At Poets&Writers, Inc, Stephen Elliott writes about going cold turkey from the hot wire:
I started reading a lot more books, which is good for me since I'm a person who writes books. And I read more challenging books. I would read and write all morning, take a lunch break, and then write until evening. I could feel my attention span lengthening. I would think about problems until I figured them out.
When I ask people why they need to be online, they inevitably focus on the stream coming toward them - the information they receive passively from e-mail lists and messages from friends and associates that contain crucial information. But it turns out that you don't miss much being offline. If something important and newsworthy occurs, you can find out from the newspaper or The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.
Last night I dreamt a friend and his wife dropped by for a visit. I was living in a huge semi-converted warehouse studio, the sort of half-baked industrial conversion I associate with twenty-year-old artists. My friend was wearing a hoodie and pants that he had, improbably, decorated with fifty or so of the labor union local emblems I once designed for a living, about fifteen years ago. The logos were the clue to me, in the dream, that I was dreaming, as many of the designs he wore were never produced and I lack a record of them. Foolishly, instead of carefully examining these missing pieces, I carried on with the dream as though it were a normal social experience.
The dream turned somewhat sour when I picked up my guitar, only to realize that somehow my treasured Martin had been replaced by a peculiar hybrid, an altered guitar that had been re-engineered the way that electrics can be, by unbolting the stock neck and replacing it with another. In this instance, the neck had been manufactured fro use with a twelve-string acoustic, half the holes inexpertly puttied and the machines poorly set, some gears stripped, rendering the instrument un-tunable. I felt real panic at this, the sort of thing I feel once a year or so when I relive the last math final I took at Indiana University, aware that failing that final would guarantee no degree that year and that I was leaving town forever the next week.
Why this dream causes me anxiety is unknowable, for in the end my degree was deferred due to changes in rules regarding foreign language requirements between the time I enrolled and the time I moved away. After a quarter or two of easy evening French here at UW, I was awarded my degree in 1992.
Still, this dream is clearly an anxiety dream. It seems to suggest that I should return to my listless and undisciplined pursuit of art, design, or music once more in order to sleep well again.
As I lay in bed last night, the 10pm LA Theatre Works broadcast of Austin Pendleton's 2000 play, Orson's Shadow came on. Recorded in 2002, the play later ran for a year or so in New York City, opening in 2005. the New York production won a passel of awards, and if I read my web-sign aright, the performer who read the Welles role for the radio play won an LA Critic's Circle award for the role in a contemporaneous stage production. The play's main characters are Orson Welles, Sir Laurence Olivier, Joan Plowright, and Vivien Liegh. The play's initial narrator and catalyst is midcentury critic Kenneth Tynan. From the opening scene through the end of the play i was totally captivated, at first by the amusingly accurate vocal chracterization of Welles and then by the complex, witty, and sympathetic writing.
The play is set in 1960, before Oliver's odd Oscar-winning turn in The Entertainer but after the stage production that would lead to the film and after Welles' work on Touch of Evil. Tynan recruits Welles and then Olivier and Plowright to star in Ionesco's Rhinoceros, and we get the best seat in the backstage to observe Pendleton's sympathetic and knowledgeable visions of his lead characters. The play is hilarious and tragic and the written voices of the well-known men ring heartily true to our mediated knowledge of their speech. It was tremendously engaging and satisfied that sublimated Jones anyone with an interest in the history of 20th century media has to spend an hour or two at table with Mr. Welles in all his brilliance and idiocy.
A seamless test upgrade this morning followed by chaos when attempting to execute on the production machines!
I must attend to trash removal. Argh.
My servers will be offline for a brief period of time tonight while I throw some switches back in the hosting yard and get all the engines of the night lined up and at steam. Do not be alarmed.
“The Codex Seraphinianus was written and illustrated by Italian graphic designer and architect, Luigi Serafini during the late 1970's. The Codex is a lavishly produced book that purports to be an encyclopedia for an imaginary world in a parallel universe, with copious comments in an incomprehensible language. It is written in a florid script, entirely invented and completely illegible, and illustrated with watercolor paintings.”
Apparently a full version of this hallucinatory work may be unearthed at the above link.
In April, 2006, Jay Allen posted about his continuing woes and a solution regarding installation of DBD::mysql on Mac OS X.
Just over a year later, the same problems apply to the platform and software combination. That's ridiculous! I was able to pursue Jay's step-by-step solution and the install succeeded for me. It has, however, taken a month to track down the information.
My headache, into day three now, is so immense and pervasive that the pain it gives approaches beauty. I believe it may be my first real-life migraine. The tip of my nose hurts in ways that are like yet distinct from the pain of cold, of burning, and of bruising.
With any luck, i should begin to experience hallucinations sometime tomorrow, I think. Sadly, it does not appear to be triggering an endorphin response that I can parse out.
I had always thought the hallucinations must have been an endorphin side effect.
However, I am beginning to perceive symmetry in the pain as it overlays the more floriated elements of my skull. This leads me to suspect that migraine hallucinations must actually be pattern-seeking overlaid on random, persistent stimuli. The symmetries of pain I am experiencing, like leaves or wings insinuated under my facial muscles, echo the bursts of light we see with eyes closed, hands gently pressed against eyelids.
Once, subject to incredibly frequent and capricious hangovers of debilitating intensity - I recall spending an entire day wracked with dry heaves and nausea apparently brought on by two beers (admittedly, they were VERY BAD beers) - I had the ability to focus and call forth a wee dab of endorphins, enough to complete a given task, such as the dishes or a shower. Today, the juice seems utterly lacking. Yet I find myself able to complete normal tasks, such as cooking dinner, without falling down or vomiting. This headache seems a different sort of plague all together.
ITEM: Viv, Greg, Stacey and I attended the Ghost LIght production of Tartuffe, featuring two actors that Greg and I have worked with previously, Michael Oakes (sp?) and Patrick Allcorn. The show was hilarious, easily eclipsing a theater-in-the-park performance (possibly by Theater Schmeater) Viv and I saw about ten years ago under the noisy jets in Volunteer Park. We started with a happy hour nosh-out at 1200, just up the road. A personal highlight of the evening was my helpless loud snorting with laughter at the end of the first half of the show. Michael had sprouted a truly refined John Waters pencil moustasche, presumably in contrast to Patrick's impressive Lemmy-style number. Michael's parents were in the audience and laughed as heartily as did I.
ITEM: The server rebuild continues to plague me. I have a cloned server that has been successfully updated as far as the current underlying OS components are concerned, but I am still wapping my head with a hammer in search of a workable and non-disruptive testing methodology before I plunge into the upgrades for the rest of the services. I did do a spot more homework on hosting and although prices have dropped, the news is not as positive as I had hoped; in particular, a hosted implementation on my budget and traffic numbers will require Google ads deployed across all my midrange sites, probably inclusive of about ten domains. This implies any number of complications, from business issues involving licensing all the way down to redesigns and user education. Sigh.
ITEM: After at least a year of farting around (RIP Kurt) I obtained and constructed a baker's rack for our 'lunarium,' a tiny room that an inspired prior owner of our domicile built nearly entirely out of 72“x48” double-pane windows. It leaks a bit, but as one might expect is a killer greenhouse.
ITEM: The spawning Steller's Jays have a loud brood of four or five chicks. They team-feed, which is interesting, and are not alarmed at all when the not me, as I am now, pecking away on the porch. I have learned a call that the female uses which appears to be an 'I'm here' message and which is quite distinct from the usual raucous bird profanity I associate with the species in their role as mountain beggar and trail scold. Interestingly, a pair of male robins are currently disputing the back yard as their very own.
ITEM: Viv, Greg, Stacey and I attended the Ghost LIght production of Tartuffe, featuring two actors that Greg and I have worked with previously, Michael Oakes (sp?) and Patrick Allcorn. The show was hilarious, easily eclipsing a theater-in-the-park performance (possibly by Theater Schmeater) Viv and I saw about ten years ago under the noisy jets in Volunteer Park. We started with a happy hour nosh-out at 1200, just up the road. A personal highlight of the evening was my helpless loud snorting with laughter at the end of the first half of the show. Michael had sprouted a truly refined John Waters pencil moustasche, presumably in contrast to Patrick's impressive Lemmy-style number. Michael's parents were in the audience and laughed as heartily as did I.
ITEM: The server rebuild continues to plague me. I have a cloned server that has been successfully updated as far as the current underlying OS components are concerned, but I am still wapping my head with a hammer in search of a workable and non-disruptive testing methodology before I plunge into the upgrades for the rest of the services. I did do a spot more homework on hosting and although prices have dropped, the news is not as positive as I had hoped; in particular, a hosted implementation on my budget and traffic numbers will require Google ads deployed across all my midrange sites, probably inclusive of about ten domains. This implies any number of complications, from business issues involving licensing all the way down to redesigns and user education. Sigh.
ITEM: After at least a year of farting around (RIP Kurt) I obtained and constructed a baker's rack for our 'lunarium,' a tiny room that an inspired prior owner of our domicile built nearly entirely out of 72“x48” double-pane windows. It leaks a bit, but as one might expect is a killer greenhouse.
ITEM: The spawning Steller's Jays have a loud brood of four or five chicks. They team-feed, which is interesting, and are not alarmed at all when the not me, as I am now, pecking away on the porch. I have learned a call that the female uses which appears to be an 'I'm here' message and which is quite distinct from the usual raucous bird profanity I associate with the species in their role as mountain beggar and trail scold. Interestingly, a pair of male robins are currently disputing the back yard as their very own.
WaPo recasts Josh as busker. He's game. DC commuters? um. Point: JOSH!
I really, really liked this. I sent this note to the WaPo team responsible for the piece.
Thank you all for making my day.
I knew Josh, distantly, as a kid when we were growing up in Bloomington. I haven't seen him except to be aware of his career in years and years. However, I have heard about his openness and groundedness through the hometown grapevine from others of that cohort. I have no doubt that he is as open to and welcoming of the brilliant and crazy stunt you crafted with his kind cooperation and as sanguine and full of humor as you capture in the story.
In the years since I left Bloomington, I have become friends with more than one busker, but only one who might be characterized as a profoundly gifted professional musician. If I read him correctly, he has come to hate the busking portion of his work, primarily because in order to gather that money-generating crowd, you must rely on set pieces, little two minute magic tricks that confound, excite, and inspire, and which can be executed over and over, once every thirty minutes, to capture the crowd and engage them into the one-or-two dollar donation, or even better, the CD purchase.
Despite what I read as his frustration, his pursuit of the technique has resulted in a spellbinding performer who is unafraid to use his magic tricks to capture the audience's attention before he proceeds with a piece he may regard as a more subtle and challenging expression of his talents as a songwriter and performer.
I flatter myself I would have had the time and openness on that morning to recognize the preciousness and hilarity of the gift Josh and your team offered the DC commuters at that, incredibly busy, station. I don't mistake my desire for self-regard with a probable account of my notional interaction.
I can, however report this: your sensitive reportage and careful attention to craft in the prose of your final piece successfully echoed the tragic colors of Josh's 'Chaconne' on the printed page, or more accurately on the internet, and moved me to tears. Kudos to all of you, and my tears are for the tragedy of our national culture of isolation and overscheduling. Thanks for a kickass reading experience, and great work with the multimedia documentation. Simply outstanding, entirely worthy of every participant, from the DC commuter though to Josh and his violin.
UPDATE:
Two days later, Wiengarten notes that this is his largest-response-generating piece, and that at least 10 percent of the thousand or so correspondents note, as I do, that we wept.
This morning as I got the paper I heard a new birdcall, a quiet 'hoo.' It was coming from very nearby and after a bit of jockeying I was able to see the source. I was surprised to note that the bird appeared to be a smaller-than-I-usually-note Steller's Jay. I was more surprised by the uncharacteristically melodious call, however. The bird was reluctant to flee my efforts to see it better, and this led me to surmise that she was in fact Mrs. Jay, my porchside companion of late.
Ascending the stairs to my deck, I noted that the nest was empty of brood-covering jay. On a doubletake prompted by a flash of movement, I saw a tiny, bright yellow beak reach tremulously up from within the nest, blindly agape. Moments later, the smaller jay I'd harassed in monkey curiosity hopped atop the tiny maw.
Around the corner, a senior citizen graciously greeted me as I gingerly walked down her drive to peruse the goods on offer at her garage sale. She is a painter, and one in particular, of a Duvall valley road, barns in the distance overmastered by alpine hills, was quite good, if a bit pastel for my own taste. She introduced herself with the words “I'm K_. We're H_ people.”
The construction is the same as if I introduced myself and my family with the phrase “I'm Mike. We're Whybark people.”
It was charmingly anachronistic. I gather the garage sale is a transition marker, given the house's real estate notice and signboard.
My apologies for the downtime today. There may be more over the next week or so. I'm prepping the web server for the upgrade and getting comprehensive backups in place in case of disaster. Tie a knot in your quipu for me.
Last night I dreamt I drank a bottle of fountain pen ink. I recall examining my darkened lips and tongue in the mirror and thinking, 'Why, surely, my shit will be the deepest black.'
New server gets up and rolls! Some PHP errors, and I have to figure out a functionality test methodology, but things look promising. Oh, if only I had the time.
