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Saturday, April 25, 2009

Slowly Growing Deaf

Three shows now, and we're getting good and better. Two of em in one weekend, and one reprise, hebdomadally distributed. Before the first song reached an end, I had come a long way toward conquering my stage fright. In the interim our material has really gelled, and apart from a few wrong notes, we're tighter than nun pussy where it really counts. People pick up on it: some fresh talent wants to invade our ranks! Yet as the instruments pile up, I'm afeared of personnel problems. 

It's not the newbies that worry me, but a stalwart member. Can I expect everyone to be as committed as I am? I hope I can find a solution that hurts no hearts, most importantly my own. I just want everyone on the beat. 

Zappa was right, this music thing has mixed me up with a celeritous crowd. I am trying to keep a grip. Last night, at our second bally-hoo happening, I encountered one of my former obsessions. We traded glances, I watched her tiny hands holding a glass of beer. I did not penetrate her space, but merely observed as she moved from room to room. Today, amidst other disappointing gossips, I came to understand that she spent the evening in a car with her bass-playing male analog. Shall I say goodbye to that fantasy?

But seriously, I never knew Oly held such a populace. I feel fecundated with such novelty. Now all I needs is more time to figure out all these new faces and place their parts. (In my music, not my mouth. I can't sing at all!) I hope I come up with something good!

MYW at 8:59 PM

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Thursday, February 26, 2009

Talk About Your Feelings

It's nice being able to see. 

When I would read sans spectacles, words were couched in dizzy shadows, and while I could make them out, it's a whole 'nother thing to take in the texture of the paper, the wrinkles in my finger tips, and all the other minutia of life while I form the memory of the moment.

There are a few stumbling blocks.

For instance, I have to remember that when I stare at people, they can see my eyes; these are not shades over my irises. 

MYW at 3:22 AM

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Monday, February 23, 2009

Mencken

Here's a new lucubration, a fresh flavor for the hormone pie: a book review!
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H.L. Mencken
Newspaper Days

This memoir, which treats Henry Louis Mencken's milieu as a fin-de-siecle newspaperman, finds the great critic in an uncharacteristically sympathetic mood, putting aside much of the sass of its predecessor Happy Days, which tells the story of Mencken's amusing slog through adolescence. Mencken admits in the preface that he holds his tenure at the Baltimore Herald in rosy esteem, perhaps the most cherished era of his long career. The famous (and famously fat) critic here appears downright giddy as he discharges himself of more than a few outrageous anecdotes from his seven year lustrum at the Baltimore Herald.

Mencken opens with a narrative of his courtship, in 1899, of a reporting job at the Herald: On the heels of his high school graduation, Mencken brushed himself up in his smartest garb and planted himself, with absolutely no credentials, before the city editor Max Ways. Ways told him the staff was full but, as it was common for reporters in those days, either sloshed or just incurably languid, to go AWOL, suggested that the runt come back the next day to check for an opening. Like clockwork, lil' Henry showed up, and was similarly turned down, every day for months until at last he scored a one paragraph blurb in the back pages. Ways recognized his talent and diligence, soon hiring him on as a full time reporter. His responsibilities (and his pay) soon began a rapid and steady climb, landing him an editorship at the Herald at the precocious age of 23.

Buncombe!The range of reportage that Mencken was called upon to perform, as well as the nature of his work in general (journalism in this ancient Baltimore apparently amounted to little more than salaried gossip) put him in touch with a sinful amount of scuttlebutt, and effectively launched him into high society: judges, policemen, editors, reporters, restauranteurs, artists, press agents, magnates, actors, politicos, and innumerable other forces are exposed in this memoir.The tales told are of the fireside variety, often ribald, typically recounted with a certain wide-eyed wonder, and  fraught with some of the writer's most pungent witticisms.

The young reporter's antics are largely benign and waggish, where he cares to share them - despite all he divulges about his peers, the man mostly keeps mum on his own affairs. Indeed, for a memoir, this one is quite lean on the beef. Where his feelings finally threaten to denude themselves, the goodies leak out in short, memorable snatches, never wholesale and direct; apropos to his profession, he does little but report the facts of his actions, and doesn't dote on private details. It is not apparent whether he endured the crises of young adulthood (perhaps this is one of the boons of avoiding college), or whether he ever doubted his own abilities. For better or worse, his editorials, featured in his Chrestomathy, remain the best source for his particular brand of froth.

He comes close at least, to full disclosure in the preface, which he capitulates with a remarkably lucid passage on the state of journalistic affairs circa 1941:

Whether or not the young journalists of today live so spaciously is a question that I am not competent to answer, for my contacts with them, of late years, have been rather scanty. They undoubtedly get a great deal more money than we did in 1900, but their freedom is much less than ours was, and they somehow give me the impression, seen at a distance, of complacency rather than intrepidity. In my day a reporter who took an assignment was wholly on his own until he got back to the office, and even then he was little molested until his copy was turned in at the desk; today he tends to become only a homunculus at the end of a telephone wire, and the reduction of his observations to prose is commonly farmed out to literary castrati who never leave the office, and hence never feel the wind of the world in their faces or see anything with their own eyes. I well recall my horror when I heard, for the first time, of a journalist who had laid in a pair of what were then called bicycle pants and taken to golf: it was as if I had encountered a stud-horse with his hair done up in frizzes, and pink bowknots peeking out of them. It seemed, in some vague way, ignominious, and even a bit indelicate. I was shocked almost as much when I first heard of reporters joining labor unions, and describing themselves as wage slaves. The underlying ideology here, of course, was anything but new, for I doubt that there has ever been a competent reporter in history who did not regard the proprietors of his paper as sordid rascals, all dollars and no sense. But it is one thing (a) to curl the lip over such wretches, and quite another thing (b) to bellow and beat the breast under their atrocities just as it is one thing (a^2) to sass a cruel city editor with, so to speak, the naked hands, and another thing (b^2) to confront him from behind a phalanx of government agents and labor bravoes. The a operations are easy to reconcile with the old-time journalist's concept of himself as a free spirit and darling of the gods, licensed by his high merits to ride and deride the visible universe; the b's must suggest inevitably a certain unhappy self-distrust, perhaps not without ground.”

Not just personal but professional curiosities are confounded as well: Writers come hither sniffing for tips will be bilked, for the sage neatly denies us of any useful particulars about his craft. The only specifics he offers are in one of the closing chapters, enumerating the ways he and his colleagues often fleshed out meager leads with private inventions, sometimes going as far as fabricating the entire story. Mencken's methods must, it seems, remain lost to posterity.

An important lesson, however, is continuously dangled before the reader, and it helps explain both Mencken's remarkable sedulousness and his highly refined prose: Do what you love and do it to death! While his peers toiled away as “simian sophomores” pursuing lives of quiet desperation, Mencken was chasing down his reporter's dream, going to bed every night exhausted, but never weary. I was so incensed after I finished this book that I marched right down to the office of the Cooper Point Journal, our student newspaper, and immediately put in my resume. Let's hope fate smiles on me quite as kindly!

MYW at 9:43 PM

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Thursday, February 12, 2009

MYW at 10:22 PM

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Tuesday, January 20, 2009

General Life Lesson

#1. Do not eat chili-coated baked potatoes directly before open gym.

MYW at 9:27 PM

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Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Googly Elmo

These people just don't get me.

Like, the other day I was all talkin bout Joplin, they're all like, "Janet?!" and I'm like "Naw, Scott!!!" And they just stared at me, stupefied. Retort: "Why you rockin those ruffly old nigger rags for? This new white shit is where it's at." Shit has got me seriously aggravated. Can't peoples just put on some glasses to help them see straight? Why they gotta be so myopic on the topic? Can't I write without having to justify my text like I was prepping in Pagemaker?

I seriously can't decide if I wanna live on this island any longer: I could cut my anchor and set sail for Minutia, where the fish don't mind scrutinizing their scales. Maybe there someone will get between the covers with what I have to say, read with relish.

In any case, a change of course is inevitable: I just can't seem to steer this vessel to boyfriendland, no matter how many times I spin that helm!

MYW at 5:30 PM

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Saturday, January 10, 2009

2009!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

New Year's Resolutions:

1. No Meat
2. Shave
3. Budget Time
4. Exercise
5. Through serious and sustained effort, rectify certain behaviors and attitudes which have proven deleterious to my happiness, pecuniary security, and well-being.

MYW at 4:44 PM

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