short fictional prose writing thing

There once was a man named John Pinchback who was a marvelously gifted calligrapher. He never studied the art, and was never aware of his talent for as long as he lived. He was indifferently read, but a meticulous speller. He worked as a mechanic at a muffler specialist, and rarely had occasion to write more than a receipt. However, when the time came to write a tag for a Christmas gift, or to knock off a flier for a garage sale, to draw a simple map for a lost stranger, or to leave a note for the babysitter, his lettering was a marvel of composition, perfectly balanced, with each stroke evincing an effortless awareness of the overall sense of what was being written. Each letter vibrated with a holographic richness, each ascender and descender conveying the sum expression of the word it formed. Despite the fact that his artistic training was limited to one high school shop class, and that his media were never more refined than a Sharpie or a ball-point pen, his calligraphy could have stood up in a comparison with any of the great Zen or Confucian masters. He has been dead for fifteen years. Outside of fragments in the possession of his family, his only extant work is a hastily scrawled "Wet Paint" sign that is folded into quarters, housed in a sun-yellowed paperback copy of J. P. Donleavy's The Ginger Man on a shelf at the Purple Heart store in Tyler, TX.

Imaginary music, 2

Scholars of the American Delta Blues are notoriously as fickle in their allegiances as a high school lunch room. The discovery of a stack of warped 78 rpm records by an obscure songster will be fêted in the obscure mimeographed journals that are the lifesblood of the field. Cassette tapes will be traded, and thousands of words will unfold in contrarian letters and in heated posts on internet forums. Sooner or later, the most marketable of these forgotten artists filter in to the mainstream. With luck, an expensive boxed set of that artist's works will eventually follow, usually with a fulsome essay or two by one of the critical eminenses grises of the blues field. Adulation and Grammy to follow. After a few years of this, there will in invariably a backlash, and the artist will be found to be derivative of some newly-discovered predecessor, their songs trite, their former critical praise rooted in some complex form of racism that takes ten years of calculus and a very sharp knife to understand.

This tendency may have reached its pinnacle in the recent lionization of Blind Pat Morita Jones. Jones may or may not have been a native of Greasetrap, Mississippi, born around 1895 (there is a burgeoning literature devoted singly to the issue of his birthdate. Some scholars believe him to have been born at least six centuries previous to this date). He was apparently the master of a sort of homemade ukelele fabricated from a cigar box and, according to Lomax, the femur of Leadbelly's uncle Rex. This is all highly speculative. In the thousands of hours of interviews done by various folklorists with his putative contemporaries, no one so much as mentions him in passing. There is no birth certificate or gravesite. And in spite of the best efforts of several anthropology faculties, no descendants have been uncovered.

There are no extant recordings of Jones' work. Some authorities believe that he at one point had a record contract, or at least had heard of one. Two years ago there was a moment of delirious academic excitement when Dr. Ted Bissup of the University of Toronto claimed to have evidence that the notorious "lost" Comanche singles (CR 105-108), always listed in the contemporary catalogs with a blank where the artist and title information should be, were in fact Blind Pat Morita Jones recordings. This theory remained current until the discovery of a test pressing of CR-107, which proved to be a pornographic recording geared towards the nascent rubber fetishist niche market, far-sighted marketing well in line with what this writer described in The Comanche Story: The Story of Comanche Records (Tulpa Press, 2007). Nevertheless, Arthur Q. Lomax (no relation) is hard at work on a boxed set of the Complete Blind Pat Morita Jones. The theory at work there is that any of the handful of structures still standing that may have been roadhouses where Jones may or may not have played (see "Is You is or Is You Ain't Mama Joon's Saloon," Delta Blues News and Review June 2002) contain in their very walls some acoustic artifact of the theoretical performance or performances, in that the soundwaves emitted necessarily caused infinitessimal changes in the structure of the building. At the time of this writing, there is no information available concerning the technology that will be used to reconstruct Jones' music from the decades of layers that these phenomena have been overlaid by other acoustic evernt, or even if such technology is at all possible.

In related work, Dr. Denis Donadieu is currently engaged in a tentative reconstruction of Blind Pat Morita Jones' lyrics, based on a subtractive analysis of back numbers of Colliers magazine, the dimensions of contemporary McCormick harvester blades, and a computer-generated composite model of the performers who might have been Jones' inspirations. A sample verse:

Baby [...]
[...]
[...]treefrog[...]
Well pemmican wine[...]
[...]mm-hmmm.

As you can see, there are more exciting developments to come.

this is beautiful

Jonathan Coulton's "I'm Still Alive" performed by the famous-on-the-internet Molly, a.k.a. Sweetafton23.

reflections upon the first 3 episodes of Airwolf, Part 1

(This is an abstract for a paper currently under revision for publication in the Spring 2010 number of the North American Journal of Airwolf Studies.)

The 1984-1987 American television show Airwolf is in many ways simply awful. The writing is horrible. The acting is almost uniformly shambolic. The special effects are often laughable model shots that look all the worse for their marriage to the much more big-budget helicopter action sequences. Stock footage is utilized relentlessly, in a way that you simply can't get away with on television any more. And yet, all of these failings combine to create something, that when it is examined from the right perspective, is far greater than the sum of its parts.

The acting and writing, as bad as they are succeed in creating a sense of an unseen mythology behind the surface of the action. Stringfellow Hawke, woodenly portrayed by Jan Michael Vincent (henceforth JMV) seems to have depths unrevealed by the scripted show. Stringfellow can fly the heck out of a helicopter. If he meets any random veteran, odds are that String probably airlifted them out of "Indian Country" back in 'Nam. Oh yeah, and Airwolf.

He performs cello recitals of Prokofiev for a bald eagle (represented by the same few seconds of stock footage again and again, occasionally flipped for the sake of variety) that fishes in the lake where Hawkes' cabin lies. (represented by the same few seconds of stock footage again and again, occasionally flipped for the sake of variety) whilst sitting in a camp chair on his dock/launch pad. His bucolic cabin on a soundstage (which is disjunctive, considering that the dock is a location shot) is filled with a collection of priceless old masters and early modern paintings. Gabrielle, his love interest from the pilot episode (they all die) exclaims at the quality of his reproduction of Van Gogh's "Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear." Hawke informs her that it is not a copy. She exclaims that she saw the original at the "Impressionists Museum" (presumably the Musée d'Orsee, one supposes--Donald Belasario apparently lacked an encyclopedia) never mind that this painting has been in London's Courtauld Institute Galleries since 1948) His wine cellar is exquisitely stocked. Gabrielle tries to impress him by identifying the wine they are drinking as a '79 Montrachet (never mind that the bottle is resting on the bar two feet from her head). A few lines later he cuttingly identifies it as a '78. Hawke is kind a total jerk if he likes you, because if he likes you, you'll probably die. Like his parents. His first girlfriend. His brother Saint John (annoyingly referred to as "Sin Jin") has been MIA in Vietnam for years. His girlfriends die with alarming regularity. This makes him understandably taciturn and brooding, communicated by JMV as a sort of sullen grumpiness. All of these ludicrous details paint a colossal figure, a dark hero who thinks nothing of using a supersonic attack helicopter as a one-on-one antipersonnel weapon. The script and JMV fail to communicate this. But the slapdash fragments of their failures somehow do.

Another aspect of Airwolf which works when it really shouldn't is the disjucntive textures of the various modes of film making used in each episode. Location shots are deliriously interspersed with soundstage sets, stock footage of various ages and qualities weaves drunkenly from exploding model shots to footage recycled from previous episodes. The end result is a celebration of the idiosyncracies of each, and their staggering incompatibility brings a fascinating off-kilter rhythm to the proceedings: we are remorselessly asked to suspend disbelief again and again, finally settling into a shell-shocked haze at the magnificent stupidity of it all. A further notable aspect of this is the recycling of various shots from the pilot episode--the iconic slow spin up of the juxtaposed rotors, shots of Airwolf at rest in her mountain fastness, the deployment of the weapons system, or of JMV's steely, determined glare through the glass of the cockpit. The reuse of these images results in sort of ritual space in the narrative. As Sylvester LeVay's iconic synthesizer theme begins, and we see the images of Airwolf becoming prepared for her next adventure, we are in the presence of a great warrior girding her loins for battle, and these images are the traditional benediction or supplications performed as part of that rite.

An aside concerning the music: Sylvester LeVay was really good. The Airwolf theme is instantly recognizable, of course. But the incidental music and synthesized sound design are totally bitchin'. There is some wicked cool fm synth programming going down here.

oh dear

As seen on Mission St.

typefighters

If any of you who care about typefaces and such didn't notice this on BoingBoing, well, there it is.

thank you Japan

From AltJapan.