Sunday, December 09, 2007

Nor any drop to drink

So Alex escapes the excesses of fire to come here to the excesses of water.
If ya don't cut down the trees yer house burns down.
If ya do cut down the trees, mudslides turn roads into rivers.

'Tis a pity, a pity that we can't coordinate things so that the floods put out the fires and the fires dry up the floods and we all go tripping gaily in the glen.

I'm not totally sure, but I think we are the only state that has high occupancy canoe lanes. (once again revealing my inability to steal outright, that joke is from Ron Judd's Seattle Times column)

Further caveat, "Tis a pity" etc is from Beethovens last words, he was referring to some wine he was expecting, which was to cure him or something.

Even more caveat, that last caveat is from something I read somewhere and is as likely to be true as anything else you read.

Caveatus maximus, "Canem"

You figure it out. My ADD just kicked in again.

Progress on the violin concerto is progressing progressively. I still feel like a bit of a coward for skipping the percussion and the piano concertos.

Beethoven again, his fifth, "The Emperor" seewhottImean?

You figure it out. My ADD just kicked in again.

Meredith (mine, not the one who is a personal friend of MTT) says there are flecks of snow wafting through the winter air outside the cold glass panes that separate us from the harsh extradomicilular environment.

I lift the curtain and gaze in vain, for I see them not.

I'm sorry, but I forgot to remember my first stepfather, no wait a minnit, the second
who was stationed at Pearl Harbor on Dec 7 '41.
I usually include the joke about there being a nip in the air.
"Nip" is short for Nipponese. "Nippon" being the Japonese word for Japonese.
In my formative years the word was Jap. Even the ones who had been here for generations.
Roosevelt sent them all to concentration camps.
My first stepfather was at Iwo Jima in the Coast Guard on a P.T. boat.
If you had to be at Iwo Jima that was a much better place.

Ummm... My first Father in law was in the Army with MacArthur when they were pushed off the island and Dougie scarpered

I, personally, found a way to get out of the draft.

Maybe that's why the Christian world hates me.

Ah, well we go into life with what we have.
Do you remember that event?

11 Comments:

Blogger Lane Savant said...

Oh yeah,
Dec. 6 was Finland's birthday
Dec. 5 was repeal (of prohibition) day.
Dec. 16 is Beethoven's birthday.

12:00 PM  
Blogger Alex Shapiro said...

I managed to find the one dry spot in all of this. The islands were spared the disaster; we just had heavy-but-normal rain the day that everyone else was clogging the canoe-pool lane.

In my desperate attempt to continue my excellent streak of finding countless things to do while procrastinating on finishing this big piece I'm supposed to be writing but managing to avoid with numerous ardent and good distractions,
(breath)
I clicked around your MP3s on the right hand side of the page.
Wonderful!
I am still howling with laughter over "Nightmare."
Folks, you gotta hear this one.
That's all I'll say.

3:08 PM  
Blogger Lane Savant said...

I'm beginning to sense that procrastination is a valuable aid to composition.
I've even gone so far as to "give it all up" only to find myself at the keyboard writing down stuff that I had no notion could ever exist.
There is probably something profound in this but it would require mental effort and....well...whatever.
You tempt me to repost my set of variations for cat choir.
S iamese
A lley
T abby
B engal
Based on a theme by Darius Meow.
All masterfully performed by the awsome Heller (R.I.P.)
Garfield number 9(L)

.............Sorry

4:12 PM  
Blogger Lane Savant said...

Yes, it does give a new dimension to the concept of a "car pool"

4:14 PM  
Blogger Glenn Buttkus said...

Nice to know that Ms. Shapiro was spared the 100mph winds, and battalions of trees crashing down on power lines, relatively safe there in the rain shadow stretching up Sequiem, and not a party to parlaying with the Puget Sound Convergence Zone. Alex, perhaps there is a small squad of angels that hang around your cabin, and your island; realizing that you need to be spared, to be safe, to continue to plug into the music eminating from the dimensional shifts between worlds, that music that only the very few, the special can hear, and write down, and reshape, and give it their stamp of perceptual individuality; as you do on a semi-regular basis, expect when procrastination and mastication prevent you from completing a thing, from declaring a state of closure on that creativity.

If you were King, Palmer, or even just a demigod, or the dog catcher, I have no doubt that you would pass some legislation that would legalize and fiscally support the canoe lane phenomonon, but that you would also create funding for the arts; without strings attached so that Alex would not hold you up to ridicule, or fuss at you.

Good steal from Ron Judd, sir:
Trail Mix: Ron Judd/the Seattle Times.

Ron Judd's "Trail Mix" column, which appears Thursdays in Northwest Weekend, focuses on the Northwest great outdoors — with just the right amount of real life thrown in for good measure.

E-mail | 206-464-8280 | Bio | Ron Judd archive
Other columns by Ron Judd
Each Sunday, The Wrap provides the punch line to the week's news headlines.

Here is some more data on Ludwig's demise:
After Beethoven lost custody of his nephew, he went into a decline that led to his death on March 26, 1827 during a thunderstorm. [12]

A Viennese pathologist and forensic expert Christian Reiter (head of the Department of Forensic Medicine at Vienna Medical University) claimed that Beethoven's physician, Andreas Wawruch, inadvertently hastened Beethoven's death. According to Reiter, Wawruch worsened Beethoven's already lead poisoned condition with lead poultices applied after repeated surgical draining of his bloated abdomen. Various theories attempt to explain how Beethoven's lead poisoning first developed, and he was very sick years before his death in 1827 at the age of 56.[13] Reiter's hypothesis however is at odds with Wawruch's written instruction "that the wound has to be kept dry all the time". Furthermore human hair is a bad indicator of lead contamination.

Sorry to be so naive, and cyber stupid, but what does it mean to have your ADD kick in?

The "blizzard" of Sunday, 12/09/07, turned into a lot of flakes here in Sumner, covered the ground pretty good for about an hour. Always shakes up the populus. It is supposed to be 24 degrees tomorrow morning. Should be a joy for me heading off to the office at 4:30am, chipping ice, and listening to my car radio.

Yeah, the Japanese lost the war, but certainly won the peace, stole the US Steel Industry, and the Lumber Industry, and have cornered the electronics and technology markets, right? Saw a dude wearing a t-shirt with a fellow riding a motorcycle, in mid jump, with the huge word, H O N D A, under it. On the back of the shirt it said, "FROM THOSE WONDERFUL PEOPLE THAT BROUGHT YOU PEARL HARBOR.". When an actor pal of mine was in the Universal film, MIDWAY, the whole cast received Christmas cards from the Japanese star, Toshiro Mifune, and the cards all arrived on December 7. I remember reading some old Life magazines from WWII years, and there was a series of photos that showed one of the many BurmaShave ads. The signs read:
SAVE SCRAP,
SLAP A JAP,
BurmaShave.

We had more than our share of Japanese Americans in the Northwest, and up in the San Juans, farmers and businessmen, and teachers. They all went to those "camps" in California, and their properties were confiscated by the US Government --and I don't think most of them got anything back.

Glenn

5:02 PM  
Blogger Lane Savant said...

ADD Attention Deficit Disorde
Was that a B-29 flying over?
I wonder if the mail is here ye...

7:56 AM  
Blogger Glenn Buttkus said...

As you have already realized, I got my son-in-law Joel to give Melva and I our "new" digital camera, our Christmas present, a few weeks early. We got him to do this because Melva is winging east in two days, and I needed some help in figuring out how to get a picture into the profile. Joel is an Apple computer user, so he had to struggle with my 9 year old Dell, but he got 'er done. My pic, of course, looks like something warning you of a pedaphile at the post office, but at our age we are lucky to even create an image at all.

Thanks for the definition of ADD. Like CRS, it is good to understand the alphabet soup. I thought it was some kind of function, or dysfunction of Word on the computer. How wonderfully literal I am midst my naive and ignorance.

I have slaved away every spare moment over the last couple of days, loading up FEEL FREE TO READ with poetry, narratives, film reviews, and general banter that should snag a "reader" or two. Doug set it up, wrote two sentences, and then never returned to comment further. I still think, sir, that this would be the forum for your old plays, short stories, and obscure poems. Maybe even you could scan the music sheets in on some of your compositions. I have pasted in all the loose prose and verse that I had stashed. Now I am ready to post any new stuff that comes along. If I were retired, like some people, I would begin to rewrite my two unpublished novel manuscripts. Of course I have "heard" that once anything, a poem, an article, or otherwise is published on the web, and is out there for "free" public consumption, there will never be a bone fide publisher that will touch the material after that; like an experienced woman, the material is no longer a mystery, a hidden and virginal treasure. So that is something I will need to check into at some point. I really do intend, somewhere down the line to put about 50 of my best movie reviews into a book, and to hawk it as a very unique perspective on film, THE BUTTKUS EDGE, or something catchy.

It is a fuzzy area for me to listen and to read that you composers have dry spells, that the Muse zips it shut, and the notes linger in limbo. I know that this can happen to writers, that words will hang behind cortexical barriers rather than flowing out faster than one's fingers can fly. I have never spent more than a few months writing, usually just setting aside a few hours in and around my life and my job. So far then I have never experienced any sort of writer's block; usually just the opposite, as words tumble out willy nilly. Why use one word when fifty will make it plainer, more specific, richer. Twice I have had times of unemployment as an actor, and I took those months to pretend I was a writer; setting down every day to write for the the first 8 hours, and then blue pencilling, and getting ready to type out the third or fourth draft. Now with word processors the whole process should be somewhat expedited. I still believe that a "real writer" always writes first in long hand; the personal touch ala Hemingway. The words appear in your own curvsive loops and twitches, and the same for the first eddy of blue penciling.

So when you and Alex talk about ways to refocus, and get the music to flow, I can only partially relate. For most of us, music is the supreme mystery; a foreign language that we can hear, but cannot read or write.

So Sunday next will be Beethoven's birthday. I will have to wear earplugs in celebration, and cuss out everyone I encounter, and kick some holes in walls, and scream at my dog.

Yes, Alex, I agree that Doug's mp3's are classic, and worthy of a listen or three. This "big piece" that you are supposed to finish, is it a presold piece, or some huge undertaking, an opus, a jazz operetta that you will first complete and then peddle? Making a living from your Art puts you into a very small catagory, a tight gaggle of artists who understand the nature of merchanidizing without compromising.

This Friday, the TFC will hold a screening of the French film, JOYEUX NOEL, and it will be shown at our annual Christmas party. It is a powerful anti-war film, worthy of viewing for its message, and for the entertainment.

Glenn

1:32 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hallö, Glenn!
How do you find out all the interesting information you pass along here?? I never before read anywhere of the circumstances involved in Beethoven's death.
Interesting that you are getting snow in the mild Puget Sound area before we get any here in mid-Mecklenburg, from which I regularly flee in January to avoid the snow and (worse) ice and head for the (usually) ice-free area where you all are.
Tschüß,
Anonomann.
P.S.I see from your photo that you still have your beard. Is that why Melva is fleeing for a spell in the hope she returns to a beardless partner??
Best wishes !!
Anonomann

1:26 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hallo, Lane!
Interesting blog!
How did you avoid the draft??
Los Angeles "air" so ruined my lunghs temporarily,before I fled that bin of polluted iniquity ("Don't Californicate Puget Sound!"), I had my "physical" and so polluted the breathalyzer that they didn't want me polluting the Army. Having been freed of fighting against people wanting to be liberated from capitalist oppression, my lunghs normalized in Arizonan, then Coloradan air and are now happily breathing Mecklenburgische Luft.
Tschüß,
Anonomann

1:32 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hallo, nochmals, Lane -- and Meredith and Keth:
The LL and I send greetings to all of you.
Tschüß,
Anonomann (+ LL)

1:53 AM  
Blogger Lane Savant said...

Hey, Anono, I avoided the draft by joining up. Just the sort of thing that is my idiom.

4:07 PM  

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