suck." Yeah, that's blunt.
You can be blunt about yourself, of course, and do no damage. You might even get a laugh or two. But you can't be that way about other people and expect no repercussions. When you hurt feelings by something you do (mistake, misdeed, etc.), people may eventually get over it. But words cut to the quick; they impact our consciousness more completely. Deeds must be interpreted ("Did he really mean to do that? What for?"), but words, especially from someone who's a little too good with them, go much more directly to one's inner being. They can be downright traumatic. It's been said a child can be abused just as badly by hateful words as by an angry fist. The bruises may heal, but scars to the mind are indelible. They last forever.
You've got to be careful talking, or writing, to people. Hold your fire, think things through first. If you must speak, ease your way into it. Because once you fire that mouth cannon, you can't take back the shell. How I wish I could truly learn this, once and for all.
An English writer named E.V. Lucas has written: "The art of life is to show your hand. There is no diplomacy like candor. You may lose by it now and then, but it will be a loss well gained if you do. Nothing is so boring as having to keep up a deception." The difference between mercurius_21's mouth history and Lucas's recommendation is that your hand must be called, before you're allowed to show it.*
___
*As best I can recall, the original version of this post went on to announce this journal was finished. Of course, it wasn't. The next post left that possibility open.
LJ orig.: 01/25/07
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
I Wish I May, I Wish I Might ...
Warmer today,
then clouds rolling in, much warmer and drizzling.
The reason I try to start with the weather is that weather affects moods. It can really swing you around, or it can be quite subtle. But weather changes do affect our emotional states and mental outlooks. If you read some of my archive, you'll spot some of my own meteorological mood swings.
(Watched pro football late afternoon and evening, and really enjoyed it. But I was rooting for New England because I wanted to see a traditional match-up for the Super Bowl and was disappointed. That may have more to do with a downbeat mood now than just the rain coming in. In other words, many factors influence mood, not just weather.)
I think a case could be made for anger, but really, I think envy is worse. I don't necessarily mean in a "seven deadly sins" kind of way (a new commercial for a phone that flips into a handheld computer uses the seven deadly sins to hilarious effect), but in terms of how you feel about yourself and how you relate to the world around you.
Anger is bad, no doubt about it, and trying not to get angry in This Modern World is almost like trying not to think of a cow (mine's always Holstein, for some reason). Envy is much worse these days, in my opinion, because so much energy is directed toward it, and it's a complete waste of human potential. How so? If you are going around envious all the time, or even some of the time, you are directing your attention away from what you already possess, and toward what you don't. This is bad, because you may possess finer things in reality than the object of your envy does but not realize it. Worse, you may be ignoring potential value in what you already have that you could be developing, instead of chasing after something or someone that you think you want. And worst (I think), you may become consumed with creating envy in the eyes of others, that is, making yourself the object of others' envy as much as possible. At that point, you've become another Paris Hilton. (At least, that's Ms Hilton's image in the public eye. She may have other motives that are better, but if so, she seems to be good at hiding them.)
What's wrong with becoming the object of everyone's envy -- or at least trying to? If you take my aforementioned premise regarding intrinsic value, you can see why. Working to become the object of envy not only ignores intrinsic value (in other words, value that you already possess), it destroys it. You have become so shallow and obsessed with others' opinions at that point, you have nothing else to offer anyone. You can only offer whatever you can think of that will promote envy. Usually, those are only appearances.
I am guilty. OK, when I'm walking downtown, I always stop and look at the latest Carreras and Kompressors parked on the street. I don't just look, my head whips and, as I stare while walking slowly past, I imagine what it must be like to be able to get in one and turn the key (legally, of course). Then, I realize I could never (as far as I know) even afford the insurance on a car like that, much less the payments and maintenance (the latter, by the way, is steep). I'm getting better: I actually envied a late-model (but newer, nicer color and trim line) of the modest compact sedan I own now. That was as late as last week!
I used to envy other guys' girlfriends. That was when I was a lot younger. I don't now. I love to look at beautiful women (who doesn't?), but I guess age has taken away that envy edge for good. So, I can't claim the "getting better" on that score, just the "getting older."
(mercurius_21 is a little self-deceptive on this issue: he's merely wistfully envious, at this point in life. Also, he refuses to admit his own computer envy: that's why he found the commercial mentioned above so funny.)
But just because I'm as guilty as anyone doesn't negate my point. I think it makes it all the more true, in fact. There clearly is no point in envying anyone's anything. What you already have, or may possess right around the corner, may be better -- better for you or just better, period. To me, self-respect is the "greatest love of all" (there's a gospel version of the song out there that predates Whitney's by some years -- I heard it on the radio on a business trip circa 1986). The very modest amount of self-respect I've managed to acquire (largely through adversity, by the way) leads me to assure you it is the most valuable thing you can possibly possess. It's hard to describe self-respect -- it is related to confidence, but that's not it, really. It's not self-love, in the typical egocentric definition, anyway. And it's not obviously not pride, which is (we're told) the deadliest sin of the seven. But I can tell you how to begin acquiring this most valuable of possessions: you cannot earn respect until you give it. Until you begin to respect others, you will get no respect for yourself. The more you respect abstract virtues like love and compassion in others, the more you will respect them in yourself. The more you respect what's good in its own right, the more you will respect your own essential goodness.
The key that unlocks this treasure trove? Ask yourself this: How can any of us say we own any of these things? If we are endowed with our very lives, then we own nothing at all.
___
*The “gospel” version mercurius-21 mentions is actually by jazz great George Benson. I heard it listening to a small gospel radio station in Midlands South Carolina on his way to Myrtle Beach at the time mentioned, but I did not hear the announcer credit the singer. I ran across the actual credit last year.
LJ orig.: 01/21/07
The reason I try to start with the weather is that weather affects moods. It can really swing you around, or it can be quite subtle. But weather changes do affect our emotional states and mental outlooks. If you read some of my archive, you'll spot some of my own meteorological mood swings.
(Watched pro football late afternoon and evening, and really enjoyed it. But I was rooting for New England because I wanted to see a traditional match-up for the Super Bowl and was disappointed. That may have more to do with a downbeat mood now than just the rain coming in. In other words, many factors influence mood, not just weather.)
I think a case could be made for anger, but really, I think envy is worse. I don't necessarily mean in a "seven deadly sins" kind of way (a new commercial for a phone that flips into a handheld computer uses the seven deadly sins to hilarious effect), but in terms of how you feel about yourself and how you relate to the world around you.
Anger is bad, no doubt about it, and trying not to get angry in This Modern World is almost like trying not to think of a cow (mine's always Holstein, for some reason). Envy is much worse these days, in my opinion, because so much energy is directed toward it, and it's a complete waste of human potential. How so? If you are going around envious all the time, or even some of the time, you are directing your attention away from what you already possess, and toward what you don't. This is bad, because you may possess finer things in reality than the object of your envy does but not realize it. Worse, you may be ignoring potential value in what you already have that you could be developing, instead of chasing after something or someone that you think you want. And worst (I think), you may become consumed with creating envy in the eyes of others, that is, making yourself the object of others' envy as much as possible. At that point, you've become another Paris Hilton. (At least, that's Ms Hilton's image in the public eye. She may have other motives that are better, but if so, she seems to be good at hiding them.)
What's wrong with becoming the object of everyone's envy -- or at least trying to? If you take my aforementioned premise regarding intrinsic value, you can see why. Working to become the object of envy not only ignores intrinsic value (in other words, value that you already possess), it destroys it. You have become so shallow and obsessed with others' opinions at that point, you have nothing else to offer anyone. You can only offer whatever you can think of that will promote envy. Usually, those are only appearances.
I am guilty. OK, when I'm walking downtown, I always stop and look at the latest Carreras and Kompressors parked on the street. I don't just look, my head whips and, as I stare while walking slowly past, I imagine what it must be like to be able to get in one and turn the key (legally, of course). Then, I realize I could never (as far as I know) even afford the insurance on a car like that, much less the payments and maintenance (the latter, by the way, is steep). I'm getting better: I actually envied a late-model (but newer, nicer color and trim line) of the modest compact sedan I own now. That was as late as last week!
I used to envy other guys' girlfriends. That was when I was a lot younger. I don't now. I love to look at beautiful women (who doesn't?), but I guess age has taken away that envy edge for good. So, I can't claim the "getting better" on that score, just the "getting older."
(mercurius_21 is a little self-deceptive on this issue: he's merely wistfully envious, at this point in life. Also, he refuses to admit his own computer envy: that's why he found the commercial mentioned above so funny.)
But just because I'm as guilty as anyone doesn't negate my point. I think it makes it all the more true, in fact. There clearly is no point in envying anyone's anything. What you already have, or may possess right around the corner, may be better -- better for you or just better, period. To me, self-respect is the "greatest love of all" (there's a gospel version of the song out there that predates Whitney's by some years -- I heard it on the radio on a business trip circa 1986). The very modest amount of self-respect I've managed to acquire (largely through adversity, by the way) leads me to assure you it is the most valuable thing you can possibly possess. It's hard to describe self-respect -- it is related to confidence, but that's not it, really. It's not self-love, in the typical egocentric definition, anyway. And it's not obviously not pride, which is (we're told) the deadliest sin of the seven. But I can tell you how to begin acquiring this most valuable of possessions: you cannot earn respect until you give it. Until you begin to respect others, you will get no respect for yourself. The more you respect abstract virtues like love and compassion in others, the more you will respect them in yourself. The more you respect what's good in its own right, the more you will respect your own essential goodness.
The key that unlocks this treasure trove? Ask yourself this: How can any of us say we own any of these things? If we are endowed with our very lives, then we own nothing at all.
___
*The “gospel” version mercurius-21 mentions is actually by jazz great George Benson. I heard it listening to a small gospel radio station in Midlands South Carolina on his way to Myrtle Beach at the time mentioned, but I did not hear the announcer credit the singer. I ran across the actual credit last year.
LJ orig.: 01/21/07
Saturday, January 14, 2012
State of My Union
Cloudy and cool all day, then a little sun late afternoon and warmer.
Bought a used CD by Michael Franks for a dollar the other day. He made it in the late 80s, The Camera Never Lies. Typical of what I used to call "yuppie jazz." Ripped it to my computer just to see if I could get WMP 11 to work. It did, and very smoothy. If you go online afterward, a track list with a picture appears in your "Library."
Franks was big on the college scene when I was 21. I remember the chorus from a song he got a lot of airplay with at my school (Think bossa nova beat, "smooth jazz" chords and a kind of James Taylor-y melody) "Daddy, he likes Coltrane/Lady, she likes Miles/Baby looks like heaven/When she smiles." I was in a dorm my last-ever semester when that was playing. It was a co-ed dorm, with males and females at opposite sides of an X-shaped brick tower. The girls from different floors had their graduating guys all picked out (law school, med school, etc), while those who weren't into that kept to themselves (no, nobody came out back then, not where I went to school. You just sort of knew, I guess). I was the odd man out. I really liked the opposite sex, but I rarely dated. I thought I was missing something, psychologically. Some "component" of my head was missing the part that "hit" on women, or that "got" how I was supposed to respond to a "come-on." (A "come-on" is 60s-70s slang for a flirtation.) I saw who I wanted, or I noticed the "come-on," but I usually just didn't do anything, except maybe smile back, or something.
I felt bad about it for years and years, because I didn't change. That "component" of my head never showed up. Then, I thought I was just shy. No, I'm not: I can be outgoing when I feel I need to. In fact, I can be utterly brazen. That's not it.
Then, I thought I must be "out of the loop" sexually -- a misfit. No, I'm pretty normal. I don't have "weird tastes" or stuff like that.
"What's wrong with me?" I'd cry to the heavens (quietly, of course. No need for the men in the little white lab coats to show up at my door.).
I finally found The Answer: nothing. Nothing is wrong with me. So, what gives?
I didn't realize it when I was younger, of course, because, well, I was young. Not understanding stuff goes with the territory. What I learned by experience was that I see men and women as they are. Not merely "friend/foe" or "mewant/menotwant." I see that, too. But what I didn't realize I saw was their essential humanness: expressions, emotions, motivations, fears, feelings. I didn't realize it because it came naturally.
I'd come to think I was "psychic" -- I decided that I was what's known as an "empath." Telepaths read thoughts, empaths read feelings. Now, I tend to think people in general are misinformed about so-called "psychics," because some (maybe most -- I don't know) you see in the public arena are probably frauds. You'd have to be, almost, to try and make a profit from it, because such unconscious impressions don't just glibly fly out of your mouth on demand. They're rarely that clear, either -- and you certainly can't bank on them. So, you wouldn't be able to turn it into a business, without some showbiz thrown in, at least in my experience. Others may certainly differ.
The other thing people in general are misinformed about is that so-called "psychics" are rare. I don't think they are. If you're reading this, you may have something rattling around in your head you don't realize is "psychic" -- just as I did when I was younger. Maybe, when science gets more information together, more sensitive instrumentation developed, we'll see "psychic power" as more normal. Maybe then, we'll quit looking at it as a "power" -- more as something like having opposable thumbs. Maybe we'll understand each other better. Maybe then there will be more peace on earth. You think?
So, my unconscious “empathic ability” interfered with the mating dance, I reasoned. Yes, you could use it to do the opposite, couldn't you? But that would be unethical, so I didn't.
By the way, "empathy" is not (Bill Clinton accent) "I feel your pain." Here is the definition from the eleventh edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary: "the ability to understand and share the feelings of another." Simple, huh?
Another “by the way” and then I'll post: I griped in an earlier post about not being able to get the OED software to work in a limited account on Windows XP SP2. How did I eventually do it? In Administrator Mode: Start>Run> type Documents and Settings\(limited account username). Right click and hold on the shortcut icon of the program you want to transfer to the limited account, then drag and drop into the Documents and Settings window.
Bought a used CD by Michael Franks for a dollar the other day. He made it in the late 80s, The Camera Never Lies. Typical of what I used to call "yuppie jazz." Ripped it to my computer just to see if I could get WMP 11 to work. It did, and very smoothy. If you go online afterward, a track list with a picture appears in your "Library."
Franks was big on the college scene when I was 21. I remember the chorus from a song he got a lot of airplay with at my school (Think bossa nova beat, "smooth jazz" chords and a kind of James Taylor-y melody) "Daddy, he likes Coltrane/Lady, she likes Miles/Baby looks like heaven/When she smiles." I was in a dorm my last-ever semester when that was playing. It was a co-ed dorm, with males and females at opposite sides of an X-shaped brick tower. The girls from different floors had their graduating guys all picked out (law school, med school, etc), while those who weren't into that kept to themselves (no, nobody came out back then, not where I went to school. You just sort of knew, I guess). I was the odd man out. I really liked the opposite sex, but I rarely dated. I thought I was missing something, psychologically. Some "component" of my head was missing the part that "hit" on women, or that "got" how I was supposed to respond to a "come-on." (A "come-on" is 60s-70s slang for a flirtation.) I saw who I wanted, or I noticed the "come-on," but I usually just didn't do anything, except maybe smile back, or something.
I felt bad about it for years and years, because I didn't change. That "component" of my head never showed up. Then, I thought I was just shy. No, I'm not: I can be outgoing when I feel I need to. In fact, I can be utterly brazen. That's not it.
Then, I thought I must be "out of the loop" sexually -- a misfit. No, I'm pretty normal. I don't have "weird tastes" or stuff like that.
"What's wrong with me?" I'd cry to the heavens (quietly, of course. No need for the men in the little white lab coats to show up at my door.).
I finally found The Answer: nothing. Nothing is wrong with me. So, what gives?
I didn't realize it when I was younger, of course, because, well, I was young. Not understanding stuff goes with the territory. What I learned by experience was that I see men and women as they are. Not merely "friend/foe" or "mewant/menotwant." I see that, too. But what I didn't realize I saw was their essential humanness: expressions, emotions, motivations, fears, feelings. I didn't realize it because it came naturally.
I'd come to think I was "psychic" -- I decided that I was what's known as an "empath." Telepaths read thoughts, empaths read feelings. Now, I tend to think people in general are misinformed about so-called "psychics," because some (maybe most -- I don't know) you see in the public arena are probably frauds. You'd have to be, almost, to try and make a profit from it, because such unconscious impressions don't just glibly fly out of your mouth on demand. They're rarely that clear, either -- and you certainly can't bank on them. So, you wouldn't be able to turn it into a business, without some showbiz thrown in, at least in my experience. Others may certainly differ.
The other thing people in general are misinformed about is that so-called "psychics" are rare. I don't think they are. If you're reading this, you may have something rattling around in your head you don't realize is "psychic" -- just as I did when I was younger. Maybe, when science gets more information together, more sensitive instrumentation developed, we'll see "psychic power" as more normal. Maybe then, we'll quit looking at it as a "power" -- more as something like having opposable thumbs. Maybe we'll understand each other better. Maybe then there will be more peace on earth. You think?
So, my unconscious “empathic ability” interfered with the mating dance, I reasoned. Yes, you could use it to do the opposite, couldn't you? But that would be unethical, so I didn't.
By the way, "empathy" is not (Bill Clinton accent) "I feel your pain." Here is the definition from the eleventh edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary: "the ability to understand and share the feelings of another." Simple, huh?
Another “by the way” and then I'll post: I griped in an earlier post about not being able to get the OED software to work in a limited account on Windows XP SP2. How did I eventually do it? In Administrator Mode: Start>Run> type Documents and Settings\(limited account username). Right click and hold on the shortcut icon of the program you want to transfer to the limited account, then drag and drop into the Documents and Settings window.
___
*The date on this is also an estimate, for the same reason as the last post. Both were obviously very personal, but posting them was necessary to see where "my head was at" back then. If you were to ask me now, I'd say there is no such thing as a "psychic", and that I'm just extremely cautious around strangers.
LJ orig.: 1/19/07*
*The date on this is also an estimate, for the same reason as the last post. Both were obviously very personal, but posting them was necessary to see where "my head was at" back then. If you were to ask me now, I'd say there is no such thing as a "psychic", and that I'm just extremely cautious around strangers.
Friday, January 13, 2012
Portrait of an Idiot
Really cold and wet yesterday. Drier and not nearly as cold today.
It started when I was three. At least that's what they tell me. I don't remember any of it, which, I guess, is normal. I was sitting in the grocery cart (I don't think they let kids do that anymore), probably in the top pull-out basket for cabbages and stuff like that. I'm told I grabbed the cereal box I wanted and started reading stuff on it. Aloud. Heads turned. Mouths gaped. This kid who fits in the cabbage basket is reading the freaking cereal box to the rest of the store!
Relatives would take me grocery shopping just to watch me do it. It was a really small town, so everybody knew. Except, I'm sure, me. To me, it probably felt normal to read cereal boxes (if I wanted the cereal, that is). They were colorful, the letters were big, it said the cereal was sweet, and it also said the box had a little toy inside. Why shouldn't I want to read it? After all, it looked promising! How would I have known, at three, that this was unusual?
And that's been the problem all along. Everybody knew what I did after that was unusual. Except me. To me, it was normal. I rarely compared myself to other children in the early years, except when it came to sports. I could not keep up with most of them. They could run faster, farther, and for longer periods than I could. They were more coordinated, they knew what to do with a ball, and this was upsetting. I hated looking foolish when I dropped the ball, or when I thought it was heading for my face and I couldn't get my hands up there in time, and I looked like an idiot when it, yes, hit me in the face and I cried. Because it freaking hurt. And my friends are yelling at me because the guy from the other street who hit the ball is crossing home while I'm sitting on the ground in front of the ball, bawling.
So, I wasn't made for hardball. When the softball hit, it didn't hurt as much. I didn't cry, and I do recall being enormously relieved. It stung, but not that much. That is, when my vision returned.
Then, I got my tonsils out. My first doctor felt strongly against childhood tonsillectomies, because they were part of a child's body, right? Why take them out? I was 11 when a surgeon found a pair of abscesses the size of quarters in my throat where he'd cut away the tonsils. Because I was no good as an athlete, and I liked to read, I recalled the story of some famous Olympic athlete whose pre-Olympic track career took off after she had her tonsils removed. I exclaimed this to the surgeon (once I'd woke up and then stopped vomiting ether residue), who looked at my father. And they both howled with laughter.
I had been a fat kid. A year after the tonsillectomy, I wasn't so much. I found that coordination was mostly confidence, and that I was no runner because of extremely flat feet. I could walk, though. I walked everywhere I possibly could, eventually took streets with the steeper hills deliberately, to test myself. Though way behind the ball-learning curve, I swatted away by myself hour after hour, tossing the ball high into the air for myself until I learned the mechanics of hitting. I recall at 13 or so, a younger cousin invited me over for the afternoon. His town actually had decent organized recreation, and they invited me to play softball with them! I struck out the first time, forgetting I was batting cross-handed (all that single-handed swatting). I put the first pitch over the short high fence my next turn at bat. Fortunately, I was put in right field, where few hit the ball. My fielding was awful (It seems the family didn't like hearing the ball bang against the front wall of the house over and over again, so I had to quit my personal fielding practice.).
I learned private determination. I learned that skills could be acquired "outside the box" (or off the diamond). But maybe no one would ever know, so I had to just accept it as a private victory and move on. However, there was a catch. You see, I still had the invisible (to me) letter G stamped on my forehead. Actually, it was a number: 163. Beside the letters IQ.
There are so few of us in the general population (two percent, I think) that most people don't realize what a handicap it is. We don't socialize as well, we can't handle changes as well, we don't always mature at a steady rate (my way of saying we're all pretty immature), we tend to see things abstractly (making it hard to compromise), and we're all idiots.
Having too much brain can be almost as bad as having too little. Some mentally handicapped folk have much they can learn, depending on their disability. With us, it's hard to learn stuff in anything like a normal way. We have our own learning styles, we have our own pet interests, we have our own little worlds. It's very hard to break out of them. We don't realize how different they are.
I just didn't like math. It bored me. I didn't like staring at something I could not immediately comprehend. It was only last week, reading a book standing at a bookstore, that I learned even PhD's in math find new technical material daunting at first. They just stick with it until they understand it, and accept that as normal for highly technical material. My ease at reading words essentially tricked me into math laziness! I learned softball (sort of) through determination and private work. Why not math? It just didn't flow like reading words, so I just didn't get as good a grade. My parents were horrified to see my math grades, year after year. How could someone so smart be so stupid as to not see he needs to work on this? (They didn't call me stupid, I just assume that's what they thought. It would be normal.) But blind spots are big for people like me. And I never took math seriously, even on the SATs. My future was on the line, and I just didn't give a rip. It doesn't make sense -- even to me, as I'm typing it! But that was my attitude.
As I assay my past, I can see where this kind of blindness held me back, kept me from making important decisions at crucial times in my life. For example, it's almost as if I could not comprehend the obvious outcome of my smarting off to the boss when I was 28, starting me down a road that soon ended my newspaper career. I could go on, but it's just the same story, over and over again.
I don't feel I'm trying to skirt responsibility for my actions. They are my actions, and I could have chosen otherwise. My IQ blind spots didn't "cause" my mistakes, I made them. But I let my own brain trick me into thinking my actions did not matter. This is the conundrum of people like me, and, of the few I notice on TV and such, I see it repeat out in their lives, too.
You'd like to just sit them down and explain it to them, but you might as well tell an orange to just "be an apple." It won't work. We have to learn these things for ourselves, and it's usually far too late when we finally figure them out.
My main point here is that most of us are probably not the twisted evil masterminds we're often caricatured as in films and TV cop stories. I suspect most of us are more like the guy on "Numbers" -- a pleasant, nonviolent person who just doesn't get other people at all. Who can't adjust to his father wanting to move out. Who can't see the simplest things about relationships that his girlfriend tries to show him. Who just can't leave things alone, for a change. He's lucky that his family is supportive, and that he is comfortable in academe. The "Beautiful Mind" guy was lucky to have a devoted wife who stuck with him through thick and thin, mostly thin. (At least as portrayed in the movie, the Beautiful Mind guy was probably not psychotic, strictly speaking. He had this private little world people like us have, and he simply went way too far with it.)
My other point is that most people like me are good with numbers, or modern linguistics, or cryptography, something abstract like that. I'm just good with words, period. I've never met anyone like me. I don't think I ever will. And it's lonely out here.
It always will be.
___
*I took this entry down a few days after I posted it on LiveJournal, but I failed to note the date in the copy of the text I kept. The original posting date below is an estimate. There are also a few minor edits for clarity's sake in this one, as well.
LJ orig.: 1/18/07*
It started when I was three. At least that's what they tell me. I don't remember any of it, which, I guess, is normal. I was sitting in the grocery cart (I don't think they let kids do that anymore), probably in the top pull-out basket for cabbages and stuff like that. I'm told I grabbed the cereal box I wanted and started reading stuff on it. Aloud. Heads turned. Mouths gaped. This kid who fits in the cabbage basket is reading the freaking cereal box to the rest of the store!
Relatives would take me grocery shopping just to watch me do it. It was a really small town, so everybody knew. Except, I'm sure, me. To me, it probably felt normal to read cereal boxes (if I wanted the cereal, that is). They were colorful, the letters were big, it said the cereal was sweet, and it also said the box had a little toy inside. Why shouldn't I want to read it? After all, it looked promising! How would I have known, at three, that this was unusual?
And that's been the problem all along. Everybody knew what I did after that was unusual. Except me. To me, it was normal. I rarely compared myself to other children in the early years, except when it came to sports. I could not keep up with most of them. They could run faster, farther, and for longer periods than I could. They were more coordinated, they knew what to do with a ball, and this was upsetting. I hated looking foolish when I dropped the ball, or when I thought it was heading for my face and I couldn't get my hands up there in time, and I looked like an idiot when it, yes, hit me in the face and I cried. Because it freaking hurt. And my friends are yelling at me because the guy from the other street who hit the ball is crossing home while I'm sitting on the ground in front of the ball, bawling.
So, I wasn't made for hardball. When the softball hit, it didn't hurt as much. I didn't cry, and I do recall being enormously relieved. It stung, but not that much. That is, when my vision returned.
Then, I got my tonsils out. My first doctor felt strongly against childhood tonsillectomies, because they were part of a child's body, right? Why take them out? I was 11 when a surgeon found a pair of abscesses the size of quarters in my throat where he'd cut away the tonsils. Because I was no good as an athlete, and I liked to read, I recalled the story of some famous Olympic athlete whose pre-Olympic track career took off after she had her tonsils removed. I exclaimed this to the surgeon (once I'd woke up and then stopped vomiting ether residue), who looked at my father. And they both howled with laughter.
I had been a fat kid. A year after the tonsillectomy, I wasn't so much. I found that coordination was mostly confidence, and that I was no runner because of extremely flat feet. I could walk, though. I walked everywhere I possibly could, eventually took streets with the steeper hills deliberately, to test myself. Though way behind the ball-learning curve, I swatted away by myself hour after hour, tossing the ball high into the air for myself until I learned the mechanics of hitting. I recall at 13 or so, a younger cousin invited me over for the afternoon. His town actually had decent organized recreation, and they invited me to play softball with them! I struck out the first time, forgetting I was batting cross-handed (all that single-handed swatting). I put the first pitch over the short high fence my next turn at bat. Fortunately, I was put in right field, where few hit the ball. My fielding was awful (It seems the family didn't like hearing the ball bang against the front wall of the house over and over again, so I had to quit my personal fielding practice.).
I learned private determination. I learned that skills could be acquired "outside the box" (or off the diamond). But maybe no one would ever know, so I had to just accept it as a private victory and move on. However, there was a catch. You see, I still had the invisible (to me) letter G stamped on my forehead. Actually, it was a number: 163. Beside the letters IQ.
There are so few of us in the general population (two percent, I think) that most people don't realize what a handicap it is. We don't socialize as well, we can't handle changes as well, we don't always mature at a steady rate (my way of saying we're all pretty immature), we tend to see things abstractly (making it hard to compromise), and we're all idiots.
Having too much brain can be almost as bad as having too little. Some mentally handicapped folk have much they can learn, depending on their disability. With us, it's hard to learn stuff in anything like a normal way. We have our own learning styles, we have our own pet interests, we have our own little worlds. It's very hard to break out of them. We don't realize how different they are.
I just didn't like math. It bored me. I didn't like staring at something I could not immediately comprehend. It was only last week, reading a book standing at a bookstore, that I learned even PhD's in math find new technical material daunting at first. They just stick with it until they understand it, and accept that as normal for highly technical material. My ease at reading words essentially tricked me into math laziness! I learned softball (sort of) through determination and private work. Why not math? It just didn't flow like reading words, so I just didn't get as good a grade. My parents were horrified to see my math grades, year after year. How could someone so smart be so stupid as to not see he needs to work on this? (They didn't call me stupid, I just assume that's what they thought. It would be normal.) But blind spots are big for people like me. And I never took math seriously, even on the SATs. My future was on the line, and I just didn't give a rip. It doesn't make sense -- even to me, as I'm typing it! But that was my attitude.
As I assay my past, I can see where this kind of blindness held me back, kept me from making important decisions at crucial times in my life. For example, it's almost as if I could not comprehend the obvious outcome of my smarting off to the boss when I was 28, starting me down a road that soon ended my newspaper career. I could go on, but it's just the same story, over and over again.
I don't feel I'm trying to skirt responsibility for my actions. They are my actions, and I could have chosen otherwise. My IQ blind spots didn't "cause" my mistakes, I made them. But I let my own brain trick me into thinking my actions did not matter. This is the conundrum of people like me, and, of the few I notice on TV and such, I see it repeat out in their lives, too.
You'd like to just sit them down and explain it to them, but you might as well tell an orange to just "be an apple." It won't work. We have to learn these things for ourselves, and it's usually far too late when we finally figure them out.
My main point here is that most of us are probably not the twisted evil masterminds we're often caricatured as in films and TV cop stories. I suspect most of us are more like the guy on "Numbers" -- a pleasant, nonviolent person who just doesn't get other people at all. Who can't adjust to his father wanting to move out. Who can't see the simplest things about relationships that his girlfriend tries to show him. Who just can't leave things alone, for a change. He's lucky that his family is supportive, and that he is comfortable in academe. The "Beautiful Mind" guy was lucky to have a devoted wife who stuck with him through thick and thin, mostly thin. (At least as portrayed in the movie, the Beautiful Mind guy was probably not psychotic, strictly speaking. He had this private little world people like us have, and he simply went way too far with it.)
My other point is that most people like me are good with numbers, or modern linguistics, or cryptography, something abstract like that. I'm just good with words, period. I've never met anyone like me. I don't think I ever will. And it's lonely out here.
It always will be.
___
*I took this entry down a few days after I posted it on LiveJournal, but I failed to note the date in the copy of the text I kept. The original posting date below is an estimate. There are also a few minor edits for clarity's sake in this one, as well.
LJ orig.: 1/18/07*
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