Writing the Arts

because it's there

seriously, you got to get on this suiseki thing. the rocks out here in adams county are just unbelievable: this should be a world-famous site; it's easy to find rocks comparable to the best you've ever seen exhibited. check this unbelievable larger rock: 18 inches at the base and 30 lbs? many more angles, and the colors and details are not adequately represented. this was used on a rock path as a paver by the people who previously were in me place. snow-capped peaks with glaciers etc.

 

 

many other faces make landscapes or himalayas, etc.

court as place of shelter

 

quite the little cast of talkings heads there: chuck d, samuel l. jackson, um bill cosby, senator barack obama, etc. but in general historical video on the trotters has been absurdly thin. i've searched many times over the years for footage of the fabulous magicians, but i remember watching more or less whole games on wide world of sports. trying to really just get good footage of the great dribblers, marques haynes, curly neal, boo johnson, etc. is absurdly difficult. anyone who's working for the globetrotters or whatever needs to get good historical vid of all the greats up in a good way. thank god some stuff finally came up after marques haynes's death: still it is insane not to have much more and much better for a great artist like that. (the comparison to improvisational jazz is extremely apt. haynes is fucking louis armstrong, but you cannot even find his songs.) or hello my former relative-by-marriage greg winik: put twenty interns on it with a good editor this summer, ok? that is your own history too.

haynes could do what he did in serious competition against nba (or nbl) players. now, louis played great, but not while large athletes were trying to grab his trumpet. it is true improvisation under pressure, even if it became a great act (imitated by many ever since, as well it should have been). 

i played a lot of playground basketball against and with black guys, and understand that i was the scrawniest little white kid you ever saw. but the court was to some extent a shelter from the race war, even if it might have looked the opposite. and i will say almost always if you got out there on a new playground (i wasn't the only white kid trying to play, except for sometimes), you almost always had to take a hard foul first; they'd kind of level you just to test you. and one way to pass the test a bit was not to call it, but just pick yourself up and try to say something like 'call that a fucking foul?'

anyway, one reason it was good was precisely that race was explicit, but played many different ways. so it could be very intimidating: like boom! you're on your back, then it's 'go home to your skanky mama, fucking white boy.' it got so where 'honky' was my nickname. but that's the way they were talking to each other (different slurs, of course) too. so you'd keep trying and it'd be more like: you can't fucking drive on me, you fucking honky. i have to say they gave you a lot of credit for sticking but then if you did something ok, you might get 'dayum, look at white boy!' anyway, i say those experiences and how i learned to come back etc are still in my persona or even on the blog all the time. people are surprised when you whip that out at a philosophy conference.

i always wanted to play black, and some of my favorite players have been those players, like 'white chocolate' jason williams, or rex chapman, or pete maravich. anyway, i'm obviously particularly obsessed with the dribblers, and i am actually serious in comparing haynes to people like armstrong, though honestly i'd rather do without haynes than louis. but why do i have to? there has got to be a shitload of great video out there. people need to care enough to get it out there, edit it right, etc.

 

look that's fucking great: everything i always wanted to be. but how can there be so much and so much better footage out there of jason williams than marques haynes or whomever? will you people get it together?

 

 

hotel jane

the best new pop album i've heard in some years is beau's that thing reality (great title). it takes account of the lorde/lana down-tempo sorta talky thing, but also many different elements of rock and country and punk. the singing is wonderful, and there are no weak cuts. has to hit, i would think: this stuff would sound great on the radio.

 

what a great build that thing has: very fine writing. beautiful production to boot.

 

loewy the incomparable

rarely have i been as delighted by any book as i am as i read never leave well enough alone (1951) by the great industrial designer raymond loewy. he is perhaps the greatest designer who ever lived, and certainly the boldest and most distinctive who ever had his designs widely realized. the range is just unbelievable, from typefaces to store displays to railroad engines to the lucky strike package to vacuum cleaners and radios to coke machines to refrigerators to farm equipment to chairs to buildings to the avanti and other car designs.

the text is a profound meditation on design, yielding many fundamental principles that would still be of use to anyone in the field, including people working on interfaces and other aspects of info processing. but it is also one of the very funniest and most beautifully-written things i have ever read, as though wodehouse and edison were the same person.

i'm just going to type in the acknowledgments; every page is this delightful.

My indebtedness to the Atlantic Ocean must be acknowledged first. In perverse conspiration with the S.S. Nieuw Amsterdam, it lengthened my crossing to Europe and compelled me to remain in bed in my stateroom for the greater part of the journey. To this forced immobilization can be attributed the first sixty-two pages of this thing. For continuing encouragement, I am deeply grateful to G.D. Searle and Company, makers of Dramamin, a new seasickness remedy.

Thanks are in order to the Pullman Company, whose new type of automatic folding toilets makes me appreciate the joys of staying home. To home, where a defective incinerator poisons my daily life, thanks for making me appreciate the joys of travel. For continual criticism of what I was thinking, doing, planning to do or write, thanks to my beloved wife, Viola, without whom this book might otherwise have been much longer. Selection of the text was greatly facilitated by my secretary, Miss Peters, whose well-times loss of a particularly boring chapter in a New York taxicab led to its complete elimination, and my blissful relief. To the mosquitoes who made writing unbearable on the beach at Porquerolles, and chased me to Zermatt, I must credit a lovely month of June in the shadow of the Matterhorn.

To the makers of my ball point pens, may I extend the thanks of the dry cleaning industry, which has been kept busy removing spots from most of my bedsheets, pajamas, tablecloth, evening shirts, white poodles, upholstery, and Lanvin neckties during the genesis of this book. To the airlines, thanks are in order for the countless hours of leisurely waiting at airports and bus terminals, where many chapters of this book have been written on empty popcorn boxes, travel folders to Mexico, and other deadly airline literature. Acknowledgements are in order to Ella, my cook, who reduced the printing cost of this book by conveniently dropping a saucerful of hollandaise on a batch of illustrations, thereby materially cutting down printing expenses.

Finally, my heartest thanks to my dear friend Peggy (Mrs. Howard) Cullman, who, after reading the first two parts of the ms., assured me that she had read much worse, thereby supplying the final dose of enthusiasm that I so badly needed to finish the job.