The Matrix of All rumbles at critical mass,
a macro-synaptic storm
in cascade
in perpetual toss
Opposed and opposing:
heads-tails
crest-trough
light-dark
alph-nul
the perception of water and thirst
Friday, December 11, 2009
Standards, formats, codes - how do new solutions arise..
this is a column I wrote for a newspaper in another state (it's long since closed), appeared in a 1990 edition of that paper. The editor then used to yell out that he had a hole on the editorial page, how large the hole was and how much time I had to write a column to fill it.. What a rush...
Drive anywhere in the continental United States and the radio jingles sound just like the ones at home. It's the same with building codes.
"What? Who's building radio codes? The Government?" asks my Uncle Henry who has placed the 20-odd parts of an old electric fan motor on a clean cardboard on the floor in front of him. They're arranged in meticulous arching rows, like a movie audience with Henry perched on a concrete block in the middle, all knees and elbows pointing a square can of three-in-oil at them like a gun.
"The government gets into everything these days, except balancing its budget," he says, polishing a bearing ring on his green coveralls, and re-adjusting his orange cap askew.
Radio jingles are kind of like building codes, I repeat. Henry squints at me quizzically.
I tell him it's the format. Format radio: they only place certain songs over and over again -- only cuts from proven hit-makers. The station guarantees the play list; the advertisers guarantee the money. They buy their little jingles on tap -- same notes different call letters all over the country.
The only problem is that new or off-beat music doesn't get played because it doesn't fit the format. It's only heard on college stations or on PBS or maybe on WMWV which has its own tossed salad format. (Or did back in 1990)
"Uncle Henry," I say, "Did you ever stop and consider that tucked away inside walls all over the country, are two-by-four studs, and they're all exactly the same distance apart wherever you go?"
My uncle scratches his chin, looking gravely concerned. He's not one for offbeat music, but he read this statement about two-by-fours to me out of a newspaper a while back, and he considers it his side of the argument.
One of his favorite themes is how the government, the world at large and TV in particular are trying to make us all the same. Not in a big way, but by tellings us what to do in a million little ways -- sneaky-like, they conspire to drain that spark of creativity right out of us.
I guess I 've been listening to Uncle Henry too long. Yes, there's plenty to be said for standardization, cheap goods, mix and match replacement parts. It makes things easier and often safer. There's even the comfit of that familiar jingle 1,000 miles from homes.
But when one way of doing things becomes an accepted standardm or even worse, a legal code, what happens to innovators? Innovators are a valuable natural resource, like lake shores or national forests.
Town codes are important and they may protect Uncle Henry from himself, but the may also deprive the world of some outstanding or novel or just place cheap and serviceable building technique that he might have invented. Maybe it's unlikey but who knows?
Hey, even the town of Conway plants its feet and refuses to follow some standards handed down from "above." We don't take state bridge money, according to the town engineer because if we did, we'd have to overbuild our bridges in a very expensive way.
He didn't just accept a given. He looked at the facts and really thought about them.
It's codified engineering, as opposed to creative engineering, that says tertiary level sewage treatment has to cost a lot when Ken Kimball of the AMC suggests letting silage corn do the nutrient removal for free. No technological wonders, no fancy chemicals. Just some plants growing in the sun. I like it. It's not in the engineering books, but it makes sense.
What about those people in Colorado who've been building houses from old tires? And the guy in Arizona who used empty glass bottles filled with sand instead of bricks to build his home. When the dessert wind blows over the mouths of the bottles, the whole house must howl softly - a jug band lullaby.
You might not want that, but it's a sample of the marvelous diversity and imagination of our kind. He hasn't got a neighbor for miles, so he's a little nuts - so why not?
If an unconventional structure meets setback requirements, is screened from the neighbors and has an engineering calculation or two to prove it won't collapse on its owner (and isn't to godawful noisy) why shouldn't a man be able to build it?
Now don't misunderstand me. Much as it pains Henry to hear me say it, there's a long-range benefit in all these codes - but FLEXIBILITY is the thing that can keep them useful -- and keep open the possibility of new solutions.
We are a foolish lot, we humans. We clear cut and dig up and mow down and dam up everything in sight. We even built a strip in North Conway in the lap of some of the prettiest mountains anywhere.
But the Zone Board of Adjustment is asking the Planning Board for changes to non-conforming zoning rules that will give it some flexibility.
Can that same kind of consideration go into building codes so we can make allowances for Yankee eccentrics and innovators and for poverty that sometimes mandates a shortcut or two?
Building codes like three-acre zoning can be used as a form of social engineering to exclude the poor. In Connecticut I heard of a family whose home was condemned and they had to move out because it didn't have plumbing. It didn't matter that they had nowhere else to go or that they had to go on welfare once they were separated from their garden and ther chickens.
Maybe that's not likely to happen in Conway, but it's important to know it does happen. I guess that's why the planning department fights so hard about the wording of its regulations.
Uncle Henry takes off his hat and shakes his saggy head. "You got to fight it," he says. He gets out his trusty Stanley measuring tape - the kind that disappears with a clatter when you press the button on the side. "measure those," says my ornery uncle pointing to the studs inside the garage wall.
Well, the rest of the world may building 16 includes on center, but needless to say Uncles Henry is a little off, by exactly the same small measure every time on purpose. That's the way he is...
Codes, jingles and new solutions
Drive anywhere in the continental United States and the radio jingles sound just like the ones at home. It's the same with building codes.
"What? Who's building radio codes? The Government?" asks my Uncle Henry who has placed the 20-odd parts of an old electric fan motor on a clean cardboard on the floor in front of him. They're arranged in meticulous arching rows, like a movie audience with Henry perched on a concrete block in the middle, all knees and elbows pointing a square can of three-in-oil at them like a gun.
"The government gets into everything these days, except balancing its budget," he says, polishing a bearing ring on his green coveralls, and re-adjusting his orange cap askew.
Radio jingles are kind of like building codes, I repeat. Henry squints at me quizzically.
I tell him it's the format. Format radio: they only place certain songs over and over again -- only cuts from proven hit-makers. The station guarantees the play list; the advertisers guarantee the money. They buy their little jingles on tap -- same notes different call letters all over the country.
The only problem is that new or off-beat music doesn't get played because it doesn't fit the format. It's only heard on college stations or on PBS or maybe on WMWV which has its own tossed salad format. (Or did back in 1990)
"Uncle Henry," I say, "Did you ever stop and consider that tucked away inside walls all over the country, are two-by-four studs, and they're all exactly the same distance apart wherever you go?"
My uncle scratches his chin, looking gravely concerned. He's not one for offbeat music, but he read this statement about two-by-fours to me out of a newspaper a while back, and he considers it his side of the argument.
One of his favorite themes is how the government, the world at large and TV in particular are trying to make us all the same. Not in a big way, but by tellings us what to do in a million little ways -- sneaky-like, they conspire to drain that spark of creativity right out of us.
I guess I 've been listening to Uncle Henry too long. Yes, there's plenty to be said for standardization, cheap goods, mix and match replacement parts. It makes things easier and often safer. There's even the comfit of that familiar jingle 1,000 miles from homes.
But when one way of doing things becomes an accepted standardm or even worse, a legal code, what happens to innovators? Innovators are a valuable natural resource, like lake shores or national forests.
Town codes are important and they may protect Uncle Henry from himself, but the may also deprive the world of some outstanding or novel or just place cheap and serviceable building technique that he might have invented. Maybe it's unlikey but who knows?
Hey, even the town of Conway plants its feet and refuses to follow some standards handed down from "above." We don't take state bridge money, according to the town engineer because if we did, we'd have to overbuild our bridges in a very expensive way.
He didn't just accept a given. He looked at the facts and really thought about them.
It's codified engineering, as opposed to creative engineering, that says tertiary level sewage treatment has to cost a lot when Ken Kimball of the AMC suggests letting silage corn do the nutrient removal for free. No technological wonders, no fancy chemicals. Just some plants growing in the sun. I like it. It's not in the engineering books, but it makes sense.
What about those people in Colorado who've been building houses from old tires? And the guy in Arizona who used empty glass bottles filled with sand instead of bricks to build his home. When the dessert wind blows over the mouths of the bottles, the whole house must howl softly - a jug band lullaby.
You might not want that, but it's a sample of the marvelous diversity and imagination of our kind. He hasn't got a neighbor for miles, so he's a little nuts - so why not?
If an unconventional structure meets setback requirements, is screened from the neighbors and has an engineering calculation or two to prove it won't collapse on its owner (and isn't to godawful noisy) why shouldn't a man be able to build it?
Now don't misunderstand me. Much as it pains Henry to hear me say it, there's a long-range benefit in all these codes - but FLEXIBILITY is the thing that can keep them useful -- and keep open the possibility of new solutions.
We are a foolish lot, we humans. We clear cut and dig up and mow down and dam up everything in sight. We even built a strip in North Conway in the lap of some of the prettiest mountains anywhere.
But the Zone Board of Adjustment is asking the Planning Board for changes to non-conforming zoning rules that will give it some flexibility.
Can that same kind of consideration go into building codes so we can make allowances for Yankee eccentrics and innovators and for poverty that sometimes mandates a shortcut or two?
Building codes like three-acre zoning can be used as a form of social engineering to exclude the poor. In Connecticut I heard of a family whose home was condemned and they had to move out because it didn't have plumbing. It didn't matter that they had nowhere else to go or that they had to go on welfare once they were separated from their garden and ther chickens.
Maybe that's not likely to happen in Conway, but it's important to know it does happen. I guess that's why the planning department fights so hard about the wording of its regulations.
Uncle Henry takes off his hat and shakes his saggy head. "You got to fight it," he says. He gets out his trusty Stanley measuring tape - the kind that disappears with a clatter when you press the button on the side. "measure those," says my ornery uncle pointing to the studs inside the garage wall.
Well, the rest of the world may building 16 includes on center, but needless to say Uncles Henry is a little off, by exactly the same small measure every time on purpose. That's the way he is...
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Ambient Music Meditations: Water Callings
Here is a brand new ambient music video, cooked just this morning. Click on the photo to watch it on my YouTube channel. I have a feeling this is one of those things you'll either love or hate.
The basic singing track was recorded in Garageband. The track was duplicated and altered over and over both in that program and in iMovie. I kind of like the wavy plaintive effect... It vaguely reminds me of birds or whales calling to each other...
The video is of the stream at the entrance to the Stamford Nature Center.
Sunday, December 6, 2009
distance hills and snow
WOOL-PULLERS: The first year I spent in Maine, I lived in an apartment over and antique store. The landlord said it had "some" insulation. What that really meant was, I spent as much on heat each week as I spent on the monthly rent - despite keeping the thermostat at 55 and wearing thermal underwear all the time. Wording can be so tricky. We hear what we hope for, not what is actually said.....
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Poetry: Mark McGuire-Schwartz - SURREAL!
Flying over rooftops with an alarm clock
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A post from December of 2009. Poems by Mark McGuire-Schwartz are quirky and a bit surreal, like eating pickles and pistachio ice-cream, then going to sleep and having a strange dream. I like this sort of thing apparently as I have published seven of his poems in Bent Pin Quarterly.
"If your poems were paintings, based on their style, what painter would you be? Are you more Norman Rockwell or Miro? Rembrandt or Picasso?" This is my stock question during Wed Night Poetry's Q & A. It's a question that leaves many poets scratching their heads, but Mark gave me a truly fitting answer.
"I would be Chagall" he told me, reminding me that I had asked him this before. Marc Chagall's odd visions enchant and disorient at the same time, and often show people flying over quaint rooftops, or barnyard animals with luminous eyes hovering at some impossible angle...
Mark has a quirky reading style as well, featuring his self-effacing charm and an alarm clock or two. You can hear him read his work at the Monday Poetry Series t the Stamford Town Center Barnes and Noble. It's this coming Monday and it starts around 7 p.m.
>>>>>Mark has a new chapbook from his own Oy Vey Press... It's called "Loss and Laughs, Love and Fauna." Sure the tittle is a little surreal, just like the poems it contains. I got my copy during his reading last week at Wed. Poetry (which is now meeting at the Blue Z Coffeehouse in Newtown), and I am enjoying it very much.
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Mark had quite a few poems in Bent Pin during its run. The archive was down for a while but is partially restored:
Here is a list of his poems with links where available in the new Bent Pin Archive:
McGuire-Schwartz, Mark -- 4/2007 NEW LINK Title: Black Coffee
McGuire-Schwartz, Mark -- 4/2007 NEW LINK Title: In Death
McGuire-Schwartz, Mark -- 7/1/2007 NEW LINK Title: Turkey Club
McGuire-Schwartz, Mark -- 10/13/2007 NEW LINK Title: What I've Been Before
McGuire-Schwartz, Mark -- 1/1/2008 NEW LINKTitle: 25 Short Poems
McGuire-Schwartz, Mark -- 4/1/2008 Title: "Is Them Things Called Stars?"
McGuire-Schwartz, Mark -- 7/1/2008 Title: Coatless
McGuire-Schwartz, Mark -- 11/10/2009 Title: Heartless
Monday, November 30, 2009
Visual Metaphor: the Appearance of Seeing Beyond
At first glance the strange shape of its gilded paper mache frame makes it difficut to read its spacial position, and it's easy to see it as some sureal portal into another room rather than what it is - a simple, flat mirror.
Rickyl's is tucked away at the four corners area, behind Roccos. They offer great granola pancakes
--- Mar Walker
Friday, November 27, 2009
De Kooning's 'Woman I': perception or projection... scary either way
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De Kooning painted Woman I from 1950 to 1952, so this work is nearly as old as I am. She is larger than life size. When I first met her, those huge eyes stared across a room which contained only non-objective paintings, so she was the only readable figure present. Yet she didn't seem out of place at all. Dekooning built her with frenzied brush strokes and scumbling. Although he worked and reworked this painting obsessively for 18 months, the immediacy, the energy, and the manic quality remain.
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Woman I is an amazing creature - powerful, imposing, possibly malevolent, lost. Her great glaring eyes are intense and somehow, well, vacant. The top of her head is turban-like and her long straight teeth are exposed in a lipless grimace. She has huge round shoulders, voluminous bullet breasts, and yet a delicate turn of ankle on parted legs. She's seated solidly with one leg forward and the other stretched sideways and backwards, as if she were trying to decide on a course of action.
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The brush strokes around and through her document passion, anger, vigor - yet she seems solid and impassive, unresponsive to De Kooning's sustained spasm of creation. According to reports, he abandoned her after 18 months, as if in all that time he couldn't figure out how to please her. Later an associate Meyer Schapiro, convinced him the painting was finished.
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Every part of the painting's surface is full of vigorous bright brush strokes of thickly applied paint. The idea of Abstrast Expressionist 'gesture painting' was to transfer the raw state of the artist's psyche directly to the canvas without the intervention of any preconceived notions of style or convention - either moral or artistic. Yet over 18 months, previous spontaneous expressions were being edited and superseded by more recent spontaneous decisions by De Kooning.
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A series of photos by Rudolph Burckhardt shows Woman I at various stages -- versions "no less compelling" according to Thomas Hess, than its current incarnation. Apparently she started with breasts bare, raised arms, head tilted back in a very spacial room with a clearly drawn window and objects in view beyond it. Then the woman, the chair she is seated on, the window and a lamp - dance in and out of sight - until, finally it's only the woman and the turmoil.
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If you are recoiling from this image, today in 2009 - remember when it was first shown in 1953, it caused quite a fuss on two counts. First the general run of folks thought De Kooning's Woman I was shamelessly vulgar, at least compared with June Cleaver and the passive demure wives of television. But it wasn't only Joe Public that hated it. Other Abstract Expressionists thought it was a step backwards - a betrayal of the avant garde because it was representational and De Kooning's marvelous crazed woman could be clearly seen.
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De Kooning's rebuttal on his Women (and I think he painted four series of works called Woman) was this: "The Women had to do with the female painted all throught all the ages, all those idols....It did one thing for me: it eliminated composition, arrangement, relationships, light -- all this silly talk about line, color and form -- because that (the woman) was the thing I wanted to get hold of...."
Frankly, after all this time, she doesn't look willing.
-- Mar Walker
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