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A few weeks ago I began experiencing an odd disturbance in the vision of my right eye. It started off as a kind of flickering in the upper right periphery whenever I moved the eyeball within its socket - never when I held the eye fixed and turned my head. But if I panned from right to left, I'd see this flickering in the corner of my vision. It was at the end of a long workday (12 hrs or so), and I chalked it up to fatigue. It was present the next morning, but much less pronounced, so I thought that was the end of it. But over the next several days, it came back. It seemed to wax and wane in severity, and change its character. Now when it happens, it's as if a large floater in my eyeball sweeps rapidly across my field of view, not quite obscuring my vision, but flashing translucently by. At other times, the vision is just filmy, as though looking through a gossamer-thin sheet of waxed paper. Blinking sometimes clears it up. Sometimes not. I have one of those home medical advisor books, the first few hundred pages of which are devoted to flowcharts for self-diagnosis. When the weekend rolled around and I was still bothered by the symptoms, I had a look. Here's where following the yes-no trail led me: "Have you had a recent head injury?" (No) "Have you suddenly lost some or all of the field of vision in one or both eyes?" (No) "Has your vision become blurred?" (Not sure what they mean by blurred - let's tentatively say Yes) "Is only one eye affected?" (Yes) "Is the eye painful?" (No) CONSULT YOUR PHYSICIAN WITHOUT DELAY! YOU MAY HAVE RETINAL DETACHMENT! (Yikes! No blurriness, nope, none at all!) "Have you developed double vision?" (No) "Have you been seeing flashing lights and/or floating spots?" (Yes) CONSULT YOUR PHYSICIAN WITHOUT DELAY! YOU MAY HAVE RETINAL DETACHMENT! Holy crap, a detached retina! This was scary, but since this was a weekend, and I couldn't be sure if this were a medical emergency or not, I waited antsily until Monday before calling my doc to set up an appointment. I also declared a moratorium on researching the disorder - I was frightened enough, I didn't need to know more when there wasn't anything I could do about it. When I called my physician, my expectation was that he'd schedule an appointment for a few days out, and that would be that. Instead, I was asked if I could get there within the hour. I did, but a cursory examination by the Physician's Assistant revealed no signs of detachment, which was a relief. Still, there was enough concern to schedule an appointment with an ophthamologist later that same week. Here's the dilly: The retina is the light-sensitive wallpaper lining the inside of the eyeball. When it starts to peel away, there is a progressive - and permanent - loss of vision. The space inside the eyeball is filled with a gel called the vitreous humor. This gel isn't free-floating, but physically bonded to the outer surface of the retina. As we age (and I'm crowding Six-Oh hard), the gel can shrink, pulling away from the retina as it does. This is called (deep breath) "posterior vitreous detachment", and this is what is disrupting my vision. Instead of rotating in lock-step with my eyeball, blobs of this gel are flapping and folding over where it's broken loose, creating the floaters and disturbances I've been seeing. Once it's completely detached, the symptoms should disappear. However, until it does, I'm at elevated risk for a full-blown retinal detachment, because the gel tugs at the retina each time I move my eye. So for the next few months I've got to see the ophthamologist every week or so to make sure the retina doesn't start to tear. If it does, surgical intervention will be necessary. So I ain't out of the woods yet. Current Location: base camp
Current Mood: anxious
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I saw John McLaughlin play (with drummer Dennis Chambers and organist/trumpeter Joey Defrancesco) at UMass several years ago. It was memorable for me because McLaughlin had been one of my guitar heroes since his Mahavishnu days back in the 1970s. It was a curious sensation awkwardly waiting in line amidst strangers half my age, overhearing them earnestly discussing my LP collection, much of which had been recorded before they were even born. (It was from a student from India that I learned the correct pronunciation of "Shakti" - with a broad -a- as in "bah", and emphasis on the final syllable.) A number of them were apparently student musicians, there to admire McLaughlin's technical brilliance as much as his artistry. It was open seating in the concert hall, and I rather amazingly found an aisle seat in the 4th row. I settled in, waiting for things to begin. Here's what I said about it in my journal at the time:
The house lights dimmed, the canned music faded, and the audience burst into applause. The black backdrop behind the stage moved, and a figure, still in shadows, stepped out, carrying a guitar, on which he began to strum improvised chords, shifting, changing, abstract yet subtly melodic, and he stepped forward into the light. There he was! Longish salt-and-pepper hair fashionably swept back; dark brown shirt with light tan pants and matching vest; and a dark red hollow-body wireless electric guitar. The long, pointed, English nose; the broad, not-quite lantern jaw; but now Animated, not just a scuffed photo on the back of an album cover. He seemed to be having trouble with a slight cough. He casually strode to his side of the stage, not thirty feet away, playing his guitar, while the organist and drummer took their places. McLaughlin abruptly shifted gears and launched into a dark, choppy blues vamp, and he eyed the drummer as he hit the distortion pedal. Chambers picked it up and began pounding hard, as only he can, and the two of them skittered off playing a hard, acid-jazz-funk, bewilderingly complex and delightfully visceral all at once. Chambers seemed to have attracted his own following, and after his first, brief solo, about a dozen kids in the front row stood up, whooping, circling their fists in the air over their heads for a few seconds before sitting back down. The drummer glanced at them with a bemused expression on his face, and acknowledged their kudos with a quick nod of thanks. McLaughlin, unobtrusively vamping on the opposite side of the stage at the time, also noticed the display; and at the end of the number, he made it a point to re-introduce the drummer to the audience. It was a nice touch, I thought, bespeaking a modest generosity and a willingness to share the glory. The organist was a doughy, baby-faced young man I was unfamiliar with, but he played a nicely soulful line with rapid-fire arpeggios fitting of Mahavishnu. McLaughlin turned his back to us to keep eye contact with him during his solo, and kept him in motion by stroking dark chords from his guitar. It was wonderful! They played only one song I recognized, "The Wall Must Fall" from Mahavishnu's final (1987) album. It's a great jazz tune, with ample opportunity for rock-blues soloing; and they did a great job with it, so abstracting the theme that it was several minutes before I recognized it. The organist, in particular, soared here. Immediately at the beginning of the second set it was clear that something was wrong. The organist had begun to play, and I could hear him just fine, but he looked startled, reached over to the amp and twiddled something, and started over. McLaughlin, who'd opened up the set by playing a long, introspective chordal solo, looked around, and DeFrancesco mouthed, "I can't hear anything". A technician ran out on stage, hunched over as if he thought we wouldn't be able to see him, and opened up the back of the amp. McLaughlin rolled his eyes and kept playing, but it was starting to get distracting, especially when the organist left his place and got down on his hands and knees to hold a flashlight so the tech could solder. Chambers looked embarassed, and his playing lacked conviction. Finally, McLaughlin began to sing, "I've got 10 seconds to go/let's get it fixed!", and actually stopped playing and started to walk offstage. The audience laughed a little nervously, but DeFrancesco grabbed McLaughlin by the arm and spoke briefly with him. The organist sat back down, McLaughlin returned to the spotlight, and they took off again, a little distracted at first; but they made it up to us! McLaughlin has always seemed to favor strong drummers (Billy Cobham, Mike Walden, and Danny Gottlieb with Mahavishnu; Tony Williams with Lifetime; Zakir Hussaine and Trilok Gurtu with Shakti and other world-music outings), and Chambers was a perfect choice for him. Throughout the rest of the set, they maintained eye contact, grinning and mugging, challenging one another to top each provocative riff, continually raising the ante. Chambers plays in bold, primary colors, and while he's perfectly capable of playing a cool, straightahead jazz 4/4, he's at his best hammering out the kind of jagged, loping funk that worked so well on Scofield's "Dirty Rice". McLaughlin was clearly loving it, but seemed to be having a little trouble with his left hand. I wondered if that was the one he'd injured several years earlier. Yet he still managed to fling out a good, five-minute cadenza, the distortion pedal flat to the stage, and the audience screamed and whooped in excitement. There was one kid in front of me on the opposite side of the aisle who must have been partly responsible for the rank, cumin-like odor I'd noticed while in line outside: he held his head, doubled up in a near-fetal position, then thrashed and bobbed in his enthusiasm. I laughed aloud: this might have been the first REAL music this kid was hearing, and he was hearing it fresh, unpasteurized, unhomogenized, and from a man old enough to be his grandfather. McLaughlin finished with his characteristic clanging, dissonant power chord, and the drummer, who'd been burning just hot enough to keep McLaughlin aflame, slowed down, then started kicking out yet another riff. He fixed McLaughlin with a sly, sardonic grin which McLaughlin returned, shaking his head as if to say "I can't! I can't do another one!". He gestured to to DeFrancesco, who then ran with it for a while. McLaughlin walked to the far side of the stage and sat down for a well-deserved rest break. At any rate, the three of them riffed, bouncing ideas off one another for 2 hours more, long after the set was supposed to have ended. Whether it was to make up for the set's uneven start or whether they just really got into it doesn't matter; it meant an evening of pure, distilled improvisation for the rest of us, and was one of the most satisfying musical experiences it's ever been my privilege to enjoy. The obligatory curtain call was a gentle, playful duet between McLaughlin and DeFrancesco, on trumpet this time, recalling the guitarist's recurring gig with Miles; and it ended with the two of them walking together offstage, still playing, as if arm in arm. A perfect dessert, sweet yet light! All this for nine bucks!
Tags: band, concert, music, writer's block
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"GOP Rallies Behind Dems' Healthcare Plan" "Bin Laden Captured" "Stock Market in Unprecedented Bull Run" "North Korea Opens Dialogue With the West" "Study Finds Exercise Harmful, Bacon Good For You" "Microsoft to End Obsolesence of Operating Systems, to Concentrate on Support and Enhancements" "Harvard to Award Sarah Palin Honorary Degree" "NTSB Presses to Mandate Cell Phone Use, Texting, While Driving" "MacDonald's Announces Introduction of New 'Healthy Alternatives' Menu"
Tags: writer's block
Current Location: base camp
Current Mood: Puckish
Current Music: Mahavishnu - "Half Man Half Cookie":
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So I went back here, armed with camera this time. (I went unarmed on my first visit.) The weather was similar to that on that earlier trip - maybe a little cooler & drier. I showed the pictures to a friend in the know who verified that it is, in fact, a TACAN installation: Tactical Air Navigation, or something like that. It's an omnidirectional beacon operating at a specific channel that aircraft can tune in to, and get some idea from its bearing where they are. It was surrounded by a dozen or so of what looked like rural mailboxes, all oriented tangentially to the circle their positions defined.   They were active devices, if the power cables feeding each are any indication. I don't know a lot about the technology involved, but my guess is that they're power sensors. The beacon itself is likely constructed of a number of directional radiators all arranged back to back in a circle. In order to ensure that they're all broadcasting at the same frequency with the same power (so the beacon is equally "bright" from all directions), each sensor would detect the output of one of the radiators and report back into a central controller. If any radiator started to drift in frequency or sag (or surge) in power, its sensor would notify the main control unit to make whatever adjustments might be needed to compensate. I dunno, sounds reasonable. But don't quote me. Likewise, the steel mesh might just serve as a passive reflector, to bounce any downward signal back up, capturing what would otherwise be lost. If anybody seeing this happens to know anything about TACAN, please feel free to post a comment. Here's the gallery - just 14 images in all. Also went back here, maybe for the last time. The first floor ceilings have all collapsed, and the structure is now little more than a box whose four sides are on the verge of collapsing outward. It looked too dangerous even to approach. No strange phenomena this time. No new pictures worth keeping.
Current Location: base camp
Current Mood: relaxed
Current Music: Joe Farrell: "Song of the Wind"
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What in the name of all that's holy is THAT? That great, flaming orb in the firmament? Is it Apollo racing his fiery chariot across the sky? Is it one of Thor's firebolts hurled our way in petulance? Is it divine punishment for our myriad sins? Is it a visitation from somewhere Beyond? Or is it... is it the "Sun", that awful being the elders' tall tales claim once graced the heavens, bringing light and warmth to the land? Weren't all their wild stories mere legend? The foolish prattle of the old, just so much nonsense and superstitious rubbish meant to impress and frighten us? AIEEEEE! Great Helios, I bow down before thee, averting my unworthy eyes from thy fearful countenance...
Later that same day...One day while screwing around with Google maps, I discovered this feature not 10 miles from my house. It sits surrounded by deep woods atop a hill at the end of a dirt road off a dirt road off a narrow, sinuous, two-lane state road. WTF? I said to myself. The name of the dirt road terminating at the object was evocative enough: Governor Jet Signal Road. I assumed this was some kind of aviation navigation facility or maybe a satellite signalling station, run by the Feds. It's proximity and potentially exotic nature intrigued me. So last weekend, in a light, steady drizzle (such as we've had nearly every day for a frickin' month, now), I took a drive over that way to reconnoiter, in the event that the rains might someday stop. Sure enough, I found the Dirt Road blocked by an unmarked gate off the Other Dirt Road, with nary a sign warning away any Googlers curious enough to shut off their computers and venture out into nonvirtual space. I thought that a good strategy if one did not wish to attract undue attention to potential trespassers like myself. I also found a place to park that was far enough from the gate to be discrete, close enough to be an easy walk; and that WTF part B was a string of phone poles heading directly up the hill. Though a shorter walk, the road itself was just about a mile in length and easier traveling, so I decided against following the phone lines. So when the cloud cover finally broke today and the air began to freshen, I decided an expedition was in order. With the car keys in hand, I contemplated the camera bag hanging from the closet doorknob, then decided against it. The facility was unlikely to be manned, but it could be watched over by security cams. The last thing I wanted was a video of me prowling around a remote government installation with a camera. I hear Gitmo isn't very nice this time of year. I made the 20-minute drive, parked & locked the car, and set out. Though the humidity was lifting, the woods smelled damp and earthy, and the breeze shook out rain caught by the canopy overhead. In short order I reached the road. The gate was about 50 feet in. I noticed a hand-painted sign in the ditch just to my left: "PRIVATE DO NOT ENTER". I thought it unlikely that a government installation would put up a hand-painted sign, but I decided that I hadn't seen the thing anyway. I pressed on and stooped to pass under the gate. As I proceeded up the hill, I noticed something rather odd. Every hundred feet or so, there were wooden posts driven into the ground on either side of the road, with reflectors fastened to their sides. Atop each post, someone had carefully placed a single stone. Now my imagination set to work, and started gnawing at my self-confidence. What if this weren't a government installation after all? What if it were a marijuana farm, or some weird religious cult who'd cleared out the circular patch as a signal to invite UFOs to land, or to call Yog-Sothoth down from the stars? I found myself avoiding the softer areas of the road in favor of the harder more firmly packed gravel to minimize the clarity of my bootprints, and stopping every so often to listen. When the road turned from its easterly track and veered north, it started getting steep, and I knew revelation was at hand. I passed the phone line just as it reached the hilltop, and observed that the poles did not continue, but that here the lines went underground. A government installation seemed more likely, then. Which a few more steps corroborated. A small, rectangular, vinyl-clad shed, with a silent air-conditioner protruding from a back wall next to a couple of doors labeled "Government Property - No Trespassing". Beyond the building, a wooden stairway, unfinished and weathered gray, ascended about 10 feet of rock ledge to a vertical aerial of some kind, and a white, ultramodern obelisk. Signs posted nearby proclaimed this to be a site run by the FAA for purposes of air traffic control, and that any damage to the equipment it contained could contribute to the loss of life. I took this to be in the nature of a warning, and not a threat. However when I climbed the stairs to approach the obelisk, I made out stenciled lettering on its side warning me not to approach any closer than 150 feet. Unsure about the effects of terahertz radiation on my body, I thought it wise to comply. Anyway - curiosity satisfied, I returned to the bottom of the hill. The walk back seemed much shorter than the walk up. It seemed to warrant a return trip - with the camera.
Current Location: home base
Current Mood: shocked
Current Music: Shakti
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So far this summer, the weather here in New England has been absolutely beastly. We haven't seen the sun in weeks. Throughout the entire month of June, it rained every fucking day - maybe only for an hour at a stretch, but just enough to ensure that nothing ever dries out, ever. The vernal pool next door should be dry by this time of year. It's near overflowing. The grass in my yard is knee-high. My mildew gardens are thriving. People's moods are as ugly and homicidal as they are during mud season at the end of a vicious, nasty winter. Even as I write this, rain is hammering on the skylight over my head, savagely trying to claw its way inside. The month of July owes us big time, but it's not off to a very promising start. So here it is, the first day of a 4-day weekend, and I'm glumly looking outside at the leaden skies and the sodden greenery pressing like some kind of creeping mold against what little yard I've got. I've got photos I'd like to take. On a recent visit to one of Winchendon's crumbling machine shops, I bumped into a curious passer-by who happened to be the town manager. When I told him how I'd sell a kidney to get inside, he laughed and assured me all I had to do was knock if there happened to be a red pickup truck parked nearby - the caretaker would be more than happy to give me a tour. The prospect of spending an afternoon chasing the light through such a place is exciting, but with no sun to illuminate the interior, there wouldn't be enough light to chase. There's an old factory building in Athol I think I know the way inside, but it involves approaching through the brush surrounding it, and it's too damned cold to get that wet. So what I'm doing instead is looking back over what I've already shot. I've taken well over 3,000 photos in the two years I've had the camera, and so eager was I to get started that I never bothered tagging my images at download time. I found it taking longer and longer to paw back through my archive for a particular image, and couldn't figure out how to use the software that came with the camera to tag after the fact. So I wrote a little app to use in conjunction with IrfanView (a free image editor I can't rave about enough!) to create an Excel spreadsheet linking a description of each image to the image itself. Once I had built up that database, I wrote another app for whenever I download a fresh batch, to query for and append a description for each new image, assuring that the database will remain up to date. Finally, I wrote a little search engine (presently in beta) to search the database for an image based on keywords. If the description contains any of the three words in line 1 AND any of the three in line 2 AND any of the three in line 3, then that image's file/pathname is displayed. It looks like it's going to become a killer app! And I've been experimenting with black & white renderings. Again using IrfanView, I convert to grayscale, enhance the contrast, then reduce the color depth to four: black, white, and two shades of gray. The results are interesting...   ...but I'm not sure where it's going to lead. I guess that's why it's called experimentation. Here's what I've done so far:
Current Location: base camp
Current Mood: pissed off
Current Music: Soundtrack from "Bullitt"
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So I've been listening to a lot of never-before-issued Miles Davis from the vaults of Columbia, including "The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions." This stuff got Miles inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (posthumously) in 2006. Miles' MO at the time was to start tape rolling the minute the musicians assembled in the studio, then start running through the various motifs he'd sketched out beforehand. They didn't record "songs" - just riffs and jams around certain chord changes or rhythmic structures Miles wanted to explore. They ranged in length anywhere from a few dozen seconds to over fifteen minutes or more. It was then up to Teo Macero, the producer, to edit, mix, and splice the best of all this work into a whole that could be packaged on two (or sometimes four) 20-minute sides of vinyl. Anyway, there's some kick-ass stuff here. Guitarist John McLaughlin proved to be about as close to a collaborator as Miles ever had - Miles even changed his style of playing to mimic McLaughlin's slashing guitar lines. There's a wonderful moment at the end of a riff called "Duran" (take #4), on which the guitarist has just laid down a second overdubbed track, ending with a particularly nasty, distorted, dissonant power chord. Before the clanging has even reverberated away, Miles chuckles appreciatively into a nearby mike, "That's some raunchy shit, John!" Some of this music has been previously released, used to assemble parts of "Tribute to Jack Johnson" and "Big Fun". Several appeared in the double LP (what we quaintly called "a four-sider" back then) "Live-Evil". The bulk of this LP was recorded live in a Washington DC club called The Cellar Door, but bits from the "Jack Johnson" studio sessions were used as well, in particular the first 80 seconds or so of a jam called "Honky Tonk." This fragment was used as bridge connecting the opening live jam ("Sivad") with a relatively quiet passage recorded later during the concert. Now: several years ago (many, in fact) I had a dream in which I'm playing this LP, and while looking over the liner notes I discover a pocket in the sleeve with a 3rd disk, one whose existence I'd never suspected! I excitedly replace what I'm playing on the turntable with this disk, and it turns out to contain an alternate version of "Sivad", one in which the bridge seques instead into a fantastic, classic blues riff. As it is with dreams, the melody dissolved upon awakening, but I've always remembered the dream with some fondness, with a sense of "if only". So you can imagine my astonished delight (mingled with a few goose bumps unrelated to pleasure) when "Honky Tonk" sequed into that very blues riff. The first 80 seconds were familiar (though out of context without the concert footage preceeding it) - but the blues riff was eerily familiar as well! Is this an example of convergent evolution? Of clairvoyance? Astral projection? Am I a musical savant without realizing it, did I logically reconstruct the remainder of the tune from the first 80 seconds? Beats me. But it's a great tune, and I can't tell you how glad I am that it finally came home.
Current Location: home base
Current Mood: pleased
Current Music: need I say?
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I've lived in the same house now for 30 years, but prior to that moved around a lot. Born in Springfield, MA (USA), moved to Cleveland OH, then to the Cleveland suburb of Eastlake, back to Springfield, to East Longmeadow MA, thence to Longmeadow, thence to Cornish NH (USA), to Walpole NH, to Westmoreland NH... Four years at the University of New Hampshire, four separate dorm rooms; to an apartment in Keene NH, and finally to my digs now. While I didn't technically live there, I spent an awful lot of time in Ann Arbor MI (USA) with a woman I met out there... I obviously must love where I live now or I would have moved by now, but the house in Walpole has special memories for me - two secret rooms, incidentally cut off from hallways and entryways by construction additions. The house in Westmoreland was special, too, for its location, surrounding by rolling pastureland. Dormitory life, however, is not something I'd ever want to experience again. I'd volunteer for waterboarding before moving back into a dorm. Tags: writer's block
Current Location: home base
Current Mood: lethargic
Current Music: snuffling of the coffee maker
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