[jet city] Grand re-opening diary post: A visit to Caba Ridgely

To mark the last-day-before-Labor-Day, we celebrated with a truly special event: a get-together for food and festivating at the Whidbey Island home of Yojimbo and his bride, Lady K. Johnbai and O joined Otis and I for a ferry ride to this storied enclave, known previously only through legend and fable, the whispered half-memories of travelers and the ravings of blessed fools. The thrill of traveling to this vertiable El Dorado was matched only by the pleasure of spending an afternoon with K, a figure previously as elusive as a mermaid.

Seriously, we had a great time hanging out on The Rock, meeting neighbors, new friends, and old pals (hi, FarmerScott!), eating tasty treats, and relaxing in the sun (and the shade). Herewith, photographic proof!

The "cabin"

The view

Let's not talk about Yojimbo

K!

And we're back!

(Originally posted on Labor Day, 2008)

Okay, here's your chance to say "I told you so"or whatever you like. I just can't keep away from the diary blogging. I used to joke that nothing ever really happened until I blogged it; that attitude seems to have embedded itself in my consciousness. I keep thinking about sharing stuff I have found or done with our little community, or celebrating the events and acts in other people's lives, and without the blog, I have no way to do that. Even Otis has noticed a change in the weather since the demise of HKC:she tells me that, for example, I no longer have a platform from which to announce how good her soup was (and it was very good!), and she misses that.

On top of that, the WordPress WalakaNet just wasn't doing it for me. It was was too formal-looking and -feeling, and I'm not sure it was helping me get back to serious, longer-form writing anyway.

So, I'm gonna fire up the dirigible again, launch the expeditionary autogyros, and begin barnstorming the blogosphere once more.

There will be a few changes:

• I'm not gonna kill myself to get a post up every day for its own sake. On the other hand, I may post more than once a day if something catches my attention.
• I will continue with the idea of categories, especially since I have shut down the comics blog. I'll try to label posts clearly so you can seek out or avoid posts in specific categories, such as comics.
• I'm going to try to continue some longer essays in addition to the linkfarms and scuttlebutt.

I've pre-loaded the page with posts so we can have a robust start, so, for better or worse, here we go again!

Oh - and happy labor day!

[jet city] Week of the eighteenth

Many thanks to all who have sent their support to Otis during the past week. You can read about some details at The Healing Nest.

Much of that support came at the Art Walk show last Thursday; Otis wrote about that at Quiet Girl Gallery. Again, thanks to all who came out and all who wanted to but couldn’t.

Speaking of art, I get to leak the good news here first: Otis will be displaying her art at Teahouse Kuan Yin during the months of September and October. The art at the teahouse is curated by the Oasis Art Gallery; they looked at Otis’s new portfolio page and offered her the space. Expect an invitation to the official opening on September 3.

And speaking of invitations, Johnbai and Olaiya have a LittleSpark event coming up on Saturday, August 30: an outdoor movie/gourmet snack food extravaganza, for a great cause as always. Check it out - I hope to see you there!

[men in skirts] Kilt-wearin' - a personal history

Not to drop into the maudlin sentimentality of The Sound of Music, but I guess that we all have some favorite things that stick with us from childhood. I’m talking about the things that we are drawn to, as artifacts or images or playthings, which eventually become totemic or symbolic or just habitual. For me, there have a been a few that stick out and have endured. Motorcycle sidecars. Deep-sea divers. Sawed-off shotguns. Airships and autogyros.

And kilts.

I don’t recall having any kilted toy soldiers as a boy, but I would have loved some. I do remember some old movies - Gunga Din and The Devil’s Brigade among them - in which kilted soldiers made for dramatic images. I had an inspirational story of Robert the Bruce in some collection that I read and re-read, and generally encountered kilts in popular culture about as much as the next kid in the sixties. Nevertheless, although I have no Scots ancestry at all, I resonated with kilts and liked the look and their unconventionality. I can remember deciding long ago that I wanted to obtain a kilt for myself someday.

Back in the day, this would have meant getting some sort of tartan kit, either a dress version - with the short black jacket and bow tie, sort of like a tuxedo - or a more casual outfit, usually with a cable-knit turtleneck. Formals shops often rented these out for weddings, or they could be purchased through specialty dealers, but they were awfully expensive. Over they years, I always managed to have better things to do with my money, so although I did get a necktie with the official Washington State tartan about twenty-five years ago, I never did get a highland kilt, and never even wore one for the first twenty years of my adult life.

Then, around the close of the last century, I ran across Utilikilts. This art-project-turned-enterprise, based in Seattle, made up-to-date, not-tartan, almost-affordable kilts, suitable for wearing in everyday life, not just at the Highland Games. Of course I had to get one - and I did. I think I picked up my khaki neo-traditional kilt at their Interbay store in Spring 2000, and wore it to The Folklife Festival and later to a party I attended while I was in town. It was great - I was finally wearing a kilt, and it looked good and felt good. It being Seattle, of course I was met with much coolness in both public venues to which I wore it.

I wasn’t so confident that the reception would be the same back in Vancouver, Washington, where I was living at the time, and I didn’t wear the kilt much at all for a few years, and certainly not at work. When I did break it out, though, it was big time. The first public occasion was my appearance as class speaker at the graduation ceremony for Leadership Clark County, a conservative, business-based community service program. Just a few months later, I wore the kilt as part of my dress uniform for my last day at work as Director of Security for Clark College. Besides these two occasions, though, I was mostly found in pants or shorts.

In Fall of 2002, I left Vancouver for a late-life transition to graduate school, and brought both my kilts with me (I had acquired an olive drab neo-trad along with the original khaki). Notwithstanding its nature as a free-thinking institute of higher education, EWU is still in the heart of Eastern Washington, and things looked dicey for unconventional types there. The kilts mostly stayed in the closet.

Upon my return to Seattle in Fall 2003, I began wearing and acquiring kilts regularly, though still not at work. More and more often, when going out for an evening or relaxing on the weekend, I began choosing the kilt over pants. I stopped replacing my pants when they wore out, and acquired three more Utilikilts of different weights and fabrics. I knew that a threshold had been crossed when more than one new friend mentioned after knowing me a year or so that they had never seen me in pants. I think it was in summer of 2005 that I started wearing kilts to teach class, and about Fall 2005 when I moved almost exclusively to kilts.

In Seattle, that is. This progressive town is pretty accepting of this sort of thing, but I moderated my choices when traveling to Spokane or back east.

That was the state of affairs until recently. I pretty much wore kilts all the time, became know as the “guy in the kilt,” named my first blog for kilts, and accepted the role of full-time representative of alternative men’s fashion every time I went out. Then, this summer, after spring quarter ended, I just pretty much stopped cold. I have been wearing what I call Thai shorts or biking shorts - mid-calf length trousers - just about every day.

Why? I’m not 100% sure, but I’ll have some ideas next time.

[pc monk] A barrier to Buddha

As I began to nibble around the edges of Zen Buddhism as an approach to life, I immediately ran across a fairly considerable barrier to my immersion into its practice. Y’see, as much as we like to label things “zen” - zen golfing, zen poker, zen whatever - because it seems to embody the sense of some sort of particular manner of action, Zen Buddhism is a form of Buddhism, and Buddhism is a religion.

Yes, I know what is always said: it’s not really a religion, it’s more a philosophy. Or it’s a “way of liberation” (in the words of Alan Watts in The Way of Zen). I understand that Zen is more subtle and less dogmatic that Roman Catholicism or Judaism or Islam, but so is Unitarian Universalism, and it’s still a religion.

A wholehearted embrace of Zen Buddhism, as I understand it, requires me to believe that there is some sort of god-thing that created all the universe, and further, that the concept of moksha represents true reality, an infinite, undifferentiated Brahman. It is this godhood, moshka, that the Buddhist seeks to apprehend, rather than the maya, the (illusory) world of sense experience and facts. No matter how much the techniques and principles of zazen (sitting meditation) and koans (zen riddles) may be intellectually stimulating and useful and even valuable in other pursuits, it seems that there is no getting around that the ultimate point of the exercise is understand something that is, by its very definition, incomprehensible by “ordinary” means.

What this says to someone of a positivist bent, like me, is that a fundamental piece of the puzzle has to be accepted on faith. (To be fair, I have much the same problem with Kant’s prsentation of the noumenon: talking about the ding-an-sich is by its very nature a nonrational activity.) And I’m not sure that I can - or am willing - to do that without reservation. To me, the world is what is before me: what we can see, touch, feel, and otherwise experience. The questions of what underlies it all are just not important to me; I think Douglas Adams put it nicely when he asked “Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”

So, as much as I believe and hope that the practices of Zen Buddhism will bring me to a more mindful existence and clearer thought, I can’t help but thinking that I am cheating a little, since I am not buying the whole package. Once we start to cherry-pick from a system, what happens to the integrity? Perhaps I am looking for something more like Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink or Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow, both of which address apparently non-rational experiences from a scientific grounding; I don’t know.

But I stumble on.

[blockhead] Poesy

The Back Country

When you are in town, wearing some kind of uniform is helpful, policeman, priest, etc.. Driving a tank is very impressive, or a car with official lettering on the side. If that isn’t to your taste you could join the revolution, wear an armband, carry a homemade flag tied to a broom handle, or a placard bearing an incendiary slogan. At the very least you should wear a suit and carry a briefcase and a cell phone, or wear a team jacket and a baseball cap and carry a cell phone. If you go into the woods, the back country, someplace past all human habitation, it is a good idea to wear orange and carry a gun, or, depending on the season, carry a fishing pole, or a camera with a big lens. Otherwise it might appear that you have no idea what you are doing, that you are merely wandering the earth, no particular reason for being here, no particular place to go.

Apparently, an actor named Mark Rylance used this prose poem by Louis Jenkins as his acceptance speech at the Tony Awards back in June. I didn’t get to see it, but I wish I had; I love this kind of approach to speechifyin’. Another great example (that I did see) was a valedictorian reciting, from memory and without preamble or explanation, Doctor Seuss’s Oh, The Places You’ll Go at a college commencement.

But it did raise a question in my mind: what makes Jenkins’s work poetry? I mean, I think this passage is beautiful and lyrical, but why is it a prose poem and not a prose paragraph? The strict formalist inside of me resists the very idea of a prose poem as an untenable hybrid; yet, there is something about tone and intent that makes a thing a poem, as well as its form, no?I guess I will do what a smart teacher would do: include writing like this in my upcoming Intro to Lit class, and let my students teach me.

[4-color ma] Duo-specificity

While reading Progressive Ruin the other day, I saw that the Mikester used this panel in a post deconstructing an old Hostess Twinkie ad featuring Captain America:

Now, as amusing as the analysis of the story-reality of the strip is, I was struck by something else entirely. This panel is a perfect example of what Scott McCloud, in both Understanding Comics and Making Comics, calls the Duo-Specific Combination of words and pictures. Look, here’s Scott himself explaining it:

After taking a look at his example, that Twinkie ad can really be called a “textbook” case, can’t it? It even has the same information being delivered textually in both a caption and Cap’s word balloon as well as graphically through the actions of the Cube.

McCloud gets a lot of grief from people even as the seminal nature of his work is acknowledged; heck, I even have a lot of difficulties with his definition of comics. But it’s stuff like that that reminds me how useful a tool for analysis his theories can be, at least on some levels.

Four-color Ma

Until recently, I maintained a blog devoted specifically to comix - comic books, graphic novels, sequential art, however you would have it. I tried to make it a sort-of boutique enterprise: not a cutting edge, review-the-latest-issues blog, not a clever snarkfest (there are plenty of those), and not a strictly academic site. As a result, the blog might have suffered from a long-term, low-grade identity crisis: while I knew what I didn’t want it to be, I think I was less certain about what I did want it to be.

I still want to talk about comix, but I am not sure I want to talk about them enough to cohesively support a blog dedicated to the topic. So, this category will contain articles, essays, and links that might otherwise have appeared there. Click here for posts in this category.

Plainclothes Monk

Whenever I get contemplative or thoughtful, or talk about attempting to increase my mindfulness or decrease my materialism, my partner tells me that I am being “monkish.” She means it in a positive and supportive way, and sometimes uses the same sort of language to describe the grounding energy that she says she gets from me (she also calls this “rock energy”).

Over this summer of 2008, I have specifically tried to explore my monkishness in a direct and deliberate way, through readings, discussions, and explorations into practices of Zen Buddhism. I am not sure how fruitful my efforts have been so far, or how promising this path will become in the long run, but I know that the attempt to achieve more personal growth in this area is clearly worthwhile.

This category will contain essays and links directly related to this journey. Click here to see posts in this category.

Jet City

My original blog was a diary blog: I tried to write every day, and the posts were more often summaries of what I had done and who I had seen than they were essays or articles. A good friend lampooned this practice with his email signature "How will people know what I had for lunch unless I blog it?" I enjoyed the sense of community that came from this sort of blogging, and felt like a gossip columnist as I bolded the names of my friends and associates to give them a fleeting moment of blog-fame.

I posted there for about three and a half years, and I didn't think I want to cross the threshold into institutionhood: the self-imposed daily routine seemed to have worn thin. In establishing a new focus, I thought a whole new presence was in order; hence, I started a completely different blog with a while new approach.

But there were still too many times that I felt the need to publicly document something regarding my associates and real-world community here in Seattle, so we're back in the diary-blog business. This category will contain notices and announcements of that nature; my wider international audience may safely choose to ignore them. Click here to see posts in this category.

Rhythmic Gymnastics with Apparatus

Part of the joy of blogging is actually the core of the old-school "web log": identifying and linking to websites of interest to share them with others. Over time, these web logs began to include comments on the various sits as well as just URLs, and then comments on topics unrelated to the sites being logged, and then it just snowballed and we got Lolcats as well as a sea-change in political reporting.

In the time I spend on the internets, I find a lot of stuff that's sweet, or touching, or intriguing, or just too cool not to share, so entries under this category will be where I will share them. I may also post some comments on popular culture in general or specific artifacts. Click here to see all posts in this category.

The Sheepman

Since relaunching what used to HKC as WalakaNet Annex, I have been trying to categorize my posts more assiduously, because this platform was merging several potential audiences. I have recently found, however, a need for a new category, one that would indicate those essays that aren't specifically about writing, or comics, or pop culture, or any particular topic at all, but aren't exactly local news, either, and don't rise to the level of meditation or reflection necessary for a "monk" post. So, when these betwixt-and-between thoughts strike me, you will find them here under The Sheepman. Not the 1958 Glenn Ford movie, but rather a place for woolgathering.

(Date stamp incorrect; actual posting 10/8/08)

Blockhead Rhetoric

There is a lonely little cobwebsite maintaining its presence in the intarweb: Blockhead Rhetoric, the temporary, tentative expression of my free-lance activities, which have been negligible of late. Nonetheless, I still have an interest in words, writing, and editing, and of course my work as an instructor of college rhetoric keeps me immersed in that world.

This category will contain essays and links appertaining to my own undertakings as a writer and a teacher of writing, as well as thoughts or links on writing or words (although I promise to forswear anything that even remotely resembles a “grammar peeve” piece). Click here to see the latest posts in this category.