[Editorial Note 2015 (age 52): I only found an unfinished draft of this old post, although I am fairly certain it was originally completed and posted to my MySpace blog in 2008, shortly after my post about Istvan and JoAnn Nadas. Yet extensive searching of my personal backups of online content have not uncovered a complete version, so I finally had to resort to finishing it as best I could, although I am certain the original effort yielded better results. The draft broke off in the middle of the third sentence about JoAnn Glenisky, so everything after that is newly written from degraded memories and with a diminished spirit.]
Half-Remembered: Bob Gardiner
As with my previous "Half-Remembered" post, the title refers exclusively to the failings of my memory in general, and should not be taken as a slight on the memorable nature of the subject. By all accounts, Bob Gardiner was one of the most memorable people ever.
I met Mr. Gardiner briefly, somewhere around 1978, spending a couple of days in his studio in Portland, OR, where he was living and working at the time. He is best known for the Oscar-Winning animated short feature "Closed Mondays", which he co-produced with Will Vinton. They split shortly after making that ground-breaking film, and Vinton's name has somewhat unfairly become exclusively synonymous with the field of "Claymation".
It was only today that I learned of his death in 2005. Broader, but generally breif, biographical information is readily available on the web; just Google his name if you are interested. This post is only going to be about my personal encounter with the man and his work, and the ways in which it instructed and inspired me.
An essential starting point is the short feature itself, which can also be easily found online by searching for "Closed Mondays" on YouTube. Go do that now, actually, and then come back and finish this, if you like.
"Closed Mondays" was the one work for which he is most noted and remembered, and was in fact the only work by which I knew of him prior to visiting his studio. I sensed that he felt a little opressed under the shadow of that early acheivement. Having an artistic temperment naturally gave him mixed feelings about the whole idea of the Oscar, so for him it may have been as much a curse as anything else.
My first visit was a small field trip for our small roster of TAG (Talented And Gifted) students (more about that later). My second visit was on my own.
He was in the middle of shooting a commercial for Kodak, which was to be a morphing sequence through all of their popular models of snapsot cameras, but admitted that it had been slow going, and as far as I know, it was never actually finished. He probably missed the deadline and defaulted on the contract. He had so many different projects in various stages of incompletion, and not just clay animation.
He worked in virtually any form of creative media you can imagine, and some that I had not even imagined. He had sculptures, clay "paintings", holograms ( more about those below), and played and sang original songs for us on an electric piano and on guitar. I felt a little bad about putting him on the spot, especially in the middle of the usualy isolate safety of his creative space. He wasn't a teacher and wasn't really sure what to do with kids around, especially since much of his work and much of his natural style was more adult in nature.
Most fascinating to me were the collection of cylindrical multiplex holograms he had created, as I had already experimented with holography, with little success, and this was a kind of hologram and production process that I had never seen or heard of before. He apparently had a hand in the development of the process, but I believe there were others involved as well. The finished product is a transparent cylinder about the size of large lampshade. When a point source of light (white light is fine, no need for lasers for viewing) is placed in the center of the cylinder, the effect is the closest thing to Hollywood depictions of "holograms" (eg. the Princess Leia hologram shown to Luke by R2D2 in Star Wars) that is ever likely to be physically possible to create. Suspended in the center of the cylinder is a 3 dimensional image which can be viewed from any angle. Additionally, the image can change or move with with the rotation of the cylinder, or by the observer moving around it. His subjects included live humans as well as clay sculptures, and many of them were designed to smoothly loop an animation sequence. I have always been surprised that this never caught on in any larger way as an art form, nor as a method for creating advertising displays. The starting point for creating these holograms is to film the subject with a motion picture camera as it makes a single full rotation on a turntable platform. The filming could be at a constant frame-rate, or it could be shot frame-by-frame, to facilitate stop-motion animation. Thus there was virtually no limit to the size or nature of the subject, so long as it could be viewed from all horizontal angles and an appropriate apparatus could be assembled to rotate it (or alternatively, the camera could be trucked in a precise circle around something very large, but as far as I know, this had not been attempted). I will refrain from going into the details of the remainder of the process here. Such details could probably be found online, or I could share as much as I know with any interested person who inquires.
The only downside of this form of holography relative to other methods is that, while it uses similar materials (ultra-high-resolution film) and equipment (lasers) for creating and embodying the image, it also has much in common with stereo photography and lenticular "3D", in that only horizontal parallax is recorded. In other words, while a traditional hologram is like a little window through which you view a fully three-dimensional image, a Cylindrical Multiplex Hologram only presents the two eyes with differing 2-dimensional perspectives on the subject, offset on the horizontal plane, although it does so by, in a sense, creating a multitude of narrow slit "windows" through which a single projected 2-dimensional motion picture frame could be viewed in full.
Also much like my previous post, this is as much about an exceptional teacher and person who did much to make my mind and my world something that greatly transcended my rural surroundings. JoAnn Glenisky was employed as an English teacher at my school, and when the federal government created the TAG (Talented and Gifted) program. The local superindendent had no clue what to do with it, so he put it in her hands, much to my benefit. She taught me how to fill out requisition forms and the process for getting them approved and turned me loose. It is hard to believe that the kid I remember convincing the district superintendant to approve and sign these forms was me. Such courage and audacity have long since been somehow deleted from my psyche, although these attributes stayed with me through some of the most challenging times of my young adulthood.
It was through these TAG funds, in part, that I was able to experiment with stop-motion animation and time-lapse photography. There were two incomplete attempts at animated short features, one of which was subsequently destroyed by a kitten, and time-lapse experiments which included a 3-minute drive across the continental United States. Eventually, some of these films were projected on stage during some shows of the 2000 tour of the band Man or Astro-man.
Mrs. Glenisky also greatly enabled my gradiose delusions of being a writer. Before I learned to type for myself, she would use her personal time to manually transcribe my barely legible handwritten drafts of truly awful short science fiction stories. While these were routinely rejected by magazine editors, one of them earned me an opportunity to join a writer's workshop with the author Ursula K. LeGuin, which was offered as a college credit summer course by Portland State University. Being a college course, this also required the payment of tuition, which Mrs. Glenisky also paid from her own personal funds. The workshop, part of a program called Haystack, was held in Cannon Beach Oregon, which also meant an exciting opportunity for 16-year-old me to be away from home and in the supportive company of adults who treated me as an equal, for an entire week.
I attended Haystack again two years later, again with Ursula K. LeGuin, with whom I had also maintained a correspondence, as well as other workshops, but by that time I was already creatively crippled by the general and social anxiety which keep me largely paralyzed to this day, even with treatment.
Both JoAnn Glenisky and Ursula LeGuin invested so much in me as a writer, my greatest regret in life is how, after a promising start, it all came to nothing, and how much I squandered such spectacularly unusual opportunities. But this isn't intended to be about me and my perpetual pity party. This is about how much I appreciate my fortunate encounters with truly amazing people.
There was another writer from the first workshop, Micaela Massimino, with whom I maintained a friendship and correspondence for a few years and even visited in Boston MA, at the end of the same cross-country drive during which I filmed my epic and chaotic time-lapse travel film. That trip, and it's cast of characters, are a whole story in themselves.
Bob Gardiner, as previously mentioned, passed away in 2005, Ursula K. LeGuinn still lives and writes in Portland OR [Update: Ursula just passed away on January 22, 2018], and my recent attempts to determine the status of JoAnn Glenisky or Micaela Massimino have been unsuccessful. I am grateful to all of them.
Tuesday, October 6, 2015
Sunday, August 23, 2015
Retro-Blog 2008/1979 (ages 45/16): A Memory of Istvan Nadas and JoAnn Ross-Nadas from 1979
Half-Remembered: Istvan Nadas
Current mood: sad
Category: Life
To say "half-remembered" may imply a diminution of the man, which I do not intend. I intend only to acknowledge the shortcomings of my own memory in general, and the collective cultural memory evident through some initial Google searching. I am sure Istvan Nadas is well remembered by many who knew him better, including his wife, JoAnn Ross-Nadas, who introduced me to him in 1979. He passed in 2000, although I only learned this today. In Googling about trying to learn more about him, I found many brief references to him in the form of name-dropping in the resumes of many who had been his students. The only biography I found online did not mention his apparently short time living in McMinnville, Oregon, nor his wife.
That biography can be found here:
http://www.janiceclarkpiano.com/about_nadas.htm
What memories I do have of him were stirred as I was searching for recordings I might like of the Beethoven piano sonatas, and remembered that I had enjoyed his interpretations many years ago.
To the prejudices of my ears, only Nadas, and my older sister, played the first movement of the "Moonlight" with the appropriate sensitivity to the ebb and flow of dynamics and tempo that sound "right" to me. I can only find one used LP on a site that doesn't even list which sonatas are included, but will endeavor to order it. I suppose I could finally visit my sister, after a lapse of only about 20 years, on the pretense of securing a recording of her playing it.
I remember visiting his home, along with some fellow high school students, in McMinnville, but don't recall if it was personally arranged or a school field trip. At that time, he played for us a composition he wrote while in a German concentration camp in World War II. Unfortunately, I cannot remember the piece in specific, only in the general impression, which was one of a great sadness I could only superficially internalize, as it spoke of depths of experience I could not have shared. I do recall there was a single note that would toll slowly like a funeral bell at regular intervals throughout much, if not all, of the piece. It is sad, and seems a sort of injustice, that I can find no evidence of a released recording of this piece, or of any other original compositions he had made.
I knew just enough of the Holocaust to be afraid to ask him any questions. I didn't know if he wanted to put himself through the trauma of remembering and describing, and I don't think I can ever really understand what it was like without experiencing something like it, and I hope I never do. Years later, 911, viewed on TV from 3000 miles away was bad enough, and yet pales by comparison. I still have to mentally turn away from those memories, unable to withstand confronting them directly. I bought all of the documentary DVDs, out of some sense of duty to acknowledge history, but they remain shrink-wrapped. So, in my very small way, I am now a little familiar with the conflicting motives to never remember and never forget.
My only other contact with Istvan Nadas was attending a series of concerts he played at a nearby college, during which he traversed the entire cycle of Beethoven's piano sonatas.
How does someone live such a full, dramatic and accomplished life, and yet leave such small ripples in our digital world? How many other lives of similar substance have passed with as little acknowledgement? I waste my squalid energies bemoaning the waste of my own imagined potential for greatness, yet those who do accomplish great things are often not given their due.Am I looking at life wrongly? Am I expecting a different sort of world?
There was a period of time when I believe that JoAnn Ross-Nadas and I were something like friends, if that isn't an overly-familiar term for the situation. I don't remember exactly how it came about that she and I would spend our lunchtimes together alone in an empty classroom, at a time when I had not yet been a student in any of her classes. She was new to the strange and somewhat socially ugly tiny town of Dayton, Oregon, and I can certainly understand why she would prefer to avoid the teacher's lounge, which at lunch time was more crowded and smoke-filled and noisy than usual. She may well have felt awkward in that sort of a hick-town tavern kind of environment. But why was I the one student invited to join her personal, peaceful exile?
I only wish I could remember any part of the discussions we had. Most likely much of it was about writing, as I did bring in my crappy little poems and essays for her to read and critique. I was probably the only student in that school who flaunted any serious pretense of being a "writer"or a "poet". That alone may be what earned me that private time with this intelligent and exotic woman. I suppose there is no danger and little shame in confessing now that I had a childish crush on her. My visual memory is the weakest, but I remember she had dark straight hair, kept medium-to-short length, and beautiful deep jade green eyes with flecks of brown. As a reference of general impression more than specific resemblance, one might consult photos of Suzanne Vega.
If it was a friendship, it only lasted until I became a student in her Senior English class in a subsequent year. At the time, I felt that she over-compensated for our prior friendship by being particularly strict and harsh with me in class. However, I suspect that I was the one who truly betrayed the friendship by failing to understand and respect the necessary differences between our prior lunches and then being her actual student. I'm sure I tested her patience unfairly, like the child that I was. The class was nonetheless one of the few I had ever really enjoyed. She assigned "Catcher in the Rye" for reading, which anywhere in the civilized world would be unremarkable, but in Dayton the book was banned from the school library, so she provided paperback copies to the class at her own expense. I still don't know how much she had to suffer for that among her peers and superiors on the school staff, or with the school board.
The deepest regrets I have in my life are those weakest moments when I would make desperate and awkward attempts to fit in with my fellow students, parroting their idiotic and often racist jokes and comments. I literally feel physically ill whenever I contemplate such ugliness coming from me, and such weakness of character. Add to this the fact that I wasn't at all practiced in the low art of adolescent verbal graffiti, and would blurt the worst thing at the worst time in the most awkward way imaginable. On the one occasion when this occurred in her classroom, I could feel her disappointment and revulsion like a punch to the gut. Not like I was the one being punched, but like I had just sucker-punched one of the few people I truly admired and respected, someone whose approval I desperately craved. Nothing was ever the same after that. The lunches had long since ceased, but now she would not so much as look directly at me. Her notes on my assignments were now strictly terse and technical. I deserved to be shunned. I was an idiot.
Wherever she is, I hope she is well. She has my sincere condolences for the passing of her husband, and my sincerest apologies for not being a better investment of her generous energies, intelligence and care. Perhaps there were other students who turned out to be less of a disappointment.
(playbill for the concert series, doodled upon at the time by me, sorry)
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[Editorial Note 2015 (age 52): The web footprint of Istvan Nadas has improved greatly since 2008. In particular, some out of print recordings have been digitized and posted to YouTube.]
Tuesday, August 18, 2015
Retro-Blog 2008 (age 45): A Reblogged Frog Eulogy
[Editorial note 2015 (age 52): This was cut from a long lost MySpace blog entry and pasted into a simple text file, just so you know what all the weird "mood/category/listening to" and other nonsense is about. Yes, I could have removed it, but it is more fun to leave it as somewhat of an artifact of it's time and virtual place, although no layout or graphical elements are retained.]
Sunday, October 05, 2008
The Story of Sigmund Frog
Current mood: ashamed
Category: Life
This post started as a comment on another Spacer's blog, in which she wrote a very sweet poem in memory of her departed pet frog. Her poem reminded me of a frog I once knew who has since passed on. The comment ran way too long and way too far off subject, so I moved it here as a blog post of it's own.
The counselor who was the first in my current series of hot-potato referrals had a frog in his office. He was some kind of tiny aquatic frog, named Sigmund, Sigmund Frog. Get it? Yeah. Anyway, poor little Sigmund lived in a tiny tank on a tiny table between the two chairs in the room. According to the counselor, Sigmund had already exceeded the typical lifespan of his species by nearly double.
I would spend the entirety of every session watching Sigmund, which was a great excuse to avoid eye contact with the counselor. Sigmund seemed so very weak and very tired. It seemed to take the full measure of his meager energy to slowly struggle his way to the surface and stay there long enough to take a breath, only to drift back down to the bottom and lie there inert, conserving and mustering his strength for the next epic struggle to win his next breath. This cycle would repeat over and over while I watched, never varying.
Sigmund's torturous existence seemed such an apt metaphor for the bleakness and senseless suffering that comprises the lives of so many. Perhaps the counselor thought that his patients would feel better about their own lot in life, with Sigmund as the reminder that it could always be worse. Perhaps he thought that his patients would find in Sigmund a kind of tiny suffering soul-mate; someone to whom they could relate and feel less alone in their futility. Perhaps he gave very little thought at all to the plight of Sigmund, or his patients. Like most mental health professionals I have met, he talked mostly about himself.
Even more likely, the counselor saw himself in Sigmund, thus the name. After all, Sigmund's tiny square tank, sitting in the center of the counselor's tiny square office, contained a replica of an even tinier little office for Sigmund. This isn't exactly the pinnacle of subtlety.
I was very conflicted in my feelings for Sigmund. I wanted him to live, was oddly proud of his persistence, almost inspired, yet it pained me so much to watch his apparent suffering. But I could not look away. Indeed, I felt this odd obligation to watch, to bear witness, as if my moral support could somehow be sensed by, and provide some measure of strength to, this frail amphibian.
On what turned out to be my last appointment with this counselor, Sigmund and his tank were gone. Both his suffering and his triumph were over. A few days before my next appointment, the counselor left me a voice mail referring me to a psychologist, who later passed me off to a psychiatrist. If this escalation continues, I'm not sure where the next stop is: in-patient care in a secured facility? I think I would prefer self-directed out-patient care in a nice dark bar, if only my social anxiety would let me get through the door.
I was never given a clear reason why I was being referred on. I was surprised when the psychologist asked me why the counselor had referred me, and if I was still seeing him as well. I figured that even if the counselor did not see fit to explain it to me, he would have at least given some indication to the guy upon whom he had dumped me. The next hand-off played out exactly the same, abrupt and unexplained, and questioned by the latest person burdened with my care. In each case, I advised them to talk amongst themselves to sort it out, as I had no clue, other than that I was being pushed inexorably towards psychoactive medications.
The beginning of the end of my relationship with the original counselor, the one with Sigmund, was probably when I offered the opinion that there can be such a thing as too much self esteem. He visibly bristled at this, and shortly thereafter proudly showed me his book, entitled "Full Esteem Ahead".
I will allow you a moment to savor that.
As is my habit, I immediately flipped to the page in the front with the publisher's information and all the legal fine print. As I expected, it was what is known as a "vanity" publisher, the kind where the author pays the full cost of printing and distribution. Full Esteem Ahead, indeed.
Perhaps an even more significant sign that things were not going well: on the rare occasion that I was able to speak openly and in complete sentences, the counselor would react by literally curling up into a semi-fetal position in his chair. Something about me was apparently deeply disturbing to him. This is why I try to avoid people. I consider my absence to be a public service.
I know this sounds like I am mocking the counselor, and I feel terribly guilty about it, yet cannot help myself. The honest and painful truth is that I genuinely liked this counselor as a person, yet I am sorry to say I never really fully respected him intellectually. He was plenty smart enough to sense this, and it had to irk him, which was a problem, because he was the kind of person who liked too see himself as being above and beyond such low and negative feelings as being irked by even the most subtle signs of condescension from, of all people, a patient.
In retrospect, I think we each had vastly different ideas about why each of us were in that room together, and different expectations of how matters should proceed. We never so much as had a simple conversation to directly address these differences. This exact statement applies to my working relationship, or lack thereof, with every other mental health professional I have seen, before and since, and perhaps, people in general.
I feel like such a jerk over this, and I'm not fishing for anyone to offer me comforting contradictions. Despite my frequent professions of self-loathing, I sometimes nonetheless give harbor to the sin of pride. Probably more often and more egregiously than I realize. Hopefully my frequent and extensive excursions into the bottomless pit of hopelessness and worthlessness are adequate penance for my transgressions.
Besides, who am I to mock the self-published? Isn't that what I am engaging in at this very moment? My only completed recordings comprised a two-song single that I self-published on CD and distributed myself, for free. The almost complete lack of response or reaction of any kind from those who received it speaks volumes. As they say: "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all". More likely, the discs were accepted out of simple politeness and were never actually played. Most of the recipients were working musicians, who understandably tend to stay focused on their own work.
Having now thoroughly broken my own rule of never publicly providing information from which can easily be deduced the identity of any of my caretakers, I will take this opportunity to publicly apologize to this counselor. In the very unlikely case that you found your way to this blog: I am sorry for being a condescending jerk and a difficult patient. For any reader who may feel tempted to sleuth out the identity of this caretaker, be cautioned that his is not the only book that bears the same title.
Flying fully in the face of anything that resembles judgment or discretion, I will succumb to the prodding of my evil twin and tell you the intended title of his next book: "The Wisdom of Solomon". And yes, his surname is indeed "Solomon", but don't Google too quickly to any conclusions here either, as there are already several books with varying forms of this title, some of which include a Solomon among the authors cited.
Yes, even after apologizing, I continue to poke fun, but I'm probably just jealous of his confidence, persistence and stubborn accomplishments, if not his punishing puns.
In any case, I still miss Sigmund Frog, yet am haunted by the memory of what I saw as his horrific life. If there are better places for any of us to go, I hope there is such a place for him, although I am not frog enough to imagine just what that might be.
Currently listening :
Sounds of Earth: Frogs
By Various Artists
Release date: By 1999-10-12
9:30 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment - Edit - Remove -
[Editorial Addendum 2015 (age 52): This was selected for re-posting partly to celebrate my recent successful rescue of a wild frog from our semi-feral cats, who had somehow transported their living plaything from the stream behind our back fence all the way up the back stairs and into our bathroom. When returned to the stream, he swam away making vigorous use of all limbs.]
Sunday, October 05, 2008
The Story of Sigmund Frog
Current mood: ashamed
Category: Life
This post started as a comment on another Spacer's blog, in which she wrote a very sweet poem in memory of her departed pet frog. Her poem reminded me of a frog I once knew who has since passed on. The comment ran way too long and way too far off subject, so I moved it here as a blog post of it's own.
The counselor who was the first in my current series of hot-potato referrals had a frog in his office. He was some kind of tiny aquatic frog, named Sigmund, Sigmund Frog. Get it? Yeah. Anyway, poor little Sigmund lived in a tiny tank on a tiny table between the two chairs in the room. According to the counselor, Sigmund had already exceeded the typical lifespan of his species by nearly double.
I would spend the entirety of every session watching Sigmund, which was a great excuse to avoid eye contact with the counselor. Sigmund seemed so very weak and very tired. It seemed to take the full measure of his meager energy to slowly struggle his way to the surface and stay there long enough to take a breath, only to drift back down to the bottom and lie there inert, conserving and mustering his strength for the next epic struggle to win his next breath. This cycle would repeat over and over while I watched, never varying.
Sigmund's torturous existence seemed such an apt metaphor for the bleakness and senseless suffering that comprises the lives of so many. Perhaps the counselor thought that his patients would feel better about their own lot in life, with Sigmund as the reminder that it could always be worse. Perhaps he thought that his patients would find in Sigmund a kind of tiny suffering soul-mate; someone to whom they could relate and feel less alone in their futility. Perhaps he gave very little thought at all to the plight of Sigmund, or his patients. Like most mental health professionals I have met, he talked mostly about himself.
Even more likely, the counselor saw himself in Sigmund, thus the name. After all, Sigmund's tiny square tank, sitting in the center of the counselor's tiny square office, contained a replica of an even tinier little office for Sigmund. This isn't exactly the pinnacle of subtlety.
I was very conflicted in my feelings for Sigmund. I wanted him to live, was oddly proud of his persistence, almost inspired, yet it pained me so much to watch his apparent suffering. But I could not look away. Indeed, I felt this odd obligation to watch, to bear witness, as if my moral support could somehow be sensed by, and provide some measure of strength to, this frail amphibian.
On what turned out to be my last appointment with this counselor, Sigmund and his tank were gone. Both his suffering and his triumph were over. A few days before my next appointment, the counselor left me a voice mail referring me to a psychologist, who later passed me off to a psychiatrist. If this escalation continues, I'm not sure where the next stop is: in-patient care in a secured facility? I think I would prefer self-directed out-patient care in a nice dark bar, if only my social anxiety would let me get through the door.
I was never given a clear reason why I was being referred on. I was surprised when the psychologist asked me why the counselor had referred me, and if I was still seeing him as well. I figured that even if the counselor did not see fit to explain it to me, he would have at least given some indication to the guy upon whom he had dumped me. The next hand-off played out exactly the same, abrupt and unexplained, and questioned by the latest person burdened with my care. In each case, I advised them to talk amongst themselves to sort it out, as I had no clue, other than that I was being pushed inexorably towards psychoactive medications.
The beginning of the end of my relationship with the original counselor, the one with Sigmund, was probably when I offered the opinion that there can be such a thing as too much self esteem. He visibly bristled at this, and shortly thereafter proudly showed me his book, entitled "Full Esteem Ahead".
I will allow you a moment to savor that.
As is my habit, I immediately flipped to the page in the front with the publisher's information and all the legal fine print. As I expected, it was what is known as a "vanity" publisher, the kind where the author pays the full cost of printing and distribution. Full Esteem Ahead, indeed.
Perhaps an even more significant sign that things were not going well: on the rare occasion that I was able to speak openly and in complete sentences, the counselor would react by literally curling up into a semi-fetal position in his chair. Something about me was apparently deeply disturbing to him. This is why I try to avoid people. I consider my absence to be a public service.
I know this sounds like I am mocking the counselor, and I feel terribly guilty about it, yet cannot help myself. The honest and painful truth is that I genuinely liked this counselor as a person, yet I am sorry to say I never really fully respected him intellectually. He was plenty smart enough to sense this, and it had to irk him, which was a problem, because he was the kind of person who liked too see himself as being above and beyond such low and negative feelings as being irked by even the most subtle signs of condescension from, of all people, a patient.
In retrospect, I think we each had vastly different ideas about why each of us were in that room together, and different expectations of how matters should proceed. We never so much as had a simple conversation to directly address these differences. This exact statement applies to my working relationship, or lack thereof, with every other mental health professional I have seen, before and since, and perhaps, people in general.
I feel like such a jerk over this, and I'm not fishing for anyone to offer me comforting contradictions. Despite my frequent professions of self-loathing, I sometimes nonetheless give harbor to the sin of pride. Probably more often and more egregiously than I realize. Hopefully my frequent and extensive excursions into the bottomless pit of hopelessness and worthlessness are adequate penance for my transgressions.
Besides, who am I to mock the self-published? Isn't that what I am engaging in at this very moment? My only completed recordings comprised a two-song single that I self-published on CD and distributed myself, for free. The almost complete lack of response or reaction of any kind from those who received it speaks volumes. As they say: "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all". More likely, the discs were accepted out of simple politeness and were never actually played. Most of the recipients were working musicians, who understandably tend to stay focused on their own work.
Having now thoroughly broken my own rule of never publicly providing information from which can easily be deduced the identity of any of my caretakers, I will take this opportunity to publicly apologize to this counselor. In the very unlikely case that you found your way to this blog: I am sorry for being a condescending jerk and a difficult patient. For any reader who may feel tempted to sleuth out the identity of this caretaker, be cautioned that his is not the only book that bears the same title.
Flying fully in the face of anything that resembles judgment or discretion, I will succumb to the prodding of my evil twin and tell you the intended title of his next book: "The Wisdom of Solomon". And yes, his surname is indeed "Solomon", but don't Google too quickly to any conclusions here either, as there are already several books with varying forms of this title, some of which include a Solomon among the authors cited.
Yes, even after apologizing, I continue to poke fun, but I'm probably just jealous of his confidence, persistence and stubborn accomplishments, if not his punishing puns.
In any case, I still miss Sigmund Frog, yet am haunted by the memory of what I saw as his horrific life. If there are better places for any of us to go, I hope there is such a place for him, although I am not frog enough to imagine just what that might be.
Currently listening :
Sounds of Earth: Frogs
By Various Artists
Release date: By 1999-10-12
9:30 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment - Edit - Remove -
[Editorial Addendum 2015 (age 52): This was selected for re-posting partly to celebrate my recent successful rescue of a wild frog from our semi-feral cats, who had somehow transported their living plaything from the stream behind our back fence all the way up the back stairs and into our bathroom. When returned to the stream, he swam away making vigorous use of all limbs.]
Friday, August 7, 2015
Sunday, August 2, 2015
Retro-Blog 1982 (age 19): Youthful Hyperbole
GUILTY
So another starving orphan
is captured in a moving photograph
So another tragic loss
is transformed into a tidy turn of phrase
So another act of cruel passion
has made the climax of the play
So one more war
has inspired a protest song
So if you think that art has innocence
look again
Blood stains the canvas
and flows from the pen
And our voices
are serving up the gory headline
with a rhyme
And all ears are tuned
to the turning of the tables
And all eyes are focused
on the faces in the frames
And the page is turned
for the telling of the fables
And the lines are drawn
for the naming of the names
[Editorial Note 2015 (age 52): This is the kind of thing one can only write when young and just figuring out obvious things about how the world works. There is only so long someone can remain shocked and self righteous about everything, so we become jaded adults who hardly notice the glaring wickedness of the world we have made for ourselves. This ends with another appearance of that pair of split lines I had previously mentioned some reluctance at including here due to possible future plans for them. Now they have grown an appendage of two more split lines. All four, or eight depending on how you look at it, ended up as part of the "Modern Man" lyric, which again, I may yet record.]
So another starving orphan
is captured in a moving photograph
So another tragic loss
is transformed into a tidy turn of phrase
So another act of cruel passion
has made the climax of the play
So one more war
has inspired a protest song
So if you think that art has innocence
look again
Blood stains the canvas
and flows from the pen
And our voices
are serving up the gory headline
with a rhyme
And all ears are tuned
to the turning of the tables
And all eyes are focused
on the faces in the frames
And the page is turned
for the telling of the fables
And the lines are drawn
for the naming of the names
[Editorial Note 2015 (age 52): This is the kind of thing one can only write when young and just figuring out obvious things about how the world works. There is only so long someone can remain shocked and self righteous about everything, so we become jaded adults who hardly notice the glaring wickedness of the world we have made for ourselves. This ends with another appearance of that pair of split lines I had previously mentioned some reluctance at including here due to possible future plans for them. Now they have grown an appendage of two more split lines. All four, or eight depending on how you look at it, ended up as part of the "Modern Man" lyric, which again, I may yet record.]
Saturday, August 1, 2015
Retro-Blog 1979-1986 (ages 16-23): Audacious Indulgences And Obvious Aphorisms
"Notes To Myself"
existence:
I don't know why I'm here but I don't know where else to be
I've just about convinced myself that I'm an alien
(Portland, Oct. '81)
boredom:
babble babble blank-barren-mindedness
unthinking nonthoughts
unfeeling nonfeelings
nontouching untouchables
(Boston, Sept. '81)
antipathy:
there is a certain comfort in bitterness
a stability in despair
a security in hatred
I really feel best when I don't give a shit
(Wild Planet, Dec. '81)
group dynamics:
no real solitude
no real companionship
just human presence
(Cannon Beach, Aug, '81)
observation:
the sidewalk was littered with torn and rain-soaked ledger sheets
so I reasoned that another businessman must have exploded
(Portland, Nov. '81)
deception:
what better place to hide a golden egg
than in a rubber chicken?
(Haystack '79)
art:
the primary value of the abstract
is that it is not dependent
upon any specific context
(Linfield, May '82)
reality:
illusions
yum, yum, I eat them
they sustain me
(Linfield, May '82)
creativity:
if we could harness the human imagination
it would drive tiny windmills
(Linfield, May '82)
degeneration:
slow decay, sudden flare-up, I'm oxidizing
(Linfield, April '82)
my mind is rusting out, my emotions are in flames
soon there will be very little of me left
(Summer '82)
paranoia:
I can't laugh at myself, because so many others
have already done it for me
(Summer '82)
irrigation:
hot piss on cold mud, pale shit between corn rows
working in the food chain, I'm feeding the world
(Summer '82)
endurance:
all you long-suffering heroes of perseverance
where do you get your strength?
somehow, I just can't take you seriously
(Summer '82)
prophecy:
all visions of the future are composed of images
from memories of the past
(Summer '82)
metaphysics:
no amount of philosophy
could ever change
the bio-chemical reactions
in my body and my brain
or at least that's what I think
(Summer '82)
madness:
insanity is a fun idea to play with
until, you really see it for the first time
in yourself
(Summer '82)
distress:
help me
echoes off cold stone walls
help me
rings dead in still air
help me
drowned-out by noise
(Summer '82)
limbo:
I feel dead
and I ask myself
am I only imagining
that I was once alive?
(Summer '82)
freedom:
freedom is food and shelter
freedom is light and heat
freedom is soap and water
freedom is money
(Berkeley "Y", Nov. '81)
waiting:
I'm bored - so bored
in clock-ticking, water-dripping silence
sinking into homogeneous monotony
eat me darkness, eat me silence
dead thoughts
(Limbo, June '82)
honesty:
no-one is the perfect and smiling reflection
of anyone else
thus, honesty leads to adversity
(Limbo, Aug. '82)
truth:
lies are the most common and cruel sins
(Greyhound Southbound, Sept. '82)
words:
language is not complete reality
nor is it pure abstraction
it is a structure that extends
from the edge of reality
to the edge of abstraction
(Space, Nov. '82)
language:
human values are closely linked to human languages
only through language can value be defined
(Space, Nov. '82)
resignation:
I no longer hate the life
it seems that I must live
I simply hate myself
for the times when I believe
it could be different
(Greyhound Southbound, Sept. '82)
ismism:
mind less ness
direction less ness
meaning less ness
hope less ness
(SanFranBay NorthCal, Sept. '82)
transience:
the hunger passes in through me
so familiar
so clean
so real
(McMinnville City Park, Nov. '82)
I'm living on meager means
in various spaces
permanently temporarily nowhere
(SanFranBay NorthCal, Sept. '82)
confession:
I have nothing to offer except pain in pretty boxes
eloquent screams
whimpers that rhyme
(Space, Nov, '82)
detachment:
they're all riding a merry-go-round
every time I try to grab ahold
I get thrown-off
(Space, Nov. '82)
stability:
modes of operation
plans of action
metamorphose
cannot map the surface of the sea
(Space, Nov. '82)
survival:
I have only my pride and my rebellion to keep me afloat
in this vast sea of indifference
(Flux, Dec. '82}
bio-chemistry:
too much sugar
too much caffeine
I'm a gurgling bag of chemicals
(Flux, Dec. '82)
art(2):
art is dependent upon medium
medium is drawn from available technology
technology serves the demands of commerce
(Space, Nov. '82)
philisophication:
I know my limitations
and I hate them
(Flux, Dec. '82)
smalltalk:
smalltalk 'round the kitchen table
smalltalk on the TV tube
talk to paint a gloss across the surface
of the superficial lives of simple minds
(Flux, Dec. '82)
transience(3):
I'm just a sack of potatoes
sitting in the corner
with baggage tags tied to my ears
(Flux, Dec. '82)
free will:
my head is just a sponge
soaked through will all the chemicals
that tell me what to do
(Winter Solstice '82)
points:
too many one-way signs pointing into the darkness
too many people pointing at an empty picture frame
shouting "Masterpiece, Masterpiece!"
(Winter Solstice '82)
maturation:
I've always been so far ahead of myself
but now I see that in many ways
I have yet to take my first step
(Winter Solstice '82)
status:
I'm not underground
I'm not overground
I'm not mainstream
I'm not fringe
I live between the cracks
(Void, Jan. '83)
options:
I'm too slow for success
too smart for contentment
too selfish for suicide
and too weak for change
(Void, Jan. '83}
darkness:
words are an abstraction
far too substantial
to convey an empty reality
(Void, Jan. '83)
paranoia(2):
when the reason for fear is gone
fear creates its own reason
(Linfield, March '83)
cognition:
I haven't a thought in my head
this happens
when I have too much to think about
(S.F. State, April '83)
loops:
I never thought I would be here again
this is because I make the mistake
of presuming that I have some control
over my life
(SoCal, April '84)
propaganda:
once an idea has been accepted into the mind
it has been given consent
to manifest itself in social action
(SoCal, May '85)
evangelism:
I like Jimmy Swaggart because he sweats like Elvis
(Salem, Summer '86)
philosophy:
philosophy is a religion
dedicated to the systematic removal
of meaning from all existence
(Linfield, Fall '86)
behaviorism:
behaviorism is a religion
dedicated to the systematic removal
of ethics from all human events
(Linfield, Fall '86)
existence:
I don't know why I'm here but I don't know where else to be
I've just about convinced myself that I'm an alien
(Portland, Oct. '81)
boredom:
babble babble blank-barren-mindedness
unthinking nonthoughts
unfeeling nonfeelings
nontouching untouchables
(Boston, Sept. '81)
antipathy:
there is a certain comfort in bitterness
a stability in despair
a security in hatred
I really feel best when I don't give a shit
(Wild Planet, Dec. '81)
group dynamics:
no real solitude
no real companionship
just human presence
(Cannon Beach, Aug, '81)
observation:
the sidewalk was littered with torn and rain-soaked ledger sheets
so I reasoned that another businessman must have exploded
(Portland, Nov. '81)
deception:
what better place to hide a golden egg
than in a rubber chicken?
(Haystack '79)
art:
the primary value of the abstract
is that it is not dependent
upon any specific context
(Linfield, May '82)
reality:
illusions
yum, yum, I eat them
they sustain me
(Linfield, May '82)
creativity:
if we could harness the human imagination
it would drive tiny windmills
(Linfield, May '82)
degeneration:
slow decay, sudden flare-up, I'm oxidizing
(Linfield, April '82)
my mind is rusting out, my emotions are in flames
soon there will be very little of me left
(Summer '82)
paranoia:
I can't laugh at myself, because so many others
have already done it for me
(Summer '82)
irrigation:
hot piss on cold mud, pale shit between corn rows
working in the food chain, I'm feeding the world
(Summer '82)
endurance:
all you long-suffering heroes of perseverance
where do you get your strength?
somehow, I just can't take you seriously
(Summer '82)
prophecy:
all visions of the future are composed of images
from memories of the past
(Summer '82)
metaphysics:
no amount of philosophy
could ever change
the bio-chemical reactions
in my body and my brain
or at least that's what I think
(Summer '82)
madness:
insanity is a fun idea to play with
until, you really see it for the first time
in yourself
(Summer '82)
distress:
help me
echoes off cold stone walls
help me
rings dead in still air
help me
drowned-out by noise
(Summer '82)
limbo:
I feel dead
and I ask myself
am I only imagining
that I was once alive?
(Summer '82)
freedom:
freedom is food and shelter
freedom is light and heat
freedom is soap and water
freedom is money
(Berkeley "Y", Nov. '81)
waiting:
I'm bored - so bored
in clock-ticking, water-dripping silence
sinking into homogeneous monotony
eat me darkness, eat me silence
dead thoughts
(Limbo, June '82)
honesty:
no-one is the perfect and smiling reflection
of anyone else
thus, honesty leads to adversity
(Limbo, Aug. '82)
truth:
lies are the most common and cruel sins
(Greyhound Southbound, Sept. '82)
words:
language is not complete reality
nor is it pure abstraction
it is a structure that extends
from the edge of reality
to the edge of abstraction
(Space, Nov. '82)
language:
human values are closely linked to human languages
only through language can value be defined
(Space, Nov. '82)
resignation:
I no longer hate the life
it seems that I must live
I simply hate myself
for the times when I believe
it could be different
(Greyhound Southbound, Sept. '82)
ismism:
mind less ness
direction less ness
meaning less ness
hope less ness
(SanFranBay NorthCal, Sept. '82)
transience:
the hunger passes in through me
so familiar
so clean
so real
(McMinnville City Park, Nov. '82)
I'm living on meager means
in various spaces
permanently temporarily nowhere
(SanFranBay NorthCal, Sept. '82)
confession:
I have nothing to offer except pain in pretty boxes
eloquent screams
whimpers that rhyme
(Space, Nov, '82)
detachment:
they're all riding a merry-go-round
every time I try to grab ahold
I get thrown-off
(Space, Nov. '82)
stability:
modes of operation
plans of action
metamorphose
cannot map the surface of the sea
(Space, Nov. '82)
survival:
I have only my pride and my rebellion to keep me afloat
in this vast sea of indifference
(Flux, Dec. '82}
bio-chemistry:
too much sugar
too much caffeine
I'm a gurgling bag of chemicals
(Flux, Dec. '82)
art(2):
art is dependent upon medium
medium is drawn from available technology
technology serves the demands of commerce
(Space, Nov. '82)
philisophication:
I know my limitations
and I hate them
(Flux, Dec. '82)
smalltalk:
smalltalk 'round the kitchen table
smalltalk on the TV tube
talk to paint a gloss across the surface
of the superficial lives of simple minds
(Flux, Dec. '82)
transience(3):
I'm just a sack of potatoes
sitting in the corner
with baggage tags tied to my ears
(Flux, Dec. '82)
free will:
my head is just a sponge
soaked through will all the chemicals
that tell me what to do
(Winter Solstice '82)
points:
too many one-way signs pointing into the darkness
too many people pointing at an empty picture frame
shouting "Masterpiece, Masterpiece!"
(Winter Solstice '82)
maturation:
I've always been so far ahead of myself
but now I see that in many ways
I have yet to take my first step
(Winter Solstice '82)
status:
I'm not underground
I'm not overground
I'm not mainstream
I'm not fringe
I live between the cracks
(Void, Jan. '83)
options:
I'm too slow for success
too smart for contentment
too selfish for suicide
and too weak for change
(Void, Jan. '83}
darkness:
words are an abstraction
far too substantial
to convey an empty reality
(Void, Jan. '83)
paranoia(2):
when the reason for fear is gone
fear creates its own reason
(Linfield, March '83)
cognition:
I haven't a thought in my head
this happens
when I have too much to think about
(S.F. State, April '83)
loops:
I never thought I would be here again
this is because I make the mistake
of presuming that I have some control
over my life
(SoCal, April '84)
propaganda:
once an idea has been accepted into the mind
it has been given consent
to manifest itself in social action
(SoCal, May '85)
evangelism:
I like Jimmy Swaggart because he sweats like Elvis
(Salem, Summer '86)
philosophy:
philosophy is a religion
dedicated to the systematic removal
of meaning from all existence
(Linfield, Fall '86)
behaviorism:
behaviorism is a religion
dedicated to the systematic removal
of ethics from all human events
(Linfield, Fall '86)
Monday, July 27, 2015
Retro-Blog 1987 (age 24): A Childhood Memory
A MEMORABLE ROTOTILLER
At some point in my preadolescent life my maternal Grandfather died. As with other family deaths, there was a great pilgrimage to the scene of the death. Aunts and uncles and cousins from all over Oregon loaded into their full-size early-seventies family cars and made the long hot nonstop to rural Colorado.The ending of his long and colorful life was commemorated by a twenty-one gun salute fired by octogenarian veterans. Even though I scarcely remembered ever meeting him, I did manage to force a few tears, being under the influence of all the sincerely portrayed sorrow around me.
As my critically-wounded step-grandmother lay in the intensive-care unit of the local hospital, my aunts and uncles set themselves to the task of remembering. The process of remembrance in my family consists primarily of the acquisition of objects once owned by the deceased to serve as "something to remember him by". Thanks to the generosity of one of my aunts, I had the opportunity to remember this grandfather I never knew with his wife's gold pocket watch to assist me in the task of fond recollection. Back in Oregon, however, my mother coerced me into surrendering the watch in exchange for a gas-powered model airplane, the result of some rather persistent negotiation on my part.
My grandfather died in a high-speed head-on collision while delivering a load of gallon jars of honey in his VW van. One small irony is that he was illegally driving while legally blind at night, yet it was the other driver who had strayed into his lane. While viewing a newspaper photo of the remains of the vehicle, my aunt Alma remembered that her father had once mentioned that he liked to keep a hundred-dollar bill taped inside the dashboard to be available in case of emergency. So she went to the wrecking yard and had them pry apart the smashed honey and blood encrusted dashboard, only to find that the treasure was already gone or perhaps had never been there.
Undaunted by this disappointment, my aunt rented a U-Haul trailer to carry enough inspiration for a lifetime of fond memories. After returning to Oregon, she discovered that she had inadvertently remembered her dead father by the rototiller he had recently borrowed from his neighbor.
[Editorial Note 2015 (age 52): This is one of those things written specifically for the "I" collection mentioned in my notes on a previous blog. Since my collected works at that time provided virtually no information about my poorly remembered childhood, I attempted to provide what few anecdotal reports I could. By the way, the phrase "octogenarian veterans" was far too seductively quasi-alliterative to resist, despite the fact that my grandfather and his peers firing the rifles were more likely in their 60s at the time.]
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