Etc

Wanted: Art Factory

BRIGHT-EYED BUT LIMP-TAILED creator — more ideas than Warhol or Lucas with one-tenth the energy, no pretensions and no contacts — seeks talented but inspiration-dry makers to loose entertaining visions on unsuspecting populace. Preferred media disciplines: comix; publishing; publicity; cartography; lost-wax casting; rocketry and aeronautical/transorbital fabrication; costume design; beekeeping; gaming, including RPG and videotronics; orchestra; robotics; armory; theater and film/video; MOOG synthesizer; CG and model-building; architecture; laser optics.

No pay necessary — work from home in your spare time. Equal returns and credit guaranteed Scout’s honor (“A Cheery Coproduction of _YOUR NAME HERE_ and Neal’s Brain Unlimited”). No poseurs, players or funless wimps need apply. Please direct all serious inquiries (no phone calls please) to scoop at sonic dot net.

Writing

5 Thoughts: Fiction- v. News-Writing

1. YOU STOP WRITING A NEWS piece when you run out of facts. But when do you stop writing fiction? When you run out of story, I suppose.

2. In news, the most important information goes up top. In fiction, it’s in the reader’s head — at least with genre pieces. There has to be some connection between the reader’s mind and the writer’s expression in terms of shared assumptions or expectations. A science fiction author knows his readers are unfazed by three-headed alien bankers, so doesn’t need to waste valuable real estate on justifying same beyond adhering to strict internal consistency. Someone writing for a general audience needs to adjust their bankers, but touch not the consistency!

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Crit, Etc, Writing

Allegiance Considered

I pledge allegiance to the Constitution
Of the United States of America
And to the ideal on which it stands:
One nation of individuals
Indivisibly intertwined
With liberty, justice and peace for all.

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Food

Food: Absent-Minded Blueberry Pie

THE GENESIS OF THIS PIE lay in my reluctance to buy retail by way of an unintentional misreading of the directions in Betty Crocker’s Orange Tome. (I left out the flour and cinnamon, thinking the blueberries would make their own sauce like cranberries do. They didn’t, and while the results are rather a bit more runny than expected still it’s not too bad — worth a blog post, at least.

Mine Firster Pie

Fig. 1

I used:

– Two 12 oz. bags frozen blueberries from the whole-lifestyle store[1]
– Two 9-inch frozen organic pie shells from same (they come two to a package, complete with tin)
– 1 cup sugar
– 1 cup water

0. Preheat oven to 425 degrees F.

1. Put the blueberries in a big pot with water and sugar. Bring to boil, then reduce heat to a fast simmer.

2. When you realize they’re not exactly cooking like cranberries (about 10 minutes), be grateful that they’re at least nicely defrosted and ladle with a slotted spoon into one of the pie shells. (Reserve liquid for making deLICious blueberry sodas — just add seltzer!)

3. Invert the other pie shell atop the fragrant steaming blue mass; crimp edges and deflate, then poke a few holes in the top to vent. Wrap edge with a 2-3″ strip of cooking foil so it doesn’t brown horribly.

4. Bake for 30 minutes. Remove foil strip and bake another 15 minutes.

5. Set for an hour, preferably on a window sill to tempt passing scamps and hobos. Slice and serve with ice-cold, unskimmed milk. (Live a little. You’re worth it.)

_____
[1] That’s how it seems when I shop there. I feel simultaneously out of place and catered to in my 48-year-old-punk duds.

Writing

Posts That Never Were

THE IMMEDIACY OF BLOGGING CREATES, for the blogger, a whole new way of looking at the world. It’s not much different from the world of any writer in terms of the compulsion to record, comment on and embroider every living moment; blogging just makes it easier and less private.

Privacy in today’s age of Instant Personal Broadcasting[1] (blogs, vlogs, YouTube, reality TV, chat, texting, Facebook and definitely MySpace) means something different than it did when the cautionary “1984” loomed in our future, before we collectively became Big Brother for both fun and profit.

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Living

5 More: Am Erica I?

1. BUT WHAT “IS” IDENTITY?

2. One empirical definition: a synergetic syncretism — specific, all-encompassing perspective resulting from every experience particular to a localized body-consciousness (i.e., “me”) — not so much the part which says “I” as what completes the sentence “I am ___.”

3. “All encompassing” and “localized” are the key terms here. E.g.: I have been enculturated with a linguistic, ethical and conceptual toolbox through which I can manipulate and “make sense” of the world of my senses, intuition and reason. To the observer, however — and exclusive of certain mindstates — this toolbox is largely indistinguishable from the thing it serves/describes: it resembles in every detail “just the way things are.”

4. But identity can also change with circumstance or with conscious choice — thus changing the observer’s “reality.” The experience of a self-identified “American” will be different from that of a self-identified “Pakistani” or “Celt” or even another “American” — the more so if the self-identifications are mashed-up or tinkered with — but may at least be more immediately comprehensible to other affiliatees. (Thus too is culture consensualized, strengthened and spread; it may begin with a specific spacetime event whose down-the-road permutations often become unrecognizable to the original witnesses/provocateurs — sort of a backwards-incompatible open-source project. “Nobody wants to feel left out, but t’ain’t like it was in my day.”)

5. Given all this, and given that we may no more shed at least our sense of identity than we may shed any other perceived part of ourselves, we might at least enjoy the hot dogs and fireworks, or bratwurst and bier, or mamalige and slivovitz, or whatever suits our skills and palates. It’s tempting to argue with the chef — to anguish over our human frailties, bemoan our benightedness — but does that better equip us to solve them than a full belly, good fellowship, and patience?

Living

5 Thoughts: I Am Erica

1. MY FOLKS ARE FIRST-TO-SECOND generation Americans, who (along with my immigrant and immigrant-descended relatives) taught me that, “In America, you can do anything you want as long as you play nicely with the others.” To them, that meant speaking, thinking, building and living as you choose — as well as helping out those less fortunate.

2. It may be hokey, but that philosophy is still the basis of my sense of patriotism, national pride or cultural chauvinism: “Come here and make a life for yourself — and help the rest of us do the same.” It’s also why I vote the way I do; if I think someone/thing will help make life better for everyone, I’m in; if not, I’m out. (Call me a bleeding-heart libertarian, if that helps you any.)

3. Sadly, we have also earned a reputation for poisoning the local air, land and water in exchange for tax credits; polluting the local mediasphere with rank invective, militant chuckleheadness and recreational character-assassination; and waging unnecessary wars. Environmental criminals (who for the purpose of this piece I would define as anyone who values their profit over the happy lives of me and mine) should take a lesson from the second half of my ancestors’ exhortation. It may already be too late to fix their foolishness; it already shames me to admit these bozos live in my conceptual neighborhood.

4. Most of my formative years were spent in the Northeast, where it seemed “ethnic identity” was something taken for granted as an organic part of oneself. Northern California is way different — folks here tend to be more self-conscious about their own and others’ identity. While that’s better than bigotry, I’m not sure it’s entirely good — for the same reason that it’s not good to think too hard about breathing, or riding a bicycle, or making music, or love.

5. The whole “melting pot” idea, where ethnic refugees drop everything to “become Americans,” is obviously not working (neither, thank “God,” did “separate but equal”). (After all, by definition, Americans can live and look like anybody.) What makes America my currently preferred home (or, as Abbie Hoffman put it, why “my last meal would be a burger, fries and Coke”) is the idea that we’re all pieces in a puzzle, looking for a fit. I heartily deplore the stupid things “my” country has done (especially where that stupidity costs lives and slack). But I am glad to live where people want to do something about the crimes which come to light — and to discover the ones which haven’t.