My weekend has been spent doing the dispiriting task of developing my employer’s human resources policies, at least to an initial state. I believe I have it wrangled but I found the experience tremendously disheartening, even though the intellectual and work-relation problems resolved by having a policy in place clearly make it necessary.

How can I put it? It was (and will continue to be) an experience I can only describe as deeply uncomfortable and wrong, a reminder of my apparently permanent alienation from my native society and culture. I found the experience profoundly depressing.

Viv was out of town as well, inspiring musings about all-day-barhopping or 24-hour punk-rock movie festivals, but instead I, um, researched human resources policy on the web from my soft, comfy couch. I left said position to

  • a) do laundry
  • b) make coffee
  • c) go to the liquor store for gin and
  • c) eat at Kimchee Bistro in the Alley on Broadway, about three and one-half blocks from my house.

I also had two long phone conversations with my parents, one while walking to the liquor store and walking back, and one while doing laundry. The additional portability of the phone under such circumstances is definitely appreciated. I doubt I would have had time to talk with them had I been constrained to speak with them while within range of the land line.

I was slightly disappointed that I did not meet my personal goal of not leaving the house for 48 hours, always my weekend aim (with the exception of next weekend, nota bene). I was also somewhat puzzled by my personal reluctance to watch one of the several interesting movies I have, unwatched, in the house on DVD or to walk one block beyond the liquor store to attend a theatrical screening of the always-rewarding Chinatown at the Northwest Film Forum.

A bright spot over the weekend was my unexpectedly long email correspondence with Jon Nelson, who I have mentioned here before. Many years ago, one of my truly lasting friendships (with one Eric White) developed in an epistolary fashion and I think that’s what happening with Jon and me now. He recently got a memorial tattoo dedicated to our mutual deceased pal Steve Millen, and talked about that and about the Green Tortoise, an alternative bus line that Jon drove for back in the mid-80s and which I once took from Seattle to San Francisco at midwinter. My trip was very memorable in a positive way. Jon does not look at his time with the Tortoise as positively.

Happily, however, Sunday afternoon, Vivian came home from her weekend getaway to Portland with one of her pals. We’ve just returned from dinner.

As I write, we are listening to the fathead classical programming of WCPE, a classical station I recently noticed in the default Radio::Classical subdirectory of iTunes. It transpires that the station is based near to my parents and may fairly be considered their classical station. It’s a public station, but I don’t think they run any NPR programming. They do run stuff that was once the mainstay of American public radio programming, such as the Sunday afternoon Metropolitan Opera broadcasts (if on Saturdays). They have never yet strayed from a certain middle-of-the-road (thus: “fathead”) sensibility in the orchestral and chamber music they play, which is slightly disappointing, if understandable. In many ways, it’s like an idealized time-capsule of public radio music programming in the era from 1975-1988.

Having learned to do intellectual work to this style of programming, it’s a kind of guilty treat to have discovered the station. I think there’s probably an interesting public-sector business story in the station as well, since its’ website branding is ‘The Classical Music Station.’ I presume they must obtain a significant percentage of their pledge drive income from internet listeners.

5 thoughts on “The Return

  1. “Fathead”, eh? That’s the first time I’ve heard that description. I know them as “Old War Horses”. I guess “fathead” is shorter and more succinct.

  2. Fathead” is something of a private joke.

    In college, when I took my first film class, they introduced the director-as-author thesis by presenting several films by directors with tremendoulsy distinct and popularly legible styles: Kubrick, Hitchcock, and Coppola. One night as I was writing a paper I was having a hard time getting going, even though I really like the films of these folks. I began to write about the ‘director-as-author’ thesis but substituing the word ‘fathead’ for ‘director,’ which made me laugh and broke my writer’s block.

    “Alfred Hitchcock is one of the best-recognized fatheads in the history of cinema. He developed his distinctive fathead style in the closing days of the era of silent film, and honed to a brilliant and commercially sucessful peak in the nineteen fifties. Marked by extreme clarity of plot and a combination of daring and contol in cinematography, Hitchcock’s work has been emulated by fatheads nearly without end since that time.”

    Part of the reason I was frustrated is that the films are so easily identified as the work of each man; of course they are ideal for teaching the thesis becasue of this. Even American college students can understand the concept!

    The chestnuts that WCPE relies so heavily upon remind me in may ways of the films of these directors. They are very well-developed, fully-realized, legible, and dense works of art. Unfortunately, over time, this has a tendency to dull our ability to actually pay attention to them. This same factor is exactly what makes them successful – most peple do not turn on the radio in order to be fully engaged with an aesthetic experience, I know that I am not lisening to the pieces in that manner when I’m using them as a concentration aid whilst writing.

  3. That reminds me of a funny story. Years ago – like fucking ten-twelve years ago on New Years eve some friends of mine got plastered and drove into downtown Seattle and ended up where the Green Tortoise was parked. This friend of mine ran up and pounded on their window and this hippie guy came out an grabbed us and held us until the cops arrived. Then they arrested my friend Dave for having a knife.

    Years later Dave killed himself.

    Maybe this isn’t that funny a story.

    After that we went to the Lusty Lady. Then I threw up on someone’s car.

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