teleny's New Writeups

Christmas Stocking (idea)

2009-11-21T18:49:09Z

Every parent dreams of this scenario: After several months of pestering, shopping, and hiding, the parent has finally found Santa's Gift. Sending the children to bed on Christmas Eve a little early, Mom and Dad share hot toddies by the fireplace while wrapping/assembling/decorating the place to look like a child's fantasy. The pony happily whinnying in its stall, the model railroad merrily choo-chooing, the fashionable bicycle on the patio, toy du jour already assembled and working, awaiting the morning glowing faces of the little ones, who've slept just a little late, and are coming down just in time for cagey old Daddy to take out his digicam to register their amazed surprise! This is what kept Eastman Kodak in business for so many years, and continues to inspire many feet of ad copy on how to pull off this feat.

What usually happens is that the kids get up while it's still dark, just a half-hour after the 'rents finally get the last piece of the playset assembled, sneak down, and have…

emotionally complex (personal)

2009-11-12T17:51:10Z

For three semesters, in my academic career, I was enrolled in music school. Not just any music school, mind you, I tall-talked my way into the New School's Guitar Study Center. For three semesters, I learned to make elementary chords on a guitar I optimistically named "Sutego" ("motherless child" in Japanese). Twice a week, I went from Hamden to New Haven to Grand Central to 14th Street, either six minutes early or five minutes late, to be greeted by a tall, Preppy-looking man, who wore brownish clothing, always seemed preoccupied and almost never spoke. (I've long lost his name, but I found out he was, long after I'd left the school, a Grammy-winner.) Keith Richards was teaching master classes that year, under the Townshend Act, in his honor, we all got silver skull rings. Few actually encountered him.

If I had my guitar, he'd wave me in. If not, I got to go to the 'brothel', where the loaner guitars were kept.
It was a warm humid atmosphere that smelled of fine wood. The…

Carl Sagan (person)

2009-11-08T03:03:28Z

At the pizza place I delivered for we earned minimum plus tips and a commission on everything we delivered. So there was an incentive to drive quickly, to be 'top driver' for the night. Now it gets cold in Ithaca during the long winters. And when you're driving with a seat-full of pizzas, there's gonna be a lot of steam. When the steam hits the windshield, it turns to ice. And then you're driving inside a deathbox, as quickly as you can. Only you're leaning way out the driver's side window so you can see, and you're trying to keep a cigarette lit too. Now, if someone orders a sheet pizza(Pudgie's huge, rectangular, 32-slice deal), it's pretty much a given that they're stoned. And they're more than willing to tip you with a hit.

Or they're Carl Sagan, who has a really cool house cut into the side of a gorge up on University avenue, across from the Rockledge fraternity. I took the order when he called it in and it was all I could do to keep a straight…

October 30, 2009 (essay)

2009-10-30T13:37:16Z

Why is there Halloween?
A different explanation.

Halloween? Isn't it Satanic? the old Black woman chided me on the bus. We often talk about cultural matters.
"Actually, it's as Christian as, well, Corpus Christi."I said. Being observant Anglican has some advantages.
"Well it's not in the Bible."
"No, but it's not pagan, either. Why do you think it's on the eve of All Saints? And what about All Souls Day? 'Let us now praise famous men..?'"
"All Saints is Satanic. All Souls is Satanic, a man-made holiday!"

Resisting mightily my urge to put on my lapsed-Satanist pointy hat, or Secular Humanist hat (I doffed them both rather publicly, a few years ago), and point out that the Bible is also a human artifact, I reminded myself of my favorite explanation for Halloween, which is completely non-Satanic, non-Fluffy Wiccan, and only faintly partaking of witchcraft As We Know it...

It's to be remembered that while many of its neighbors were pagan,…

Aesthetic movement (essay)

2009-10-27T17:11:13Z

    Artistic and literary movement, circa 1880-1890, England and America. Best examples: The Peacock Room, Freer Gallery, Washington, D.C., The Chelsea Hotel, NY, NY.

    In mid-century Victorian England, the Industrial Revolution was firmly in place. What had been engineers and craftsmen of the previous era, were now proud owners of factories, mills, and all their suppliers and subsidiaries. In 1851, The Crystal Palace Exhibition showcased the very best that Britain could offer to the world.

    The academic world was...ah, polite, but not interested. Mostly, the exhibits were overdesigned and stupifyingly ugly, appealing to the lowest common denominator, if they weren't proving over and over again that it was now possible to make X many of a thing with the time and expense it used to take to make one.

Their students, mostly the children of these same industrialists, were quick to take up the idea: modern and/or machine-made, bad, old, better. Home or handcrafted,…