AS I PLEASE XI: SWEEPING OUT MY BRAIN EDITION
An old friend of mine recently accused me of using the "As I Please" subseries of this blog as a broom to sweep out my brain. He likened my other subseries to objects that had been crafted fully, if not necessarily to everyone's taste: but this one, he said, was the mere sawdust within my creative noggin. Curlicues of ideas. Pieces and fragments. Leftovers and remnants. The grisly bits I couldn't or wouldn't fully develop into their own blogs.
This accusation is entirely true. I'm fairly sure I've even admitted it in these very pages. So if you're a regular or semi-regular reader of Stone Cold Prose, you could be forgiven if you rolled your eyes and muttered "hard pass" whenever you see an As I Please pop up in your feed. On the other hand, you must realize that allblogs, of whatever kind and written with whatever motive, exist partially for this exact purpose, the purpose of emptying the ole braincase. They are essentially outlets, pressure valves, "playspaces" (as Maynard James Keenan put it) where rules which might govern our lives in other ways do not apply.
In my mind, the whole fun of the otherwise frequently poisonous internet is that all that tedious logic and structure we were taught in school can be chucked out the window in favor of all sorts of niche, recherché, free-form, even stream-of-consciousness approaches to storytelling and idea-sharing. Being old enough to remember when the internet was actually invented, I recall as well the excitement many of its earliest denizens felt at discovering this playspace where no teacher, parent, or disapproving neighbor could intrude on their passion for Star Trek, Japanese pottery, or porn stars. Where dense, inaccessible, deeply immersive subjects of great complexity could be analyzed on one hand, while on the other, the most absurd, juvenile nonsense could be blathered about in another -- free of pesky grammar, syntax, spelling or punctuation. The early Net was a kind of cyberspace Wild West, a digital Hong Kong whose anthem was "Anything Goes." It was, in a word, free. In recent years that excitement has faded almost out of existence, and with it the crude outsize passion those lucky nerds who got in on the web's ground floor felt back in, oh, 1998 or so. That's sad. It's always sad when excitement yields to a mixture of boredom, oversaturation and entitlement. And this sadness is also why I refuse to bring any real order to the chaos that is my blog. The Wild West is only fun to look back upon because it was Wild. Take away the wildness, and all you've got are dusty, desolate frontier towns where the beer is served warm and the streets are full of horse shit.
All of this having been said, it's now time for me to grab my broom and start sweeping the following onservations out of my cranium:
* While visiting my Mom the other day, I took the occasion to peruse the still-vast, highly eclectic collection of books occupying shelves all over her home. This is the home I grew up in, and both she and my father, and later me and my older brother, filled it from floor to ceiling with books of every kind. I took home with me an armload from the basement, and I know book lovers everywhere will understand the quiet pleasure I experienced when, after dusting them off (no easy task, that) I opened them and was greeted by "that book smell." And no, I don't mean the smell of mold or dust itself. I mean the smell of old linen and foxed paper. It's the sort of scent you encounter only in secondhand bookstores or private libraries, and if you love to read, it is to you what the smell of gunsmoke is to a warhorse, or brandy and cigars might be to a Victorian gentleman coming home from a hard day's work. It manages to convey not merely an object, but a range of experience which includes wonderful tactile sensations, such as one experiences when sitting in an armchair by a fire with your favorite volume and a cup of tea (or whiskey). George Orwell once wrote a depressing passage about how much he loved the smell and feel of books until he worked in a bookshop and grew tired of it all. I hope that never happens to me. It would be a great loss.
* In the same spirit, I now recall an incident from more than twenty years ago, when I came home from work in a state of some exhaustion and despair. It was a winter night of the "dark and stormy" variety, cold and inimical, and the first thing I did was chain the door, as if this could keep the evil from following me. What I wanted was to turn off my phone, turn down all the lights but one, put on comfortable clothes and get into bed with something hot to drink and a good book. But not just any good book. It had to be Lawrence Sanders' "The Fourth Deadly Sin." In that moment I needed the pure escapism Sanders' magnificient prose could deliver, and rummaged all through the apartment: I couldn't find it and nearly gave in, then said, "No, I'm not quitting," and continued to strip-search my modest home until at last, the paperback was in my hand. Only people who frequent a site like Goodreads can understand the joy I felt when, with door locked, phone silenced and only my reading lamp on, I reclined into bliss. It was the perfect antidote to a cold, cruel world.
* When I moved back East in 2020, I had to leave in storage nearly all my books. I had only a few on hand, and a few more I later bought online or from the local secondhand bookstore. Not having my favorite entertainment on hand, I began to replace reading with video games, movies, television. Not to say that I didn't do these other things before: I just balanced them against my principal hobby. But now I had fallen into the trap of mostly watching rather than mostly participating. It troubled me but I did nothing to stop it, and now I find myself struggling every year to read a mere 12 - 14 new books. I boasted in last year's wrapup that I was going to finally meet the Goodreads Challenge again, but I failed -- again. I am in the process of getting myself back into the habit, but it's proven disturbingly difficult. Evidently even lifelong habits can atrophy if neglected long enough.
* Speaking of television, and from the "just because they can, doesn't mean they should" files of human existence, I must say that HD-TV is a retroactive disaster for pretty much any television show shot between the 1990s and the 2010s. The cameras being used at present see more detail than the human eye, and therefore easily penetrate the make-believe of the eras in question. Since getting a hi-def TV years ago, I've noticed more tan lines, freckles, age spots, vericose veins, cellulite, stretch marks, pimples, burst capillaries, wig-lines, appliance seams, spirit gum, and pancake makeup applications than I would have believed humanly possible on actors who are supposed to be beautiful or at least passably attractive. A show as recently produced as "CSI" (2000 - 2015), watched in hi-def, seems designed mainly to display that no amount of makeup, mood lighting, filters and color correction can disguise human frailty from modern cameras and modern televisions: the line of Ted Danson's wig is as plainly divisible as a national border on a map. It doesn't do wonders for silicone appliances, either: the effects work which looked so good in SD looks as fake as a three dollar bill in HD.
* I know I talk a lot about Hollywood in this blog, and sometimes it probably strikes the reader as a form of self-aggrandizing monomania: "Oh Christ, he's corking off about the entertainment industry again." But let's face it, everyone's wells are wettest where interest meets life experience, and thirteen years in the business leaves me with a lot to say, even if I do tend to harp on the same themes over and over again. On the other hand, I rarely talk about law enforcement or criminal justice in these epistles, probably because it's presently how I make most of my wages and therefore impossible to write about objectively or even safely. This is a subject I intend to explore more fully, but for obvious reasons I have to careful not to be too specific, local or contemporary. In the mean time, the Hollywood rants will continue.
* I was accidentally reminded today that Trump is running for president again. The fact that I had to be reminded surprised me, and speaks a lot, I think about shock value and the law of diminishing returns. Trump, like Madonna and various others throughout history -- I'm also reminded of Morton Downey Jr., Rock Newman and Paris Hilton -- thrives on controversy. He craves and in fact requires attention, and doesn't much care whether it's good attention or bad attention, so long as they spell his name right. A lot of his so-called weaknesses in that regard were actually what got him elected. The problem with this burn-it-down approach is that, well, sooner or later you torch all the combustibles and use up all the oxygen: witness the careers of every one of the people I just mentioned. The shtick gets old, people get bored, and attention wanders. It's too soon to write Trump's political obituary, but I get a strong sense, at least at this juncture, that not many people have the stomach, or the stamina, to endure another five to six years of The Donald Trump Show. The mere fact someone as dull, boring and "establishment" as Joe Biden was elected by a such a wide margin serves as partial proof that Americans may need a break from loud noises and open flames for a few years yet.
* Speaking of diminishing returns: the war in Ukraine -- the largest, bloodiest conflict fought in Europe since WW2 -- has now entered its second year, and is clearly slipping out of the minds of Americans concerned with skyrocketing gas prices and energy bills, not to mention the increasingly absurd cost of food. As a rule, Americans traditionally care very little about anything outside our own borders, but the speed with which we can acclimatize ourselves to catastrophes on this scale is distressing. The Russo-Ukraine War is a pivotal historical event unfolding in real time. It is a struggle between the forces of ethno-nationalism and global unity, between autocracy and democracy, between institutionalized corruption and fragile honesty. It is as close to a good and righteous war as anything that has happened since 1945, and near as I can figure, almost nobody around me cares. Caring, of course, won't change anything in Ukraine, but an awareness that there is no going back to the American isolationism of yesteryear, that like it or not the nations of this world are inextricably linked to each other and what effects one effects all, and that doing nothing in the face of aggression always -- always -- fuels more aggression, would restore some of my lagging faith in the human species.
* I've finally decided that this blog will now appear every Saturday (my "Saturday Evening Post") and Wednesday both, so twice as much incoherent nonsense as before is now coming your way, delivered every half-week, like junk mail or allergy injections. You're welcome.
And with that observation -- maybe it's just a hope, politics are best when served bland -- I now leave you among my sawdust.
This accusation is entirely true. I'm fairly sure I've even admitted it in these very pages. So if you're a regular or semi-regular reader of Stone Cold Prose, you could be forgiven if you rolled your eyes and muttered "hard pass" whenever you see an As I Please pop up in your feed. On the other hand, you must realize that allblogs, of whatever kind and written with whatever motive, exist partially for this exact purpose, the purpose of emptying the ole braincase. They are essentially outlets, pressure valves, "playspaces" (as Maynard James Keenan put it) where rules which might govern our lives in other ways do not apply.
In my mind, the whole fun of the otherwise frequently poisonous internet is that all that tedious logic and structure we were taught in school can be chucked out the window in favor of all sorts of niche, recherché, free-form, even stream-of-consciousness approaches to storytelling and idea-sharing. Being old enough to remember when the internet was actually invented, I recall as well the excitement many of its earliest denizens felt at discovering this playspace where no teacher, parent, or disapproving neighbor could intrude on their passion for Star Trek, Japanese pottery, or porn stars. Where dense, inaccessible, deeply immersive subjects of great complexity could be analyzed on one hand, while on the other, the most absurd, juvenile nonsense could be blathered about in another -- free of pesky grammar, syntax, spelling or punctuation. The early Net was a kind of cyberspace Wild West, a digital Hong Kong whose anthem was "Anything Goes." It was, in a word, free. In recent years that excitement has faded almost out of existence, and with it the crude outsize passion those lucky nerds who got in on the web's ground floor felt back in, oh, 1998 or so. That's sad. It's always sad when excitement yields to a mixture of boredom, oversaturation and entitlement. And this sadness is also why I refuse to bring any real order to the chaos that is my blog. The Wild West is only fun to look back upon because it was Wild. Take away the wildness, and all you've got are dusty, desolate frontier towns where the beer is served warm and the streets are full of horse shit.
All of this having been said, it's now time for me to grab my broom and start sweeping the following onservations out of my cranium:
* While visiting my Mom the other day, I took the occasion to peruse the still-vast, highly eclectic collection of books occupying shelves all over her home. This is the home I grew up in, and both she and my father, and later me and my older brother, filled it from floor to ceiling with books of every kind. I took home with me an armload from the basement, and I know book lovers everywhere will understand the quiet pleasure I experienced when, after dusting them off (no easy task, that) I opened them and was greeted by "that book smell." And no, I don't mean the smell of mold or dust itself. I mean the smell of old linen and foxed paper. It's the sort of scent you encounter only in secondhand bookstores or private libraries, and if you love to read, it is to you what the smell of gunsmoke is to a warhorse, or brandy and cigars might be to a Victorian gentleman coming home from a hard day's work. It manages to convey not merely an object, but a range of experience which includes wonderful tactile sensations, such as one experiences when sitting in an armchair by a fire with your favorite volume and a cup of tea (or whiskey). George Orwell once wrote a depressing passage about how much he loved the smell and feel of books until he worked in a bookshop and grew tired of it all. I hope that never happens to me. It would be a great loss.
* In the same spirit, I now recall an incident from more than twenty years ago, when I came home from work in a state of some exhaustion and despair. It was a winter night of the "dark and stormy" variety, cold and inimical, and the first thing I did was chain the door, as if this could keep the evil from following me. What I wanted was to turn off my phone, turn down all the lights but one, put on comfortable clothes and get into bed with something hot to drink and a good book. But not just any good book. It had to be Lawrence Sanders' "The Fourth Deadly Sin." In that moment I needed the pure escapism Sanders' magnificient prose could deliver, and rummaged all through the apartment: I couldn't find it and nearly gave in, then said, "No, I'm not quitting," and continued to strip-search my modest home until at last, the paperback was in my hand. Only people who frequent a site like Goodreads can understand the joy I felt when, with door locked, phone silenced and only my reading lamp on, I reclined into bliss. It was the perfect antidote to a cold, cruel world.
* When I moved back East in 2020, I had to leave in storage nearly all my books. I had only a few on hand, and a few more I later bought online or from the local secondhand bookstore. Not having my favorite entertainment on hand, I began to replace reading with video games, movies, television. Not to say that I didn't do these other things before: I just balanced them against my principal hobby. But now I had fallen into the trap of mostly watching rather than mostly participating. It troubled me but I did nothing to stop it, and now I find myself struggling every year to read a mere 12 - 14 new books. I boasted in last year's wrapup that I was going to finally meet the Goodreads Challenge again, but I failed -- again. I am in the process of getting myself back into the habit, but it's proven disturbingly difficult. Evidently even lifelong habits can atrophy if neglected long enough.
* Speaking of television, and from the "just because they can, doesn't mean they should" files of human existence, I must say that HD-TV is a retroactive disaster for pretty much any television show shot between the 1990s and the 2010s. The cameras being used at present see more detail than the human eye, and therefore easily penetrate the make-believe of the eras in question. Since getting a hi-def TV years ago, I've noticed more tan lines, freckles, age spots, vericose veins, cellulite, stretch marks, pimples, burst capillaries, wig-lines, appliance seams, spirit gum, and pancake makeup applications than I would have believed humanly possible on actors who are supposed to be beautiful or at least passably attractive. A show as recently produced as "CSI" (2000 - 2015), watched in hi-def, seems designed mainly to display that no amount of makeup, mood lighting, filters and color correction can disguise human frailty from modern cameras and modern televisions: the line of Ted Danson's wig is as plainly divisible as a national border on a map. It doesn't do wonders for silicone appliances, either: the effects work which looked so good in SD looks as fake as a three dollar bill in HD.
* I know I talk a lot about Hollywood in this blog, and sometimes it probably strikes the reader as a form of self-aggrandizing monomania: "Oh Christ, he's corking off about the entertainment industry again." But let's face it, everyone's wells are wettest where interest meets life experience, and thirteen years in the business leaves me with a lot to say, even if I do tend to harp on the same themes over and over again. On the other hand, I rarely talk about law enforcement or criminal justice in these epistles, probably because it's presently how I make most of my wages and therefore impossible to write about objectively or even safely. This is a subject I intend to explore more fully, but for obvious reasons I have to careful not to be too specific, local or contemporary. In the mean time, the Hollywood rants will continue.
* I was accidentally reminded today that Trump is running for president again. The fact that I had to be reminded surprised me, and speaks a lot, I think about shock value and the law of diminishing returns. Trump, like Madonna and various others throughout history -- I'm also reminded of Morton Downey Jr., Rock Newman and Paris Hilton -- thrives on controversy. He craves and in fact requires attention, and doesn't much care whether it's good attention or bad attention, so long as they spell his name right. A lot of his so-called weaknesses in that regard were actually what got him elected. The problem with this burn-it-down approach is that, well, sooner or later you torch all the combustibles and use up all the oxygen: witness the careers of every one of the people I just mentioned. The shtick gets old, people get bored, and attention wanders. It's too soon to write Trump's political obituary, but I get a strong sense, at least at this juncture, that not many people have the stomach, or the stamina, to endure another five to six years of The Donald Trump Show. The mere fact someone as dull, boring and "establishment" as Joe Biden was elected by a such a wide margin serves as partial proof that Americans may need a break from loud noises and open flames for a few years yet.
* Speaking of diminishing returns: the war in Ukraine -- the largest, bloodiest conflict fought in Europe since WW2 -- has now entered its second year, and is clearly slipping out of the minds of Americans concerned with skyrocketing gas prices and energy bills, not to mention the increasingly absurd cost of food. As a rule, Americans traditionally care very little about anything outside our own borders, but the speed with which we can acclimatize ourselves to catastrophes on this scale is distressing. The Russo-Ukraine War is a pivotal historical event unfolding in real time. It is a struggle between the forces of ethno-nationalism and global unity, between autocracy and democracy, between institutionalized corruption and fragile honesty. It is as close to a good and righteous war as anything that has happened since 1945, and near as I can figure, almost nobody around me cares. Caring, of course, won't change anything in Ukraine, but an awareness that there is no going back to the American isolationism of yesteryear, that like it or not the nations of this world are inextricably linked to each other and what effects one effects all, and that doing nothing in the face of aggression always -- always -- fuels more aggression, would restore some of my lagging faith in the human species.
* I've finally decided that this blog will now appear every Saturday (my "Saturday Evening Post") and Wednesday both, so twice as much incoherent nonsense as before is now coming your way, delivered every half-week, like junk mail or allergy injections. You're welcome.
And with that observation -- maybe it's just a hope, politics are best when served bland -- I now leave you among my sawdust.
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ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION
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