The Blue Raccoon's Spring Awakening

Amie took this dogwood-dappled image of me standing at Robinson Street and Monument Avenue on Easter Sunday, while the Monument Avenue Easter Parade drifted along around us.

This is us kicking up our hills and swinging at one of the venues we visited; Carol Piersol did us the honor.


I wrote a bit about the experience on the three-days-a-week blog The Hat which I write for Richmond magazine, the publication that keeps me gainfully employed.

In a parallel development, my postings at this space have dwindled off in the past several months. My desire is to develop a weekly habit much is like what I'm doing on the Other Network -- perhaps every other day, say -- except that I'm not sure there's enough of my creative self or general life experience to spread all that around.

All Up In The Facebook

Another wrinkle in my creative/writing/social existence is....Facebook. Along with e-mail, this utility is threaded/snake coiled into my life these days and I find it helpful to my work and general communication. I'm still figuring out exactly the best way to utilize the service but in terms of alerting people to when I'm going to be at such a such place doing this or that, in particular when it's book related, there's not been such an acute means of self-promotion to a niche market. When I think back to the Lubricat Theatre's Mutation Project of 2003, which creatively considered the issue of globalization, in reference to Facebook, the effort now seems both prescient and almost antique. 

Suffice to say, I've been busy on several fronts; the Flogging The Book side, the General Domestic Tranquility Side and the Takin' What Their Givin' 'Cuz I'm Workin' For A Livin' Side.

Multi-Tasking

On the Ragtime business, I've participated in readings and signings, with more to come, and I generally enjoy myself and sell a few books. I'm giving a bus tour through the Valentine Richmond History Center -- based on the book -- in June. I also did one for Valentine's Day, ostensibly about "Richmond Romance" but it was a bit more on the darker side, with duels, Poe's amours, Patrick Henry and his first wife who went crazy and so forth.

I'm in a trough between my own creative projects at the moment. I'm not on a big deadline and so confess to a certain listlessness and a need to get back into the ring, though working on fiction right now seems more a flight-of-fancy escape than it ever has.

Giving observations on world events strikes me as not just vain in the egotistical sense, but futile in the "as if anybody could care" sense. With so many bloggists out here typing madly away in the assurance that if only somebody would listen to them then this financial crisis would be all straightened out, what on earth could a lone Kollatz accomplish?

POTUS BHO And His Discontents

But, I want to at least make this observation. The POTUS BHO is just shy of 100 days in office. The bloviators of Left and Right blather about his taking on too much, not doing enough, or just trying to shove as much through as he can while he owns a great quantity of political capital. In short, they are accusing him of being.... a politician. How many in either the general public or the media thought he'd be....what? Something else? Being a politician is not an immediate mark against one's character. There are levels and gradations. 

I watch CSPAN quite a bit and it seems those who align themselves with the right can just mutter about how he reads from the prompter, that he's out of his depth, that he's just a tax-and-spend liberal, that he's socialist or a communist or a fascist, most of them prating on about this without any knowledge of what they're talking about. There's this snide tone, calling him a Jimmy Carter one-termer and a weakling and everything else.

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to watch Alexandra Pelosi's Right America: Feeling Wronged and getting the feeling of having fallen through Alice's mirror. The most normal-appearing ordinary subject, who speaks in simple declarative statements, comes off sounding unhinged and divorced from reality. The Pillsbury doughboy of a guy with a tongue stud and a T-shirt emblazoned by, "Say No To Socilism" and when Pelosi notifies him he's not only spelled socialism wrong, but then he has to Google the definition to explain what it means.

Even when in Mississippi, when a truck driver at an Oxford, Miss. service station says he's not voting for a n*gger, then two black men shake their fingers at Pelosi and declare, 'Shame on you Miss Liberal movie maker, you come down to Mississippi just so you can get somebody to say the word, 'n*gger." I mean, Christopher Guest couldn't come up with this stuff.

Some of those who ended up at the business end of Pelosi's camera have been traumatized by life experiences; through job loss, family members to war or disease -- but we don't really hear about that in her acc0unting. These ideas lodge in heads for reasons -- they may not be logical, but they do accrue somehow.

Critics called Right America "drive by journalism" but is this to deny that these people aren't out there, and seething, and some less quietly than others, about how their concept of the country has veered way out of their particular comprehension? 

Some 58 million people did not vote for the president. Pelosi may have felt confident she was covering the losers, but I for one didn't believe that McCain wouldn't become president until I was standing amid jubilant throngs at Laurel and Franklin streets spontaneously cheering Obama's name. I really didn't assume this election result possible, and I swear, I look and listen to him and after all that's come before, still find the circumstance refreshing and astounding. But I find more that we disagree on. 

He's done things about which I'm not comfortable; such as upholding rendition and not allowing telecoms to be sued for domestic spying. The appointment of cabinet level positions to people who haven't paid their taxes, the rescue of the banks, the punishing of the automakers, the entrenchment of an endless, Vietnam-esque conflict in Afghanistan, the continued support of the "War on Drugs," and lately, though previously classified torture-related documents were released, prosecution of the perpetrators isn't likely. All these things just don't make any sense to me.

I am heartened by his support of environmental and alternative fuels regulations including high speed rail, the SCHIP, and stem cells, and the release of Bush era documents. But, as POTUS might put it, let me be clear -- it's been not even 100 days, and he got dropped in his lap the biggest pile of steaming scheit the likes of which few presidents outside of FDR have received. 

I've said in this space before that I'm not a huge partisan of the two-party-system. I think it's ridiculous, and that our nation is big enough to handle three or four however-many political parties, and that we should have as wide a choice as possible. The unimaginable cost of running for office, the hamstringing compromises that must be made on the way up, the gerrymandered regulations that make third or other parties getting on the ballot almost impossible, the fogging over of ideals for opportunism, are all atrocious and of grievous result to the republic. That said, I think we have perhaps the best man for the job; but not a perfect one, nor stainless or sinless. You don't get to be POTUS through saintliness.

Readin' and Writin' 

I watch too much MSNBC, and need to just get off the TV diet, anyway. I'm reading several books, one of which is Robert Massie's huge history Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War. The other is Tom DeHaven's novel Funny Papers. Thus I've read his Derby Dugan trilogy in reverse.

Meanwhile, my colleague ink-stained wretches are going through a challenging, wrenching period. Almost every day comes news of newspapers closing, moving operations online and widespread layoffs. Last week, the Richmond Times-Dispatch let go more than 50 of its staff, including the loved/hated movie critic Dan Neman.

Will the T-D go the way of the Detroit Free-Press which recently went to delivering the paper to subscribers just three times a week? The Richmond paper's parent company, Media General, purchased the online Richmond.com and what will become of that isn't quite clear.

Mike McGrail explained inner meaning of the imploding news business this way, back in November, at Checkmate: a beaupre blog.

"Newspaper reporting, for all its oft-mentioned flaws, is the photosynthesis of the news ecosystem; it feeds everything above it. Broadcast and cable follow up newspaper articles with their own reports, bringing the news to a broader audience. Bloggers comment and contribute their own knowledge, correcting and expanding on stories that they would probably have missed if they hadn’t read it in a newspaper. The news ecosystem will not collapse without newspapers, but there’s no way it will uncover important new stories at the pace it does now. That’s not good for society. Fear of exposure is a powerful motivator for governments, businesses and individual to mind their manners. Newspapers have historically done most of the watching and scolding."

OK Computer

Finally, in my technological life, though I've been blogging more-or-less, off-and-on under the Blue Raccoon marquee for several years now, I still don't like the way the blog feels or looks. I've contemplated, not over seriously, altering the look or changing the lay out. My ignorance of this medium remains, well, significant. If I am to renew my blogging commitment, as it were, I need to work on all this. 

But any of this must occur through the eMac which has served me so long is these days making ball bearing grinding noises that seem to indicate an internal mechanical problem. And that needs to be rectified, else this blogging business will become moot, and the billion-eyed audience will be thus deprived. The world may not need another blog, but of course, it cannot stand one less. 

Signs of The Times
An object lesson on the Avenue


The horse representing Robert E. Lee's Traveller, of the Lee statue on Monument
Avenue, peering off the pedestal, via David Rencher at lumis.com.


Dear billion-eyed audience:

I'm just busy. And drugged.

Yesterday spent bulk of afternoon in specialist dental chair and then again this morning, and now on a course of painkillers and penicillin. Up to three in the a.m. killing my lovelies in Ragtime In Richmond. Tonight, a board meeting at the Firehouse Theater, then home for more finessing, eradicating and revising. Rewriting is writing. I keep telling myself.

I'm also behind at the office on numerous things, and kind of woozy headed. I have a root canal in my future, and an "implant." Not that kind. But in my upper jaw. A tooth that is not a tooth.

But this I want to share.

So it's past four in the afternoon, and I'm bustling across loverly Monument Avenue, that I'm fortunate to traverse perhaps two or three times a day, and , and I hear the click clock of high heels on sidewalk pavement; these are not Sunday heels, these are I'm Sexy On Tuesday heels.

I assume this, of course, as my attention gravitates across the green median of the urbane boulevard as I'm walking, and there she is, a blonde with a bounteous pony tail, a silky green baring blouse, lithe arms, black pants and strappy pumps, also black. She is preparing to enter an apartment house. A hostess at a restaurant, perhaps, or going to a party, I'm not sure, but as I am watching her progress, she veers away from the steps and makes a deliberate negotiation into the scruffy grass in front of the first floor balcony where, as I see for the first time, a McCain-Palin sign has been thrust.

Our Girl, with an annoyed twist of her mouth, yanks the political advertisement out of the ground, and her elbows bent in that angry way, she pushes through the apartments front door as though intending to slap the sign over the head of whoever is in there.

Now, I realize, this scene is getting enacted across the country and I surmise, perhaps, that the other guys got a few signs pulled up and tossed away in just this way, somewhere else in the City of Richmond this afternoon. Statistical chances are good in that way.

But for me, the pleasure of hearing those 4 o'Clock Heels on the sidewalk, and her expression and the decisiveness with which she carried out her removal of the message that irritated her, was yet another reason why I enjoy walking where I'm going whenever I can.

Now forgive me, I have much to do and not much time. Back in a couple days.

Marathon of Writing Ends

Marathon of seeking image permissions begins


Like Our Miss Brooks pictured above (in one of my fave pix of her -- the dress! the shoes! the bent arm! the pretty doze!), I spent much of Tuesday in a quasi-conscious mode; present but not quite, feeling as though encased inside one of those Jules Vernes-ian deep sea suits, you know, the kind with the round helmets. The world was blurry, muffled and in slow motion. But Rag-time In Richond: Socialists, Suffragists, Sex and Murder 1909-1911 is this much closer to reality.

Amie hauled my droopy self off to the pool, fed me, then dumped my carcass in the bed around 9 where I took the crosstown express into Nod, though dreaming of Richmond's early 20th century mayor, David C. Richardson, getting a ride in the first airplane to visit Richmond, at the 1909 State Fair, and how that must have felt for a Confederate veteran who'd probably in his life never been more than seven or eight stories high off the ground.

My two-day, three-night writing marathon has concluded, though I still have plenty left to tie up. As a very serious writer, and acquaintance of mine, wrote to me yesterday, after I wondered why I hadn't dedicated my life to, say, becoming a great canasta player: "It is an ugly and unfortunate business." And my slender volume of history is not a great academic text, it isn't Serious Literature. But it is mine, and I'm destined to the completion. There is steady stream of "T/K" coursing through, bits and pieces here and there, meaning "To Come" and now, it must, um, come, so to speak.

I must at the same time pursue rights and permissions for a number of diverse images. I have some from my own collection, but they are in various kinds of media, and none of them digital. I've been practicing avoidance on this issue, but also I couldn't really choose images until the text was done.

In the Random Notes division, I present one of the saddest images I've seen for the file of Richmond's Socio-Cultural and Physical Development -- and there is no blood, no guns, just this: a streetcar rolling across Monument Avenue on Sheppard Street. I have to thank Ray over at The Devil's Triangle, Richmond, Virginia, about this slice of Richmond that is bounded by Belmont, Kensington, Monument avenues and the Boulevard. This site is here.


This otherwise unremarkable picture just makes me sad for several reasons. First, you squint, and you could be looking at the same intersection in 2008. The built environment remains more-or-less intact, no big glaring wrecker-ball atrocities to cite.

The trolley, though, was yanked away from the city in 1949, the ripped up, paved over and burnt, just as thorough and awful as though an outside enemy had come to inflict punishment upon the city. Thing is, like the Evacuation Fire of 1865, we did it to ourselves.

The tremendous loss and wrong-headed planning that followed the elimination of this transit system is incalculable. Hard to believe, but if some form of the Richmond streetcar system had been saved until the present day, it would be 120 years old this year. You can read more of my screed about our absence of light rail transit, with more vintage images, at this location, but scroll down, here.

If, in that alternate Richmond, we'd had the presence of mind to have kept the system and improved upon it, there'd be sleek, modern, European models humming around town, along with some heritage cars (with air conditioning, I should think) much like this one.

If Richmond had maintained, expanded and remained dynamic with its transit, this city would be quite different today. Oh, to walk down along the Carytown portion of that altenrate Richmond, glimpse the headlines of their newspapers, hear the topics of their day, and see what how a contemporary transit system would have transformed this city's shape, and its self-regard.

Created in 1888, he Richmond transit system would be celebrating 120 years in 2008.

Another view, tighter on the action.


Speaking of Wrecker Ball Atrocities, on the site of a "recovering architect" I found this example of why Modernism failed the city, and the comments are worth reading too.

The before-after image is Howitzer Park at the juncture of Park and Harrison in Richmond, Virginia. Not show, I thinks its just off to the left, is the Masonic Temple that was for years VCU's theater building, with a cafeteria in the basement. The only image I've ever seen in it is in a art work by Caryl Burtner. (And even then, it wasn't the work itself, but a picture of it in Urge Magazine). That building was demolished just before I got to VCU in 1980. But I AM old enough to remember the raziug of this block for the PAC center. Sheesh. That link, but you have to scroll down to June 27, 2007, is Veritas et Venustas.

This observation pretty much nails the thing on the metaphorical noggin:

"The source of many problems with contemporary architecture is that it is easy to do. Type the desired specifications and dimensions for a building into a computer program, distort the resulting box for selected style and context, prepare the client an artist's rendering with landscaping and upper middle-class pedestrians, and voila! Clearly, this happened in Richmond to a neighborhood which should have been preserved.

What is missing in today's design is taste and talent, for which no program can substitute. Many trained architects have neither, which is why America is filling up with either dreadful pastiches of Colonial houses on the low end, or oppressive Futurama aberrations on the high end. Great design has at its soul a profound geometry and sense of proportion, the multiplicity of a building's parts made unified and coherent by the use of regulating lines in architecture. These design fundamentals are wonderfully explained and illustrated by Le Corbusier in his treatise. And until they are revived, understood and practiced, whether in traditionalist or modernist forms, the kitsch shall inherit the earth."

And now, via YouTube, we send you off with a ride through the streets of Lisbon, we'd call these Heritage Trolleys now, and in fact, the one Ms. Bocock rescued and brought back to Richmond--as a museum piece--came from here.





Then, the more contemporary styles we should have here, linking the city and outer burbs (the spread of which would've made more sense with this kind of transit and rigorous zoning). This is in Berlin, and I've ridden on these, and and they're great.

Slouching Toward 2008: A Miscellany


The yoga-dacious, cheer-riffic Kendra is a cover girl for
Art and Style Weekly's year-end Score. Scott Elmquist
photo.


Billion-eyed audience, I'm taking a pause from the present shuddering of the world to catch up on some of this and that.

Direct your attention to the year-end issue of Style Weekly and a few familiar faces and mentions of favorite things. First on the cover, the Art Cheerleaders. Frequent glommers here may remember the cheerleaders from the appearance of Kendra and Rebecca in the video shot for the collaboration between Amie and me, "Dictation," for her just-closed "Walk The Walk" exhibition. You can see the cheerleaders in motion, and more, down at the December 5 post. Great to see Rebecca Oliver, Robbie Kinter, Mary Burruss captured in full flight. And Jocelyn Bandas and Rebecca Buhrman, too. Jocelyn looks quite excited by the prospect of 2008.

I can't tell you how wonderful their presence felt...cheerleaders jumping and shaking their pom poms for history and art! What a great cultural pradigm shift. Made me feel good, that's for sure. Yeahhhhh art!

David Timberline gave the Firehouse Theatre a mention, "The year ended on a hopeful note, though. Firehouse Theatre Project’s brilliant rumination on race, “Spinning Into Butter,” underscored theater’s unique ability to address serious social issues in ways that are both entertaining and engaging." Dave also has a theater blog of his own, here.


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Last night I was walking past Black Swan Books and Nick and Ellen invited me in to sign their remaining stock of books, about 10 or so, to which also I added hand-made editorial ammendations that are getting changed in the second printing. I've received some quite wonderful reports back from people who've given the slender volume as a gift. I thank all those 1,800 or so people who have made TRS the earliest book among its first releases ever to go into an encore printing.

During the next few days, I'm sorting out through piles of stuff to get my desk and office ready to begin making progress on research for the second book.

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During the Christmas holiday, we had up from Mississippi Amie's mom Sue and her nephew Justin. This allowed us to show off the town a little. I introduced Justin to the New York Deli, and during the moderate temperatures, walked him up Monument Avenue giving discourse on the histories of the monuments.



Being more of an outdoorsman than his uncle-by-marriage, he could identify the types of fish carved into Maury's pedestal. Also pointed out to him that the swirling mass of humanity wround the globe presented Monument Avenue's only woman, and she's quite a hottie, I think. (The figure next to the akilter boat, left. You can click on the image to make her more discernible.)

I became one of those tourist types I wrote about in "24 Hours With General Lee" -- taking pictures of my relative in front of each statue. Well, he wanted them. I wasn't tugging him kicking and screaming, he's a bit of a Civil War buff.

Then we went down to the Lee Houseon East Franklin. Because of the holiday, I couldn't get him in to the back porch where Mathew Brady took the famous photograph of him with the Cross-and-Bible door providing a background for him, just-so posed by the photographer to give the impression that Lee was both a main of great faith, and the commander of many martyrs. I also explained that Lee didn't really reside in the house for long; the place was where he came to after the Army of Northern Virginia surrendered at Appomattox.



I also had opportunity to give him a tour of Hollywood Cemetery and show him some of the more prominent among those in their eternal rest there, and of couse, the Pyramid.

My Grande Louvre, however, has been suffering from her second bad head cold of the season and had to deal with not feeling well, relatives in town and Christmas. This past Monday when the weather was dreadful, she shepherded them to the American Civil War Center at Tredegar, where Amie was distracted because people we knew were in the films, including our pal Raynor Scheine, who now lives here after more than 30 years in New York. Then they the Museum and White House of the Confederacy and the Virginia Historical Society's Lee and Grant exhibit.

Amie said, despite her depleted physical condition, she enjoyed playing tourist, going to places she's never been here. Good that Justin saw the Museum of the Confederacy before its collection is broken up and sent to three different locations throughout the state.

**********************************************************************

My father's birthday is Christmas Eve. That morning, Amie and me, with her mother, and Justin driving his rental car, aided by Mapquest directions, journeyed to a Cracker Barrel restaurant somewhere off Hull Street Road deep in the whorls of Chesterfield County's cul-de-sac archipelago. This is what Dad wanted, and it was his birthday, his 69th.

I'd not seen my sister Sharon and her husband Kevin in months, and had missed my niece Mya . Amie gave them a portrait painted of Mya.

The place was packed and with a waiting line. So many people who looked as though they perhaps had breakfast there more than once-a-year. I couldn't eat that much food on a regular basis and my Dad shouldn't, either.

But perhaps a present to him came later, on Christmas Day, when he dropped by to deliver some presents Mom forgot to haul to the Cracker Barrel. In conversation about family, I was reminded that Dad's two older brothers were both dead--of heart problems. And he'd had little dealings with them during the past decades. To call them estranged is euphemistic. He has a younger brother, whom he's not seen in 30 years, and didn't even know whether he was alive, and if so, where.

Well. I put the Interwebs to work. Using Switchboard.com, upon Amie's suggestion, and Google, we found someone with his brother's name and that of his wife living in Arizona. No phone number, but an address, and a chance to communicate. Further, with his 50th high school reunion coming up in October, Dad was curious to see if he could find a classmate to whom--for some weird reason--he'd given letters written to Dad from Wernher von Braun! Dad in those days was interested in cars and rockets and aerodynamics. "They used to call me Rocket," Dad told me, and not in a kind way, I gathered. I think we found him and his phone number--the person had the right age and an unusual name--living in Minnesota.

Hope he's able to connect with these folks after all this time.


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I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the recent death of retired Virginia Museum of Fine Arts éminence grice Fred Brandt. His memorial service was quite High Church Episcopal, according to a friend of ours who was there, which surprised him. He'd known Brandt many years, "And I couldn't remember a time when he ever mentioned the word God." Perhaps he enjoyed the aspects of ritual and ceremony.

He's one of those people who can make an impact on a city like Richmond that needed people like him to help mold the culture, yet few are as well aware of his handiwork as they should be. Writer Ed Slipek Jr. gave him an appropriate farewell in Style. Another one of Richmond's cultural lights has gone out as those of Brandt's generation fade into the mystic. Pax.