THE ROOFTOPS OF PARIS

I got a great book called "The Rooftops of Paris" for Christmas. Thumbing through it I found myself asking, "What are these rooftops trying to tell us?" They seem to be saying something, I just can't figure out what it is.

In the 19th century, when a lot of these buildings were put up, the poorest people lived on the top floor. That's because there were few mechanical elevators and getting up there required an arduous climb. What a good deal for the poor! They not only got a terrific view of the city but they were able to look out over the surreal, mysterious, innovative, historic, artistic wonderland of the rooftops!

Some rooftops seemed to be planned and ornate, others seeme to be gerry-rigged and put up almost as an afterthought. Maybe some featured add-on rooms, built without knowledge of the law. Some of the most creative designs might have been add-ons.

Rooftops like these provoke so many interesting questions. Are we wasting the best part of buildings by putting them so high above the street that nobody can see them? Should we build rooftop-type structures on the street level? Should we promote a world above the ground by bridging rooftops? Should we deliberately send our eccentrics up there to live in the hope that they'll create an interesting world up there? Should we have trolleys up there so rooftop people could visit each other without going down to the ground?

Matbe witches or Dickensian criminal types like Fagin should live up there. Maybe ninjas. Maybe thatched cottages and trees should be permitted. Maybe a foreign country should be allowed to exist up there.

I borrowed this picture from a previous post. This suggests that people in higher rooftops could lean over a railing and enjoy the antics of people on lower rooftops. Or maybe it suggests a kind of pedestrian highway enabling fast travel on the rooftops.

WHAT BIRDS ARE TRYING TO TELL US

Everybody loves the sound of chirping birds. There's something soothing and peacefull about waking up in the morning to the sound of bird calls. It's as if the birds said to each other, "Let's fill this neighborhood with song so the humans will reflect on how glorious and full of happiness the world is!" At least that's what I used to think.

After seeing a TV documentary on the subject I now know what they're really saying:

"I'm hungry!"

"This is my tree!"

"Where's the women!"

Fascinating!

Maybe this is the universal message that the animal world is trying to communicate to us. I remember that years ago the hippies used to talk about communicating with dolphins. A researcher named Lily wrote a book about his ongoing attempt to teach language to dolphins and his book was on every hippie bookshelf. Lily speculated that when we learn to talk to them dolphins will share with us their rich culture and philosophy along with a history of the oceans going back to the time before man.

Lily died before he could finish his work but others took it up and after years of arduous labor they finally achieved what they were after. A dolphin who learned to manipulate a typewriter with his nose painstakingly typed out a message to his hippie friends who were waiting with abated breath. The message, which was the culmination of tears of work, read:

"I'm hungry!"

"This is my water."

"Where's the women?"

I guess that's the universal message.

I JUST BOUGHT A WATER PEN!

I just bought a water pen and I'm delighted with it! How long have these been around? How come I never heard of them before? I only discovered it because Enrico, who runs the Sketchcrawl website did a watercolor sketch of it (above). He seemed to awear by it so I made a trip to the art store to see what he was talking about. Man, am I glad I did!

What it is, is a refillable brush pen loaded with water. If you have a little portable set of watercolors like the Windsor & Newton set above then you're all set to color pictures on the move, any time, anywhere. No fuss, no mess, the brush has it's own water. It's easy to clean and easy to remove the old color to make way for a new one.

I like funny subjects so my pictures aren't likely to look like the ones above. I'm just grateful to Sketchcrawl for turning me on to the materials. The sketchbook he recommended looked pretty interesting too. I never used the Mikado pencil.

THEORY CORNER - SCIENCE SECTION

The reason is that the normal human attention span for just about anything is probably only two or three minutes. When the limit is reached people collapse then have to summon the strength to begin a new round of attention. The guy in the drawings wasn't bored, he was actually intensely interested in what was going on around him. He simply reached the end of his attention span.

So far as I know this important phenomenon was discovered by John Krisfalusi. One day I met John for lunch and I found him animating flipbooks on the restaurant table. Most of the books were funny, I wish you could have seen them, but one one book in particular stood out. It showed a guy getting a glassey-eyed stare, collapsing then straightening up again. I asked John what it was and he said he was just animating what the people at the other tables were doing. I stared at those people while John made more flipbooks and that's when I noticed what I drew above. Every single person at every table got a glassey stare and collapsed every few minutes. It's subtle, and I probably would never have noticed it if I hadn't been for the flipbook, but when you know what to look for it's unmistakable.

Interesting, huh?

I WANT TO PODCAST!

The more I hear about podcasting the more I like it. What it amounts to is radio that you can listen to at any time, almost anywhere, with no commercials. That's amazing! I'd love to try that on this site, maybe a 10 or 15 minute podcast once a week in addition to everything else that's here.

What kind of format? Not theories, they come off better in print. I'm dying to tell original stories: horror, sci-fi, comedy, kids'show etc. The first one I want to do would be a romance serial. Man, I can't wait!
I have no idea how to go about this. I got a book from the library, "Podcasting for Dummies" that mentions one way so I'll describe that here and see if anyone knows how to do it better. The method: 1) buy an iRiver T-10 portable mp3 player. It contains a microphone and converts voice recordings to digital mp3 files, 2) use Audacity software (for PCs, free off the internet) to edit, and 3) get an audio card installed in the computer. The book recommends the Audiophile2496 PCI digital Audio Card for Windows XP users. According to the book If you have this stuff you're ready to go.

I'll add that Kali told me about another possibility: use the microphone on any digital camera. I know that Windows XP contains some kind of sound editing program. Maybe that can do what Audacity does. Maybe it's not necessary to buy anything!

BTW, the pictures above are of radio personalities Orson Welles (topmost) and Jean Shepherd (below Welles).

THREE OF MY FAVORITE CLASSIC BOOKS

Here's the book (above) that influenced me more than any other: "Hamlet." I'd read Shakespeare in school and liked it but never gave a second thought to it after the assignments were turned in. One day, when I was 17 or 18, a friend and I took in Olivier's Hamlet at a revival house. I wasn't expecting much, I was just curious to see why other people liked it. Well, the curtain went up and I've never been the same since. When the film ended I could hardly stand. My friend and I walked home in silence. Neither one of us had the words to articulate the new and wonderfull thoughts the film had put in our heads.

I can truthfully say that I've never had a day in my adult life when I didn't think, at least briefly, about this play. I compare every book, film, song, bubble gum comic, and conversation, to it. It's the standard that I use to determine if the media I'm thinking about is "good enough." Actually I had one other experience like this, which was when I saw Clampett's "Great Piggy Bank Robbery" for the first time, but we're talking about books so I'll leave that for another day.

Like everyone else I've been reduced to tears by this story (above) many times. The candlestick scene is one of the greatest in all of literature. The story is especially important to me because I think it revealed my own true self to me. Before I read this I used to imitate what other people did and seemed to have success with, even if it felt hard-edged and out of character to me. After reading the story I realized that I was a Hugo kind of character, sentimental and earnest, and that life strategies that worked for other personality types probably wouldn't work for me. Frankly if I could chose my personality I think I'd pick something different but these are the cards I've been dealt and Hugo taught me to accept them.

"David Copperfield" (above) and Boswell's "Life of Johnson" (below) both taught me the importance of character in all the meanings of that word. One sense requires a layering and a balancing of interesting traits that don't always fit comfortably together. The other sense indicates reliability and guts. I don't have these characteristics but I'm grateful for the push in that direction provided by these books.

I also like the way England is described in these books. You get a sense of a rough, brutal place which is somehow struggling to give birth to something really impressive and worthwhile.

Well, that's it. I should add that I picked these pictures from the internet based soley on the attractiveness of the covers. If you're going to read these books then you should shop around for the the best type styles, editing and translations. For the Boswell book start with the part about a third of the way through where Boswell meets Johnson then, when you've read to the end, go back and read the first third. You might want a slight abridgement of the Hugo story.

ADVICE FROM UNCLE EDDIE'S MOM

This piece might just as well have been titled, "WHATEVER HAPPENED TO DINNER PARTIES?" or "THE CURSE OF THE FINICKY EATERS." My mom was right, finicky eaters have ruined the world, and the first step in that ruination has been the abolition of dinner parties.

Remember dinner parties? A group of friends would get together for a home-cooked dinner, something the host took hours to prepare. The meal might be something modest like a really well-done spaghetti from fresh ingredients or it might be something fancy requiring reduced stock and sauces. The only hard-and-fast requirement was that the food be cooked lovingly with attention to detail. Wine or good beer of course and, in a previous time, good cigars. And did I mention good conversation? What could be simpler or more delightfull? So why did these communal dinners dissapear?

I blame finnicky eaters. You can't find two people who eat the same dish anymore. This man's a vegetarian, that man's a carnivore. This woman drinks beer, that one likes wine. This person loves pasta, that person hates it. Even vegetarians can't agree. The whole thing has gotten out of hand! The little buggers who used to spurn their food as children are now grown up and are wreaking havok in the world. When dinner time rolls around it's not uncommon to see a group of friends split up, each to go to a seperate meal, either that or they all get in a car and spend an hour fighting traffic to find a restaurant on the other side of town that they all can at least tolerate. This is madness!

My mother absolved the finicky eaters but held their parents in scorn. A mother is supposed to wage a daily battle with her kid to get the kid to eat common foods. It's no fun for the mom to do this but she makes the sacrifice so that her kid will have some kind of social life as an adult and not be a hermit. Mother Eddie did this for me and as a consequence I am the sterling example of food consumer that you see before you. I can eat all the common foods...well, sort of. Of course the daily battles aged my mom way before her time. Thanks Mother Eddie for paying the price and a pox upon finnicky eaters!