Ken Layne's Blog, page 11
October 4, 2014
misterhippity:
In days of yore, before there were cat pictures...
In days of yore, before there were cat pictures on the Internet ….
(From the Greensburg [Indiana] Daily Review, 1900) (via)
The Night Bureau Presents: "Bedtime News For Nightmares"
Medical copter crashes in north Texas, killing patient
The patient died at the scene, the statement said. The helicopter’s pilot was listed in stable but serious condition at United Regional Hospital.
The flight nurse and paramedic were sent to Parkland Hospital in Dallas
Vomiting passenger cleared of Ebola after 2-hour quarantine and CDC investigation at Newark Airport
The passengers aboard United Airlines Flight 998 were ordered to stay in their seats after the jet landed at Newark Airport on Saturday — they were being quarantined after one among them was suspected of being ill with the deadly virus.
More than 250 passengers aboard the flight from Brussels were held on the plane for almost two hours as Centers for Disease Control and Prevention workers wearing hazmat suits removed the passenger — a Liberian national who had vomited on approach — from the plane. His daughter was also removed.
Mass Graves Found Near Mexico Town Where Students Went Missing
The remains were buried on a hillside up a rocky dirt track on the outskirts of Iguala in six suspected graves, which were still fresh, a local official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. Investigators discovered the burned remains, which were put into bags, two officials said, asking to remain anonymous. It was unclear who the remains belonged to, they added.
Former U.S. Ebola patient back in hospital; Dallas patient critical
Dr. Richard Sacra had worked as a medical missionary in Liberia but not directly with Ebola patients. Nevertheless, he contracted the disease. He was treated in isolation at the Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha then released after testing negative for the virus.
Early Saturday, he went to an emergency room in Boston with a cough and fever, said missionary organization Serving in Mission. He was afraid he might have pneumonia.
Bizarre yearbook caption angers parents
A West Virginia high school yearbook photo showing two teens with the caption “Most Likely To Disappear” has parents outraged.
One of those two teens is also special-needs and now his family wants answers and action from the school. The section in the yearbook is called Cameron’s 2014 Hall of Fame.
October 3, 2014
Here’s what my “public domain field guide desert"...
Here’s what my “public domain field guide desert" image search turned up. How’s your research going tonight?
September 23, 2014
September 21, 2014
"We’re encouraged to lose our possessions. Music? Store it on the iCloud. Books? Store it on the...
"We’re encouraged to lose our possessions. Music? Store it on the iCloud. Books? Store it on the iCloud. Movies, magazines, newspapers, TV—all are safely stored in the ether and not underfoot or stuffed in a closet. It’s a modernist monastery where the religion is Apple itself.
Meanwhile, those who have hung onto possessions are castigated, jeered at, and painted as fools.
The hit A&E TV show Hoarders identifies people with things as socially malignant, grotesque, primitive, dirty, bizarre. In a word: poor.”
—Ian Svenonius, “All Power To the Packrat," Jacobin, 7/25/2014
“Why bother with space-devouring, planet-harming plastic objects when so much music can be had at the touch of a trackpad—on Spotify, Pandora, Beats Music, and other streaming services that rain sonic data from the virtual entity known as the Cloud? What is the point of having amassed, say, the complete symphonies of the Estonian composer Eduard Tubin (1905-82) when all eleven of them pop up on Spotify, albeit in random order? (When I searched for ‘Tubin’ on the service, I was offered two movements of his Fourth Symphony, with the others appearing far down a list.) The tide has turned against the collector of recordings, not to mention the collector of books: what was once known as building a library is now considered hoarding. One is expected to banish all clutter and consume culture in a gleaming, empty room.”
—Alex Ross, “The Classical Cloud,” The New Yorker, 9/08/2014
September 19, 2014
Has your approach to making music changed over the decades?
I never had an approach. I was always...
Has your approach to making music changed over the decades?
I never had an approach. I was always like a bear in a honey tree, just trying to get something without getting stung to death.
September 17, 2014
It’s that time of year, almost!
It’s that time of year, almost!
September 12, 2014
The Mojave Phone Booth is an important part of...
The Mojave Phone Booth is an important part of turn-of-the-century Internet culture that happened to involve a mysterious land you can actually visit, in the Mojave National Preserve way up in the high desert between Las Vegas and Los Angeles. The guy who did more than anyone to make this rural desert phone booth a strange international phenomenon is now just 19% away from completing his fundraiser to publish the book. It will be a interesting artifact to own, and I advise you to back the “Kickstarter project" for a few dollars, right now.
September 2, 2014
Highway 666 Revisited
Dusk on Highway 6, a crescent moon hanging over a jagged line of the Sierra Nevada, a distant set of headlights miles up the road from me. The FM choices are few, but with night comes the faraway AM stations. I have heard strange and beautiful noises on these desert nights: Paiute chants from reservations, melodic static like a chorus of goblins, and especially the mystifying rockabilly program I picked up somewhere near Cortez, Colorado, in the summer of 1983.
I was driving cross-country, in my bright orange International Harvester Scout II—a rounded 1970s tank with four-wheel drive you needed to get out and turn on, with a wrench—and there was a scary-looking thunderstorm rising up over the San Juan Mountains ahead. A hillbilly guitar line jumped out of the speakers, with impossible levels of reverb. Howls of insanity and abandon followed, an ancient sound, far more terrifying and primal than anything produced by the punk-fueled rockabilly revival of the era. Another song followed, short and brutal, this time with lyrics so unintelligible that I could never figure out if they were Spanish, English or Martian.
The DJ laughed maniacally, his voice echoing both from the modulation of the scratchy signal and whatever effect he used in his studio booth. He spoke an arcane 1950s’ style slang of Cholo Spanglish I recognized from the slick old guys with their Low Riders in San Diego and Chula Vista and El Cajon. There was an old car-hop diner called Richard’s out in then-rural Santee in San Diego County, and on Saturday nights the classic American cars and less-classic 1970s’ Low Riders would line the gravel parking lot, the proud owners hanging around and talking to their buddies, looking under the hoods at the gleaming engines beneath.
The Cortez DJ was somewhat in the style of Wolfman Jack and the other radio howlers of early rock ‘n roll, but he was also his own special kind of lunatic. The records were menacing, too: For every recognizable number by Johnny Burnette or Eddie Cochran or Wanda Jackson, there were three or four so resolutely bizarre and arcane that the DJ himself might’ve been performing them live, creating them with a Gretsch hollow body run through a theremin and bounced off Sputnik back to Earth.
Adding to this terrifying sonic mix were the lightning strikes from the thunderstorm, now right on top of me. For two or three harrowing hours, I crept southward on U.S. Highway 666 (since renamed by people scared of the Devil) toward Gallup, New Mexico, while giant white bolts exploded around me and a mix of violent rain and hail made it nearly impossible to see the road. At one point I saw what looked like a massive ocean liner (or a Jawa Sandcrawler) backlit by the blue-white glow of another crashing bolt. Only later did I learn this was the notorious “Shiprock"—the remains of an ancient volcano in the Navajo Nation. I was so was shaken and exhausted that when I finally reached a motel and got a room that I couldn’t sleep for another several hours.
I cannot be sure if this was the motel in Gallup where I finally rested so uneasily that night, but it looks right, and “Thunderbird” sounds right, too. On the corner was a phone booth, with the glass shot out, and when I walked out there to make a call home to California, I saw a knocked-over highway sign—two signs, actually, one of them a coveted U.S. Route 66 marker. Back to the Scout for my toolbox and the socket wrench set. I crouched in the highway weeds as the rain poured down, and I brought those signs home. Route 66 officially vanished a year later, but was already the subject of many nostalgic television features and newspaper articles in the early Eighties. (The signs are, I think, still at my sister’s house in Portland. She had nothing to do with that particular crime.)
Thirty years after that harrowing night, I’m driving solo from Bishop to my property up near the Nevada state line, and that music and that voice are right there with me, through the scratchy AM of a rented Hyundai hatchback. 660 AM. Twang and reverb, more country & western than full-on rockabilly, but then … yes, the alien hillbilly beat. Could it be the same lunatic? A recording, like the classic Art Bell show from 1996 I found on another station this same Labor Day Weekend night? The Internet should be a help, but it’s not: there’s a 660 AM that’s a Navajo station, but there’s nobody on the program schedule that matches “crazy reverb guy playing obscure and possibly alien rockabilly.” Mysteries of the Desert.
August 21, 2014
The last Yosemite trip of the summer.
The last Yosemite trip of the summer.
