Good grief, have I really let this thing slide for three days? When I first started blogging, I was content to post maybe once or twice a week. Now I don’t like letting it sit idle for more than a day or two, tops.
Anyway.
The main impediment here is a lack of computer. I’m in the process of relocating my home office, and several days ago, I unplugged my computer and all its attachments (i.e, printer, keyboard, iPod, wireless receiver, and what I think is a bugging device attached by the RNC), thinking I would be moving it to its new location quickly. Three days later, my CPU is still sitting upstairs in my old office — sans keyboard and monitor and everything else — still unplugged and still unused, all of which makes blogging rather difficult. The delay in moving it downstairs is due largely to the fact that it’s taking longer to pull telephone in the new office than I thought, mainly because the wiring in the old house is — typically — not up to snuff. So we’re taking apart, and putting back together — which, given my patience, takes quite a while.
The end is near, however, and I’m hoping to be back up and running by this weekend, so I can get back to juggling projects. At least now I can do so in a room that actually has heat in it.
Congratulations to my colleague at Arcade, Dr. Stephen Weismann, for a pair of stellar advance reviews for his book Chaplin: A Life. Publisher’s Weekly called it an “engaging…portrait of how a cinema artist is created and how he practices his craft,” while the rock ’em, sock ’em Kirkus says it’s “a fresh entry in the evergreen field of works devoted to Charlie Chaplin,” as well as a “perceptive, literate take on the great screen clown.” Awesome.
I’ve begged, borrowed, and cajoled my way into getting an advance copy of the book, and I’ll let you know my thoughts on it, right here, as soon as possible. If you’re even a casual reader of this blog, you know that Chaplin is one of my Very Favorite People Ever, and I’m really looking forward to reading this book.
Just for fun, here’s four-and-a-half minutes of Chaplin doing what he does best, from my all-time favorite film of his, The Circus:
I had a great time last night speaking at the Goshen Historical Preservation Society. The crowd was responsive, the food was good, and we even moved quite a few books. All in all, a successful event, and I couldn’t have asked for nicer hosts. My thanks to the GHPS and to all who came. I had fun.
__________
Fall has officially arrived here in Maryland. After weeks of temperatures in the high 70s and low 80s, we’ve finally settled down into a much more autumnal mood. The trees have known what time of year it is all along, though, and have gradually, almost sneakily, been skewing their internal tint knobs over to orange and red and dropping leaves all over the lawn. It’s nice. I’ll miss tending my lawn and the flower beds, but getting the fall weather and fall color is a completely fair trade.
__________
If you’ve been following this blog for a while now — and by god, why wouldn’t you be? — you know our house has been in complete and utter disarray for the past three months as we worked to retrofit our 80-year-old farmhouse with a modern geothermal heating/cooling system. As I reported several weeks ago, the system is up and running perfectly — so we’re now in the process of taking everything we moved out of the attic and basement to make way for the HVAC crew and putting it back. This gave us a perfect opportunity to sort through the clutter and get rid of some junk and, more important, change the function of several rooms.
You have to understand, our house has been added on to several times over its eight decades, expanding from the original one-bedroom/one bathroom farmhouse into its current hodgepodge of many odd-sized rooms. Some bedrooms are barely larger than closets, while others look like handball courts. A bathroom twists its way around the backside of a kitchen pantry. The upstairs doesn’t match the downstairs, and there are no real closets to speak of.
That sort of non-conformity is actually very freeing, in that it’s let us come up with some interesting functions for the various rooms and nooks and crannies. The upstairs room that once served as a makeshift kitchen, then, became my office several years ago. It’s a long rectangular room, only about eight feet wide — which was just wide enough for me to cram a desk and a bookshelf in one end of it. Our plan now is to move me out of the small office into the newly-organized basement, where I’ve got more room for bookshelves and all the random junk I like to collect. Knowing that I’m not much longer for my old office, then, I have adopted an I’ll put it away after I relocate attitude with my space. Thus, my normally tidy little office now looks like this:
Yes, it’s awful — like a Nerd Bomb went off, or something. Anyway, our task this weekend is to begin moving me out of that space, and into this one:
This is the front room in our basement — previously one of the yuckiest spaces in the house, but now gleaming with a new coat of wax on the old tile floor (notice the compass rose built into the middle of the floor — a nice touch that was almost invisible under the 50-year-old coat of gunk and grime we scrubbed off) and shouldering an incomplete coat of primer as I prepare to give the old panelling a coat of paint (a tough call, but the room remains very dark otherwise). The fireplace doesn’t work — the chimney needs to be sealed — but it’s a nice room, and with the new heating system, it’s the most comfortable room in the house.
There’s still a lot of work ahead — including running some new electric and telephone wiring — but our plan is to have the room ready and up and running by the end of the month so I can get back to work.
Just a reminder that I’ll be speaking tonight before the Goshen Historical Preservation Society, at 7:30 p.m. at the Church of the Nazarene in Goshen, Maryland.
Come join the fun as I give what I call my E! True Hollywood Story talk:
LAUGH! as Irving dances with the “fine, portly, buxom dame” Dolley Madison (even as he finds President Madison to be a depressing “withered apple-john”!)
CHEER! as Irving assists Martin van Buren in negotiating the West Indies trade agreement!
SWOON! as Frankenstein novelist Mary Shelley tries to put the moves on Irving!
HISS! as Edgar Allan Poe and James Fenimore Cooper flatter Irving to his face, then stab him in the back!
APPLAUD! as Irving hosts a public dinner for Charles Dickens in New York City (but botches the speech)!
And much, much more!
Come on, it’ll be fun! And I even made sure it wasn’t on a Presidential debate night.
I’ll be speaking for at least 30 minutes and taking questions for as long as you want to ask them. I’ll be happy to sign books — and if you don’t yet have one (I know the Borders and B&Ns in the immediate area are sold out), there’ll be a limited number available for sale, if you’re so inclined.
I’m obsessed with knowing how things work. More specifically, I love knowing how people work — how they do their jobs, what their creative process is, what their working environments are like, and what challenges they face. I’m especially fascinated when it comes to learning more about how writers and artists produce whatever it is their particular craft might be.
When you hold a book in your hand — or view a painting, watch a movie, or listen to music — you’re seeing only one part of a story — and usually it’s only the last chapter, ripped from the book and handed to you as the Complete Story. That bit of creative misdirection means that you’re seeing only what the artist wanted you to see. The artist who produced that painting you’re looking at, for example, doesn’t really want you to know or care where he bought the canvas, who he scrounged the paints off of, what room he painted in, or that his mother always wanted him to be chef instead of a painter. The art itself — which is the end result of the creative process — is meant to be the statement; the rest is insignificant.
I tend to disagree with that. The biographer in me can’t help but wonder how people were working and living their lives, even as they were creating their art.
I love knowing what goes on behind the scenes. I love visiting the homes of famous writers, artists, or politicians, for instance, and soaking up the atmosphere where they lived and worked. I enjoy poring through journals, letters, records and receipts, fascinated with what people write in the places where they believe no one will ever be looking. I’m one of those annoying people who watches every single “Behind The Scenes” or “Making of…” feature on a DVD, so I can see the interviews with the cast and crew, writer and director.
Creating art is hard work. And I think that hard work deserves to be explored and celebrated — especially when it makes for such a good story.
Let me give you an example.
I’ve always been intrigued by the Beach Boys. It’s not so much their music, which I’m not interested in much beyond what you might find on a typical greatest hits CD; rather, I’m fascinated by the relationship and creative dynamic between the Wilson brothers and their overbearing father, Murry. While I’ve not yet been able to find a biography of the group that truly rises to my expectations in this regard (the last one I read, Catch A Wave, was, I thought rather flat), I recently came across a primary source that’s even better: forty minutes of open audio from a 1965 Beach Boys recording session, when the early takes of “Help Me, Rhonda” are broken up by the entry of a drunken, sometimes angry, sometimes weepy, but almost always abusive Murry Wilson.
Murry proceeds to take over the session, berating the singing of Al Jardine — who’s singing his guts out — and lecturing Brian Wilson on sacrifice and hard work (“I’m a genius, too!” Murray testily proclaims). At one point, Murry and Brian can be heard scuffling over the controls, as Murry tries to turn off the recording equipment and Brian — thankfully — manages to leave the tape rolling.
It’s a fascinating look behind the scenes, and makes you appreciate even more just how difficult it must have been for Brian Wilson to produce . . . well, anything. More than anything, you can see that Brian Wilson didn’t create great music through magic; it was, for more than just a few reasons, hard work.
If I’ve peaked your curiosity, don’t worry, I won’t leave you hanging. Courtesy of WFMU, then, here’s the full 40-minute version of the January 8, 1965 Beach Boys recording session. If you don’t have 40 minutes, here’s a highlight reel.
As an added bonus, here’s the first installment of Peter Bagge’s The Murry Wilson Show:
My point is, sometimes what’s going on behind the Wizard of Oz’s curtain is just as interesting as the final product itself — provided, of course, that you really want to look. But you tell me: Does that peek behind the scenes take something away from the final product? In other words, is the magic gone at that point? Or does knowing of all the hard work that went into it make you appreciate the final product that much more?
“U.S. Forces Nine Major Banks To Accept Partial Nationalization,” reads the front page, stacked-and-centered banner headline on today’s Washington Post — making this about the fifteenth day in a row we’ve seen an enormous banner headline in a newspaper that isn’t normally known for such drama above the fold.* And as I do every day, I shake my head at the headlines, make a quick scan through the lead stories, and eventually lose interest before the stories make their jumps to the inner pages. I just don’t get it.
As I tell my coworkers every day, I wish I understood all this stuff better, because I know it’s important. Yet, I feel completely lost.
Until now.
Today I was pointed toward this website: The Money Meltdown: Everything You Need To Know About the Global Money Crisis. Site creator Matt Thompson — an online journalist and blogger — says he established the site as a way of pulling together “useful, authoritative, and comprehensive information about our current financial crisis in an accessible way.”
As someone completely baffled by finance, banks, and stock markets, Matt’s page is just what I needed — and maybe you’ll find it of some use as well. Click here to go get it.
* Okay, I’ll amend that to add, “at least not when it comes to finance and the stock market.” We see our share of big headlines when it’s politics, not finance. We leave that to those snooty New York newspapers….
“They continued on their course until two in the morning, when a gun from the Pinta gave the joyful signal of land . . .
“It was on Friday morning, the 12th of October, that Columbus first beheld the new world. As the day dawned he saw before him a level island several leagues in extent and covered with trees like a continual orchard. Though apparently uncultivated it was populous, for the inhabitants were seen issuing from all parts of the woods and running to the shore . . . Columbus made signal for the ships to cast anchor, and the boats to be manned and armed. He entered his own boat, richly attired in scarlet, and holding the royal standard; whilst Martin Alonzo Pinzon, and Vincent Yanez his brother, put off in company in their boats….
“As he approached the shore, Columbus, who was disposed for all kinds of agreeable impressions, was delighted with the purity and suavity of the atmosphere; the crystal transparency of the sea, and the extraordinary beauty of the vegetation . . . On landing he threw himself on his knees, kissed the earth, and returned thanks to God with tears of joy….”
— Washington Irving, Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828)
Tomorrow night — and on every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday from now through Halloween — Historic Hudson Valley (HHV) is presenting the Great Jack O’Lantern Blaze at Van Cortlandt Manor in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. If you’re in New York any time over the next four weekends — or are planning to be — then trust me, this needs to be on your agenda. Add it now. It’s one of the coolest things you’ll do this year.
The Great Jack O’Lantern Blaze — which actually started last weekend — is a spooky walk-through attraction at one of HHV’s neatest properties, Van Cortlandt Manor, an old stone Dutch manor house on the banks of the Croton River. The Blaze features more than 4,000 hand-carved, illuminated Jack O’Lanterns, gaping, grinning, leering, and laughing at guests as they wander through the woods on the Van Cortlandt property, with the spookily-lighted house looming up in the darkness. Round one bend, and you’ll see dozens of flickering fish; round another, it’s skeletons and witches. Round another, you’ll see dinosaurs battling. And in one of the neatest — and simplest — effects, you’ll see a lighted path of pumpkins disappearing off into the woods toward infinity as hidden speakers play the sound of an approaching horse. Creepy.
If that weren’t enough, HHV is also presenting its Legend Weekend at Philipsburg Manor, on October 18, 19, 25 and 26. Stroll the grounds of this colonial-era farm at your own risk — witches, pirates, and ghosts await you. And if you’re lucky, you just might see the Headless Horseman — straight out of Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” — come tearing by. Brrrr.
More information on the Great Jack O’Lantern Blaze and Legend Weekend can be found here. Tickets are required for each — but become a member of HHV, and you’ll not only be entitled to free tickets, but you’ll be helping preserve a unique part of America’s heritage. I’ve been a member for nearly ten years, and I’m proud to support them.
So,was anyone else infuriated by this? I hope so; it’s our money paying for it, after all:
AIG Spa Trip Fuels Fury on Hill Pressing Executives to Concede Mistakes, Lawmakers Blast Them About Bonuses
For some people at AIG, the insurance giant rescued last month with an $85 billion federal bailout, the good times keep rolling.
Joseph Cassano, the financial products manager whose complex investments led to American International Group’s near collapse, is receiving $1 million a month in consulting fees.
Former chief executive Martin J. Sullivan, whose three-year tenure coincided with much of the company’s ill-fated risk-taking, is receiving a $5 million performance bonus.
And just last week, about 70 of the company’s top performers were rewarded with a week-long stay at the luxury St. Regis Resort in Monarch Beach, Calif., where they ran up a tab of $440,000.
The article in its entirety, from today’s Washington Post, is here. Click away.
In my office, the discussions run from irate to incredulous, with “What were they thinking?” being the main question on the table. And my answer is “They weren’t.” Because in my experience, those who perpetrate such cosmically selfish acts of self-indulgence aren’t thinking about much of anything other than . . . well, themselves.
I spent several years in the non-profit sector, working in an organization that had its heart in the right place, but was run by a CEO who enjoyed the trappings of the office more than the actual work. Consequently, one of her primary jobs — fundraising — became secondary, then tertiary, then finally dropped off the radar screen entirely. Meanwhile, even as the organization was beginning to hemorrhage and the rest of us were looking for ways to reduce costs, she proposed bringing the entire staff across the country for a staff retreat at Coronado Island, California. At still another time, we ended up eating the costs of several high dollar, non-refundable airline tickets because she had decided, the day before the scheduled trips, that she preferred to stay home.
There wasn’t necessarily any malice in some of these actions; just a complete ignorance — and sometimes disregard — of How Things Really Work. “Clue free,” one of our staffers used to call it.
Now, I expect better of Wall Street investors and insurers, of course, who claim to be smarter and wiser about business than all the rest of us combined. But I bring this to your attention merely to illustrate that at all levels of business — whether it’s a low-dollar non-profit, or billion dollar insurance agency — there are always those who either don’t know, or just don’t care, how their actions and decisions affect others. In their world, money just sorta shows up from some place — and you’re entitled to it, after all, or you wouldn’t be sitting where you are. So you might as well spend it on yourself.
I wish I had something deep and meaningful to say about all this, but I don’t. My point is merely that greed and stupidity aren’t limited to the AIGs of the world. I wish I could say I’m surprised or appalled by the behavior of the muckety mucks at AIG and elsewhere. But my own experience just leaves me thinking, “How typical.” And I hate it that I feel that way.
In 1960, science and technology writer Clifford B. Hicks — an editor for Popular Mechanics — wrote the first of what would eventually be nine children’s books featuring a spunky young inventor named Alvin Fernald. Alvin — with the help of his own “Magnificent Brain,” his best friend Shoie, and his sister Daphne (“The Pest”) — was always stumbling onto mysteries that needed investigating, codes that needed decoding, and various problems that needed creative solutions, usually with the help of one of Alvin’s inventions.
I was never a hardcore fan of Alvin Fernald — when it came to mysteries, I liked Encyclopedia Brown better, and I thought the world inhabited by Beverly Cleary’s characters was far more interesting — but when I saw Alvin Fernald, Superweasel advertised in the pages of the Scholastic Books catalog, I begged my mom for it. My second grade brain — which was just beginning to soak up books, comics, and movies where radiation gave you superpowers instead of cancer — was all but certain this book would be about a kid only a little older than me who had acquired the powers of a weasel through some freakish lab accident. I mean, he was an inventor, right? Surely, this was an example of Science Gone Horribly Awry, right?!?
No such luck.
As it turns out, Superweasel is basically a manifesto on environmental awareness for young adults. Alvin, appalled at all the trash and pollution in his hometown of Riverton, Indiana, adopts the guise of Superweasel as a way of carrying out a few acts of ecoterrorism without being recognized. Dressed as Superweasel, for example, Alvin climbs to the top of the tallest smokestack in town and plugs the top, sending smoke belching back into the factory and workers scrambling for fresh air. Mission accomplished, point made.
Yet, despite my disappointment that Superweasel didn’t live up to expectations, I was glued to this book and couldn’t read it fast enough. In the summer of 1974, I spent several nights sprawled out in a sleeping bag on the floor of my bedroom (it was the closest I liked to get to camping in New Mexico…), reading Alvin Fernald, Superweasel by flashlight, even as I fought to keep my eyes from slamming shut.
For that reason, Clifford Hicks’ Alvin Fernald, Superweasel scores the first Two-Fer in the First Books feature: it’s the First Book I Read With A Flashlight Under The Covers, and it’s The First Time I Fell Victim To A Deceptive Title That Failed To Live Up To My Initial Expectations (cross reference: Danny Dunn, Invisible Boy).
More information on Clifford Hicks and Alvin Fernald can be found here.
Welcome to the official website of Brian Jay Jones - that’s me, the writer and biographer and not the dead Rolling Stone. Or the live aeronaut. Keep trying.
Brian Jay Jones 