Wed - October 17, 2007
Edna reborn!
Who indeed?
I have admired this poster for a long-defunct
North Beach fish & chips joint ever since I first saw it at the vacation
cabin of our friend G some years ago. The original measures approximately 14" x
22", and has been much knocked about in the years since it was printed (between
1963 and 1965 is my guess). I finally prevailed on G to part with the thing for
long enough to scan it and repair, four high-res square inches at a time, the
many creases, tears, stains and other blemishes that time had inflicted. I have
just retrieved the glossy printout of Edna's digital doppelgänger from the
service bureau, and I gotta tell you she hasn't looked this good in
decades:
—I would be remiss were I not to acknowledge photographer (and designer?) Jeffrey Blankfort, who is apparently still at large in the Bay Area. I have written to him asking after the backstory, but have yet to hear anything after a month.
Update 14 November 07: I have heard from photographer/designer Blankfort, who has graciously provided the following account:
It was, in fact, taken at Muir Beach, in early 1969, and that was Edna Wells (the Edna of the Fish and Chips) with the pitchfork and the quote was suggested by her son Peter who now lives in Mendocino. Edna is long gone. That was one of two posters, my actual favorite being another where I had her pose with two workers at a fish market at Fisherman's Wharf with a box of fish on the floor. The posters were printed by Lavon Masgofian of Tea Lautrec who printed ball the posters for the Fillmore and the Avalon during the 60s. I don't know what happened to the negs but I still have a copy of the originals. Edna closed the shop and went around the country teaching the cooks at H Salt how to do it. Hers were the best. She was born in Billingsgate in London.
—I would be remiss were I not to acknowledge photographer (and designer?) Jeffrey Blankfort, who is apparently still at large in the Bay Area. I have written to him asking after the backstory, but have yet to hear anything after a month.
Update 14 November 07: I have heard from photographer/designer Blankfort, who has graciously provided the following account:
It was, in fact, taken at Muir Beach, in early 1969, and that was Edna Wells (the Edna of the Fish and Chips) with the pitchfork and the quote was suggested by her son Peter who now lives in Mendocino. Edna is long gone. That was one of two posters, my actual favorite being another where I had her pose with two workers at a fish market at Fisherman's Wharf with a box of fish on the floor. The posters were printed by Lavon Masgofian of Tea Lautrec who printed ball the posters for the Fillmore and the Avalon during the 60s. I don't know what happened to the negs but I still have a copy of the originals. Edna closed the shop and went around the country teaching the cooks at H Salt how to do it. Hers were the best. She was born in Billingsgate in London.
Posted at 07:07 PM
Wed - September 19, 2007
Autumn approaches
"Where will we be...when the summer's
gone?"
A largely clement summer, comfortably warm but
seldom intolerably hot, appears today to be packing its bags. As I crossed the
Bay Bridge eastbound this afternoon the waters were roiled with whitecaps, and
half an hour ago (lord, is it dark
already?)
there were clouds aplenty gathering north and west. There's the hint of a chill
in the air this evening, whereas a couple of weeks ago we were still leaving the
kitchen door open nights for the crossbreeze. All this suggests that the
autumnal equinox will arrive on
schedule.
At one time, fall was my favorite season. This was before I took fulltime employment. Once I was confined indoors from eight to five I came to cherish any daylight hour I could call my own, and clung to the summer months with a sun-dazzled passion for the illusion that I actually had a life after work. I still savor the crispness of the autumnal air, at least so far as this cuts through the dense and gritty particulate emissions that drift a dozen feet up from the urban thoroughfare outside my house before settling on the front porch, but it's those long summer days that have my heart. And at this point in my development, which comes to seem more like a folding, I greet each summer not with a sense of infinite possibility, but rather a speculation on the order of "How many of these remain in the jar?"
But I was ever one for a poignant glance backward. I swear, by 1960 I was already wistful about the vanished salad days of Fifty-seven.
At one time, fall was my favorite season. This was before I took fulltime employment. Once I was confined indoors from eight to five I came to cherish any daylight hour I could call my own, and clung to the summer months with a sun-dazzled passion for the illusion that I actually had a life after work. I still savor the crispness of the autumnal air, at least so far as this cuts through the dense and gritty particulate emissions that drift a dozen feet up from the urban thoroughfare outside my house before settling on the front porch, but it's those long summer days that have my heart. And at this point in my development, which comes to seem more like a folding, I greet each summer not with a sense of infinite possibility, but rather a speculation on the order of "How many of these remain in the jar?"
But I was ever one for a poignant glance backward. I swear, by 1960 I was already wistful about the vanished salad days of Fifty-seven.
Posted at 08:31 PM
Mon - January 8, 2007
Ode to the Boss That Got Away
A good man down—but first this
disclaimer
(I don't know whether my employer has
a policy on employee blogging [probably not—the institution is old, staid,
and ever well behind the technological curve] and I'm not keen to find out the
hard way, so I've been at pains to leave the whole topic alone here. That's not
an option this evening, but prudence dictates a generous measure of
circumspection and a dollop of obfuscation in the following
tribute.)
JPL arrived from New York to take over our San Francisco branch about four years ago. He was only the fourth Head Honcho here since the 1950s, and the first in living memory to occupy that nice corner office without having previously served in some less exalted capacity here in The City (we are known within the company as a somewhat inbred lot).
He took up the reins on the eve of a merger and reorganization, billed, as these things always are, as a union of equals; in sordid practice, of course, nothing of the sort. Fortunately our side was the pitcher rather than the catcher, so most of the immediate collateral damage was taken by the two absorbed entities, but the situation was rather, ah, fraught, and my own position within the firm, notwithstanding three or four centuries of conscientious if not strictly loyal service, felt a little unsteady as the transition approached. Afterward JPL remarked that before the merger the SF assignment was the best job he'd ever had, and that a year later it had become the worst. One of the PR schlockmeisters at the Mothership back east came up with the inspirational tagline (I paraphrase) "One Team! One Goal!" which some (ahem) wag amended to "One Team! One Goal! Three Email Systems!"
Partly because he'd come to us as an unknown, partly because he was drafted, and was sundered from the personal and professional bonds he'd formed for thirty years in New York, where he was, I gather, well-beloved, JPL seemed somewhat guarded in affect when he arrived at the end of 2002, and for some reason he never quite connected with the workforce at large, accustomed as they were to his predecessors of the previous twenty years, both of whom, otherwise quite different in temperament, were press-the-flesh types. For the whole of his tenure he was seen, I'm afraid, as grave, formal, remote, baffling.
By contrast his first-level subordinates, our senior managers, adored him. First, he was not his immediate predecessor, who approached her duties in a style I can only describe as free-associative punctuated by fits of arbitrary rage. Second, he was funny, capable, brilliantly intelligent and hands-off in his management style, by which I mean that he sized up his deputies, concluded that they knew what they were doing, and let them function unimpeded. He was an imposing man, and I think all of us who worked directly under him would have dreaded his anger. More importantly, though, you wouldn't have wanted to disappoint him. He trusted you to get the job done, didn't look over your shoulder, and asked only that you'd deliver what you'd undertaken. I received an email reproach from him when I missed a deadline (for another division to which I'd been seconded). It began "Rand, you dilatory scoundrel..."
I'm not senior management, or any sort of management at all, but I occupy an odd niche in the firm, performing the duties of what amounts to the art director, and for twenty years I've reported directly to the Head Cheese. Since so far as I've ever been able to determine I have no equivalent in any of the other cities in which our globe-girdling enterprise is represented, I was a little uneasy when I was first presented to JPL. I needn't have worried: he liked having an art director. Early on a chance remark to him by his executive assistant established that he and I were both aficionados of "art house" films, and on this basis we became, oddly, friends. He extended me his protection from the vagaries of our office politics, alerted me to threats from elsewhere in the organization, and even called me from retirement last spring to warn me to "stay off the radar" of his acting replacement, who fortunately didn't get the permanent assignment.
We weren't so very far apart in age: he left college three months before I started, and although this wasn't the sort of thing one would discuss up the foodchain, I'm fairly certain that had our paths crossed in 1970 we might well have shared a relaxing doobie: I think I can tell an old stoner when I see one, and he let slip once that he attended Woodstock. Shaggy he might have been back in the day, but he came to San Francisco impeccably tailored and groomed. He was a big man, probably 6' 3" or more, and at the outset probably right at the limits of the weight his generous frame could carry gracefully—but he did carry it gracefully, and with vast elegance.
As you might guess from all this, he's been dead now for a week. Almost as soon as he arrived, it seemed, his health began to falter, and over the years the weight melted off so that toward the end of his tenure those splendid tailored suits seemed to hang off his shoulders. He retired quietly last March, and moved back east. On 30 December he fell and broke his neck, apparently paralyzing him, and died on Tuesday night.
I'd hoped to visit him this summer. Obviously this won't happen. I post this graphic, adapted from one his senior staff commissioned on his birthday a few years ago, as tribute to the best boss I'm likely ever to have. Here's to you, JPL—you were a class act.
Postscript — A dream last night: I am walking up an alpine path under leaden skies, patches of snow on the ground, and come to a paved highway through the mountains. JPL is there, waiting to cross (although there is no traffic in sight). Approaching, I say "I heard you were dead." JPL: "As you see, I am not." RC: "I had it on pretty good authority." JPL (airily): "Nevertheless, I'm fine." RC: "I'm very, very glad to learn this." (we cross the road) JPL (indicating the road): "That way down the mountain" (proceeds along alpine path and out of sight; dream ends).
JPL arrived from New York to take over our San Francisco branch about four years ago. He was only the fourth Head Honcho here since the 1950s, and the first in living memory to occupy that nice corner office without having previously served in some less exalted capacity here in The City (we are known within the company as a somewhat inbred lot).
He took up the reins on the eve of a merger and reorganization, billed, as these things always are, as a union of equals; in sordid practice, of course, nothing of the sort. Fortunately our side was the pitcher rather than the catcher, so most of the immediate collateral damage was taken by the two absorbed entities, but the situation was rather, ah, fraught, and my own position within the firm, notwithstanding three or four centuries of conscientious if not strictly loyal service, felt a little unsteady as the transition approached. Afterward JPL remarked that before the merger the SF assignment was the best job he'd ever had, and that a year later it had become the worst. One of the PR schlockmeisters at the Mothership back east came up with the inspirational tagline (I paraphrase) "One Team! One Goal!" which some (ahem) wag amended to "One Team! One Goal! Three Email Systems!"
Partly because he'd come to us as an unknown, partly because he was drafted, and was sundered from the personal and professional bonds he'd formed for thirty years in New York, where he was, I gather, well-beloved, JPL seemed somewhat guarded in affect when he arrived at the end of 2002, and for some reason he never quite connected with the workforce at large, accustomed as they were to his predecessors of the previous twenty years, both of whom, otherwise quite different in temperament, were press-the-flesh types. For the whole of his tenure he was seen, I'm afraid, as grave, formal, remote, baffling.
By contrast his first-level subordinates, our senior managers, adored him. First, he was not his immediate predecessor, who approached her duties in a style I can only describe as free-associative punctuated by fits of arbitrary rage. Second, he was funny, capable, brilliantly intelligent and hands-off in his management style, by which I mean that he sized up his deputies, concluded that they knew what they were doing, and let them function unimpeded. He was an imposing man, and I think all of us who worked directly under him would have dreaded his anger. More importantly, though, you wouldn't have wanted to disappoint him. He trusted you to get the job done, didn't look over your shoulder, and asked only that you'd deliver what you'd undertaken. I received an email reproach from him when I missed a deadline (for another division to which I'd been seconded). It began "Rand, you dilatory scoundrel..."
I'm not senior management, or any sort of management at all, but I occupy an odd niche in the firm, performing the duties of what amounts to the art director, and for twenty years I've reported directly to the Head Cheese. Since so far as I've ever been able to determine I have no equivalent in any of the other cities in which our globe-girdling enterprise is represented, I was a little uneasy when I was first presented to JPL. I needn't have worried: he liked having an art director. Early on a chance remark to him by his executive assistant established that he and I were both aficionados of "art house" films, and on this basis we became, oddly, friends. He extended me his protection from the vagaries of our office politics, alerted me to threats from elsewhere in the organization, and even called me from retirement last spring to warn me to "stay off the radar" of his acting replacement, who fortunately didn't get the permanent assignment.
We weren't so very far apart in age: he left college three months before I started, and although this wasn't the sort of thing one would discuss up the foodchain, I'm fairly certain that had our paths crossed in 1970 we might well have shared a relaxing doobie: I think I can tell an old stoner when I see one, and he let slip once that he attended Woodstock. Shaggy he might have been back in the day, but he came to San Francisco impeccably tailored and groomed. He was a big man, probably 6' 3" or more, and at the outset probably right at the limits of the weight his generous frame could carry gracefully—but he did carry it gracefully, and with vast elegance.
As you might guess from all this, he's been dead now for a week. Almost as soon as he arrived, it seemed, his health began to falter, and over the years the weight melted off so that toward the end of his tenure those splendid tailored suits seemed to hang off his shoulders. He retired quietly last March, and moved back east. On 30 December he fell and broke his neck, apparently paralyzing him, and died on Tuesday night.
I'd hoped to visit him this summer. Obviously this won't happen. I post this graphic, adapted from one his senior staff commissioned on his birthday a few years ago, as tribute to the best boss I'm likely ever to have. Here's to you, JPL—you were a class act.
Postscript — A dream last night: I am walking up an alpine path under leaden skies, patches of snow on the ground, and come to a paved highway through the mountains. JPL is there, waiting to cross (although there is no traffic in sight). Approaching, I say "I heard you were dead." JPL: "As you see, I am not." RC: "I had it on pretty good authority." JPL (airily): "Nevertheless, I'm fine." RC: "I'm very, very glad to learn this." (we cross the road) JPL (indicating the road): "That way down the mountain" (proceeds along alpine path and out of sight; dream ends).
Posted at 08:33 PM
Wed - August 17, 2005
Frances Among the Beehives
As promised in this space a year
ago!
The excellent Frances Waverly Reynolds, née
Fisher, celebrates another birthday today, and it seems appropriate to observe
it by unleashing this by-blow of an unexpected visit by the Muse of Light Verse
a quarter of a century ago. Frances was then living, as she did until this past
year, in Utah, or “behind the Zion Curtain” as she called it. A
couple of specialized terms could perhaps bear elaboration: Frances’
circle in those days, secular humanists all, referred to themselves as
“blackhats” and to the, ah, dominant culture as the
“saints,” except for the polygamous communities out in the sticks,
who were, of course,
“polliwogs.”
I remain after twenty-five years quite pleased with this caffeinated effort, which consumed just an hour from inspiration to completion. Happy birthday, FWF!
Frances Among the Beehives:
A Birthday Ode, 1980
Frances Fisher, drinking gin
and tonic as the Saints march in,
Waverly Fisher, whom Random knew when
Has turned twenty-nine. Rand starts over again,
Smites his forehead, pours a cup
Of Folgers hi-test, sobers up
Within another cup or two, or
(Muse invoked) another few,
Conveys from land of sin and surf
His greetings to Moroni’s turf,
Hopes Provo is pleasant, knows Mormons are not
All that bad save en masse
(but it’s en masse you’ve got—
Utah being the homeland of Wog and of Polly,
Salt Lake, Brigham Young and the Osmonds, by golly!).
This doggerel is pretty poor
Imitation Clement Moore
Which is, however, no excuse
Not to play it fast and loose
On Frances Fisher’s natal day.
Sin! Debauch! And by the way
Do not let Sainthood take its toll
On Franny’s hedonistic soul.
In Rome we do as Romans do
But are, in Zion, careful to
Stay decadent. Remain alert.
Party, drink, and don’t convert.
Cheek by jowl with Latter-Dates
Black hats discreetly congregate
and slipping from the pious’ sight
Go Gentile into that good night.
I remain after twenty-five years quite pleased with this caffeinated effort, which consumed just an hour from inspiration to completion. Happy birthday, FWF!
Frances Among the Beehives:
A Birthday Ode, 1980
Frances Fisher, drinking gin
and tonic as the Saints march in,
Waverly Fisher, whom Random knew when
Has turned twenty-nine. Rand starts over again,
Smites his forehead, pours a cup
Of Folgers hi-test, sobers up
Within another cup or two, or
(Muse invoked) another few,
Conveys from land of sin and surf
His greetings to Moroni’s turf,
Hopes Provo is pleasant, knows Mormons are not
All that bad save en masse
(but it’s en masse you’ve got—
Utah being the homeland of Wog and of Polly,
Salt Lake, Brigham Young and the Osmonds, by golly!).
This doggerel is pretty poor
Imitation Clement Moore
Which is, however, no excuse
Not to play it fast and loose
On Frances Fisher’s natal day.
Sin! Debauch! And by the way
Do not let Sainthood take its toll
On Franny’s hedonistic soul.
In Rome we do as Romans do
But are, in Zion, careful to
Stay decadent. Remain alert.
Party, drink, and don’t convert.
Cheek by jowl with Latter-Dates
Black hats discreetly congregate
and slipping from the pious’ sight
Go Gentile into that good night.
Posted at 05:38 PM
Thu - April 21, 2005
Efficiencies of scale, heh-heh
The moving finger having writ, now slowly
extends to its full length, with two furled digits
flanking...
I would never have attempted to design and build
a website back when HTML, simple as its options would have been in those days,
was the only way to go. When in 1996 I first laid a footprint in www-land, it
was by means of “PageMill,” a (by modern standards) ludicrously
underpowered but withal pretty easygoing WYSIWYG page creation package (keeping
in mind that WYSIWYG remains something of a chimera) sold, though not created
by, Adobe Systems, whose founders invented—or at least smuggled out of
PARC without being caught—the PostScript page description standard, which
has been the basis of my regular income for eighteen years
now.
I like Adobe Systems. I've used their “Illustrator” drawing software almost daily since v. 1.0 back in 1987; their old “PageMaker” page layout software (acquired from the late Aldus Corp in the early 1990s) from 1987 until I migrated to Adobe’s “InDesign” in 2000; Photoshop since the beginning of time (no one has ever mounted a plausible challenge to this sixteen-thousand-pound gorilla) and for web design “GoLive” since 1998, when it was known as “GoLive CyberStudio” (so 20th century, that “cyber”) and owned by a German software house.
For much of this time there have been competing applications in each of these areas: “FreeHand,” devised by the brilliant Texas-based Altsys, appeared a year after Illustrator and has paced it, version by version, ever since; the deeply-hated (apparently even by its most deeply-committed users) “Quark Express” killed PageMaker with a thousand cuts; Macromedia’s “DreamWeaver” never yielded its early lead in power and features to latecomer GoLive, even though Macromedia’s UI irregularities are said to compare unfavorably with Adobe’s increasingly fluent interapplication protocols.
But now...but now Adobe is acquiring Macromedia. Whither FreeHand (almost certainly dead)? Whither Flash (adios to Adobe’s attempted competing standard SVG)? What’s to become of DreamWeaver (ah, geez, some think that GoLive will be quietly smothered and DW, heavily made up, introduced, rechristened and passed off as the corpse).
We, the shortly-to-be-merged customer bases of Adobe and Macromedia, yearn for answers. The press releases and like materials have not been forthcoming. Fortunately a blog has come forth to answer all our questions...to translate the smooth FAQ-You boilerplate of Adobe’s PR flacks into idiomatic English...ladies and gentlemen, I give you the “Daring Fireball” Adobese-to-English page! Give these people a big hand! Or a finger...
I like Adobe Systems. I've used their “Illustrator” drawing software almost daily since v. 1.0 back in 1987; their old “PageMaker” page layout software (acquired from the late Aldus Corp in the early 1990s) from 1987 until I migrated to Adobe’s “InDesign” in 2000; Photoshop since the beginning of time (no one has ever mounted a plausible challenge to this sixteen-thousand-pound gorilla) and for web design “GoLive” since 1998, when it was known as “GoLive CyberStudio” (so 20th century, that “cyber”) and owned by a German software house.
For much of this time there have been competing applications in each of these areas: “FreeHand,” devised by the brilliant Texas-based Altsys, appeared a year after Illustrator and has paced it, version by version, ever since; the deeply-hated (apparently even by its most deeply-committed users) “Quark Express” killed PageMaker with a thousand cuts; Macromedia’s “DreamWeaver” never yielded its early lead in power and features to latecomer GoLive, even though Macromedia’s UI irregularities are said to compare unfavorably with Adobe’s increasingly fluent interapplication protocols.
But now...but now Adobe is acquiring Macromedia. Whither FreeHand (almost certainly dead)? Whither Flash (adios to Adobe’s attempted competing standard SVG)? What’s to become of DreamWeaver (ah, geez, some think that GoLive will be quietly smothered and DW, heavily made up, introduced, rechristened and passed off as the corpse).
We, the shortly-to-be-merged customer bases of Adobe and Macromedia, yearn for answers. The press releases and like materials have not been forthcoming. Fortunately a blog has come forth to answer all our questions...to translate the smooth FAQ-You boilerplate of Adobe’s PR flacks into idiomatic English...ladies and gentlemen, I give you the “Daring Fireball” Adobese-to-English page! Give these people a big hand! Or a finger...
Posted at 05:44 PM
Mon - December 20, 2004
Looking at the big picture
The Lord helps those who delft
themselves
It's actually a
mosaic of a few dozen images taken over a period of 75 minutes, and if
you examine it closely you'll find a few ragged seams, but the thing behaves
like the preposterous technology attributed to the CIA in popular entertainment
whereby ten pixels are resolved into an eight-character license
plate.
Zoom in on the millimeter-high protrusion at the center-rear of the image: it's a clocktower (one of two). The time is clearly readable.
[Speaking of time, I'm still spending some of that commodity in a conscious effort not to follow politics. I'll probably go gingerly back in that direction next year, but I have a website—not my own—to overhaul before January. Patience, droogies.]
Zoom in on the millimeter-high protrusion at the center-rear of the image: it's a clocktower (one of two). The time is clearly readable.
[Speaking of time, I'm still spending some of that commodity in a conscious effort not to follow politics. I'll probably go gingerly back in that direction next year, but I have a website—not my own—to overhaul before January. Patience, droogies.]
Posted at 08:51 PM
Thu - October 21, 2004
RIP Paul P.
"The Big Guy is getting our
range" —John Updike (perhaps
a bit paraphrased)
An email today from my old friend Elizabeth
advises me that her husband Paul, whom I met just once, four years ago, has died
of a stroke. Elizabeth had been married since the 1970s, but our infrequent
meetings from 1974 on had somehow never included her spouse until the turning of
the century. He seemed a pleasant, if slightly feckless man, whose passion in
life—charming wife and two charming daughters, now both of college age,
apart—appeared to be the restoration of classic automobiles. Elizabeth's
grief is, I suspect, both heartfelt and complicated. She is at present out of
email reach, and at this time I merely mark the moment for the edification of my
two or three other regular readers. Updike again (also qualified): "You can see
the end of the plank from here."
Posted at 06:00 PM
Tue - August 17, 2004
Francis Reynolds celebrates a birthday!
Old friends: America’s
non-renewable resource
Something I've noticed about middle
age—hell, it began to be true in my twenties—is that one's newer
friends seldom burrow under the skin the way the best of the old ones did. There
are people with whom I socialized regularly ten years ago whom I haven't seen in
five, and haven't missed, whereas there are others I've barely seen in twenty
whose absence I still feel keenly. In my latter teens (say, 1966-1972) I
assembled a cast of characters in my particular self-absorbed personal drama
(who among us is not supremely self-absorbed at that age? —not that
self-knowledge is very frequently part of the package) who dominated that drama
for the next couple of decades, and most of whom I know yet, with even the
absent players, my ex among them, still looming over the back
story.
I have been honored to count Francis Waverly Reynolds, née Fisher, my friend since early in 1968. I will not enumerate her virtues (there seems something vain about making extravagant claims on behalf of one's friends) apart from the general observation that these have always seemed to me vast. That I fell in love with her family early on along the approximate lines of Brideshead Revisited, of which I was for another dozen years ignorant (though they, of course, were not) says perhaps less about them than it does of my own then bleak and scattered clan. In the event, I adored Frances, unwittingly alienated her brother (slightly closer to me in age, and a fellow middle child with whom I ought to have found common ground), and flirted, not wisely, not well, and ultimately to the point of estrangement, with her sister: the follies of one's thirties, undertaken with such a vaster scope for harm and yet with a moral arsenal not so much greater than that one had to hand in one's foolish twenties, perhaps merits an essay to itself one palmy day.
But Frances and I have remained friends. We are, oddly enough, less frequently in contact in this internet age, when packet-switching permits the instantaneous transmission of a letter with the tap of a "return' key, than we were throughout the Seventies, when narrative contact involved us in paid postage and in mucilage. I count the fault my own: once a faithful (in some respects perhaps alarmingly so) correspondent, I drew in my horns in the latter Eighties, lost in a sterile postmarital introspection and remorse, and many other chums, bound up in their own complicated transitions to middle age, dropped me as I dropped them.
The friends who have made it thirty years or more should be cherished. I have one or two who remain on the payroll for that reason alone, but far the greater number have earned their staying power by overall moral excellence or by showing up one way or another when my spirits were flagging. Frances has pride of place on this roster for both reasons. Happy, happy birthday, my oldest and dearest friend, and I hope our respective couples can get together again before too much longer.
Next year, should this blog still be in business (President Kerry might bring about a just society in which I'd feel no need to post these screeds; President Bush might roll up this sort of operation and send me to Guantanamo or, more likely, lean on my employer [you know what I mean, FWF] to fire my sorry arse), I may post, on its twenty-fifth anniversary, my magnificent verse epic Frances among the Beehives: A Birthday Ode.
I have been honored to count Francis Waverly Reynolds, née Fisher, my friend since early in 1968. I will not enumerate her virtues (there seems something vain about making extravagant claims on behalf of one's friends) apart from the general observation that these have always seemed to me vast. That I fell in love with her family early on along the approximate lines of Brideshead Revisited, of which I was for another dozen years ignorant (though they, of course, were not) says perhaps less about them than it does of my own then bleak and scattered clan. In the event, I adored Frances, unwittingly alienated her brother (slightly closer to me in age, and a fellow middle child with whom I ought to have found common ground), and flirted, not wisely, not well, and ultimately to the point of estrangement, with her sister: the follies of one's thirties, undertaken with such a vaster scope for harm and yet with a moral arsenal not so much greater than that one had to hand in one's foolish twenties, perhaps merits an essay to itself one palmy day.
But Frances and I have remained friends. We are, oddly enough, less frequently in contact in this internet age, when packet-switching permits the instantaneous transmission of a letter with the tap of a "return' key, than we were throughout the Seventies, when narrative contact involved us in paid postage and in mucilage. I count the fault my own: once a faithful (in some respects perhaps alarmingly so) correspondent, I drew in my horns in the latter Eighties, lost in a sterile postmarital introspection and remorse, and many other chums, bound up in their own complicated transitions to middle age, dropped me as I dropped them.
The friends who have made it thirty years or more should be cherished. I have one or two who remain on the payroll for that reason alone, but far the greater number have earned their staying power by overall moral excellence or by showing up one way or another when my spirits were flagging. Frances has pride of place on this roster for both reasons. Happy, happy birthday, my oldest and dearest friend, and I hope our respective couples can get together again before too much longer.
Next year, should this blog still be in business (President Kerry might bring about a just society in which I'd feel no need to post these screeds; President Bush might roll up this sort of operation and send me to Guantanamo or, more likely, lean on my employer [you know what I mean, FWF] to fire my sorry arse), I may post, on its twenty-fifth anniversary, my magnificent verse epic Frances among the Beehives: A Birthday Ode.
Posted at 08:01 PM
Still here
’arf crippled, but still in the
game
I've taken some time away (the better part of a
month—I hadn't realized) from discretionary keyboard-related activities to
nurse an injury to my right arm sustained during a backpacking expedition to, or
in my case near, Leavitt Peak in California's unduly rugged Sierra Nevada late
in July. A spotty photographic record may be viewed here.
The arm is on the mend, though more slowly than I'd like, but I've taken some
advantage of the downtime to cut down the amount of time I've spent obsessing on
the sorry state of the Republic and on the Bush junta's various Crusades to
Destroy Everything that is Good in Life, because one needs from time to
time—or at least
I
need from time to time—to back away from the public mythology and
reconnect with the personal.
But the stakes are high, of course, and I will shortly return with my occasional screeds.
But the stakes are high, of course, and I will shortly return with my occasional screeds.
Posted at 06:46 PM
Wed - July 28, 2004
Ode to Richard O.
The elder brother turns 57. Coincidence?
Heinz think not.
This would be first thing tomorrow, and I yodel
my warm best wishes to him and for the benefit of all one or two of my regular
readers. Richard and I have probably not seen eye-to-eye in a presidential
election since we both voted for McGovern in 1972, but at that time we were both
(he barely) of conscription age, and it was by no means clear that the crazy
motherfucker in the White House was actually prepared to fold the tent in
distant Amman. I believe that we might both have voted for John Anderson in 1980
(a vote I would cheerfully take back, for all that it taught me the valuable
lesson that to spurn the lesser of two evils is to gorge the greater), but I
suspect that we did so for very different reasons, and since that time the
senior sibling has reliably plighted his franchise, as my grief fluctuated
according to the stakes, to the Dark
Side.
None of this, oddly enough, suffices to diminish by so much as a dram (what's the old joke? —"How many scruples in ten drams?") the awestruck admiration with which I've regarded my older, smarter brother since (perhaps) late 1954 or (certainly) mid-1955, whenever I was first capable of forming opinions on these matters. This was brought home to me, to cite a comparatively recent and vivid occasion, when I applied to him about nine years ago, during a period when we lived just a couple of miles apart, to give me a lift to a local gas station and back so that I could exchange my long-dead spare tire for a functional one to replace the left-front jobbie I'd just killed with a snakebite. He offered to assist me in the replacement; I waved him off, being perfectly competent to undertake this project solo. Except I was not: the flimsy jack Volkswagen had provided did not agree with the ergonomically suboptimal angle of approach, and the handle sheared off after a dozen operations. I called Richard, abashed; he appeared, held me cordially at arm's length, changed my tire. "I hadn't expected to be this helpless at 43," I said wanly. "If you can't count on your big brother...?" he responded. Just so. I've always counted on him, save in matters of politics (he votes his tax bracket; I perhaps do not vote mine, quite, but he has ever been further over the line than I), and on the eve of his birthday I wish him superlatively well, and wish him further a change of heart before November. Here's to you, bruder mein: you're the best.
None of this, oddly enough, suffices to diminish by so much as a dram (what's the old joke? —"How many scruples in ten drams?") the awestruck admiration with which I've regarded my older, smarter brother since (perhaps) late 1954 or (certainly) mid-1955, whenever I was first capable of forming opinions on these matters. This was brought home to me, to cite a comparatively recent and vivid occasion, when I applied to him about nine years ago, during a period when we lived just a couple of miles apart, to give me a lift to a local gas station and back so that I could exchange my long-dead spare tire for a functional one to replace the left-front jobbie I'd just killed with a snakebite. He offered to assist me in the replacement; I waved him off, being perfectly competent to undertake this project solo. Except I was not: the flimsy jack Volkswagen had provided did not agree with the ergonomically suboptimal angle of approach, and the handle sheared off after a dozen operations. I called Richard, abashed; he appeared, held me cordially at arm's length, changed my tire. "I hadn't expected to be this helpless at 43," I said wanly. "If you can't count on your big brother...?" he responded. Just so. I've always counted on him, save in matters of politics (he votes his tax bracket; I perhaps do not vote mine, quite, but he has ever been further over the line than I), and on the eve of his birthday I wish him superlatively well, and wish him further a change of heart before November. Here's to you, bruder mein: you're the best.
Posted at 07:18 PM
Mon - July 19, 2004
Another meaningful birthday
A heartfelt shout toward a distant
anechoic surface
Best to you, vsf, this
forty-ninth.
Posted at 09:55 PM
Fri - July 9, 2004
Et in Alaska ego
I could get used to this distribution of
day and night...
No longer, of course, do my ego be in Alaska et,
since my week there, on the scenic Kenai Peninsula, was spent in unspeakably
rustic and primitive conditions (outdoor biffy; 28.8 dialup internet access)
from which it was not realistic to update the blog. We passed a splendid few
days, though, Lina and I, and I adored the light/dark arrangements they have in
train there at this time of year, although I suspect that by the same token I'd
require armored sleeves and turtleneck to survive the winters. Our hosts, an
extended family of Finns, could not have been personally more gracious or
hospitable. On the major issues of the day, ranging from social policy, to the
divinity of Jesus, to the age of the cosmos, to whether George W. Bush should
have been exposed on the hillside at birth, much less ever been permitted to
stand for public office, we found few points of agreement, though perhaps one or
two more (disdain for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, for
example) than might have been the case had I found myself camping out with the
Taliban. With fond thanks to my late hosts I am glad, glad, glad, glad to live
in a
blue
state!
Posted at 07:35 PM
Tue - June 22, 2004
Viral marketing
Vehicle to autonomous biped robot
conversion for the Mini Cooper r50
Cleverly done, unslick and geeky enough to be
persuasive, although never entirely convincing—the very first photographic
image sets the bullshit-detector chiming, and long before you make it to the
video of the prototype stopping a car...well, see for yourself. Some internet
sleuths have noted that a query of the the domain name returns the street
address of a London post-production house. I suspect that this has been done on
behalf of BMW, which has been dabbling in offbeat under-the-radar (or
under-the-lidar in this instance) publicity on the web for a few years now.
Still, it's pretty amusing—not that I see a surge in Mini-Cooper sales
resulting from it.
Link .
Link .
Posted at 09:40 PM
Sat - June 5, 2004
One of the eternal questions addressed
Not quite up there with proving Fermat's
Last Theorem, but we've been worrying about this for
years.
Posted at 06:11 PM
Sun - May 23, 2004
Auld Lang Syne
She who...she
who...
I can't let 23 May 2004 go by without a rueful
happy birthday to Kim A. Manton, to whom I first wished same two-thirds of a
lifetime ago.
Posted at 08:18 PM
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