Thanksgiving Day

As most people know, the Pilgrims dropped like flies that first winter in the new world, and now I know why.

Here in England where the Pilgrims originated from, there isn't much of a winter. The coldest it ever gets is slightly below freezing, though in Celsius "zero degrees!" certainly sounds cold. But it isn't. Not really.

Now the pilgrims, looking on maps of the world, figured they'd dial down winter even more so they aimed for somewhere in what is now Massachusetts, figuring that it's far more southernly latitude would mean no more winters of any sort.

They were wrong. What they couldn't have understood at the time was that England's far northern latitude is only made habitable by the fluke of the Gulf stream, which pumps warmth up from the Gulf of Mexico. The pilgrims logically concluded that traveling a thousand miles south of England's latitude would mean weather similar to Southern Spain. Heck, as they crossed the Atlantic some of them may have even thrown away their coats, figuring they'd never need them again.

Things must have been nice that first summer in New England, confirming all their calculations. By this time, they probably figured that winter had set in and that it was slightly colder than they had expected. What they didn't realize, however, was that this not winter by any means, only fall in New England. Winter would be another 30 or 40 degrees colder.

It's no wonder, then, that the Pilgrims dropped like flies that first winter. They were woefully unprepared for what was going to hit them, and I can't even imagine how native Americans equipped themselves to live through the worst of Northeastern winters.

Q: What do they call Chinese food in China?

A: Food.

The Thousands

Caught a gallery opening over in Shoreditch tonight,  featuring works from folks such as Swoon, Banksy, Blek Le Rat, and plenty of others. Very nice.

Medium term readers of this blog will know that I was a "toy" tagger back in the mid 1970s in Washington Heights, and much later would trade nods with Keith Haring (whom I stand around watching while he did his chalk art in empty ad places in the NYC subways). Because of this, perhaps, a lot of this art feels a hell of a lot more approachable than much of the uninteresting and self-referential Big Establishment art.

Shoreditch, if you are unaware, is kind of London's defacto artsy zone, vaguely like Soho back in the late 70s and 80s: Lots of old factory buildings but with hidden gallery spaces and odd shops and design firms. That part of London is actually not easy to get to from the West End and London's great north, but it's worth checking out if you want to get a flavor for local interesting activity. Anyway, here's some photos...


Some Banksy prints...

An area of up-and-coming folks...

A piece by WK Interact...

And this was the ramp I walked in on. Unfortunately, I walked on that little upturned lip at the bottom and it caused the whole ramp to teeter-totter up and then slam down, sounding just like a gun shot. After turning to look at what had happened I then looked back at the assembled folks and they were all silent and staring right at me like I was nuts or something!
Ah well. Perhaps they're right.

Finch

Did I ever mention that I want it all in a novel these days? I not only want well-crafted characters, I want incredible ideas and a really nonlinear plot. Oh, and I want phenomenal prose, too.

I'm getting this in Jeff Vandermeer's Finch.

More than this, however, is the fact that only in his city of Ambergris can the noir-knob be set so damned high...not even Sin City can match a world in which fungal humanoids have taken over a city previously already quite chaotic but human-dominated. But in Ambergris, nothing is certain, not even physical structures or humanity as they all are succumbing to the Grey Cap's fungal technology. It's such a sense of uncertainty and living nightmare that it validates why I feel that some of the best writing occurs in genres that publishers and retailers like to slap with a tag of "sci-fi" or "fantasy". But this doesn't do books like this or Samuel R Delaney's any kind of real justice.

The prose is superb, and as the plot evolves even the every day features of life in Ambergris are unnerving as they are exposed, such as the "memory caps", which are memory mushrooms that sprout from the dead and that visually replay (for those that eat them), the experience of the deceased in the hours and minutes before they died.

It's a world so dark and detailed and unobvious and disturbing that you find yourself memerized and astonished.

Gotta fire a guy

Weird. I'm in a situation at work where I will need to fire a guy. More specifically, I actually want to fire this guy, and I don't feel bad about it at all.
Don't get me wrong, I completely comprehend what getting fired does to your life. First of all, it puts you in a fairly dangerous and desparate financial situation: You need to grab a new job fast, or face homelessness or, worse, moving back in with your parents (if they are alive). It also really screws up your social life and self-esteem: You try to avoid discussing "what you do" in conversations. Finally, you feel kinda loserish. Actually, since my brothers and many of my friends are musicians, the idea of being 'unemployed' is far less well defined, so I regularly hang out with folks who don't technically give a shit about being unemployed.
But for those of us who have 'gone legit', getting fired can be quite a blow.
In this guy's case I don't feel bad, however. First of all, I know I wouldn't be firing him simply because he didn't kiss enough ass or try to fit it. After all these years my ego has enough crap kicked out of it that I don't need to be the personal life boss to all my employees. (Since folks working for me find this liberating and others can't quite handle me talking to them as equals.) Second, I wouldn't be firing this guy because he wasn't quite good enough for my crack world class team of supergeniuses. No. Rather, in a team of relatively bright folks who try to kinda care about what they do, this guy just doesn't do ANYTHING. People have asked me what he does and I say I don't know.
Third of all, I would be OK with carrying some dead weight, but they won't let me hire anyone in addition and this guy's lack of functionality is really making life suck for everyone else.
Is the guy crazy? No, I don't think so. I think he just misrepresented himself and the kind of environment he's worked in before and I gotta get rid of him. The tough thing about this situation is that he could possibly take us all down with him if he doesn't do what he's supposed to, so fuck that. It's him or the rest of us and I choose him.
Heartless, aint it?

The House on the Lanes

That house was pretty unique, actually. A holdover from the "black country" days of coal mining and heavy industry. For its' time, it was considered one of the more posh houses in the neighborhood, fit for a foreman or higher-level manager as opposed to a worker.

Today, the house exists at the joining edge of two separate neighborhoods, each of which sits in two different counties, though this is really not directly relevant per se. But what is relevant is that the house does not sit on any street, but at the end of a series of alleyways and maze-like cut-throughs between these older workers cottages and muse houses. Actually, it sits at the end of two series of alleyways and maze-like cut-throughs, each alley leading to the house zigzagging through its respective neighborhood/county on either side of the house.

Because of this unique situation, the house eventually accumulated a steady traffic of people using it as a cut-through to get from one neighborhood to the other, as any other route required a drive of several miles.

This may sound improbable, and like the house had become some kind of public property, but this was not the case. Actually, it's easy to imagine the actual situation: Friends of the couple that lived in the house would sometimes drop by through one door for afternoon tea, and then when finished leave through the other door, to go grocerie shopping or visiting relatives in the other neighborhood.

The utility of the house as cut-through was well-known, of course, so that when it became known that actual friends of the couple were going to visit/cut through, they would sometimes accumulate friends and acquantances who would want to come along so as to partake of the convenience of cutting through.

These secondary friends and acquantences would of course eventually come by themselves and sometimes not even stay for tea: They merely would like to know if it was OK if they could pass through and, no bother, not importune them for tea or biscuits. As the secondary friends became regulars, they'd of course bring along tertiary friends until after a while there was a steady traffic of strangers passing through the kitchen and front parlour of the house.

The husband, actually the son of a lifelong miner, was the manager of a dairy distributor, got tired of this and decided one day to brick up the bottom level, so that from the front parlour it was only possible to get to the kitchen by traveling up the stairs to the first floor and then walking down the back stairs down to ground.

For a while they had some piece as it became quite clear what the motivation was. Some of the actual friends understood, but others in the area considered it rude and there were Chinese whispers around the neighborhood suggesting that the real cause was some sort of marital difficulties.

Eventually, however, the primary friends started moving up the stairs to get over to other side of the house and out the door to access the other neighborhood, and soon followed secondary friends and, eventually, strangers. It got so bad that they had to socialize appropriate times for the cross over. The husband felt like that boatman mentioned in the Greek myths that ferried people from life to the full-fledged afterlife, but he couldn't remember the name of that chap.

Eventually, however, he made the decision to brick up the second floor as well, and this caused some issues: The wife's job occurred in a county beyond one of the adjoining neighborhoods while the husband's job was local to the other adjoining neighborhood. As a result, it often made sense for them to sleep in separate halves of the house.

They did, however, develop a system for passing small objects to each other through the windows by placing the objects in small baskets at the end of poles. They had wall-knocks to signal or, if one of them was not within hearing distance of a knock, they'd phone and ring three times before hanging up to signal the need to "talk" through the knocks.

After months turned into years, they eventually forgot what each other looked like. You may think that's absurd, but how many married couples look at old photos of each other? They just assumed they did still know what each other looked like but in reality they had forgotten. That's why, at an antique show + auction one Spring afternoon, they bid against each other for the same item, a small inlaid snuff box from the 1880s.

Between the two of them, bidding soared into the high 3 digits for the snuff box, with other bidders rapidly falling away. As they bid each of them felt a certain animosity towards the other, for muscling in on a special item that only he or she had the proper eye to appreciate. As a result, bidding rose well beyond what the item was worth, and even well beyond what either of them would have otherwise paid for it, no matter how charming. More to the point, the bidding surpassed even what money they had in their account (which was a joint account after all) and even beyond the conservative credit line given to them by the bank. In other words, neither of them could afford it. And because this antique show was a small, local affair, there had been no credit checks so both of them had to forfeit the item. It was offered to the third-placed bidder for £125.

Bjork interviews Arvo Part

They seem to understand one another perfectly.

Junior College Shooting

At Patriot Junior College in Texarkana Arkansas, student Mel Turkington opened fire, killing 19 people. During the melee, police responded and in the process, Officer Henry Jones opened fire, killing 3 of his fellow officers and wounding four more.

Hearing the gunshots, Mel Turkington returned fire, killing an additional 2 officers and 4 more fellow students. One student, however, holed up in the Patriot Library, appears to have been armed, and she herself killed both gunman Mel Turkington, Officer Henry Jones, 1 additional officer and 5 more additional students.

At a nearby gas station, Sean Williams witnessed police cars responding to the campus shooting and, apparently in response, begain firing his semi-automatic weapon indiscriminantly at fellow employees, motorists, and patrons of the adjacent In-and-Out-Burger, killing 5 and wounding 4 more.

Although unconfirmed, the author of this blog post, upon hearing of the shootings, himself picked up a .44 caliber handgun and proceeded out to the street, where he shot (in succession) a street cleaner, a bus driver, a poodle, three little old ladies, a convenience store owner and a ticket booth worker. Certain older readers of this blog, upset that the blog has continually failed to live up to its original anno mirabils, returned fire, severely wounding the author.