Summahtime Music
June 20, 2012
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Top down. Seat back. Wing window wake takes your hat.
Diamond in the back, sunroof top
Diggin’ the scene
With a gangsta lean
Gangsta whitewalls
TV antennas in the back
Manufactory
June 19, 2012
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Manufactory is a great word. People often think I made it up when I use it, because they don’t read Smith. It’s fallen out of favor. Its two great pieces have been made wholly independent: Manual and Factory. But they are not mutually exclusive; at least, not for people like me. I think the word factory is cold; dead. People animate it no matter how few are in it. A factory without people is a machine — no more.
I work in a manufactory. It is not a factory and it is not entirely manual, but a melding. I have hand skills of some sort or another, and I use judgment more than you’ll see in a factory, but things get made.
I work in a manufactory that is solely of my own making, but it is not entirely to my liking. I am constrained by my circumstances. I have to produce what I am capable of making with the resources I have at hand for the customers I can find. I have worse tools than I’d like to. A more challenging physical environment than I’d care to be in. There is unnecessary drudgery that is made quite necessary. Yet here we are.
Watch the man in the video. He is highly skilled at what he’s doing. He has cultivated an ability and he’s using it, which is gratifying. His ability shows externally, but it’s internal, like dignity is. It is portable, as long as he is.
It is a little thing, but mine own. That’s all I can claim about many aspects of my life. It’s enough.
What’s A Human For?
June 18, 2012
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I find the modern factory fascinating.
There’s no one working in there to speak of. And most of the people that do work in there are really just presiding over work, not doing it. They’re valuable in a definable way, but not highly skilled. They have knowledge peculiar to the operation and that’s it. They couldn’t work anywhere else using the knowledge they’ve got.
If you were training someone to do this job, you’d have them read a little bit, watch a few videos, maybe, and then endure ten times that much information all about safety. Workers become extravagantly valuable only if you injure them. Most safety training nowadays is simply to keep workers from injuring themselves through a bizarre set of foolish behaviors, undertaken against the express demands of the employer.
How would you educate a child in expectation that they’d someday fill a job like this? If I was in charge, their childhood education would have consisted solely of being taught to read, understand, and be able in turn to produce plain text; to accurately and quickly work with numbers in their head and on paper; and to pay attention closely for extended periods of time while important things are done. This is exactly, precisely, explicitly, utterly and wholly the polar opposite of public education today.
Some people think humans are for making things, [See: Rowe, Michael] and some people think humans are only good for consuming things. [See: Kardashian, various] When the consuming contingent can’t afford to consume things anymore and the producing contingent can’t make anything anymore because there’s no one left to consume it, there’s going to be big trouble.The robots, however, will remain sanguine.
After re-reading that last paragraph, I realized I should have written this about thirty years ago. I apologize for the delay. I have to go make something now. Hope someone buys it.
If You Think Seasick Steve Is Too Highfalutin’, Try Brushy. He’s Keepin’ It Real With One String
June 16, 2012
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Andrew Chin a.k.a. Brushy One String is the son of the late great Freddie McKay, one of Jamaica’s most renowned artists. Like his father, Brushy has reached the hearts of many through the power of original song, fascinating audiences since he was a child with only ONE GUITAR STRING! Established in Jamaica where he is revered by both young and old, financial success and professional management have eluded Brushy. With a soulful voice and infectious guitar melodies, Brushy‚ ‘soothes souls and rough hearts’ as he continues to perform in Jamaica without a record of his own to sell. -United Reggae
I recall a long time ago, when I still lived in Los Angeles, my older brother answered an ad in the local indie paper looking for musicians, and I tagged along. It was in a very sketchy part of town, and I wondered if the car would still be there when we returned to where it was parked.
The fellow answered the door wearing an outfit you couldn’t reproduce without diving in a Goodwill box. A cross between pajamas and clown motley. All the details about the guy’s appearance that weren’t average-y were actively bad. He was shortish, his face was as pockmarked as any Dark Ages smallpox survivor, his hair was wild and falling out at the same time. His teeth were a three-hundred-year-old graveyard.
He apologized that all he had was a Spanish guitar to accompany himself, one that had obviously been used to dig a drainage canal before he owned it. He’d given up trying to keep anything better in his crash pad, as anything even remotely valuable would get stolen on a roughly twice-weekly schedule. If he was home when he was robbed he’d have to hand it to them; if he was out they’d just take it or break it.
His entire life’s work was in a spiral bound notebook of the kind purchased by mothers and ignored by schoolchildren. He carried it around with him like an oxygen tank.
It was the foulest looking sheaf of documents I’ve ever seen. It looked like he ate off it and slept in it.
He opened it up to a page, scrawled runes with chord changes peppered over the top. He had a singing voice somewhere between meh and unpleasant.
Every song in that book was fantastic. We were transfixed by him. He’d get bored a quarter way through one number, and then after a fit of speed-flipping he’d find another one and start in and we’d be entranced again.
He was like the love-child of Cole Porter and Professor Irwin Corey.
I knew in my heart that every single page in that book could win a Grammy or sell a million copies or cure cancer or at the very least explain the meaning of life in a fashion that would make Thomas Aquinas look like Benny Hill. And I also knew, immediately, that no one would ever hear any of them.
How To Be A Dad
June 15, 2012
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When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years. -Mark Twain
Every mother generally hopes that her daughter will snag a better husband than she managed to, but she’s certain that her boy will never get as great a wife as his father did. -Anonymous
The father is always a Republican toward his son, and his mother’s always a Democrat. -Robert Frost
A father is a banker provided by nature. – French Proverb
When I was a kid, I said to my father one afternoon, ‘Daddy, will you take me to the zoo?’ He answered, ‘If the zoo wants you, let them come and get you.’ – Jerry Lewis
Small boy’s definition of Father’s Day: It’s just like Mother’s Day only you don’t spend so much. – Anonymous
When a father gives to his son, both laugh; when a son gives to his father, both cry. -Jewish Proverb
How pleasant it is for a father to sit at his child’s board. It is like an aged man reclining under the shadow of an oak which he has planted. -Voltaire
My father didn’t tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it. -Clarence B. Kelland
It is a wise child that knows its own father, and an unusual one
that unreservedly approves of him. -Mark Twain
My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard. Mother would come out and say, “You’re tearing up the grass.” “We’re not raising grass,” Dad would reply. “We’re raising boys.” -Harmon Killebrew
One father is more than a hundred schoolmasters. – George Herbert
You don’t have to deserve your mother’s love. You have to deserve your father’s. He’s more particular.-Robert Frost
Never raise your hand to your kids. It leaves your groin unprotected. – Red Buttons
It’s a terrible thing to raise your own to disown you –Sippican Cottage
Spread the diaper in the position of the diamond with you at bat. Then
fold second base down to home and set the baby on the pitcher’s mound.
Put first base and third together, bring up home plate and pin the three
together. Of course, in case of rain, you gotta call the game and start
all over again. -Jimmy Piersall
My Father had a profound influence on me, he was a lunatic. – Spike Milligan
(Thanks to reader Al Johnson for sending the video along)
Month: June 2012
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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