(I'm not going to make pronouncements pro or con on whether this is a new millennium. Stephen Jay Gould has already done well enough with that topic. I must confess, though, that I was sorely tempted to point out that we are now in The Computing Era, and that regardless of previous conditions, counting now starts at zero. Ahem.)
As various people have pointed out, this is the dawn of civilization, and we are living in the future. ...Well, at least some of us are living in the future. If you remember when computers were great hulking things that filled entire specially-air-conditioned buildings, weighed tons, and could be afforded only by governments and well-funded research institutes, then this is the future. If you don't understand why we talk about "dialing" telephones, on the other hand, you may want to take a look at the last fifty years of the history of technology. Not very long ago (I know, this seems totally ridiculous), there was no such thing as a yellow sticky; there was no such thing as a GPS receiver; even the idea of, say, soybean plants that produce their own insecticide was somewhere between science fiction and inconceivable. I don't have to recite the entire litany, those few items are enough to make me shiver. The implications are vaster than empires, but rather more swift ...and not all of them are particularly good, either, but I'll get into that later if it seems appropriate.
For now, I want to say some things about where we appear to be and where we may (or may not) be headed. It is going to take me a few days to get this articulated, and I'll probably keep extending this particular page as I do so. I also want to say more about where I appear to be and where I hope I'm headed, and I think I'll intersperse those bits among the rest. Please bear with me.
It is, as I begin this, January 1, 2000, both where I am typing and where the results of my typing are being stored on magnetic media and served forth to the Web. These locations (and I use the word "these" advisedly -- both are immediate to the process) are about five million meters apart, give or take a bit. This, too, was highly unlikely a few decades back, and of course that has its implications as well.
Some of my friends are filled with optimism and hope, or at least so they claim. They are convinced that there will still be humans in a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand years. I am much more guarded about this. I continue to see humans and their institutions adopting positions based on greed, willful obliviousness, and even outright stupidity. Just for example, it appears that the Chinese government decided to destroy the Yangtze River long after it was obvious from the results of the construction of the Aswan High Dam that they would not obtain the results they were going after, or at least stated that they were going after, and that the results they could count on were horrific.
You can also examine what Sylvia A. Earle has to say about the degree of sustainability of various current practices in the ocean. Her views are public, and her books are readily available in many places. Rachel Carson was not stupid, and neither is Dr. Earle.
...And yet, and yet, well, we seem to be making it through the majority of the Y2K issues, at least, in glowing shape. Seems like a damned fine start.
I grew up in Brooklyn. Things were a certain way. For example, when I was in the fourth grade, my class was taken on a trip to a working dairy farm... in Brooklyn. That was about 40 years ago, and of course the farm is long gone; but it seems that when they tore down Ebbetts field, they chose a site for the new stadium for the Dodgers, and it further seems that that site stayed vacant until only a few years ago. It is now a shopping mall that is built to look like a converted baseball stadium. This, friends, is New York: a bizarre mixture of nostalgia, idiocy, the most radically up-to-date, and I don't quite know what-all else.
I got on a subway train, and the woman who was the conductor had this rich Jamaican accent. That would have been rather unlikely, on several counts, when I was a kid. (Sounded great, though.)
Some things remain unchanged; while there is no more Dave's Corner Luncheonette on Canal Street, at least Pearl Paint and some of the other stores I remember from a couple decades back are still there. So is Junior's, in Brooklyn, home of the definitive New York cheesecake. (I am not sure whether Lindy's, another home of the definitive New York cheesecake, still exists. I am not going to get into a fight about which is more definitive, either: romping excellence is romping excellence, and who gives a flying crap anyway?)
As you may have noticed, Noo Yawk is not the pill you take if you want to be pastoral. Ahem.
Before I leave this subject, I should note that there are still places in Manhattan where you can get Italian cheesecake (a wholly different and equally stirring rendition). The place we went to, Caffe Roma, which is either on or just off Mulberry, perhaps a block from Grand, was out of cheesecake when we arrived, but they had something much more mysterious and considerably less common: pizza grano.
In case you missed it, "pizza" = "pie". That is, "pizza pie" is redundant. Pizza grano is a pie that has as its filling not berries or cherries or anything of that sort, but rather a wheat custard filled with orange flower water and bits of citrus peel. (Well, Caffe Roma's has those things in it.)
In my book, pizza grano is something one might look forward to eating in the next life, if one is truly fortunate. Mind you, my tastes are a bit... peculiar; still, it's a wonderful thing if you like that sort of thing, and I most certainly do. I hadn't eaten it in 25 or 30 years, and I 'bout wept.
(The very name seems pastoral, but Laurel is actually a hotbed of technological flamboyance.)
Over the last few weeks, I've been a busy little bee here. I have, for instance, acquired just about all the bits I need in order to build a nitrogen laser. I've thrown a few pots at Glen Echo Park, and have even glazed one. (I should be able to retrieve it in a day or two.) I've gotten more used to the birds, and the birds have gotten more used to me. When we get a working digital camera into the house, I'll try to provide a photo of Deadeye doing his kissy thing with my nose.
I now have in my possession both of the polymers that I use in my throwing porcelain. This means I can start mixing clay, something I've been waiting for with 'bated breath ever since I got here and realized that I had stupidly left this stuff behind. Alas, I don't have a jar mill yet, but that will happen. (I've found that if I mill some of the kaolin, the clay behaves better in general, and specifically during drying -- I get almost no bottom cracking that way, whereas I lose quite a few pieces to drying cracks if I don't mill the stuff before I mix it.)
I also have some wood ash now, and will soon have more. This means that I can start redevelopment of my brick-clay tenmoku glaze, also something I've been waiting for. I'll probably try to put up photos of various glaze tests as I fumble my way back to righteousness with this one.
Prolegomenon: The character "å" should be pronounced approximately half like "ah" and half like "aw". That isn't 100% accurate, but it is certainly close enough for folk music.
The scene: a tropical forest glade, in downtown Washington, DC.
In the middle of the glade we see Sintå (female lead), the lovely wife of Rama (hero and, in the Tarot sense, fool). She is weighed down by several large bronze discs, which are tied around her with ropes. She is sweating; the air is quite damp. It is winter, and about 35 degrees...celsius. The breeze carries its usual assortment of things... jasmine incense, hot bronze, pandanus leaves, tea, the Metro, car exhaust, museums, monkey shit. (This last is to remind us that in just a few scenes we will come face to face with Hanuman and his legions.)
Enter, stage right, King Klånå (villain). Klånå peers around, sees a banana tree, eats one of the tiny bananas in a surprisingly delicate manner, but then flings the peel over his shoulder like any yutz. He peers around again, sees Sintå.
Klånå speaks, in a voice that is somewhere between gravel falling out of a large truck, and Brooklyn attempting (with notable lack of success) to be Paris.
Kl: Eh, behbee!
Sintå turns her head toward the sound, not yet certain what it is.
Kl: Eh Sintå, behbee, you come wid me, we make de beeyouteeful museeks togedder, eh?
S: Buzz off, banana-nose!
Kl: I'n't dat a quote?
S: Nope, hasn't been written yet. Give it a thousand years or so.
Kl: So behbee, you come wid me, we go back to my palace, everyt'ing nize.
S: F'get it, rump. My hubby will be back any minnit.
Kl: Sez you, behbee. I sez odderwise. Mah spahs, dey telling me dat yo' hubbeh, he vair' beezee raht now. Ah doan' t'ink we see heem ontil mebbe nex' mont'.
Sintå squinches up her eyes and spits. Then she takes a banana leaf and rakes it with her fingernails. The shreds fall to earth, smoking. Klånå appears not to notice. She stamps, twice. A nearby butterfly has a heart attack and is reincarnated elsewhere as a wise king. A huge shadow sweeps across the forest. It is Garuda, in the form of a 747. Neither Sintå nor Klånå sees it, but all the plants in the shadow's path tremble.
Those who are familiar with The Ramayana in its Javanese incarnations can imagine the rest of this scene. (Even for those who are not, it isn't very difficult. They have a bit of a fight, at the end of which he drags her off, kicking and screaming. She is greatly unamused by this, and so is Rama when he returns and fails to find her. The story goes on from there.) On the other hand, I've introduced a few elements that are somewhat out of the ordinary, and it is possible that this version doesn't go exactly the same way the regular one does. What, for example, are those large bronze disks??
Just (slightly) kidding.
I was given a fine gift today: over six pounds of beautiful gray powdery dry fireplace ash, and over ten more pounds of the same stuff, wet from lying around in the basement for a while underneath the (self-cleaning) fireplace. My intention, as I mentioned above, is to re-create the dark-red Brick-Clay Tenmoku glaze that I had and then accidentally wandered away from.
This will prove to be slightly difficult, I'm afraid: my previous batch of wood ash was different from this one in several respects, so just duplicating the percentages of the four materials is not likely to produce the same effect. Also, I have to build a kiln, because the kiln at Glen Echo Park (where I'm currently taking classes) only gets fired about once every six weeks, and I need to run about a dozen sequential glaze tests as rapidly as possible. I don't have 72 weeks...
Again, I'm not finished with this segment yet, and there
will be more as I think of it. I may also cause some of
this particular page to disappear, depending on how I
feel about it later.
Pseudo-mailto: jon [the "a"-circle thing] bazilians [put it here] org
Last modified: Mon Jan 29 20:10:26 PST 2001