Happy Þorsdagr*

*Thursday. From the old norse Thor's day celebrating the protean god Thunaraz, God of thunder. Yesterday, wednesday, or Wōdnesdæg, we celebrated an anglo saxon god Wodan who apparently bid his final adieu in about the 7th century.

Wodan's day was a bit woeful for me as I pretty much paid up all of my outstanding debts, some that had slyly hung around for several months. Got one left that should be manageable. Now the cupboard is near bare again and I get to start the cycle all over, like most americans do on a monthly basis. Now I have an excuse to be miserable for the rest of the week.

We went to a wonderful dinner the other night at some friends' home. A friend who is a retired professor, food and wine critic and multiple cookbook author (and faithful blog reader) manned the grill and worked up a sumptuous feast which included a delightful salmon over swordfish mousse dish and a perfectly roasted filet mignon. Denis has written several books on the cooking of meat including the new Complete Meat Lovers Cookbook with Bruce Aidells. So he should know his way around a grill and did. Not only do you learn a lot about cooking when you read his book, you get to meet his statuesque Aunt Nora, and his proud Irish uncles back in Sheepshead Bay.

Anyway folks got to talking and we somehow got on the topic of the rises and falls and spectacular crashes in our lives. I parroted the statement that I once heard not to trust anyone who has never fallen on their ass. Most of those types of people were exceedingly lucky once, but somehow figure they are brilliant instead. They lack a certain humility that broadens the spirit and if nothing else, allows one to appreciate dark comedy. I take a certain pride in all of my scars and travails. It was a great dinner. We had one obligatory white wine and then got down to business with some really good reds including an excellent bordeaux.

We lost another business on Main St. this week, the Lace Apron. This hurts for a multitude of reasons, but principally because the owner and all the people who gave it a go put so much effort into making it work. And selfishly, because I went over for one of their delicious little flans nearly every afternoon.

They are clearing out the store this week and I noticed a cop talking to the proprietor yesterday afternoon. Apparently the front door had been accidently left open for two days. Someone notified the gendarmes. She had all this kitchen equipment priced and apparently people came in, and left their money on the table for the sold items. People walked in and out leaving money for two days and nobody stole anything. Or touched the money. Another reason to love Fallbrook.

I have had a lot of positive feedback about my blog this week and I really appreciate it. I was grooving. One of my friends hounds me that I should be doing this for money. 

Now I tried to explain that there is no blog equivalent of Schraft's luncheon counter where I can go and get discovered. There are millions of writers in Blogdonia and I am deeply appreciative that people find the time to peek into my little corner of the universe, oftentimes on a daily basis.

I have had two professional writing gigs in my life. In the late eighties and early nineties, I wrote an occasional article for California Grower, an agricultural magazine.  This enabled me to write off a trip to Israel for an article I wrote on the Volcani Institute in Tel Aviv and to stick around for the Scud War. I wrote several articles for Silver Magazine in the late nineties. Wrote a little science fiction that got published up in Oregon in the eighties as well, some of it pretty damn good, now all unfortunately lost.

All of the media are changing so fast that no one really knows what to make of this blog thing. What I do know is that if it's not free nowadays, it ain't going anywhere. Music, photography, writing, once the cat is out of the artist's bag and flowing through the cyber ether, you just can't stuff the genie back in the bottle. The concept of copy write and compensation has been flushed down the swirling vortex of cyberspace. 


So I might as well just write. Number one, I can't not write, as last month's failed experiment showed and number two, writing daily makes one a better writer. What am I gonna do, sit back on my haunches and wait for Lewis Lapham to call and tell me how brilliant I am and sign me up for Harpers? I'm waiting, Lew.

As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of 'do it yourself.'

Marshall McLuhan


I read another quote the other day from, I forget who, about whoever controls the images controlling history. Or something like that. Maybe whomever controls the information pipelines actually has the power, hence the grand rise of google, Corbis and facebook. With the explosion of real time communication, we are also seeing a rise in preposterous viral events like Birther stories, balloon boys, Trade Center conspiracies, etc. It isn't enough to debunk, because perception drives reality and they take on a life of their own. And can change financial markets, cause great numbers of otherwise sane people to start having tea parties, and create a multitude of other end of the world scenarios. And then the next thing you know, the townspeople are running through the shtetl with torches.


I was reading the interview with the Taliban captured correspondent for the New York Times the other day and he said that his captors were enraged by the Abu Graib, Guantanamo stories of U.S./Israeli subjugation of the Islamic world. Which seem to have been grossly overblown at least in scale, but provided a lot of fodder for new generations of budding suicide bombers.


So we have seen a total decline in academic scholarship in the news media, which allows an anti media conglomerate like Fox to assume its mantle in protecting the conservative base from the slanted liberal mainstream. What bothers me is how it elevates intellectually challenged people like O'Reilly and Hannity to an equal position with serious journalists. What did O'Reilly ever do, write for the Boston Phoenix? Inside Edition? Yet he had a jackoff session with Britt Hume last week where he sounded like he was the second coming of Edward R. Murrow. 


We live in a new world of immediacy. Visceral sound bites. Hit and run journalism. Flavor of the month, quickly disposed of to allow for the next wave of incoming flotsam. I can even come back in two hours and change this paragraph and no one will be the wiser. The concept of time and permanence shifts in the new digital age. A few keystrokes and voila, twenty twenty foresight.


This affects my business to some degree. I have seen my peers rush to the altar of modernism only to find that the fads have as much shelf life as raw milk. That is why one of my eyes is continually open to the wonder of the 18th and 19th century and is pointing more to classical style every day. Tried and true.


You can win the rat race but you are still a fucking rat.
Mike Tyson


I remember reading about Malthus in school. Work people so hard that they don't have time to screw. House them in Bauhaus like modern jails and call it the new frontier. Form follows function until it hurts. Clean lines that eventually choke the user like so many prison bars.


I may be a dying swan. The current generation has no use for history. Or the artifacts of same. Ikea baby. Disposable. Shellshocked by continual sensory bombardment. One of the problems with the digital revolution is that it raises several trust issues. Images, sound waves, quotes, everything can be altered in a Wave the dog, Forrest Gump scenario. With the short memory and general lack of interest of humankind, history is whatever we say it is at the moment. It is interesting to see how two viewers can disagree about an act that occurs in the present. How much more so for an event in the not necessarily so distant past, like the Holocaust for instance. I here bye declare that -----------[insert here] never occurred, moon landings, resurrection,Vasco de Gama, what have you. 


So we rely on aggregators of facts, your Huffington Posts, Blue Heron Blasts, Townhall.coms, who all have their own agenda which subtly flavors the content of the raw information stream. Which few of us have time to plunge into or navigate. So we greatly heighten the stupid index. And fall victims to those that would exploit our ignorance.


It is interesting to me that the keyword in the arts and antiques business, from my vantage point and in my opinion, at least for the last ten to twenty years, is regionalism. People are interested in the paintings and furnishings created locally. This allowed several things to occur. Number one it allowed people to connect with their local history, possibly as a prescient reaction to the globally homogenized barrage we are currently experiencing. 


The same thing occurred 120 years ago in England with Morris, Ashbee and Ruskin and the Handicrafts Guild. They celebrated hand made things with an eye on the brutal shadow of the industrial revolution to come. And then were subsequently bulldozed down by the oncoming wave of the mass market.


I read a nonfictional book excerpt once that stayed with me about a guy who was canoeing in the Amazon with four friends and goes through the most horrible traumatic experiences and washes up on a river shore and crawls into a primitive hut and sees that the Flintstones cartoon is playing on a satellite television system. To his misery. Dallas and Dynasty and american consumerism have been like a viral tidal wave that has caused more cultural devastation than any air borne disease ever could. Now we have women in the Philippines sanding there skin pigment off to look whiter.


I wore one of my old tie-dies to the gym to a lot of guffaws recently. And heard a friend bitch about a neighbor's purple house. Because we live in a land that begs conformity and then deals out swift punishment to knock the offending corners off any cultural lawbreakers.


So fellow nonconformists, we might be going to hell in a bucket but at least we can enjoy the ride! I salute you. Let your freak flags fly! Thanks for reading.