Last night I spent watching TV. There was a cooking show on PBS, and then they were showing ‘Arsenic and Old Lace,’ which just rules, and then there was this thing about the guy who designed the dam-buster bombs for Britain during WWII. And then there was an episode of Andromeda, which is a fun show, and then there was a Mutant X, which is stupid, but there’s this really astonishingly beautiful woman who plays a ‘feral’ mutant, so she’s sexy and acts like a wolf, which, well.. Anyway.

And then there was a moment when I turned off the TV and read one of the essays in ‘Patriotism In The American Land,’ which is a bunch of environmentalists talking about patriotism.

And then I turned on the TV again and it was this really well-done documentary on WWII. The gimmick was that it was all color footage from wartime. This meant that the narrative of the war was shaped not so much by history but by what they had color footage of. For instance, they got to Pearl Harbor and the narrator says, “No color footage of the Pearl Harbor attack could be found.”

Nevertheless, it did a good job of illustrating the build-up to American involvement in the war, which few other documentaries do. And they did it because there was color footage.

After two episodes of that, it was 4am. I hate when that happens.

The BBC is soliciting photos of anti-war demonstrations taken with mobile phones.

This is my favorite so far.

Today’s music inspired by the fact that m759 caught the Dresden/Vonnegut connection.

Tom Waits’ ‘Get Behind The Mule‘

Listen all the way through.

Link: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., interviewed about the prospect of war with Iraq.

Gee, you think he’s for it or against it?

My favorite quote:

Q: Based on what you’ve read and seen in the media, what is not being said in the mainstream press about President Bush’s policies and the impending war in Iraq?

A: That they are nonsense.

It’s a chill night. I pull my car up to the big metal doorway. Get out, leave the engine running. Press the codes on the keypad. The door grinds open.

I pull in to the interior parking lot. Turn off the car. Unlock the doors.

I locate the big flatbed dollies. The good ones are chained to the wall; you have to put a quarter in the lock to use them. I do so.

It’s a big empty room. The metal door rattles shut after a while, and when it has uttered its last shuddering argument, the silence returns. The walls are white painted cinder block. The floor is a smooth cement. Any sound bounces around forever in here.

The click of the lock where I put the quarter becomes a sonically momentous event. The rattle of the dolly against the floor builds to an overwhelming echo.

I load the dolly from my car. Another small load of anonymous boxes. 8 of those white office records boxes full of my trinkets. Mostly books in this load. The boxes stack like Legos. They’re sturdy and reusable. We like these boxes. Their featureless sameness makes the rote job of stacking them on the dolly that much easier.

When I’m done, I lock the car, even though it’s essentially in a concrete bunker. I pull the dolly around to the elevator. Enter my code on the keypad next to the elevator door, press the up-arrow button.

Wait.

A muffled ‘ding!’ and the elevator doors open. It’s bright inside, lined with anodized steel. I hope that I am never stuck in this elevator.

I push the cart in. I press the 4 button. The door closes with a kind of forced casualness. The way machines are, sometimes. They’re designed to be quick and useful, but if they’re too quick they’ll take somebody’s arm off. So the elevator door was designed to be frustratingly slow.

Wait.

The elevator reaches the 4th floor with another, slightly more victorious muffled ‘ding!’ Pull the cart out of the elevator. Watch the doors close slowly.

The 4th floor is dark and quiet, in contrast to the parking area. The computer has lit only the path between the elevator and my storage unit.

I push the cart down the hallway formed by plywood walls dotted with hinges and padlocks. Go to the end, make a right, go to the next to last one…

It’s still. A building floor inhabited by inanimate objects. Waiting behind these doors are people’s things. Desks, sofas, bicycles, books, records, stereo equpment, VCRs. Exercise benches, five years worth of receipts, the stuffed kangaroo grandma gave you. Your pictures from that time you went to the Grand Canyon. Your special wooden box with the love letters.

I’m seeing through the plywood and the objects of your life are looking back.

The plywood is painted this strange fleshy brown-orange, with a single orange stripe at about chest level. The stripe was meticulously crafted. Someone went to great effort to make that stripe. It’s ugly as sin, but it’s straight and true and bright orange.

I reach my unit. Unlock the padlock. Swing wide the door. My measly stufff is there, stacked inside. I stack in some more measly stuff, in its anonymous white boxes.

I can’t even remember what’s in there. If I had any guts I’d take those boxes to the Salvation Army pickup place instead of bringing it here, but I can’t do that without opening the boxes. And if I did that I would never be able to part with whatever it is that’s inside.

The echoing sounds of my motion die quickly. Stillness doesn’t return; it never left.

I lock the door and push the cart back. I have to stop at one unit, though, where the door has been ripped off it’s hinges. A heating unit hangs from the ceilng into the storage unit, pushing air around a little bit. I stand there and warm my hands, wondering how long the computer will give me before it starts turning out the lights.

Today’s music: ‘My Backyard‘ by Adrian Belew.

Why is this the music for today? Because these are the pictures for today:

My new back yard:



The cedar tree in my new back yard:



Down the street at Meadowbrook Park, there’s this mysterious thing:



It’s a parabola, and if you sit on the rock, it sounds as if the creek is babbling through the ground.

And this is a greenspace up on the hill:

Ok, so since I haven’t been saying much on my ‘blog, and since it’s just a bunch of links to other things, today’s featured music is:

‘No Language In Our Lungs‘ by XTC.

This song is from their ‘Black Sea’ album, which is arguably their best ‘punk Beatles’ album. See, there are three XTCs: The ‘punk Beatles’ era, the ‘Andy realized he hates performing live’ era, and the ‘Dukes Of Stratosphear wasn’t a joke’ era. ‘Black Sea’ and ‘English Settlement’ are the transition between the first two.

Buy a Total Information Awareness t-shirt, lunch box, or thong, and profits go to the ACLU.

Speaking of the world going to hell in a handbasket..

I think I’ve got another case of outrage overload!

Today’s musical selection:

Cliff Edwards‘ version of ‘Singin’ In The Rain.’ Click to listen.

The scat part is what really struck me. I just couldn’t stop laughing.