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Living The Potemkin Life

October 31, 2013 15 Comments

[Thanks to my friend Andy for sending this video along]

Love, love, love that guy’s speech. That Pepperidge Farm accent is actually getting pretty rare in Maine. I live in western Maine, and you hardly ever hear it around here. This delightful fellow is in Deer Isle, about two or three hours dead east of here, right on the Maine coast. Western Maine isn’t Yankee. It’s more continental polyglot than Albion. People have a distinctive twang here, but it’s more like a frostback NASCAR lilt than ayup.

The Intertunnel loves stuff like this. They treat the discovery of such work online as akin to unsealing Tutankhamen’s tomb. While I’ve never done it myself, I’ve seen it done lots of times. Landscapers for tony houses in Massachusetts routinely split granite in this fashion to make outdoor steps while I was working alongside them doing something else. Feathers and wedges. Of course, there’s one gigantic bit of handwaving involved with the video. Someone’s got to drill those holes, and drilling holes in granite is no picnic.  Most use an air hammer. The wedge and feather work is the easy part, if more fun to film.

I was told that our colonial ancestors used to split rock in quarries by drilling holes in a line, which must have been very hard work indeed, then filling the holes with water and waiting for the winter’s hard freeze to expand the ice in the holes and crack the block loose. Most heavy stuff out in the landscape, prior to the internal combustion engine, anyway, was moved in the winter on sledges. Loggers like working in the winter because it’s easier to drag big boles over frozen ground with no puckerbrush around.

This fellow and his wife(?) run a hostel in Deer Isle. Of course it’s an eco-hostel, because moral preening adds oodles of enjoyment to any Potemkin vacation. I find such quirky people interesting and generally enjoyable, and people have been known to lump my family in with such quirkies, which is all right by me; I just have no appetite for the intellectual horsehockey necessary to think that subsistence farming is “ecologically” less intrusive than a two bedroom ranch filled with people that buy beefsteak tomatos at the Stop &Shop. New England, and especially Maine, is now empty, and that emptiness has been filled in with lots of trees, not pavement, because subsistence farming for everyone was shot dead a long time ago, and there was no longer a need to flatten the entire landscape to plant a few wan acres of the barely edible, looked after by people one hard winter from destruction.

If you do things for yourself, Intertunnel viewers are quick to praise it, generally, unless it’s self-defense, of course; but there’s a limit to what’s sensible, or even possible to do on your own, and you rub up against that limit pretty fast. It’s ridiculous to poop in a hole in the ground with a solar panel on the roof over your head and talk about sustainability. Solar panels aren’t made in a shed, and you don’t swap last fall’s rhubarb crop for them. Your hammer came from Home Depot, not a forge in the back yard. And money made right next to a smokestack and spent with you out in the landscape is still the same kind of money.

They’re interesting people, and backbreaking work is fun — if you’re visiting. Why can’t people leave it like that?

Unorganized Hancock Makes Videos, Like Humans Do

October 30, 2013 9 Comments

Your favorite unorganized band, Unorganized Hancock, is back and better’n ever, with their gloss on Like Humans Do by David Byrne.

David Byrne is an interesting fellow. He’s part of a very fertile batch of artists, musicians, authors, actors, and assorted ne’er-do-wells that emerged from The Rhode Island School of Design back in the late sixties and seventies, which also includes two other members of the Talking Heads, Charles Rocket, David Macauley, Martin Mull — and my older brother, who shares the ten-year-old drummer’s name, and who gives the big one music lessons on Skype in all his spare time, a non-existent thing if there ever was one. He tried to teach me how to play thirty years ago, but I’m lazy and discovered you could get gigs if you just owned a bass, so not much of it did me any good. He’s having more luck banging glissandos and fermatas and solfeggios, which are all various kinds of pasta, I think, into The Heir’s head.

If you’d like to throw those minstrel boys a coin, there’s a PayPal button in the right hand column. The boys play live, and record, using equipment we were able to purchase for them because of the generosity of my readers. Many thanks! Generosity: it’s what humans do, or at least the ones I’ve met on the Intertunnel.

[Update: Wow, Charles E. from New Mexico made a generous donation to the boys, and suggested they might like to purchase Nehru jackets with the loot. Sage advice, if you ask me, but the boys will probably waste the money on a digital input/output signal processor instead. Jeez, kids these days. No sense of style. Many thanks!]

[Up-Update: Wow again. Melissa K. from Tejas is very generous, and we all thank her for it. They should make her the mayor of Texas. I’d vote for her twice]

[Upper-Update: Kathleen M. from Connecticut restores my faith in humanity — not one iota less than that]

There’s Always A New Trend

October 27, 2013 7 Comments

Bossa Nova means “new trend” in Portuguese. Born in the fifties, made big in the sixties, it took a Brazilian beach samba vibe, mashed it with smooth jazz, and became a new trend indeed.

If you hear it in the elevator now, you might think The Girl from Ipanema is trite. But then again, things have to become more or less universal to become trite. If you’ve a mind to, you can transport yourself to the time and place and circumstances of the ears hanging by the transistor radios and wonder what it would be like to hear Astrud Gilberto’s whisper and Stan Getz’ lounge saxophone for the first time. There was nothing like it. Compare it to the blattering roar of big bands, still abroad in the land from their heyday in the forties.

I’m not sure what the new trend is right now. I don’t try to keep up as much as if I was still performing, or even listening to popular records. But there’s got to be something out there. There always is. Maybe my children will invent it.

Beware Justin Gotta

October 25, 2013 8 Comments
[Editor’s Note: first offered eight years ago. It got edited heavily, but there’s still some ancient references in there]
[Author’s Note: I’ve been doing this for eight years? Either I deserve a medal, or the readers do. There is no editor]

Who’s Justin Gotta, you ask? Why, he‘s your consultant for house design and decorating, work, home life, play, finances, politics, childrearing…

Maybe I should explain.

I’ve discovered a rule of thumb that has carried me through my life without disappointment for many years. I came to two realizations by observing my housing customers’ as well as my employees’ behavior. Only later did it occur to me that it applied to almost any stripe of life. Here it is:

Part 1: When the customer uses the word just in a sentence, you’re about to hear something dumb.

Example: Why don’t you just build the second floor first, we have the lumber for that, and slip the first floor under it later? Why can’t we just do that?

Or: Why can’t we just make the house two thousand square feet bigger for no money?

Part 2: When an employee uses the words I gotta in a sentence, it’s going to be followed by something stupid, or a lie — generally both.

Example: I can’t work today because I gotta …

There’s no need to bother listening to that sentence, because it really doesn’t matter what follows, you don’t want to hear it.

On the one hand, I’ve had employees come to me and ask permission to leave work fifteen minutes early on Friday afternoon so they could go to chemotherapy. They scheduled their treatments on Fridays as late in the afternoon as possible, so they could recover in time for work on Monday.

People like that never use the words “I gotta.”

The “I gotta” is a sort of a vestigal verbal tail, left over from the teen years, an attempt to weasel out of your obligations or get treatment you don’t deserve by appealing to a goldbricking, layabout deus ex machina, an overriding imaginary obligation that makes further discussion or disputation impossible.

“But I told you I gotta have Wednesday off! Didn’t you hear me? I gotta! It’s not like I have a choice in the matter; I gotta pick up my brother and go to the casino and get loaded and then I gotta have another day off in a couple weeks to go to court for missing my child support payments that I blew at the racetrack on the way home from the casino and the barroom. I just gotta.”

Keeping a watchful eye out for those two terms has served me in good stead lo these many years. And I always hope to give as good as I get, so I’m careful to beware of them lest they appear in my own sentences.

Customers, beware the just and gottas on your own end, as well. Like an accusing index finger, the just and gottas generally have a malefactor on both ends of them.

If you hear: “We were going to work at your house this week but we gotta…”

Oh no. We gotta. The “we gotta” is an especially virulent form of the virus, and has been known to wipe out entire work weeks.

“Can’t you just pay us in advance? Because we gotta… “

This is the equivalent of the plague sweeping a medieval town. If you spot the dreaded we gotta, in the same sentence, or egads, in the same prepositional phrase as can’t you just?, abandon all hope. There is nothing left for you but prayer.

I began to notice that the rule applied to everything in life, not just work. It’s as close to the Golden Rule as I’ve ever gotten, and I’m no philosopher. Think about it.

It’s charming to remember a time when that jugeared martian from Texas, Ross Perot, was considered a legitimate presidential candidate, and his whole party platform consisted of saying why can’t we just about everything. Why can’t we just tell those Palestinians and Jews to knock it off? Why can’t we just raise the gas tax fifty cents? Why can’t we just run the federal government out of a Motel 6 in Austin?

And so forth. It’s a testament to the attraction of “just” and “gotta” that he got as far as he did, and likewise a testament to the good sense of the electorate who finally realized he’s just a cross between your boss asking you don’t you just work on Christmas eve for free, and your plumber telling you he can’t come for two days, to make your finless brown trout disappear, because he’s gotta wax his boat.

And so, gentle reader, remember: when someone says: Why don’t you Just Do It, tell them it’s unlikely you’ll just become a two hundred and seventy pound mass of muscle who runs as fast as a sprinter by buying shoes that look like moonboots. When you hear: Why don’t we just get five gay men to decorate our shabby apartment on television, or: I gotta talk to the president again and dictate American foreign policy from a ditch by the side of the road, why can’t we just… caution is called for.

Beware Justin Gotta.

We’re Winning The Desultory Race

October 23, 2013 7 Comments

We went for a walk by the seaside by mistake. Just my wife and me. The sun tried to climb its ladder to its summertime nest, but it’s weary now and falls a few rungs short. It hangs lower in the sky, and you can take the full measure of its power without worrying that you’ll get too much. You’ll dream of too much for the next six months.

The road dipped and swelled and swayed back and forth along the wide green pastures that rolled on down to the granite border of the surf. Walking along the margin between pavement and grass, you could see that a pasture isn’t a carpet; it’s more like clumps of grass, elbowing each other for room. A pasture is not a lawn. It was only shin high, but it looked like it could swallow you as easily as the surf. There were barns, well cared for, dotted here and there along the route. You could tell they’d been there forever. Really old barns don’t have any windows. Their cedar shingles, gone silver with a fringe of black, were ready to shrug off another winter’s weather, and many more after that.

The ocean’s different here than the one I remember from my childhood. Cape Cod has flat patches of sand, slowly forming and reforming themselves into one hillock after another, sprinkled here and there with beach roses and dune grass. Someone surprised me once and told me that the roses, rosa rugosa, didn’t belong there and are considered an invasive species; but so am I, and took no offense. Here in Maine, the water wears a stone belt, and the big pines and spruces often creep right down and lord over the margin between earth and sea and sky.

Oh, yes — the mistake. We had parked a long hike from our target, and egged on by a local man that likely thinks the moon can’t be more’n ten miles from here, we’d forgone a chance for a shuttle and we’d walked to our destination. Half our party decided to wait and return with the bus ferrying people to and fro, but we decided to hoof it back, too. We made it into a desultory race.

My wife and I are seldom alone. There is no place to go without our children. But there we were, with nothing but the sun in the sky and the endless green pillows in the fields rolling down to the sea. We talked little about next to nothing, and didn’t hurry, like contented diners with a cup of coffee going cool in front of them, unwilling to yield their table. People long married don’t talk like they’re on a date when they’re alone, thank God. There’s no need to prattle on. It’s too late to try to impress anyone. No one can be impressed with you after they’ve heard you snore. We were alone, and together, and the world was a jolly place for the three hundred and fifty miles or so that fellow thinks a mile is.

We won our little race, going away, and spread a blanket on the grass and sunned ourselves for a little while, my head in her lap, with twenty-three years of marriage arrayed behind us like a chorus to murmur their assent.

Month: October 2013

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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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