It used to make such a funny story

When I was about 12, I was
on the school’s team for a TV quiz show. The host — using information collected by some backstage-lackey — introduced me as “wanting, someday, to be a house-husband”.
It used to make such a funny story.

Play while it is still play

Mr. Dressup is dead

Mr.Dressup was an icon of Canadian children’s-culture. It’s hard to imagine that any Canadian kid – born between roughly 1965 to 2000 – would not recognize his picture. Some large majority would recognize the theme music. Another majority would have watched the show dozens and dozens of times.

Ernie Coombs entered the television as a puppeteer in Mr.Roger’s Neighbourhood.  A few years later, the CBC gave him his own show… the first episode of “Mr.Dressup” was aired February 13^th, 1967.

Until 1990, Finnegan and Casey lived in Mr.Dressup’s backyard. Finnegan (a dog) was silent. Casey was, officially, neither a boy nor a girl. I loved Finnegan. To be honest, Casey gave me the creeps.  (It never occurred to me until this moment how odd it is that Mr.Dressup had a child living in a backyard tree-house).

Just shy of three decades after it began, Mr.Dressup stopped taping. Since no narrative linked one episode to the next, the CBC let the 10:30am broadcasts drift into re-runs without any mention of retirement.
Somebody was afraid that the idea of retirement might upset the children. This seemed cute, until I gave it some thought.

The illusion continued…
Five years later, on September 10^th 2001, Ernie Coombs suffered a major stroke. He died a week later, on September 18^th.
After a few days of silence, the show resumed its re-run drift.

Plenty of people said: a big part of a generation’s childhood died, right along with Ernie Coombs.

I imagined that something saved Mr.Dressup from witnessing the disturbing imagery of 9.11.  And I wondered if that same something took Ernie Coombs – that prince of naivety – away from a culture so shaken.

Another five years later, on September 3^rd 2006, even the re-runs were extinguished.
A DVD set is forthcoming.

at the window, sunny day

10 Films, no particular order — No.1 “Berlin”

Lou Reed. Berlin (2007)

It’s quite rare for me to have much interest – let alone go on and on about – a concert film.

But here it is:

First:  few people who are not Lou Reed fans will be able to  enjoy Berlin. The fortunate ones can look forward to 85 minutes of magic.

The live performace of an album named “Berlin”, was filmed by Julian Schnabel (Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Before Night Falls). Ala Andy Warhol and Lou Reed’s Velvet Undergound days, Schabel projects a mostly abstract video feed on the set.

Lou is old now,  and he looks it. But it suits him so well that I actually can’t picture him as a young man anymore.

He’s wearing honest-looking, worn jeans, rusty red t-shirt, frameless spectacles… He told one interviewer that, in the past, he would have worn sunglasses, as something to hide behind.
His skin is deeply creased with a scattered network of wrinkles.

Don’t know the original (1974) album Berlin?

“Berlin” is a suite of songs which you can listen to as another Lou Reed album, and then be shaken when you listen to it carefully.

From the introduction written Julian Schnabel: Berlin is about “love’s dark sisters: jealousy, rage and loss”. That’s just about right.
Reminiscences fond and bitter, drugs used to the point of oblivion, domestic violence and a suicide.

It’s a stunning musical performance… elaborate without swamping the material. The core band (Lou Reed plus a guitar, bass and drums) plays its way through the entire suite.  Occasional texture is added – an occasionally explodes – from four horns and winds, three strings, extra guitars, a second bass, piano, two backup singers and a dozen members of the Brooklyn Youth Choir.

In his virtually deadpan way, you can tell he is having a great time… at least until they reach what would have been the second side of the original LP, when pain mounts too high.  With its concluding song (Sad Song) – you see the release of regret and relief.

The first of three encores, is a startlingly beautiful, and lullabye-like. Antony (Antony Hegarty) emerges from his shadowed stool. Singing backup, his voice was quirky and effeminate… up front, it is angelic and ethereal. With lips curled oddly over his teeth, he sings most of Lou Reed’s tender, sad “Candy Says”: /…What do you think I would see, if I could walk away from me?../
As the last chord is played, and the crowd applauds, the sincerest of grins spreads across his face… loving pride shines from behind his spectacles.

With the next song, classically grim Lou Reed returns. Swooping, heavily distorted guitars alternate with spare, crystal clear chords beside Lou’s voice. /“…They’ve tied someone up, and sewn up his eyes…”/

As is his odd beauty, Lou Reed’s voice is mostly monotone, painted with moments of melody… occasionally perfectly pure, sometimes grasping at the tune.

Berlin seems raw and lyrical, but honest.  It’s completely convincing as a confession… but (if you need to know) the entire thing is actually fiction.

As for the title and the setting of Berlin, Reed bluntly told the NYTimes: “I’d never been there. It’s just a metaphor. I like division.”

What is Ripeness?

Is my banana ripe when it is no longer green?
Is it over-ripe when it has brown spots?

she (excerpt)

(circa 1994).

two types of joy

Falling birds can not manage to vanish

Photographs of people falling from the North and South towers of the World Trade Center (9.11.2001) were published in countless newspapers on the morning following the attack. It was a part of the story in television and radio coverage… but only in the first stage of the marathon. By September 13th, “the jumpers” had virtually vanished.
This was not some back-room conspiracy. It was spasm of self-censorship, repeated and mimicked across an entire country.  Angry audiences objected to the terrible images. Editors responded by averting our gaze.

This one bit of the story almost, but not completely, vanished.Esquire Magazine (Sept 2003) published “The Falling Man” by Tom Junod. This article, centered around one photograph of a single falling man, stirred the set-aside pot. What does it say about us we allowed our horror, and a taboo, erase this part of the story?

Why does their disappearance upset me?
Why are their part of the story so important?

Allow me to do this by way of a story… about where their tale intersects my own…

On that day, I happen to be listening to National Public Radio. (I was driving down Long Island, towards Manhattan, but that’s a story for elsewhere). A news bulletin announced that there had been reports of an explosion at the World Trade Center. Very shortly afterwards, the WNYC suddenly fell to static.
WYNC, it wasn’t hard to realize, was broadcasting from an antenna on top of one of the World Trade Center towers. (It turns out that this was on roof of the North Tower, the first to be hit. The heat from the resulting fire must have fairly quickly reached the roof and destroyed the antenna).
I pulled off the highway — about 30 miles from New York City — and started flipping through the dial.
While others gathered around television sets to watch the unfolding spectacle, I was confined to radio.
(It wasn’t until a few weeks ago, almost nine years afterwards, that I saw the television footage that millions and millions of people saw that day… and repeated over and over again).
Confined to radio, unable to see the obscene theater of the second plane hitting the South Tower, it took quite a while for the severity of the situation to sink in. I certainly wasn’t ignoring what was going on… I was flipping through the radio dial, excited to be so close to what was obviously a major event. This may seem a little less troubling if you understand that I had spent much of my university time studying the peace/conflict side of  “International Relations” (terrorism and American foreign policy were major topics).
But World Trade Center attack was — with terrible brilliance — designed to be seen. The second plane struck 17 minutes after the first… perfectly timed: several cameras were broadcasting live images of the fire up in the North Tower, accidentally capturing the second plane striking the South Tower.
No radio-bound words could come close to matching the power of that bit of footage.

What did jolt me out of my mind out of its whirling mode, treating the whole thing as an exciting moment for analysis?
The jumpers.
I remember it as a child’s voice asking “are those birds?”. In fact, I can still hear that child… and that innocent, but horrible question.
(From reading the other day, I found references to a mother trying to comfort her child by telling her that “those are only birds”. Whichever).
It was the thought of people falling hundreds of feet to the concrete which jarred me into a more compassionate mode. The next day, the news-photographs pushed me further.

The images of the doomed fell out of circulation almost as quickly as those people fell to the ground. Within 48 hours, they were gone.
I hate that we made the jumpers vanish.
Something which jolted me into compassion… was ushered out of sight, into a the confines of a taboo.

The images froze the them in mid air. The doomed were suspended in terrible flight.
Did we think that by making the images vanish, we’d stop what gravity says next? Did we leave them suspended in the air?

Reflecting Absence(s)

depiction of "Reflecting Absence" design... by Squared Design Lab

A calamity is more than just numbers.
But let me walk you to the place my mind went when I heard about the planned memorial at “ground zero”.

computer generated image of how names will be inscribed

The memorial will display the names of those who died 9.11.2001 (plus six who were killed in the 1993 bombing attempt). This is a total of 2979 names.
The names will be inscribed along enormous bronze plaques with run the outline of two pools. These pools —  roughly marking the footprints of the North and South Towers — will be 176′ x 176′.
As far as I can tell, the names will be arranged in five rows.

Now here comes some math.
(I will not admit just how long it took me to figure out the following numbers… I was not a stellar math student… in fact, my last math teacher wrote on my report card: “you are the only student who’s math skills have ever managed to detierate during the year”.   —But I do assure you that I am quite sure that my math is correct, if hardly elegant or efficient.)

Since there are 2979 names to be inscribed around two pools, it seems reasonable to estimate that each pool will display 1490 names.
IF the names are arranged in five rows, 298 names would wrap around each row.

The pool will be 176’ x 176’

The perimiter of each pool is 704’

704 feet, divided by 298 names… that’s an average of 2.36” (aprox 2’4”) per name.

Imagine building such a memorial to other calamities… even restricting ourselves to events properly understood as a single attack (such as 9.11.2001).

On the night of March 8/9^th (1945), a single raid of US B-29s dropped 1700 tones of bombs on Tokyo. Somewhere between 88,000 to 100,000 people were killed.  We’ll use the more conservative number (proposed by the US Strategic Bombing Survey).

To accomodate the names of ½ of those killed in Tokyo that night (44,000), arranged in five rows (8,000 per row)… each of the two pools at a Tokyo-edition of “Reflecting Absence” would require 20,768 linear feet of bronze.
The dimensions of such a pool would need to be 5192’ x 5192’.

That is just a bit under one mile.

Just one of the pools at Tokyo-Reflecting-Absence would cover large portion of lower Manhattan.

one Tokyo memorial pool ... superimposed on Manhattan