where art collides

17h32-18h45, 27-March-2013

Meant to head out to some writing perch or other today, however circumstance conspired to keep me from doing so. Thus, I am coming to you today via my usual keyboard from the desk in my home office, a cozy cave measuring roughly 12 meters square, surrounded by books and ever mindful of the dangers posed by various flotsam and whatsum that has found its way to the floor and into the corners over the 11+ years that have passed since La Famille Kessel first took up residence at 57BB.

On Monday the Internet rocked with the release of the first real trailer for World War Z, a tent-pole Summer 2013 sci-fi flick starring Brad Pitt. Having only clocked a scant awareness of the film, due most likely to having my “Blockbuster” RAM filled with the likes of Star Trek: Into Darkness and Iron Man 3“, I clicked through and soon found myself staring agape at some remarkable CGI.

Zombies. Again. And this time tuned up to the absolute nth degree of their power to stimulate the apocalypic imagination. Dozens, hundreds, thousand, millions, TENS OF MILLIONS of zombies! Zombies jumping from rooftops, zombies rolling over buses, zombies grasping helicopter undercarriages, zombies crawling over zombies with the intent and will to make more zombies. And these zombies aren’t your typical everyday run-of-the-mill zombies, aching through every shuffling footstep at roughly the rate of a speeding turtle. Oh no, these zombies have got game!

So being as much a sucker for a well-produced trailer as anyone, I finished my first run-through and immediately fired that puppy up for a second look. Zombies. YES!

Faithful readers already know that I have something of a jones for The Walking Dead (the serious comic book, not the comical TV series), and I have certainly enjoyed many a zombie film over the years, beginning (probably) with George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead and moving through more recent ghoulish quality offerings such as 28 Days Later, Shaun of the Dead and 2009’s utterly terrific Zombieland. Yup, I suppose it can be said that I draw significant entertainment from all-things-undead, a satisfaction that could be rooted in a deep fascination I have with Judgement Day scenarios or that perhaps ties to some penchant I have to always root for the underdog against forces deemed insurmountable (been a Chicago Cubs fan since birth, yes I have). This World War Z thing managed to scotch right by me, though, until the trailer hit the other day. And finding myself delighted and excited by it all, I began binging (googling, whatever) and instantly learned that I have a huge zombie-culture blind spot! World War Z is based on Max Brooks’s best-selling book? And that best-selling book was preceded by The Zombie Survival Guide, yet another best-selling book by Brooks (and the likely title of a WWZ sequel that is already in development)? How can I know about such zombie coolness as Colson Whitehead’s Zone One and the Jane Austen (yes, THAT Jane Austen)/Seth Grahame-Smith collaboration Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and yet be completely brain-dead on World War Z?

“Zombies on ice..that’s nice.”

17h04-17h51, 23-March-2013

** Scribbled down over the weekend and only now revealed to the Internet’s great light **

No new material here for more than a week, but who is out there to complain? Or is that an utterly shameless attempt to garner some comments? Wow, compelling stuff!

No idea, really, who first said it — it could’ve even been me — but one mark of a truly great coffee house is that from the moment you walk in you feel as though they have been waiting for you. Back at Black Market Café today, dropping in just as Talking Heads’s Psycho Killer began shimmying through the speakers.

Just learned what a “cowboy cookie” is and I can honestly say I am better for it. Oatmeal, pecans, chocolate chips, and coconut. Life doesn’t suck.

In 8 days I will put 47 in my rearview mirror. For writing’s sake I truly wish I could express some angst, hesitation or — heck! — just some need to contemplate over moving up a click, as anything would be a markedly more interesting than the indifference I feel towards my personal mark in time. I did manage, though, to parlay the imminent arrival of 31-March into a blue-sky discussion over what to do two years hence for my 50th (the spending of our 2015 Winter Holiday in New York with My Missus and The Boy…and anyone else who wants to float in/out while we are there), so it isn’t a total non-thing.

From “Psycho Killer” to Life During Wartime to Once in a Lifetime to Swamp to Burning Down the House to This Must be the Place (Naive Melody) to And She Was to Road to Nowhere to Wild Wild Life to (Nothing but) Flowers…chronological mixes are fine, but any Talking Heads fan worth his salt would rise up in loud protest over the absolute lack of anything from <More Songs About Buildings and Food! Imagine me at this very moment pouncing up from my chair, stepping onto the table — rattling the mugs, glasses and silverware but good in the process — and launching into Take Me to the River (and, yes, I am aware that the tune is an Al Green classic and not a Heads original…feh)! OK, got the image? Hold onto it and cherish it, because it didn’t happen. Never would. Can’t. That flavor of mad courage maintains a lonely existence in the deepest and darkest corners of my cerebrum.

My Missus has finished her art and gardening magazines and a dog chose just now to do his business on the street in front of BMC, framed perfectly in the plate glass window for my benefit and that of all of my fellow patrons. So, time to go. Ah, Paris.

16h18-18h15, 15-March-2013

A thousand words on multi-tasking…OK, go!

I don’t remember when the first time was that I heard the term “multi-tasking”, but I can say that for me it required not a lick of explanation. And yet…what is multi-tasking? What? Doing more than one thing at a time? Big whip! Of course, time is relative (No shit, Sherlock…er, Einstein), and whether it is even possible to do more than one thing at at time really depends on how “time” is defined in context. For instance, at this exact moment I am typing, but less than a minute ago I was checking both Facebook and my Twitter feed and my email, and before that I was looking in on my torrent downloads (kinda hot to test-drive some disk utility software today after having read Joe Kissell’s Macworld article Do you need a third-party disk utility?), all immediately following a round of click-click-clicking to establish my place on the free wifi network at my Black Market Café perch. Is this multi-tasking? The answer is both “Yes!” (if “time” is defined in increments of 5 minutes) and “No.” (regardless of one’s level of keyboard prowess, even at the proverbial speed of light it is simply impossible to simultaneously perform any of the tasks I just described).

OK, science geek. Get over yourself, bag the theoretical and pedantic, and move on.

Juggling is often used to as a metaphor for multi-tasking. However, still I consider myself to be the one of the original multi-taskers, despite my absolute inability to keep more than one ball in the air at a time. And although I cannot play the piano with more than one finger (and slowly with that finger, at that), I can play a keyboard like nobody’s business, all ten fingers working in tandem to accomplish individual tasks towards a common goal. So can touch-typing be considered a form of multi-tasking? No, that’s just silly. Are you really so desperate to get down a thousand words on multi-tasking, Kory? Come on.

One of the sharpest insults heard during my teenage years was the labeling of a person as someone who couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time. The line is decades-stale today and is seldom used, but that doesn’t mean I don’t continue to hear it in my unspoken thoughts…except these days I tends to ascribe it to uncooperative computer operating systems…Hello, OSX! Yes, Windows, I’m talkin’ ’bout you!

It used to exasperate my Mom when in high school I would do my homework while watching Late Night with David Letterman and talking to friends on the phone. And as glad as she no doubt was that my grades didn’t suffer, I think it irritated her greatly that said formula worked so well for me. Poor Mom. What was she going to say? “Just imagine how much better your A in English would be if you concentrated harder on your work!” Later, when I struggled during the first semester of my Freshman year at Yeshiva University, Mom saw her moment. Harping at me (lovingly, of course) that college was so much more difficult than high school and that it was time to bear down and concentrate on my studies, she was quite gratified when my grades rebounded in second semester. It has been nearly thirty years since then, but I am reasonably certain I gritted my teeth in a smile and swallowed the response I no doubt ached to offer, that being that my letters were back up due to my having recovered (somewhat) from the first semester breakup with my first love (we’ve all got ’em) and had as a result returned to watching David Letterman while studying (and whatever rerun whatnot WNBC ran after that).

One man’s concentration is another man’s desolated desert of distraction. Oh, somebody please poison me slowly for not editing that sentence out!

Hopped away for a moment to check Facebook and Twitter, track my Raspberry Pi order (how cool it would’ve been if the darn thing — which I ordered back on 12-February — had shown up yesterday!), send a couple of iMessages to My Missus, grab a glass of water (writing is thirsty work!), gab with Yusef about his terrific decision to fire up some sweet Chet Baker, and to wag a finger at The Boy for doing face stuff (imagine things 11-year-olds do unconsciously that involve fingers, fingernails, noses, mouths and you’ll have enough information to go on). A multi-tasking fiend, am I.

I want to write here that following university my work habits matured and that I no longer required distractions to achieve my best work, but that would be akin to saying that I no longer enjoy comic books or dig good sci-fi or organize my music collection. No, not only do I still need to have a glorious mess of various-and-sundry going on that has nothing to do with work to have any hope of doing my work and doing it well (e.g., a documentary running on the screen to my left, social media humming away, some kinda music running underneath, an article open on Pocket, 25+ Chrome tabs open…), but I remain a world-class procrastinator. Rough estimate? To get in my 8-10 daily work hours I only need 12-14 hours in front of AppleKory, with sleep paying the multi-tasking freight.

Just resolved to drop “multi-tasking” from my vocabulary and to replace it with “multi-tracking”. This new term — during this introductory period please feel free to use it at no cost — benefits from the shedding of the connotation of simultaneousness that the now-replaced term shouldered for so long (and badly), and it also sounds way cool. Bit of a feeling of movement and kinda music-y at the same time. Got a “one-track mind”? No multi-tracking for you! Got an eight-track mind? Wake up and smell the digital.

00h32-02h21, 15-March-2013

I just spent nearly 4 minutes trying to come up with a clever opening line, something that would poke great fun at my neglecting to fill this space yesterday. First I tried a clever take on Genesis 2:2, and when that didn’t work I made a stab at paraswiping a lyric from Hot for Teacher but it really sucked, so…

I clued into “The Walking Dead” somewhat late but caught up quick, blowing through issues 1-72 over the course of a little less than a month in late 2010. What with the the much-ballyhooed (and really really thick) The Walking Dead: Compendium One making a bunch of 2009 “Best Of” graphic novel lists and the building hype over the imminent launch of the TV series, I could hardly avoid it any longer. And I wasn’t the least bit disappointed. Well-told and beautifully rendered comics are my red meat even when they don’t touch upon or hint at the End of Days, but throw eschatology into the mix you can be sure that Dark Kory will come out to play…and to feed. I love so much about the story that writer Robert Kirkman started telling nearly ten years ago, marveling both at the myriad of rich characters with whom he has populated his post-Apocalypse American South and at his ability to employ these characters in portraying the best/worst/what-the-fuck of humanity. And it continues. Thank the devil in hell, it continues. This in spite of the epically awful Bizarro World television version of it depicted on AMC’s “The Walking Dead” (on which Kirkman serves as a Producer), which recently I was horrified to learn is currently the highest-rated scripted show among viewers 18 to 49 (horrified, but not surprised, as the lowest common denominator has long had an insatiable appetite for blood-and-guts and various viscera).

Over 100 issues into “The Walking Dead” the reason behind the Zombie takeover has not been revealed, may never be revealed, and it doesn’t need to be revealed because that isn’t the crux of the story. In the 6th episode of the 1st season of the TV program our heroes are told by a scientist at the Center for Disease Control that Zombie-ism is the result of a virus and a possible cure is hinted at, produced by the French! Over 100 issues into “The Walking Dead” and still we do not know the extent of the new Zombie reality and an undefined but very real — and wonderfully tortuous — hope for redemption remains. Three episodes from the end of the 3rd season of the TV program and already it is dead-bang established that all hope is gone, that those who continue to survive have only war and strife and the constant pursuit and fight for food, shelter, and safety to look forward to until a relentlessly inevitable extinction that only makes the stories told seem like so much wasted effort. No future equals no reason equals no interest.

So I just slammed “The Walking Dead”, the most popular scripted television program currently in production in the English-speaking world, and a show that offends my sensibilities on many levels (artistically, culturally, integrity-wise…). But, of course, I watch “The Walking Dead”, and I’ll continue to watch it. In fact, I am watching it now, this past Sunday’s episode, a gorgeous high-definition .avi file. Dark Kory must eat.

21h28-23h13, 12-March-2013

Previously…on ‘Dallas’.

Between the time I left for Yeshiva University in October ’83 and July ’86 my folks moved once again, this time into a split-level house…a house that came complete with a designated For-When-Kory-is-Home room that was situated squarely at the top of a flight of stairs leading up from the den (which is really just an extremely wordy way of saying “above ground-level” or “2nd floor”). And though most nights my head was not hitting a pillow in this house, during the breaks and holidays that did require I lay me down to sleep at 10431 Shadow Bend Drive in Dallas, TX USA you can reasonably drop coin I was performing my security haunting…that is, until 21-July-1986.

The summer of 1986 began for me in New York, couch-surfing first with a friend in Washington Heights and later with another friend in Brooklyn, while working to hold down a sales job with a lower Manhattan Your-Office-Out-of-the-Office company located somewhere in the shadow of the World Trade Center. That didn’t last long — how could it? — and by mid-July I was back in Dallas, camped out on the 2nd floor of my parents’ house and splitting my time between two part-time jobs, one slinging frozen yogurt in a strip mall and the other ringing up puppies and tropical fish for an awful Valley View Mall pet store.

On that Monday afternoon a wicked height-of-summer storm rocked Dallas, with dark clouds rolling over the city with scary-movie lightning and too-loud thunder cracks along for the ride. I was putting in some hours at the pet store that day, probably spending 90-95% of my time looking out at the pelting rain and doing anything other than useful work (HATED that job, though I did make a friend-for-life out of it in the form of a marvelous cat I lifted from the shop and promptly named “Larceny”). Anyway, a raging thunderstorm at 5PM had become a bright and sunny summer’s evening by 6PM when my shift ended and I took to my car for the 10-minute drive home. At last, the day was mine, and I jacked the stereo volume and had just began mulling over potential nighttime plans when I found myself caught in epic traffic on Hillcrest Road heading south. “Fuck this.”, I said (or, at least, thought), as I took a left, knowing the area so well as to be able to easily skirt the traffic and make it home via neighborhood streets. And soon enough, I was moving smoothly down Boedeker Street and making a right onto Pagewood Drive, singing along to something LOUD and tapping the steering wheel (Talking Heads? Maybe Van Halen?). A minute later, still rockin’, I made a right onto Shadow Bend Drive, and there in front of me was the cause of that horrendous traffic jam I had so ably avoided: my parents’ house ablaze, firefighters in front of around and atop, with every available neighbor looking on. I parked Erin (my first car…faithful readers of this space for the past two weeks already know that) and got out. I then sat on the hood — having taken quick stock of my Mom and Dad and the family dog, Miko, in the crowd — and took in the spectacle, laughing, aglow with the joy of neurosis in resolve.

22h55-23h59, 11-March-2013

There must be no less than twelve things I would rather be doing right now than sitting down to write. Should I list them? Huh? Should I?

I have spent a lot of time driving down Iceland’s Route 1 lately, and like any good highway it has the power in its more mundane straighaways to trigger unexpected thoughts and recollections. For instance, today just after shooting past some outlet glacier tongue of Vatnajökull whose name I have no prayer of ever remembering I found myself dwelling on the latter half of the summer of 1986, when circumstance (and a lightning bolt) finally put ‘Paid’ to a long-held (self-diagnosed) neurosis of mine.

My obsessive fear of house fires began in 1971, immediately after being shown a Walt Disney/Donald Duck cartoon on fire prevention in the 1st Grade during a school assembly (along with at least one other short film on the subject, one that did NOT involve familiar animated characters and was thus a whole heckuva lot scarier). I vividly recall going home that day and immediately checking our basement for oily rags that could spontaneously combust. Also, that night — and countless other nights over the ensuing 15 years — found me lying awake waiting for my parents to turn out their light so I could sneak out of bed to make sure (1) the stove was turned off, (2) that there were no live cigarette embers in the ashtrays strewn throughout the house, and (3) that neither Mom nor Dad had fallen asleep in bed with a lit cigarette between their fingers. The fact is, all thanks for my being the quintessential “night owl” today should probably be set at the webbed feet of Donald, Huey, Dewey, and Louie.

Time passes. We move from a house in Hoffman Estates, IL USA (3rd story room, a 30-foot drop) to a house in Richardson, TX USA (2nd story room, window egress to a sea of concrete) to a house in Plano, TX USA (a ground-level room, and a breath exhalation held for nearly six years). I continue to make my tiptoe rounds each night, though, having added fireplace cinder waiting-out and door lock confirmation to my routine (the latter likely tied to Dad’s having made a career shift into the sale of home security systems).

More time. More moves (a subject for other days)…and more ground floor bedrooms. All good. College begins, and full-time residency with the parents comes to an end without my perishing in a blaze brought to ferocious life by a shoddy-wiring-and-insullation cocktail or the superheated creosote of a poorly-cleaned chimney. And of course I am aware that university dormitories come complete with up-to-code fire escape routes and evacuation plans.

And that’s all we have time for today, folks. Do tune in tomorrow, though, for the conclusion of this episode of…”Route 1 Reminiscing”!

22h53-23h57, 08-March-2013

So no excuses. I knew that carving out time to write each day while on holiday in Iceland with My Missus and The Boy was going to be a challenge, what with our typically frenetic mornings, the fact that we are driving everywhere (and I am the wheelman), long days packed chock-full with take-a-picture-here-take-a-souvenir (followed at night by three sessions of upload/edit/admire), and blissful unwinding at the end of it all. So no excuses.

Even with the near-religious importance I have long put on food/feating/eeding I still find myself surprised at the sheer might that a good meal can brandish. And I’m not talking about a pizza salve following the loss of the Little League championship in the 10th inning on a walk-off-homer, nor am I referring to a big bowl of chips-n-salsa applied liberally by a pal to help shake off the fact that she wants nothing at all to do with you. There, there? No. NO. Not cross-over grub, but a meal capable of changing the conversation, able to take you from whinging about everything awful that made your awful day the awful day that it was to reveling in the splendor of flavor, the magic of taste combinations, to “Forget about whatever it was I was bellyaching over, you have to taste this bisque, what goes into that coulis, and, no, I hardly ever order dessert but considering how good everything else has been so far, who would’ve ever thought we’d eat like this out here in Wherevertheheck?” The power of love? No, Huey, that’s the power of food.

Talk of “getting away from it all”? Cacophonous. Taking time enough from toil to truly leave it behind? Cliché Cops in hot pursuit. Need a long break? Break this, buddy. So what, then? This: Book a holiday (that’s “vacation” for you ‘Mericans out there) to start at mid-week. Weekend-to-weekend holidays all come complete with a “Next Monday”, as in “I go back to work next Monday.” You cannot get away when you know precisely when you need to get back. “It’s Tuesday. Damn, I have to go back to work in less than a week.” “It’s already Thursday? Where did this week go? Man, that was fast. Tomorrow is the weekend, and next Monday…back to work.” But a holiday that kicks off on a Thursday and ends the following Wednesday? Not only is there reapable benefit to be had in the not-full weeks on the front and back end of your holiday, but the cracking of the norm is sure to levy confusion of the very best type. Take for example La Famille Kessel, which began its happening-now Iceland holiday two days ago (Wednesday, for those of you out there not paying close enough attention)…today My Missus must have asked me what day it was no less than three times, and no less than three times I had to stop and ponder and do a few nano-seconds of actual work to figure out the correct answer.

Next Monday has no hope of finding my ragged ass!

17h39-18h08, 07-March-2013

Settled into our Efsti-Dalur accommodation and biding time until we head over to Geysir for dinner, trying to shut out The Boy’s relentless repetition of a poem he has to have memorized by the time his Vacance d’Hiver ends…in 11 days. And the Airmail beta releases are getting out of hand (not rendering that as a link this time, oh no…not taking bad karma for anyone jumping in who doesn’t want to reinstall their email application 1-2 times a day). And The Missus needs her iPad charged, and this can only happen via AppleKory because she didn’t bring her charger to Iceland. And there I go again, Command+Tab back to Chrome to see if the latest-greatest Airmail beta .zip has finished downloading. And now My Missus has set her Mac up on the desk alongside mine, uploaded her photos from the day, and invited The Boy to scootch in to look the pics over (which I also want to do)… Sod it. Will pick up again after dinner/evening entertainment/family turns in/chaos no longer reigns.

22h00-23h34, 07-March-2013

I’ve always enjoyed driving. Not in a “Man, I feel so alive with the windows down, Def Leppard’s Photograph blaring, and the speedometer topped out with my foot on the floor and my hair on fire.” way (image ROCKS, though), but as a means/manner/venue for feeling good in the world…feeling right. A worthy destination, a reliable car, a full tank, an open road — four lanes good, two lanes better! — and the sun nowhere in sight. Now depending on circumstance, a true companion “riding shotgun” doesn’t hurt, nor does the right mixtape (plural, if the drive is of the interstate variety), however solo-in-silence is the pure sweet stuff, the top-shelf añejo.

I was well into 11 before I ever spent more than 3 hours in a car heading towards a Point B from a Point A (Chicago to Dallas, a ripping out of roots and an attempted transplantation) or crossed more than one state line in the same day’s drive (El Paso to Los Angeles, family holiday fun). Since 1976, though, I have had my wings…uh, fins…uh, well, been significantly more mobile. To recount the more substantial roadtrips to which I have been participant would only be long and boring, and this you can believe because before I performed a monster edit such a recounting was splashed right here, and it was…tragic. Let’s just leave it with “Since I was 11 I have taken many roadtrips across the USA and enjoyed driving holidays in Europe.” and call it a paragraph, OK?

Today La Famille Kessel visited Þingvellir, the Iceland location where the continental drift between the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates can be seen and sometimes experienced (earthquakes). In describing the location to The Boy as we made our way there today, he said “Can you tell me when Europe ends and North America begins?” and all I could think, both hands on the wheel staring down Iceland Road 36 was “If only.”