Monday, January 13, 2003

In Even The Best Families The other night I was looking over this book on the Medici, the egregiously wealthy family that dominated Italian religious and cultural life in the 14th and 15th centuries. It was comforting on some level to recognize that most rich people have always been erratic and largely unscrupulous skeezebags. The most interesting thing I stumbled across was the family tree in the back of the book; there, nestled between Cosimo the Elder and Lorenzo the Magnificent, I discovered the sad sack of the Medici family, the consolation prize for all of us miserable drones: Piero the Gouty, "The Mediocre Son," who nonetheless somehow managed to give birth to the great Lorenzo. Anyone looking for a band name could do a whole lot worse than Piero the Gouty. 4:00:53 PM

Curiosities of Science ...in the year 1639, a woman was delivered of two eggs at Sundby, one of which was sent to Olaus Worm the famous naturalist, with 'attestation signed by Ericus Westergard, Rotalph Rakestad and Thor Venes, coadjutors of the pastor in the parish of Niaess.' They certified, that upon 'the 20th of May in that year, by the command of the Lord President in Remerige, the lord Paulus Tranius pastor in Niaess, we went to receive an account of the monstrous birth in Sundby by Anna, the daughter of Amundus and wife of Gudbrandas Erlandsonius. Upon the 7th day of April she began to grow ill and her neighbors came to her assistance. She brought forth an egg like that of a hen which was broken by the women present. They found that in it the yolk and white answered directly to the common egg. Upon the 18th of April, about noon, she was delivered of another egg, which in figure was nothing different than the former. The mother reported this to us and the woman with her confirmed the truth of it. 'Dr. Olaus Worn, the ornament of the University, preserved the egg in his study to be seen of as many as please.' This story is reminiscent of the case of Mary Tofts, 'the rabbit-breeding woman,' who deceived some of the leading physicians in the time of George II by her assertion that she had given birth to a number of living rabbits.           --C.J.S. Thompson, The Mystery and Lore of Monsters, 1930 3:42:59 PM

The Man Who Loved Landscaping For forty years he worked a shit job on the city streets, and he'd come home every night to study yard and garden catalogs, turf manuals, seed annuals. He didn't have a big yard, but he had a vision for it. He lived in a northern city where he lost six months of yard time to winter, so he had to make the most of the time he had. His kids were all grown up and gone now, but over the years every one of them had thrown his lawn back in his face at one time or another. One boy had a drinking problem, and once had the audacity to sit there in one of his treatment groups and accuse his father to his face of having neglected his children in favor of his lawn. The rest of the drunks sat there tsk-tsking and shaking their heads. That was what was wrong with this goddamn country, he thought: none of these messed-up screwballs would ever feel the pride of a property owner. Men like him, it had always been important to have a nice looking lawn. It was a badge of honor; it meant something. And, sure, maybe he went a little overboard from time to time, but he always wanted to have the best-looking yard in the neighborhood, and there was always some other guy breathing down his neck and trying to show him up. Was he honestly supposed to believe that this somehow made him a bad father? 3:25:11 PM

The Dream In The Developing Tray It's like watching a photograph take shape in the developing solution and realizing, shit, you missed it. That's not what you saw, that's not the picture you thought you were getting, that's not it at all. Not even close. Now imagine you were looking through the view finder of that camera for fifteen years. You were looking at that photograph in the developing solution for months, for month after month after month. Watching a dream coming from a very long ways off, becoming, to your great shock, barely recognizable. You live with what a dream becomes. That's all there is to it. Or you take another picture and wait some more. 3:05:14 PM

Road Trip Here Come The Warm Jets, which was good, just fine. We'd been arguing about the music selection all across North Dakota. I was lobbying for a consistent groove or mood, but Slim Chung trafficked in jarring juxtapositions. The man didn't have any kind of a relationship with consistency. I knew damn well he'd go right from Brian Eno into something like .38 Special or Tom Petty. He didn't really even have any taste, or rather his taste was so indiscriminate that it really didn't amount to taste. I'd argue that Fred McDowell should be followed by something like Doc Boggs, or if you really wanted to change things up, Albert Ayler. But Slim would go from McDowell to something awful like the Moody Blues. It was Slim's Impala, so I conceded the music selections to him, at least initially --those were the rules of the road, and I generally tried my best to play by them. But after sitting through Motley Crue, Wayne Shorter, and Journey in succession I started to agitate for control of the stereo. Every time Slim would pull over to take a piss I'd remove a few more of the offending selections and stash them under the back seat. 2:55:03 PM

Peter Green, Austin, 1979 He'd carefully extinguish the fire in his barrel stove and take his rowboat up the river into town. He liked the nights in mid- to late-November, when darkness settled early and before the snow had come for good and the river had iced over. Cold, dark nights, the river a black wonder and the sky at its showiest, his favorite sky of the year --the striking perfect embroidery of Orion lying just to the southeast above the horizon, the Hyades just beyond, and lovely fork of the Pleiades sitting up top of the sky. The ragged, broken W of Cassiopeia, spider on its back, in the north. Most of the big constellations made no sense to him; they were illogical. He couldn't see any flying horses or sea monsters or bulls. He just saw beautiful geometry, and on these cold, clear nights this world never seemed less real or more impossible to him. He'd take his boat around to the east side of town, to the neighborhoods where the slaughterhouse workers lived, and while the bachelors drank in the bars downtown he could break into a half dozen houses a night. 2:43:24 PM

© Copyright 2003 Brad Zellar. Last update: 4/6/03; 9:57:40 PM.