July 20, 2008
If you’ve never heard Knopfler or Dire Straits, do yourself a favor and listen to some of the music. I write this blog to share things that might be important, and this guy’s music has illuminated my life for a long time.
Mark Knopfler’s music has been sending chills up my spine for 30 years now, ever since I heard that opening snare beat and guitar chords of “Sultans of Swing.” He has an amazing talent for telling stories and creating landscapes, woven together with his virtuoso guitar playing and a band that includes violin and Hammond organ as well as drums, bass, keyboards, more guitars, and the odd recorder and sitar. I just saw him live for the first time, last night. I guess I don’t get out enough.
There’s little point in trying to describe the concert, but I’ll try to tell you how it felt. Watching the man play and sing songs I’ve listened to hundreds of times was moving. It was like coming home. It was watching a master practice his craft and get a little something new out of it with every new performance. You see, I’ve composed movies in my head for each of those songs (don’t we all?), and to see and hear the music performed live, visually, in real time, was almost overwhelming. The movies meshed with the live performance in a way that’s hard to describe.
Who but Knopfler could make a driving rock anthem, “Boom Like That,” out of Ray Kroc’s bio? Listen to the historical sweep of “Telegraph Road,” to the voices of the characters in “Why Aye Man,” “Sailing to Philadelphia” (Mason and Dixon), “The Trawlerman’s Song,” and “Brothers in Arms.” Don’t miss Knopfler’s unique take on love songs in “Romeo and Juliet” and “Tunnel of Love.” If you decide to take a listen, I wish you well in your journey. If you already know what I’m talking about, it’s been nice sharing this with you.
May 19, 2008
I’ll admit it: I have a borderline-obsessive interest in writing instruments. I have dallied with them all, from fountain pens to felt tips, from exotic fiber-tips to liquid ink rollers and gel pens. Along the way I have lost some favorite shirts to the spreading dufus spot of ink radiating from the pocket, a souvenir of my forgetting to retract. It’s alarming to find yourself sidling over to the pen display at Staples when you really came in for a printer cartridge or some envelopes. And I have had to eat a lot of Dundee Orange Marmalade to collect enough ceramic jars to hold all those pens.
Meanwhile, the pencils sat around, relegated to marking spots on walls to hang pictures or occasional duty filling in the bubbles on standardized tests. Until recently, when I became disillusioned yet again with the latest nanoparticle-ink-titanium-ball-quantum-gelroller*. I picked up a pencil to take notes in a meeting, and it was as if discovering pencils for the first time. It is a very different kind of writing. It is much more tactile, a little more like drawing than writing. A pencil in your hand begs you to doodle in the margins. I seem to have much more control over the letter strokes than with slippery rollers or stubborn ballpoints.
The names are evocative of childhood: Dixon, Ticonderoga, Eberhard Faber. There is the historical connection to the earliest writing implements — homonids were probably using rocks to scratch marks on other rocks before they figured out brushes and ink. And how often do Thoreau’s admirers forget to mention that he was a maker of pencils before he headed out to Walden Pond?
*Fictitious item. Please don’t ask me where to find one. If you do find one, please don’t tell me.
May 3, 2008
Yesterday, for the first time in my life, I found myself on crutches. They’ll be with me for at least another week. Annoying, uncomfortable and inconvenient? Yes, but what an eye-opening day I had.
My colleagues were amazing. People got me coffee, brought lunch, wheeled me in an office chair, and even brought my car to the door. I am grateful. I am humbled. I am also much, much more aware of the intricacies of handicapped access. You really can’t appreciate the finer points until you are faced with the big door that opens inward, the trip to the men’s room, the frustration at having to plan your way around things you normally do without even thinking.
Also, a pleasant surprise. Some co-workers, passing in the hall as I clumped along, opened up and shared mobility stories of their own. The broken bone here, the troublesome knee there. The difficulty in learning to walk with crutches. Many in this group were people I don’t regularly work with, barely know, and usually just nod at in the halls. All of a sudden, we were chatting like old friends.
So, without getting all sentimental, it’s obvious that people really do want to connect. Is it about the crutches? Do people need to share trauma? Or are the crutches just a convenient entry point to conversation, a door through the social barrier? I don’t think a blog post can can do justice to these questions, but they’ll be on my mind for a while.
How did I get myself into this spot? A lawn sprinkler ambushed me, and I leaped away. Then I tried to leap in an orthogonal direction. Bad move. Go ahead, laugh; the medical staff did, and so did I.
April 17, 2008
The instructions at Geek Technique work as promised. For 30 bucks, I doubled the memory of original Mini, converted it to solid state (when was the last you heard that phrase?), and kept it out of the trash stream.
