culture

The 1960s ranch

Moriah

I have really fond memories of the house I grew up in, which does not exist anymore. I mean, well, there’s a HOUSE there, where I grew up, but it’s morphed and changed so much (not in a good way) that it might as well not exist. I think it burned somewhat at one time and was um, “remodeled,” or else it was, er, “rebuilt,” but MY house is gone.

Still, when I was a kid, I’d go to my grandma’s house and it was in what I thought was a chichi neighborhood (I don’t know, maybe it was, but now it’s a tad rundown). I would go sell my school wares around HER neighborhood cuz none of my neighbors had any money.

Now, I love architecture anyway. If I’d been more focused in school (ha!) and a little more in touch with my creative/analytical abilities, I’d have known to go to school for that, but, well, hindsight is 20/20.

Anyway, I’d go around my g’ma’s neighborhood and see all these NEAT houses of mostly the same style: 1960s ranch, with a mid-century modern (which I did NOT like as a kid, but have come to appreciate more as an adult) mixed in here and there. I wanted to live in that neighborhood so badly. To me, living in a 1960s ranch represented having “made it,” but I was 12 and didn’t dare dream any higher (even though I knew there were far more grand neighborhoods in existence and had drooled).

So fast forward a couple of years and here I am with husband and tax deductions and 2 cats, in want of a house and we moved into … a 1960s housing development with … 1960s ranch types (albeit no mid-century moderns). Some are more georgian (which here means, ranch with a second story) and a couple are split ranch (of both types) and ours is a raised ranch (finished, walk-out basement).

Friday I did some yard work, which involved going outdoors. (Shocker, I know.) Once I collapsed on my front porch to rest, I looked out over my neighborhood with the old, well-kept houses, the pristine lawns, and somewhat 1960s-ish landscaping (well, hell, I planted arborvitae, so who am I to talk, right?).

This morning, my door is wide open and I can see one old 1960s ranch with the brick veneer facade and the diamond-mullioned windows and the immaculate emerald lawn. The only sound in the neighborhood are the birds and the 3-year-old Tax Deduction.

My inner 12-year-old is very happy right now.

My angel is the centerfold

Moriah

I sorted my music by Mojo-defined genre for a change and noticed a very strange juxtaposition in the category of “’80s Pop”:

“Centerfold” by the J. Geils Band directly followed by

“Black Velvet” by Alannah Myles (don’t hate me ’cause I’m cheesy).

and I’m like, why? Why do I have these together in the same sort because they represent two vastly different phases of my life.

The remembery I associate with “Centerfold” is a roller rink. I was 13.

The remembery I associate with “Black Velvet” is my room in the apartment I shared with 3 other girls in Provo, Utah. I was 21.

Screenshot of my nostalgic music playlist

That’s not to mention all the flashes of rememberies in between the Centerfold part of my life and the Black Velvet part of my life, all rich in music, rich in experience, all helping to define my personality and philosophy, riding with me through alternating giddy and painful adolescence to adulthood. (Although to be fair, I don’t remember much between giddy and painful ’cause I tend toward the melodramatic. Betcha hadn’t noticed that yet.)

I have self-defined genres that fit a certain aspect of my life. I remember nearly every song on the radio the day I sat in my aunt’s house in Salt Lake, waiting for my parents to say it was time to take me to Provo and leave me there for the next 4 years of my life, 1200 miles from home. Shit, I couldn’t wait. (Never mind I didn’t make it 4 years and ended up with a home-grown degree from UMKC.)

I also have one that chronicles the summer I was 20, feeling my oats, not a care in the world and delivering pizza on a lunch rush for fun money. I went to Europe that summer for a month with my family and I couldn’t turn around in Holland and Germany without hearing Belinda Carlisle’s “Circle in the Sand.”

I did a lot that summer. I wish I’d done more.

Oz never did give nuthin’ to the tin man

Moriah

Poster for the movie TIN MAN.that he didn’t already have.

—America, “Tin Man”

This is one of my favorite sentences and has been since I was a child. When I was a child, I didn’t quite understand it (and some days I think I still don’t), but it resonated with me deeply until I was old enough to at least grasp the intellectual concept. (Some of the best things I’ve ever read/heard come from a subconscious wisdom that it took chemical enhancement to drag kicking and screaming into the light, but what the hell, right?)

I still draw on it for strength and encouragement fairly often, at least once a week. I don’t have it posted anywhere; I don’t need to.

Go ahead. Be brave. Pony up with your guiding maxims.

Jukeboxes and libraries

Moriah

I have a bunch of beautiful books. They’re mostly in hardback because I don’t see paperbacks as objets d’art the way I do my hardback books. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I read hardbacks, certainly. If I have it, I read it. But there’s just something substantial about a hardback book. Specifically, I’m thinking of my faux leatherbound books, but no matter.

As I go around the ebook blogs like Teleread and The Book is Dead, a bunch of dissociated rememberies from my childhood plague me. They’re always the same ones, played in different order, but in a loop:

Remembery #1.A small plastic panda that is a transistor radio. The eyes are knobs, and the belly is the speaker.

The mp3 player was only a Wish when I was a child (think 1970s) with my little panda transistor radio barely capable of tuning in the jazz station, but playing disco just fine and dandy. Rock the boat, don’t rock the boat, baby. Rock the boat, don’t tip the boat over.

I had my Wish in my mind like a jukebox, playing all the songs I loved and none of the songs I didn’t love, all in one place, in the palm of my hand. Even as I got older, I couldn’t afford to buy albums and then, once I got a “boom box,” couldn’t afford to buy cassettes, either. I taped random songs off the radio and tried my best to come up with as clean a version as a K-Tel compilation cassette as I could. It didn’t work and my wish became a longing so intense sometimes I couldn’t bear it. Then I got a Walkman, which was a step up, but my ADD/OCD could not be happy. Why, oh why, was there no way to buy a song at a time? What would that look like? How could it be done?A Rio Karma, an mp3 player that is not made by Apple

My Wish: a jukebox in my hand, with all the songs I loved and none of the songs I hated, with the ability to purchase one song at a time.

Remembery #2.

Dark house post family bedtime. Flashlight. Book. Covers. You all know this routine. For my mother, it was hiding in the back of a closet. With a flashlight. And a book. Why didn’t my book come with a light? You know, something handy, that I could clip onto it? That way I didn’t have to give my flashlight a blow job every time I had to turn the page.

Remembery #3.

Jean-Luc Picard sitting in his cabin reading a hardback book. To me, this was nothing until a crew member questioned him. Wesley, maybe? I can’t remember. Too young to know what a hardback book with paper pages was. To Picard, it was an antique. To Wesley, it was a novelty.

DISCLAIMER: I didn’t watch Star Trek much. Not the original, not the Next Generation, not Voyager, or many of the spinoffs (although I actually enjoyed Deep Space 9 because everybody on that show had serious faults and weren’t a bunch of Mary Sues and Gary Stus running around knowing how to deal with every situation). This is why my remembering an STNG episode is so…exceptional. And it had to do with a book and what must have happened to books to evoke the reaction Picard’s hardback paper book evoked.

An eBookwise ebook reader.
eBookwise reader

Something that could store a library in one spot? Like my dream of a jukebox in my hand. Could it be? A library in my hand?

Don’t get me wrong. At that point, I was old enough to know it could be done, but I wasn’t getting my hopes up because the jukebox in my hand hadn’t materialized yet or if it had, I didn’t know about it.

You have to know something about me that makes my need for such things a compulsion (you know, besides my mental disorders): I am an anti-packrat. I hate Stuff. I have Stuff I don’t hate, really, but if it can be condensed, packed, and stored out of sight until I need it, so I can have SPACE, I am more kindly disposed toward Stuff. (Oh, Space Bags, how I would love thee if every blanket we own weren’t in use because it’s as cold as a witch’s tit outside.) I don’t like knickknacks, either. And as I get older, the Mies van der Rohe school of architecture (mid-century modern) gets more and more attractive to me.

The only things I collect and store without driving my OCD/ADD batty is data. And mp3s. And now, ebooks.

(I like lots of art, though, so as soon as the Tax Deductions stop coloring on the walls, I’ll paint and put up my art. It’s difficult to deal with the child who writes her name on the wall and then blames her little brother, who doesn’t know how to read, much less write.)

I haven’t quite figured out how to go completely minimalist, given the life of a family and its needs for Stuff.

But the jukebox-and-library in hand is a good start.

The book as art

Moriah

I said something in my little rant the other day that’s stuck with me: The book is the art.

To me, Harry Potter’s fabulous because it’s a whole experience. The cover art and the story work together. It’s got color, movement, focus, texture. You’re sitting there in your reading chair on a cold day (possibly snowing), drinking hot chocolate, bundled up with this heavy hardback book in your hands.

Your head’s in the story. Your eyes are seeing the specialized fonts in the header and the brilliant colors of the edge of the binding. Every once in a while, your eyes get a treat in the form of a graphic buried in the text denoting handwritten notes that give you a sense of intimacy with the events that you don’t get with typesetting. Your arms feel the weight of good storytelling. Your fingertips brush the dust jacket and feel the texture of the thick mottled matte paper, they pinch heavy paper between them and turn the pages.

I have a leatherbound edition of Alice in Wonderland. It, too, is an experience, with a little bit of the feel of age. Deckle edges are the best.

I can tell you all the usual reasons I decided to publish independently, and give you another half dozen reasons why Dude enthusiastically encouraged me to do so (the biggest being that he has faith in my work). But after my little temper tantrum, it occurred to me that there was one other reason I really hadn’t thought about much:

The whole book is the art. I had a vision for my book, the series. Even when I was sending out queries galore, I had a vision and I’ll tell you, I was vaguely depressed to think that even if I got The Call, someone else was going to take my vision and put his own spin on it—and he may or may not give a fat rat’s ass what I want or what I see. That’s not to say a graphic artist wouldn’t have done better than I could have and surpassed my vision by light years. It’s simply that I would have no control over it, a little input that might or might not be taken into account, and perhaps no veto power, especially if he was up against a deadline. This is not a client-vendor relationship between the author and the artist.

Interior design is a relative static: You design so as to make the reader unaware of your design. You don’t give him a headache, you don’t wear his eyeballs out. In short, as Zoe put it, you don’t piss him off.

I can give no advice with regard to other indies and how they handle cover design. All I’m saying is that I’m a very visual person and for me, the story is not the art.

It’s the book.

The springtime song

Moriah

Tax Deduction #1 is 5 and can’t read much yet. Bad Mommy! Bad Mommy! Call social services.

Okay, well, I keep a CD player in her room so she can have music (“lullabies”) and we’ve been doing this for about 7 months, I guess, givvertake.

CD #1 was Kenny Loggins’s Return to Pooh Corner. That lasted about 4 months.

CD #2 was Tina Malia’s Lullaby Favorites. That lasted about 3 months.

She wanted the Nutcracker next (took her to the ballet last Christmas), but I couldn’t find my CD. (Must be in another case somewhere—I hate it when that happens.)

So we’ve been on CD #3 now for about a week and a half. It’s just one of those compilation samplers of baroque (you know, the musical equivalent of the bathroom book of quotations to make you seem really smart at cocktail parties).

She says to me, she says, “Mama, there’s a springtime song!”

Oh, really? I mean, I know which one she’s probably talking about, but where/how does she know it’s the “springtime song”? Did she learn that at school? (Cause, wow, great school!) Or does it just magically say “Hey, I’m a springtime song” to a kindergartner?

So she’s on me about this, right? Tonight I turn on her “lullabies” (she had a meltdown when I told her it was really called “baroque,” so we’re back to “lullabies”) and she says to me, she says, “Number 9 is the springtime song.” So I look and why, yes, it is, right there, #9. I asked her a bunch of questions about how she knew this (well, I guess interrogated would be a better word), but she didn’t cough anything up.

I decided to go on the theory that a 5-year-old, when listening to Vivaldi’s Concerto No. 1, automatically knows that that’s the springtime song.

Because to think otherwise would take away the magic.

Too much of a good thing

Moriah

I have an addictive personality and for years, I lived by the motto: If a little’s good, a lot’s gotta be better. It’s taken me years to get that pounded out of me. There are only 3 things where, as Madonna put it, “any number is fine with me/as long as it’s more”:
A stylized resin sculpture of Rankin-Bass Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer

sex
money
books

And there are 2 things I have learned, to my everlasting detriment, where less is best:

salt (way to ruin a perfectly grilled slab of cow)
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

See, Christmas for me usually starts in late September/early October, when the autumn rains start and the leaves begin to mat on the ground. Well, this year, the autumn rains are coming early (though the leaves haven’t even begun to whisper that they’re going to turn). The first sign I’m getting itchy? I crack out the Christmas carols. Okay, so I’m a bit ahead of schedule right now, but then I decided to do a bit of Mom Stuff (that would be mending) and went digging for the Rudolph DVD.

The Tax Deductions don’t appreciate Rudolph for the wonder and magic that he is and I have to admit, in September, there’s not much magic there for me, either.

The magic of Rudolph, I’ve discovered, is in knowing that it will be shown on X date, probably early December, on CBS at X time and if you miss it, you’re just shit out of luck and you have to wait until next year.

I have a DVD and a VHS tape up for sale.

More steampunk, please!

Moriah

I read a lot of Neal Stephenson’s stuff and the only thing he’s written that I cautiously suspect might possibly could be classified steampunk is Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, but I still don’t know if that makes it steampunk because it’s set in the future with Victorian aesthetics instead of in Victoriana with modern technology. (Great book, BTW, but I really really liked The Big U.)

I’ve been meaning to get into it (really!), especially after looking at sites such as Steampunk Workshop and Kit Stolen’s site (and oh, isn’t he a beautiful man; you know I had to make a character out of him).

But this limits me because to me, steampunk is eye candy, as in goods: Pretty clothes and pretty things and gorgeous textures–all DIY. I mean, really. Look at this stuff. It begs caressment.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
steampunkkitstolen
steampunklaptop
steampunkkeyboard

And oh, various steampunk keyboards are for sale at Datamancer, FYI.

Anyway, I’ve been reading a short story by Eva Gale, which is post-apocalyptic for one and steampunk for two (steam engines? of course it is). The story is from Phaze anthology Fantasy IV and is called “Scorpion’s Orchid.” And now my appetite for steampunk fiction is whet and I want more, but SF/F is a foreign land to me. Obviously, I’m going to take suggestions off of Steampunk Workshop’s site, but help me out here, folks. Good steampunk (with or without utopian/dystopian elements) suggestions being solicited.

My guilty pleasure

Moriah

My first full-on real-life romance novel was Shanna by Kathleen Woodiwiss. Naturally, it’s on my keeper shelf right next to The Wolf and the Dove. I have the ones with the original covers, though they are far from mint. The namby pamby covers on the ones with the links are meh. Unlike most of my contemporaries whose first (or close to it) romance experience was Woodiwiss, mine wasn’t with The Flame and the Flower or Ashes in the Wind, neither of which I cared for.

But she’s not my guilty pleasure.

It’s Carole Mortimer of Harlequin Presents circa 1979 through, oh, I guess around 1986.

Read more →

Reading against type

Moriah

This morning I’m listening to Simply Red (flashbacks from freshman year at BYU) and the song “Money’s Too Tight to Mention” is a good song. If it weren’t, I wouldn’t have it in my library.

It also trashes things I believe in. Does it bother me? On some visceral level, yes, but that doesn’t make it difficult for me to listen to it and it certainly doesn’t keep me from listening. I’d miss a whole lot of good music (and that voice!) if I took umbrage at other people’s opinions and the way they state them (usually the way they state them is more off-putting than what they say).

So it started me thinking about how I read fiction,

Read more →

Speaking of politics…

Moriah

My husband and I went to see Rush last night. We had AWESOME seats.

There were two age demographics: late 30s and up and … their kids. The youngest I saw was sevenish, but if there was anybody there between the ages of mom-and-dad-forced-me-to-come and 30, I didn’t see them.

It was the most sedate audience of a hard-rockin’ concert I’ve ever been to, but then, most all of us were old and fat. No matter. By halfway through the second half I was ready to get laid.