Friday, July 12, 2019
Thursday, July 11, 2019
Religion
When I was 11 years old, I told Rev. Boland that I didn't believe in God. He replied without criticism that "You're not the first one." I concluded that Rev. Boland didn't believe in God, either. He was a good minister who people listened to and admired. A couple years later, he quit our congregation and moved to the Apostle Islands in Lake Superior. Quite beautiful up there and almost no Germans. I don't remember the replacement minister's name, but he wanted to build a new concrete block building for social activities, and he fired my mother, who played the organ in church a dozen years somewhat badly. God eventually caught up with him, disbanded his elderly debt-laden congregation, and later destroyed the historic Friedens church with a bolt of lightning that ignited its steeple and gutted the interior.
In college, I went to a splendid old Catholic church and asked the priest how it was possible to perform rituals that were obviously crazy? He said it was important for social control, to keep people from doing wrong. Made no sense. His parish was too rich to do wrong.
In Tripoli, it was almost impossible to shop for food. Minarets blared five times a day, and shops closed for prayers. There was one bookstore in downtown Tripoli. It was jammed with hundreds of Korans, all kinds of fancy bindings, no other books, no foreign newspapers. I pitied the guys who flew to oil rigs in the desert. Pilots in flight knelt and prayed. They used bungie cords lashed to their control column as an autopilot. Allah flew the plane. Muslims actually believe that everything happens according to the Will of Allah. Two plus two equals four because Allah wills it, and Allah could change his mind, make it humanly incalcuable.
I learned to be tolerant of friends and neighbors who attend church. They're good, decent people who have been kind to me, a sort of reverse toleration, which puts me in mind of the Maryland Toleration Act of 1680 or thereabouts (I forget the exact year). Catholic Maryland pledged to tolerate other sects of Christianity, particularly Nonconformists and Anglicans, and to put atheists to death and burn their homesteads.
In the U.S. Supreme Court case of Engel v Vitale, the court held that we are a religious people and we have Christian symbols and slogans on our money, Congress prays before they begin each session of legislation, and the Supreme Court itself has prominent architectural features that pledge allegiance to the Ten Commandments, and therefore prayer in public schools is unconstitutional. Atheists took this as a cue to tear down public Christmas displays of cows, sheep, and kneeling kings adoring a plastic Baby Jesus in a manger. Reindeer led by Rudolph with an electrified red nose are okay, I think, although strictly speaking, Santa is a religious figure, transmuted from an historic Saint Nicholas who threw gold through a window to save three daughters from imminent sale into slavery by an impoverished father. Santa became a jolly old fat man in red courtesy of Coca Cola advertising art. In Holland, "Sinta Klas" wears a white robe and red bishop's miter, accompanied by a servant, to give gifts on December 6th, unrelated to Christmas, which is a solemn ceremony, although scholars know that Jesus was born in springtime, and the DOB was moved to late December to co-opt pagan winter rites involving little fir trees, burning logs, reindeer meat, heavy drinking, and revelry.
My parents were partly pagan. I was born in late September.
Forgive me, just thought of something. Music is holy. My mind flashed back to Los Angeles in the late 70s. The Blue Note jazz club was on the top floor of a Hollywood office tower. The Baked Potato was on Cahuenga, a stone's throw from Universal. The Lighthouse was in Santa Monica, and there were headliner jazz concerts in Orange County. Over the years, I worked backstage at a bunch of big showrooms in Sydney, London, Lake Tahoe, and the Bay Area, never tired of music, always enjoyed multitrack mixing, working with choreographers and dancers, dozens of superlative musicians and shockingly gifted vocalists.
Amen.
.
In college, I went to a splendid old Catholic church and asked the priest how it was possible to perform rituals that were obviously crazy? He said it was important for social control, to keep people from doing wrong. Made no sense. His parish was too rich to do wrong.
In Tripoli, it was almost impossible to shop for food. Minarets blared five times a day, and shops closed for prayers. There was one bookstore in downtown Tripoli. It was jammed with hundreds of Korans, all kinds of fancy bindings, no other books, no foreign newspapers. I pitied the guys who flew to oil rigs in the desert. Pilots in flight knelt and prayed. They used bungie cords lashed to their control column as an autopilot. Allah flew the plane. Muslims actually believe that everything happens according to the Will of Allah. Two plus two equals four because Allah wills it, and Allah could change his mind, make it humanly incalcuable.
I learned to be tolerant of friends and neighbors who attend church. They're good, decent people who have been kind to me, a sort of reverse toleration, which puts me in mind of the Maryland Toleration Act of 1680 or thereabouts (I forget the exact year). Catholic Maryland pledged to tolerate other sects of Christianity, particularly Nonconformists and Anglicans, and to put atheists to death and burn their homesteads.
In the U.S. Supreme Court case of Engel v Vitale, the court held that we are a religious people and we have Christian symbols and slogans on our money, Congress prays before they begin each session of legislation, and the Supreme Court itself has prominent architectural features that pledge allegiance to the Ten Commandments, and therefore prayer in public schools is unconstitutional. Atheists took this as a cue to tear down public Christmas displays of cows, sheep, and kneeling kings adoring a plastic Baby Jesus in a manger. Reindeer led by Rudolph with an electrified red nose are okay, I think, although strictly speaking, Santa is a religious figure, transmuted from an historic Saint Nicholas who threw gold through a window to save three daughters from imminent sale into slavery by an impoverished father. Santa became a jolly old fat man in red courtesy of Coca Cola advertising art. In Holland, "Sinta Klas" wears a white robe and red bishop's miter, accompanied by a servant, to give gifts on December 6th, unrelated to Christmas, which is a solemn ceremony, although scholars know that Jesus was born in springtime, and the DOB was moved to late December to co-opt pagan winter rites involving little fir trees, burning logs, reindeer meat, heavy drinking, and revelry.
My parents were partly pagan. I was born in late September.
Forgive me, just thought of something. Music is holy. My mind flashed back to Los Angeles in the late 70s. The Blue Note jazz club was on the top floor of a Hollywood office tower. The Baked Potato was on Cahuenga, a stone's throw from Universal. The Lighthouse was in Santa Monica, and there were headliner jazz concerts in Orange County. Over the years, I worked backstage at a bunch of big showrooms in Sydney, London, Lake Tahoe, and the Bay Area, never tired of music, always enjoyed multitrack mixing, working with choreographers and dancers, dozens of superlative musicians and shockingly gifted vocalists.
Amen.
.
Sunday, July 7, 2019
Pleasant memories
My first real job, in a noisy factory, pocket money, learning craftsmanship at age 16. A dozen years later, riding the Main Line and the Broad Street Subway daily to another job, another craft. I would learn all the trades, blue collar and white, from ditch digging and demolition to custom electromechanical gismos that I designed, tested, aligned, and installed. The steely thrill of refurbishing a complex sound system with multiple zones and multiple triggers, to be heard over the din of slot machines, made possible with 1/3-octave measurement of the environmental racket to push announcements through a narrow slot of frequencies, heard clear as a bell. Installing sound bars and speaker systems that I built by hand.
I had a basement radio shack when I was a kid, listened to the world and chatted with grown men on CB. I soldered Knight Kits together with steady concentration, a delight when I threw the switch and it worked. There were Estes rockets and nichrome igniters.
Most of the films and videos were wonderful experiences, too many to list. Thousands of moments, hours, days, nights, and situations that were electric, monumental, unrepeatable, mine to savor because I made it possible and it succeeded as signature work. The stream of life on screen. The glory of cutting -- directing the editor with a snap of my fingers to mark the exact moment, one of the highest pleasures known to man. Standby, ready, snap!
I liked operating equipment myself when I could, an old Steenbeck, a Sony 800, or a clunky control track rig. I can't guess how many cameras I held in my hands. I adored mixing music, creating a stereo image and sonically shaping each input on a big desk. Every time I hung a luminaire and focused and gelled it, I felt the sweaty reverence of painting with light.
OMG -- the women!
Solemn admiration for Wright's Price Tower, Pei's Bank of China skyscraper, and the oils of Vermeer's Melkmaid in a museum. I was born in the era of passenger rail -- journeys on the Chicago & North Western, the 20th Century Limited, the Reading Line, British Rail, superwide Deutschesbahn, cramped Dutch inter-urban, and steam V&T. To be completely honest, I very much miss the L-1011, finest airliner in history. No brag, just fact, my 3-D video microscope and focusable fiber optic lamps diagnosed what was wrong with the L-1011 cockpit windows, a manufacturing defect in the gold film layer that defrosted it. I explained how to fix it. My pal Bud Alger did the main cabin video projectors. Lockheed was a local Burbank customer.
I suppose that the streets of New York were grand, but I was so busy that I seldom saw the skyline, although I shared a 3rd floor Midtown walk-up with a good view of the Empire State Building illuminated every night. Covent Garden and Wardour Street were nice. I spent two years in London and a couple more in Scotland. I learned to love the game of snooker. There is a rugged simplicity of Scots that makes one a better human being by osmosis.
And that brings me to the subject of literature. RLS has a place in my heart like no other, the simple tale of Kidnapped, a great gift that I often re-read, always fresh and inspiring. I own a volume of Hammett's novels and have a sharp recollection of Bogart as Sam Spade. Chandler said that the best Marlowe was Bogart. I would be hard pressed to say which of his movies was better -- Bogart opposite Kate Hepburn in The African Queen, or Bogart opposite Edward G. Robinson in Key Largo, or Bogart fencing with Sidney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre in The Maltese Falcon. A thinking man's hero, ruthless, inquisitive, and necessarily stupid.
The human experience as I understand it is a string of blunders, the natural karma of heroes and heroines, the plot twists of Atlas Shrugged. Francisco -- oops ... Hank -- oops ... Galt as a final choice. The blunders in Fountainhead are infinitely worse. I think it's all of a piece, the pleasant memories and colossal disasters. I did not dislike carrying a loaded gun, safety off, ready to kill or be killed any moment. Prison was a memorable challenge. I think it may be necessary to suffer, in order to experience the heightened vista of joy.
Do you know what pure joy is? Arriving to hear the raised voice of a confident 1st A.D., who presses an electric bell to grab attention and shout: "Director on the set!" Too old to direct, I took up writing. Same sort of business, to make a movie happen in the reader's imagination. Same sort of pleasure, the magic of mise en scene, every page.
http://www.lulu.com/shop/wolf-devoon/four-strange-stories/paperback/product-24166175.html
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