My loyal readers have followed me down some long, narrow pathways, but usually — I hope — we’ve ended up standing on an eminent point with a spectacular view. Today our path may be tortuous and dark, and I’m not certain if the vista at the end is so quite so vast as some others. Still, I want to take this trip. Please hang with me. I advise you now that this article is not entirely self-contained; you should be prepared to click on the links provided to listen to and read a few bits, or it will make absolutely no sense unless you possess an encyclopedic memory of a certain time in popular culture. Because the subject of this piece is, itself, anarchism of a sort, it still may not make sense, but if you follow those links it should be at least an informed senselessness. There, I think that qualifies for consideration in 2012′s “most elaborate caveat” awards. Onward.

I recently about a new book by an author I trust that few of you know. Upon finding the review of his book, however, I was galvanized with excitement. His name was one that had not come to mind for many years — decades, even. But there was a day when, well … let me start at the beginning.

My part of this story begins in London in 1971. I had the priceless opportunity to travel around Europe that summer — the whole backpack, youth hostel, hitchhiking thing. For the ambitious six weeks’ trip, my buddy, Joe, and I faced all those challenges travelers confront: how to transport ourselves from one place to the next, identify edible food we could afford, and find places to sleep on a budget that — two decades after its publication — was not much more than Mr. Frommer’s iconic “$5 a Day.” Given the rate of inflation at that time, it was an insanely optimistic goal.

We also faced language barriers. It wasn’t so bad in France and Italy and Germany where, even in those ancient times, the people who came in contact with tourists spoke some English, except for guards. Travel Rule #357: European security people carrying automatic weapons don’t speak English. Make a note of it. We did encounter severe difficulties with English in places where it’s never been heard. Glasgow comes to mind. There, when a man, after repeating his request three times, seemed to be asking us, “Lads, are ye tame?” he was actually asking, “Lads, can ye tell me the time?” A foreign land, indeed.

To Joe’s unending credit, he had secured a place for us to stay in London — then, as now, one of the world’s most expensive cities — where our trip began and then ended, six weeks later. Even as a college sophomore, Joe was an intellectual force to be reckoned with, and had impressed one of his history professors substantially enough to have her offer to put us up for a couple of nights in the flat she’d be occupying during a summer of study in London. This was in Hampstead, at the extreme southern edge of Hampstead Heath. She was doing research at “The B.M.” — the British Museum; I have no idea on what arcane aspect of world history her researches that summer focused, although it would speak better of my native curiosity were I able to give at least some sketchy idea. I have none. Well, we stopped into the BM ourselves and did a bit of research. Caught a glimpse of the legendary Reading Room (now a place that ordinary people can visit but then limited only to scholars with special passes), as well as the manuscript of Beowulf:

Beowulf MS

The digs in Hampstead were utterly classic — a tall, narrow townhouse from the 19th Century with three storeys, set shoulder-to-shoulder with nearly identical other brick houses, distinguished from one another primarily by the color of the front door (ours was a glossy black). Each house had a shallow, railed “area” in front between the building and the street, and a little enclosed rear garden backed up against the garden of the house on the parallel street. It had high ceilings, narrow, steep stairs, kitchen in the rear. It’s exactly the sort of place the Beatles occupy in the movie. To go there now, set your GPS coordinates to 51°33’19.96″ N 0º09’35.89″ W. Just to north is the wide expanse of Hampstead Heath. All around were little shops and coffeehouses. It was the ultimate London suburb. I hope I can someday go back and see what it’s like  40 years later. Here’s a Kodachrome image of that scene (click on image to enlarge):

Mackeson and Constantine, Hampstead, 1971

Helen, Joe’s professor, had a roommate. M, we’ll call her. She was Indian, dark-skinned with deep dark eyes and wore exotic (to my mind) saris. She spoke in the soft, precise accent of the educated subcontinent of the latter days of the Empire. I never learned what she did in the way of a profession, but clearly she was a writer, poet or artiste of some sort, part of the polyglot community of global inhabitants in the World City of London. To my mind, the most compelling thing about her was that she knew Allen Ginsburg and the circle of Beat poets and writers. I am sorry to report that I have no clear memory of any anecdotes she might have related during the couple of days Joe and I came and went from the little flat on Mackeson Road; a major failure of writerly curiosity that I have labored to overcome in the intervening decades.

Even in the brief time we stayed in the little flat, camped out on the first-floor parlor floor, there were lots of comings and goings of colleagues of Helen and M’s, both Brit and American. It was an academic idyll of sorts, a pro tem expatriate summer for Helen in the academic stewpot of the Old Country while, clearly, for M., it was part and parcel of the cosmopolitan life she led. Joe and I were — mostly — silent observers of the lively, hip, educated cats who came and went. Ah, could I go back there as a grownup, and understand more about what was going on among those only slightly older people!

On one of the evenings, a friend of Helen and M’s named Peter started playing some records. I must explain that “records” — for those of you too young to remember — were sound recordings pressed into circular vinyl discs that played analog sound by conveying vibrations from irregularities in the surface of the disc through a thin needle that rode a groove … well, heck, just imagine that we were playing CDs. Same thing. “Say, lads,” (or something like that) he said, “Do you know the Fugs? My god! You must!” When we expressed our utter ignorance (a quality of which I possessed an unlimited supply in 1971), young Peter, chipper, handsome, blithe, clever, no doubt a scholar at Oxford or the London School of Economics or something, put on another record. “Listen to this!” he exclaimed.

Then, from the little portable stereo emerged — not music, exactly, and not poetry, but something in between. With a wacky backbeat of unrecognizable instrumentation, a not-very-polished voice declaimed the poem in an exaggeratedly accented manner:

BeFORE the beGINning of YEARS/There CAME to the MAKing of MAN/TIME with a GIFT of TEARS/GRIEF with a GLASS that RAN ….

My nascent command of the corpus of English Lit. allowed me to recognize it as a recitation of Charles Algernon Swinburne’s “Before the Beginning of Years,” (precocious lad, wot?) but rendered in a way that, well, beggared — and still beggars — description. This was a rendition done  by the inhabitants of an asylum for the insane! It was madness, I thought.

No, it was The Fugs, and that was (click to listen) The Swinburne Stomp.

There was a lot going on in the late 1960s and early 1970s of which, I was quickly learning, I was not aware. Some of the awareness had started to hit me when my Ohio school shut down and ended the academic year early after the events at Kent State in 1970. These guys, The Fugs, were in the midst of it all and had been, it turns out, intimately involved in the attempt to levitate The Pentagon, as Mailer documented in Armies of the Night. Radical dudes! One of the founders of The Fugs, Tuli Kupferberg, was a longtime fellow traveler with The Beats, Ginsberg and those cats. So, there I was, sitting on the floor of a flat in Hampstead, with M. not far away, listening to the Voice of a Generation that might be mine, but also was rooted in the generation before mine.

There wasn’t anything that could be much more compelling to a college sophomore in those heady days of the Nixon administration than this sort of artistic anarchism. During this six weeks’ tour, I hit my 20th birthday and got my draft lottery number: 300, exempting me, almost certainly, from carrying an M-16 in southeast Asia upon my graduation and the loss of my II-S deferment. I became a Fugs fan, however oxymoronic that term may be. Forget the Grateful Dead and The Band, The Fugs were my guys.

Now, decades later, I am pleased to read that Ed Sanders, Kupferberg’s collaborator and partner, has published a memoir, Fug You. To read the review in the NY Times, CLICK HERE. Both Sanders and Kupferberg’s bios identify them as “anarchists.” Unless I take radical steps, and soon, it’s not a term that is likely to be associated with me in any future biographies.

As we labor through this endless, eternal year of ceaseless political campaigns, it’s refreshing — to my jaded ears and eyes, at least — to recall an era in which “music” didn’t consist entirely of corporate-manufactured singsong and when voices not of the mainstream found a platform. Music was actively involved in commenting on, promoting and opposing whatever was current in politics and culture — “protest music” was not new, even in the 60s, of course, but that may have been it’s zenith. I vividly remember seeing a single-page mimeographed (don’t make me explain it, look it up) sheet of “official” songs of Bobby Kennedy’s presidential campaign. The mind, of course, reels to think of what music to associate with today’s candidates.

The ultimate expression of The Fugs and their post-Dada, anarchic/ironic mode of expression may be encapsulated in their epic anthem, “Nothing.” I think they may still have something to say to us. CLICK HERE to hear it. CLICK HERE to read the lyrics.

Forty years on, I am one of the older generation who just don’t GET what is going on with a lot of contemporary culture. Then, though, I was mesmerized by some truly outrageous stuff that seemed — to me — to capture the angst and anger and disassociation of a world wracked by meaningless violence and greed. One would never expect the mainstream adult world to accept the premise that this “music” “represented” anything except mayhem and idiocy. I don’t think much has changed, except that The Fugs would probably not have a recording contract in 2012. Acts more extreme and outre’ have them, though. Back then, my age group represented the biggest buyers of recorded music, so we ruled the marketplace, and — we still like to think — understood the irony of irreverence that informed our choice of endorsing “anti-social” acts. I don’t think much has changed. I will take my own object lesson and attempt to understand that what seems meaningless to me today may speak loudly and precisely to people from another generation. Maybe that’s the lesson of today’s text.

Thanks for following me along this path. As Uncle Bodie said, play the music that’s in you.

The header photo includes lyrics by Woody Guthrie from “This Land is Your Land.” Commercial use of those lyrics requires approval under U.S. copyright law.

Okay, class, it’s Twelfth Night, which means that we’re at the end of our annual reading of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” I trust you’ve all been keeping up with your reading assignments, and you should be finished with the poem. Before we discuss some conclusions about our reading, I want to look at some very interesting verses early in the poem, starting with line 495. That should be on page 70 of your texts in Cawley, if you’d open them there.

(sound of books being drawn out, pages turning.)

Umm … Mr. Cabezaloco? What’s that little computer you’re looking at? If you’re making a Facebook entry, I’m sure we’d all be interested in what you’re posting about us.

“It’s not a computer, Professor Nixon, it’s my Kindle.”

That’s very amusing, Mr. Cabezaloco. However, I’d like you to join us in our study of the text, if you don’t mind.

“I have the text here, on my Kindle.”

You have the Cawley text on that little device?

“Yes. I downloaded ‘Gawain and the Grene Knight’ from Project Gutenberg.”

Is that so? Very interesting. And was it not made clear to you that the authoritative edition we’d be studying in this course would be the edition by A.C. Cawley? Is Mr. Cawley the editor of the version you have there?

“No, Professor. Um …. (Cabezaloco presses keys on his tablet) … this is edited by Richard Morris.”

Ah, I see. So you’re working from a variant of the text we’ve been studying for the past two weeks. I wonder, were you unable to download a facsimile of the actual manuscript, Cotton Nero A.x. in the British Museum? I’m sure that would have been much more authoritative than the primitive printed books the rest of us have in front of us. (tittering from the class.)

“Um … I don’t know. What’s that?”

Had you been paying attention during my introductory lecture instead of texting your girlfriend, you would have known that the unique manuscript of Sir Gawain is contained in the manuscript Cotton Nero A.x., now housed in the British Museum. I was just curious to learn if your skills in Middle English had far surpassed all of us and you were reading from the original manuscript.

“Umm … I don’t think so.”

Nor do I. Be so kind as to begin reading from the line I had in mind today, 495, IF your edition has followed the traditional enumeration the rest of us are following, that is …

(Cabezaloco is pressing a key repeatedly.) “Okay, I’m there.”

Please read lines 495 through 499, if you would, please.

“Ah … OK … ‘Gawan wats glad to begynne those gomne in halle/ Bot thas the ende be hevy, haf ye no wonder; / For thas men ben mery in mynde, quen thay han mayn drynk, / A … uh … serne sernes ful serne, and seldes never lyke, / the forme to the fynisment foldes ful selden’.”

And are you certain of that reading?

“Um … pretty sure … ?”

And, I’m sorry to say, Mr. Cabezaloco, that I am relatively certain that you have NOT got it right. You see, I happen to know that that due to font limitations AND from Mr. Robinson’s editorial approach, that engaging little device in your hand is incapable of differentiating between several of the original 14 Century scribe’s representations of different vocal sounds that ranged from the voiced glottal “gh” which we might interpret as an “h,”  from the unvoiced version, which we call a “y” or even the unvoiced labio-palatal “z,” which in your reading you missed several times. I also know that one can buy the Cawley text online from Amazon for as little as one cent, so your free download of the Early English Text Society version has left you without the edits of Mr.  Cawley, for a net savings of one cent, which may cost you dearly in your grade in this course.

“Oh.”

OK, enough of this. As regular UWS readers know, each year, I mark the holiday season by rereading (and subjecting you to) the 14th Century alliterative poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It’s my way of keeping my formerly acceptable Middle English skills honed to something above nonexistence. Since we’re now in the third year of Under Western Skies (I posted the first piece about Sir Gawain in December, 2009 — thanks all you loyal readers!),  it’s therefore the third annual opportunity for you to journey with me to that  dire and dismal era at the end of the middle ages.

I have to admit that on this third attempt to share my passion for middle English alliterative poetry I was running out of ways to make good ol’ Sir Gawain seem compelling for reader with only a passing interest in extinct versions of our language, until I discovered a free download of the poem to my Kindle from www.gutenberg.org. There, I discovered that one can indeed download a scholarly version of the poem, but in a way that presented some serious difficulties. Back in the year 1400 or so, the scribes who wrote this stuff down were copying texts onto parchment with quill pens, and not always with a full understanding of the local dialects in which the texts were originally written. Quality control was not their strong suit. To illustrate what scribes did at about that time, here’s a fresco from an abbey in Italy that shows a typical monastic scribe at work:

Hugh of St Cher in San Niccolo, Treviso

(Notice, by the way, that this monk, Hugh of St. Cher, is wearing eyeglasses. This is, supposedly, the first depiction of a human wearing spectacles, recorded by Tomaso of Modeno, in the Hall of the Chapter of Dominicans, part of the Church of San Nicolas in Treviso, Italy.)

The problem with downloading this text for free, vs. buying a used copy of the edited, printed text for 1 cent on Amazon, is that the monks who transcribed manuscripts were a bit casual in the way they represented a number of sounds from the oral tradition, and their recordings of “s” and “y” and “gh” and a few other sounds were distinguished in ways that ordinary fonts in electronic documents today are not prepared to deal with, unless you have a very specialized custom font in your system. Therefore, a text in my well-worn copy of “Gawain” that’s been edited for print looks like this (click on photos for larger images):

Gawain, Cawley edition

While the transliterated electronic version you can download from gutenberg.com looks like this:

Gawain, electronic download from gutenberg.org

As you can see, the electronic version substitutes a version of the number “3″  for a number of sounds that Mr. Cawley, in his wisdom, edited into various forms like “s” or “y” or “gh,” because that’s what they were meant to represent. The problem is that computers can’t represent the subtle variations between the different signs. So, while they look different on the printed page, they appear as “3s” on the screen. That’s the source of Mr. Cabezaloco’s problem.

I have seen the original manuscript in the B.M., and it’s a beautiful work of illustrated artistry, but I can tell you that without years of study (which I did not undertake) one cannot read it — at least not very easily. (There are no online facsimiles of the original manuscript available without cost that I can find. CLICK HERE for the Wikipedia entry, which shows a page from the M.S.)

The poem stands as one of the icons of English literature, but it’s tough to read. Over the past three years I’ve shared my enthusiasm for it with you, but, ultimately one has to read it. There are excellent translations by Marie Borroff and by J.R.R. Tolkein, and I encourage you to check your local library for them.

For links to the previous posts on this subject, which explore more about the poem’s story, language and the historical context, please look at the bottom of today’s article. To start, if you don’t know the story, you may want to review the first of those posts, “Silent Night, Green Knight.” CLICK HERE. 

Then, I wrote, “A 14th-Century Christmas” on 12/24/10.

Also, “The Knight in Winter“  on 12/26/10.

And, last year, “Don We Now Our Green Apparel” on 1/1/11.

I hope that 2012 will hold many fascinating reading adventures for all of you, whatever your interests. Don’t forget to support your local library. As the Gawain scribe would have written, Happy Nw Yere!

As the old year turns new, we all look back on the year’s opportunities and risks; at the chances taken, and moments we let pass. 

As a gambler, I’m no great shakes, but I enjoy it. I like to play blackjack when I get the chance, if the odds are reasonable and the buy-in isn’t too big. I especially like gambling in the big, ostentatious gambling palaces that let me create the illusion that I’m James Bond and that the man next to me at the table and I are playing for stakes no less than the Future of the World. Creating and maintaining that illusion requires a wide and tall, subtly lighted room with plenty of tables working and a lively, vibrant background that has lots of coming and going from casino patrons, plus plenty of moving-around by the staff in the pit, and the steady hum of voices from around us while the cards fall on the green felt. I want a lively, engaged crowd around me to create that sense that HERE, we are on the knife’s edge between triumph and disaster. Although that’s the elevated image of My Ideal, make no mistake: I’ve shambled into my share of dusty backwater halls around the American west to find a game — including a memorable night in Elko, Nevada … but that’s another story. I’ve leaned my elbows on the padded edges in New Orleans and Reno and Atlantic City and, of course, in Las Vegas, not to mention some towns you may never have heard of, and they all have their appeal. But, earlier this year, I looked forward to my apotheosis as a gambler when, finally, my day would arrive, and I would step through the doors of the Casino Ruhl in Nice, on the French Riviera. The Counselor and I had booked two weeks to divide evenly between Italy and France. In our final seven days we’d be based in Villefranche-sur-Mer, a ten-minute taxi ride from Nice. I began to practice my basic blackjack strategy against the evening I would stand there on the carpet in that legendary joint and place my Euros on the felt amongst the bons-vivants of the greater world.

I studied my terminology and the local casino rules. Blackjack there is not, as one might think, vingt-et-un. It’s “Blackjack.” A “minimum bet” is “le mise.” Le mise for Blackjack is 10 Euros at Casino Ruhl. For me, at my basic skill level, that means I had to be armed with a minimum stake of two hundred Euros in order to hold out until the shoe might turn positive. Not that much different from a ten-dollar minimum in the States, but one wouldn’t want to lose track of the 50% difference between Euros and dollars!

The worst news is the time at which the gaming tables open and one can begin playing blackjack there: 10 p.m. Of course, they make up for it by the fact that the tables (les tables des jeux) are open until 4 a.m. — 5 a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. That is, if you care to stagger out of the casino at 4 a.m. and try to find a bus back to your apartment at that hour. I reasoned that taxis would be standing by, and prepared accordingly, planning to have my address written out to hand to a driver rather than to try communicating in my ghastly French late at night.

I familiarized myself with the French equivalents of other necessary terms: Hit: carte, Split: coupe, Insurance: assurance.

Casino Ruhl requires that men wear a jacket. No challenge there. Guys, take my advice, and always wear a jacket when you play. There’s nothing more offensive than the sight of a man hitching himself half up off his stool to pull his wallet out of his hip pocket  for more cash. It’s plus de classe’ to reach smoothly with the left hand into the right breast pocket for the billfold to extract a couple of Benjamins (or the Euro equivalent), rather than digging into the watch pocket of your jeans for that rolled-up wad of cash left over from the afternoon’s shopping trip. Always wear a jacket, even in far-flung Elko or on the outskirts of Albuquerque. Take it from me, it lends a higher air to the proceedings and it puts the dealers on the defensive, if nothing else.

As the days passed, we made the reservations for planes, hotels, trains, opera tickets (Verona, in the ancient Roman theater, as I related HERE), and, as we did, I began to visualize the fateful evening I’d arrive at the casino. Late as it might be, and as intimidated as I might feel, there on the French Riviera, I would play. After all, whether in French or in southern Louisianan, the game is more or less the same, and money talks. My mind raced ahead, trying to place myself in that scene: how different might it be from Caesar’s in Las Vegas or Harrah’s in New Orleans or Bob’s Truckstop Lunchpit in Tuscaloosa?

Finally, in late July, we were airborne, the first long leg of the trip, from LAX to Frankfurt: 12 hours on a Lufthansa flight, squeezed into middle seats that pretty much negated everything you’ve ever heard about the glamour of flying with the big international carriers. Still, amidst the hours of tedium, the pointless meals and even more pointless in-flight movies, I did manage a little fitful sleep. And I dreamed …

… it’s late in the evening — probably the early hours of the morning. I’m surrounded by the sophisticated energy of one of the world’s great gambling palaces. Beautiful, well-dressed women and even more beautiful better-dressed men stroll confidently among the tables, exchanging — in addition to Euros — bon mots. There’s all the energy and excitement one finds in even the most modest casino, but — somehow — elevated to a fine frisee’ of the unexpected. I find myself holding even against the house, waiting for the deck to turn positive and make a big play. I’m in the shortstop seat, the next to last seat to the left of the table. After having been focused solely on my cards, and trying to keep my count straight, there’s a momentary pause while someone changes a thousand-Euro note. I look around the table to get a sense of who are my playing partners. On the far right, over on “first base,” by gar! it’s George Lazenby — the original James Bond! Still svelte, debonaire, impeccably turned-out, he’s focused on his play, so he doesn’t catch me eyeing him. To his left, one place closer to me … yes, that’s Pierce Brosnan, looking extremely natty in a tuxedo jacket with an open collar. He seems to be holding the attention of six or seven women who are leaning over him, while, to HIS left, yes, it’s Roger Moore, looking not at all natty, but carrying off with extreme panache an amazing combination of blue blazer and — I’m not kidding here — pajama top. Between Moore and me (by now you expect it), is, of course, Daniel Craig. I take a quick glance at him, right into those steely blue eyes, and he sticks a small beretta knife between my ribs for bothering him, but I let it pass. Comes with the territory. I pocket the knife as a souvenir, draw a breath, and look around me again.

I know I have to look to my left, but I don’t want to spoil it. After all, there have been five Bonds, and I’ve already seen four of them. The original, the ultimo, the ur-Bond MUST be there.

And so I look.

It’s Woody Allen.

He looks at me and says, “I hate to get all these Kings in a French casino! Do I have to get Kings all the time? I feel like I’m just here to usher them to the guillotine!”

… and I awoke to daylight over central Europe. The plane was descending. Our two weeks in Italy and France were about to begin.

Friends, I never made it to that casino. I saw it as we rode a bus through Nice on our way back from a visit to the fascinating Provencal town of Vence, which — it occurs to me — I’ve not reported in this blog, although it was a tremendous day.

Remind me to write that blog some time soon. It was a glorious day.

There were, of course, plenty of nights I could have boarded the bus or gotten a taxi for the short trip to the Casino. On the other hand, those were all nights of velvety summer air in the narrow streets and the charming light of evening with the little restaurants and the views out over the  harbor of Villefranche and the strolling musicians that I could spend with a certain brunette …

… I trust you won’t hold it against me that I played my cards another way. I, for one, have no regrets.

Have a happy new year. And as the old year passes, remember that you let some things go because the things you might have had are not really as good as what you do have. That’s what I know. Hony soyt quy mal sy pence.

Six years ago, The Godmother of Rock had an idea: we’ll form a band. Not just any band. A band comprised of employees from our company, which, at that time, numbered something like 60,000 people, all around the world. This would be a worldwide band, a Global Jam!

As 2011 draws to a close and I look back over things done and left undone, I’ve  just discovered that I’ve been too busy with other matters to close the loop on an open story line: the 2011 performance by the company’s Global Jam.

If you’re new to the blog, let me explain that the Global Jam is composed of musicians who are also colleagues of mine at The Big Firm (which now has about 94,000 employees). From a company this big, we draw a big ensemble: drums, bass, guitars, keyboards, plus a horn section and some outstanding voices. There are about 25 of us, and, because the company operates around the world, we hail from a dozen different countries. We perform once a year at a big corporate conference in June. It’s a genuine band, not a rag-tag assembly of so-so musicians. These cats can PLAY, and they work year-round to be ready to go onstage for the big show. I’ve described the inner workings of how you put a band together across 6 continents in previous posts. From the previous blogs about the band, go over to the right-hand navigation under “Categories” and click on “Global Jam” to read up.

We arrived in Orlando on June 3rd, ready for rehearsal to start the following morning. We had four days to work together in person to turn the individual parts we’d been practicing on our own into a polished set of numbers. It was a happy reunion. Many of us have been together for the six-year history of the band, and we’ve become good friends who look forward to this single week in the year when we become real people, instead of just voices on the conference calls.

We’d had some setbacks en route to this year’s performance. A couple of members simply couldn’t manage the entire week away from late-developing personal commitments, and a couple more got demanding new work assignments that  required their presence at home. Very late in the game, we had to reassign parts, and various members picked up additional numbers to learn with very little time to do so.

It was already a demanding set list: 33 numbers, 3 hours of music, which we’d play through nonstop. The stakes were high since we’d have an audience of more than a thousand people. We had weighted the set list heavily in favor of numbers that featured our horn section, and those cats were hard-pressed to master a lot of tough material. One of the changes was that our rock-solid drummer who’d been with us since the inception of the band was one of those who had to drop out, and we had a new drummer, added just a couple of months before the gig.
We also had gained a new singer from Brazil, and both these newcomers were talented and welcome new additions.

Because I had the full-time job producing the conference, I didn’t get to spend as much time rehearsing live with the group as others do, even though I could use the practice. The others worked through Saturday and Sunday, and as many hours on Monday as they could while the conference got under way around them. Then, Tuesday, and it was time for the full run-through before that night’s performance.

The band made their way into the ballroom, and, man, were there some surprises waiting for them. (click on the photo to enlarge)

Rehearsal, about 4 p.m., day of show

The projection screen filled the room. 105 feet across and 22 feet high. And a single, seamless video image filled it: a mammoth “Global Jam” logo. Not only that, our staging wizards had, uh, thrown an extra truss and a few special lighting instruments onto one of the 7 semis that hauled the gear into the place, and laid on a little effects smoke. Normally, they take this gear when they do the shows for Bon Jovi or Green Day, but they gave us the big-time treatment! Then, a four hour rehearsal right through the set. Not everything was perfect, but it was clear that the months of work were going to pay off. Add to that the fact that the dude handling the house audio mix — “Daddy” — just happens to have worked with some bands you might have heard of … one named Nirvana and — well, it was time.

8 p.m. Showtime!

I regret that I cannot post recordings of the show. Because we were performing cover songs, posting recordings of copyrighted material brings down the wrath of a variety of industry watchdogs. Pictures will have to do.

Under the lights

The band is a dance band playing for an audience who are attending a conference. These are not couples out on a date, or even looking for dates, so, although we do some slower, schmalzy numbers, the primary goal is to get the people rocking onto the dance floor. Three hours flew by. After every number, the onstage combination of players shifted, with everyone changing places quickly to bring on the next singer, the next backup ensemble, guitar players changing places. A heady experience, as I’ve explained before, to stand on stage and play with such an exceptional group of players.

The evening wore on. Hour one. Hour two. And as 11 o’clock approached, the crowd was jumping. We played an encore, and they called for more, so we gave them one more. This was where my friends and colleagues in the band did me a special favor. This was, as it happened, my final stint with the Global Jam, after six years of marvelous music-making. My job was ending, and, since I would leave the company, I must quit the band. And so, for our final number — my FINAL number, we gave ‘em “Johnny B. Goode.” I sang a couple of verses, backed by the entire group, and we turned the guitar players loose on solos. I sang another verse, and I took a couple of turns through a harmonica solo and then passed it to my Harp Brother, Niels, who wailed out his own solo.

We had solos from the horns and from the piano. We sang through the verse again, and we had a DRUM SOLO! And then, having exhausted every possible way we could think of framing the song we finished. It was done. The crowd cried out for more. They begged for more. I believe someone even mentioned a matter of money.

Leave ‘em asking for more, I believe the man once said. So we were done.

Very few amateurs ever have the chance I’ve had for six years, to stand on the stage and perform while a mighty drummer and the bassman drove the rhythm and guitars wailed and shining horns filled the air with joy, while on either side of me, the singers harmonized around me. It’s good, and it reminds me to advise you that if you have a chance some time to encourage a kid to pick up an instrument or to make some joyful sound, give them the gift that we all can share. It’s a gift that grows with the giving. Give them music.

Let me close by thanking my friends in the Global Jam for sharing the gift with me. They are already well into the planning and practicing for 2012. Rock on, brothers and sisters.

The Global Jam

As I post this item, it’s Christmas Eve (except in those far-flung regions of our vast readership where Christmas has already dawned, and the detritus of Christmas Day is giving way to a search for Double-A batteries, a 13mm socket wrench or that allspice mix you KNEW you must be in the spice cabinet). It’s also Hanukkah for Jews, so there is a lot of holiday-making across the world. That also means it’s a day on which few people will visit Under Western Skies. They have better things to do.

One place that isn’t affected by religious holidays isn’t going to generate much traffic on the site, either. In North Korea there is not only no Christmas (or any non-State holiday), but no double A batteries, 13mm socket wrenches OR allspice … or much food of any kind, for that matter. Nor is there much in the way of internet connectivity; to my knowledge, UWS has never had a hit from North Korea. Were you there, your mind would be bent to only one immense reality: the recent death of the Dear Leader. At the tender age of 69, he left them, with the youngest of his three wacky sons in his place as apparent heir (here, cue the theme music from “My Three Sons” — who plays the role of Uncle Bub?).

Now, the Dear Leader — Kim Jong-il — was the son of Kim Il-sung: the Great Leader. We now learn that Dear Leader’s successor — his son, Kim Jong-un, that is (because that’s how things are done in North Korea, England and Monaco) — will be known as … wait for it … “Outstanding Leader.”

Well.

Obviously, these are English translations of terms that have immense cultural weight in a language of which I have not the faintest grasp. For all I know, they’re all signified by arcane Hangul symbols that have infinitely subtle differentiations, and don’t ascribe at all well to transliteration into our notoriously vague English, love it as we may.

Still, this business of giving nicknames to leaders has a proud history, and one assumes that the North Korean Department of Propaganda and Agitation (I kid you not, that’s its official title — in English) has provided a useful official translation and all appropriate supporting material. We’ve had Peter the Great, Alexander the Great and, in music, the Great Caruso. We do a bit of it here in the U.S., too, though without making the names part of official state discourse. Lincoln was the Great Emancipator. Reagan was the Great Communicator. Taft was the Great Big Fatso — okay, I made that one up.

There’s an implied, subtle progression, though, from Great Leader to Dear Leader to Outstanding Leader. Assuming that the rest of the world is content to let N. Korea stew in its own juices for untold generations, what will be next? Will Kim Jong-un’s son (or daughter — sorry one has to ask) be the Acceptable Leader, to be followed, in one decade after the next, by the Leading Leader, the Reasonable Leader, the OK Leader, and the Not-As-Good-As-the-Previous-But-Still-Noticeable Leader?

One might choose one other model: the superior of those nefarious villains, Boris and Natasha. They, of course, reported to Fearless Leader. I think it would have been an irony beyond our mere human means to appreciate if North Korea had determined to be headed by Fearless Leader.

I ask you, Dear Readers: what should be on the list of names for future North Korean leaders? I await your comments.

And have a merry holiday season, however you may celebrate it. I await the joy of the season with endless optimism, as always.

Now, where did I put that allspice that Piano Nan sent me?

A recurring theme in this blog is the notion that there are matters of interest everywhere, and that one need not be on an official vacation trip or expedition to find sights and sites of interest. This week, we had business in Long Beach, and, with an hour to spare, I walked along a portion of the Pacific Coast Highway, U.S. Route 1. When you’re here, just call it “PCH.” Everyone will know what you mean.

Long Beach is a large city — the 36th largest city in the U.S., nearly half a million people — about 20 miles south of downtown Los Angeles. It’s large in extent as well as population, covering a variety of urban and suburban settings, from the beach, a struggling downtown, the massive container port, and a wide variety of residential areas that range from spiffy to scruffy.

At this point in its path along the California coast, PCH is not at the edge of the water; it’s a few miles inland. It’s a busy route, and lined with every type of business you can imagine, from large-scale commercial buildings to little strip malls. Included in this encyclopedia of modern highway culture are two of Under Western Skies’ favorite southern California icons: motels and car washes. I passed great example of each on my walk this week.

I recently wrote about Los Angeles-area car washes (click here). Here’s one more great example.

Car Wash, Pacific Coast Hwy, Long Beach

In the early days of this blog I posted a series of articles about vintage motels that line PCH near my house, about ten miles west of my walk this week (find them in the “categories” list over on the right of this page). As the original major route for tourists visiting California in a day before interstate highways, PCH must have had hundreds, if not thousands, of motels. Many are still operating and flaunt at least some of the retro glory of the 50s and 60s. Here’s one I passed.

In the old days, that marquee would have touted in-room TV or free phones. Now it’s wi-fi.

I also had to navigate around something that is not very common in this part of California: a traffic circle.

Traffic Circle/Roundabout, PCH, Long Beach

Of course, you readers in the former Commonwealth and on the Continent call this a roundabout. Wikipedia uses that term, too. In the Northeast of the U.S., they’re rotaries (thanks to faithful reader Jill for that note).

Traffic circles/roundabouts are extremely efficient means to move traffic through intersections. They’re not common in many parts of the U.S. My impression is that they’re more often found in the Northeast, but that’s not based on any particular fact, just my impression. Also, my observation is that they tend to exist in places that have more complex intersections than a simple crossing of two roads. That’s the case there at the intersection of PCH, Lakewood and Los Coyotes.

I will say that traffic circles are not always pedestrian-friendly (even by the pedestrian-averse southern California street scene). I had to zig and zag around this one, which has no sidewalks or pedestrian crossings. But roundabouts do move traffic quite efficiently and with great dispatch. Many traffic planners advise the implementation of traffic circles as much as possible to eliminate traffic signals, stop signs, and to keep things moving. Properly planned roundabouts need not take up significantly more space than traditional intersections, although they’re difficult to insert into well-established built environments.

This also brought to mind the first time I ever encountered a traffic circle. It was the summer after my first year of college, so I’d been driving for a few years. On this particular summer day, the Tampa Scribe and I set out to see the Football Hall of Fame in Canton (he, of course, went on to his own brand of sports fame as an award-winning writer covering every sport except maybe 43-Man Squamish). We also drove north to Stow, to visit one of my roommates. We were doing fine, driving through Tallmadge when — kazango — there was a traffic circle. We’d never encountered one. I’m not certain that we actually knew of their existence — at least not in Ohio. We weren’t beginning drivers, but this was something new. Fortunately, I have nothing more adventurous than the mere fact of surprise to relate here, and we navigated it successfully. The Wikipedia listing for Tallmadge features an aerial photo of that famous roundabout, CLICK HERE.

Lots of keen stuff out there, kids. Keep your eyes peeled, and don’t forget to carry your camera.

I’m not a shy person, as those of you who know me are already aware. There’s a certain degree of presumption — pretentiousness? posturing? — in assuming that a self-published blog will find any audience at all.

Some of my favorite aspects of the work I do are also not small or retiring. As an example, here’s the big projection screen at a conference last summer (click on images for larger view):

The Big Screen

A single, brilliant image 105 feet wide and 22 feet high. And a sound and lighting system on a scale to match. And we could put multiple images inside the main image, as a sort of super-sized version of the picture-in-picture function of your TV. That is about as good as it gets for big excitement in my biz.

This town — Los Angeles — is not a place for shy people, either. It’s full of bravado, swagger, self-promotion, egotism and flackery of all sorts, since — after all — it’s the center of the entertainment and promotion world (whatever New Yorkers may say to the contrary). This is the town that owns the reality TV business and the even wider world of celebrities who are famous simply for being famous (or notorious). Thanks to the miracles of TV, movies and the Internet, we all reap their myriad benefits.

As a result, there are plenty of places to go around here to witness the excess of display. Take, for instance, Beverly Hills. Wealth unimaginable, and, to provide a place to spend your limitless wealth (or watch others do it), B.H. has Rodeo Drive.

I was in that part of town a few months ago and caught one photo that does, perhaps, convey a thousand or so words’ worth of this notion. There are numerous big-name design, couture and style houses with storefronts there on the Drive. One of them, named after the designer himself, is perpetually touting itself with large billboards in various highly traveled corridors around the west side of the city. So, you’re a designer, and you want to put your mark on something eye-catching, with the appropriate upscale cachet that places you firmly in the big-spenders’ eyes? How about designing a SPECIAL EDITION of an automobile that STARTS at a million dollars before you add your special features?

Bijan's Bugatti Veyron, Beverly Hills

That’s a Bugatti Veyron, tricked out in its custom design, parked in front of the shop. It gets a lot of attention, as you can see from the people posing next to it. THIS SITE attributes a price of $1.7 million to the car. I have no way of knowing.

There are a couple of back stories worth briefly relating. For one, this designer, Bijan Pakzad, died a couple of months before I took this photo, but the enterprise continued to display his Bugatti (and other over-the-top cars in Bijan’s collection). Secondly, someone vandalized the car in broad daylight about a month after I shot this photo, smashing one of the windows. Think about that before you park your million dollar car unattended!

Regular readers of Under Western Skies are familiar with one of the central tenets of what we cover here: that there are fascinating stories and eye-catching details in infinite supply, if one only keeps on the lookout for them. And, while one can go to the Grand Canyon or Disneyland or the edge of the crashing sea to be guaranteed a stimulating environment, I like this example of everyday wonderment on a quiet suburban street not far from our house.

Diving bell mailbox

It’s a mailbox made from some sort of underwater gear (I could have been fooled, but if that’s not a genuine piece of equipment, it’s a very convincing simulation). The houses on that street have a view westward out over the Pacific. Many people in this area, of course, actually have their business on, in or around the water, including, one assumes, this resident, since the logo on the diving bell says “Global Diving Services.” A lot of ingenuity and a fair amount of mechanical skill went into creating that mailbox (not the least challenge would be making it adhere to U.S. Postal Service regulations). Just as eye-catching as a million-dollar car and, somehow, more human-scaled.

Keep your eyes open, whenever you travel out under those western skies.

After I published my recent article marking the second anniversary of Under Western Skies, it occurred to me that some of you may find it interesting to have a little look at what goes on here at UWS WHQ.

Admittedly, when we launched the blog, Under Western Skies was nothing like the finely-honed enterprise of today. To give you a quick glance back at those early days, here’s Dani, who was receptionist, story researcher, fact-checker and computer department, all in one (click on photos for larger images).

In the beginning

As you can see, Dani — as did all of us — had her hands full. And, of course, we roll our eyes now at the outmoded technology Dani was using (as you’ll see later when we look at the UWS installation of today). We’ve grown a lot since those first stumbling steps, and we’re very proud of both the technological infrastructure and the expert team of professionals who work constantly to produce the blogs. I’m pleased to give you a little tour of the effort that goes into publishing Under Western Skies.

Each week begins with the heads of all the departments — Art, Literature, Travel, etc. — gathering for our weekly Story Conference. The same sort of thing happens at newspapers, magazines and publications around the world. We meet for several hours each week, and it’s always a freewheeling give-and-take of a high-powered team of creative individuals.

Story Conference in the UWS War Room

As Publisher, I treasure this chance to see great people performing at their peak during this session. Once the editorial staff determines the lineup for the week, we assign each story to a team of writers, researchers, graphics, photo and layout pros, and they set to work. In the next photo, Stephanie and Robb — two of our Senior Writers — are discussing some data they’ve just received from the research team (Robb’s holding the data drive).

The UWS senior writing staff

It’s a daunting, demanding process to get the facts, conduct interviews, delve deeply into databases and online libraries, all against a deadline. It requires accomplished professionalism as well as a deep understanding of the latest technology, but the UWS team is equal to the task.

Senior Researchers Darby Sue and Melinda Sue

A little later, you’ll see more of the impressive technology that supports their work, but it’s still a people business. One of the most important factors is, of course, a great work environment. Here’s Angelica, one of our research assistants, going through some online databases from a workstation in what we like to call The Fishbowl.

The Fishbowl

For a lot of the work, of course, you can’t have daylight streaming in on the screens. Below, two of our writers are discussing a series of UWS stories they’re preparing. Stemming from an in joke too laborious to relate here — associated with the logarithmic functions of the computers there — this part of the facility is referred to as the “Log Jam.”

At work in the "Log Jam"

It takes long hours and excruciating attention to detail. While the writers are developing the story outlines and the researchers are mining all the necessary facts, Iphigenia, our fabulous Art Director, is meeting with her team, circulating from desk to desk in “The Stable,” establishing the basic layout for each of the stories.

Art Direction Conference in "The Stable"

As Iffie and the team map out the initial layouts and determine the creative treatments, assignments go to the graphic artists. Here, two of our seasoned veterans, Caleb and Cal, discuss a rendering for an upcoming project.

Caleb (standing) and Cal

It takes multiple hands working with a number of advanced imaging, graphics and layout technologies to bring the stories to life.

Proprietary UWS Graphics Interface Workstation

One particular aspect of UWS — The Under Western Skies Kitchen of Adventure — requires a very special set of skills and knowledge. Here’s Brunhilda, our Quality and Safety Assurance Director, examining some ingredients from our National Chili Month recipes, to make certain they meet our exacting standards (and, as you see, Brunhilda’s located in our Marina office, where fresh fish, produce and rare spices come right off ships from around the globe).

Quality and Safety Assurance

Whenever she sees a need, Brunhilda can call on the resources at the UWS Remote Support Site (UWS RSS) for further testing and evaluation of any ingredients or recipes.

Quality Field Testing at UWS RSS

Of course, inspectors from the County, State and Federal governments are always on hand to supervise our adherence to FDA, EPA and County Health Department regulations.

Quality and Safety Inspectors

As the stories, artwork and layout take shape, the initial drafts go into Editorial. Every publication lives and dies by its ability to control the workflow through a disciplined editorial process, and we pride ourselves on the rigor of our version control. Here’s Ed at the console, monitoring and adjusting the proprietary UWS Editorial Version Control System (EVCS).

UWS EVCS

As the final step in the EVCS, every piece reaches what I understand the writing staff refers to as the “Sanctum Sanctorum:” The Counselor’s desk. This is the final, critical gate through which all work — including mine — must pass. (Insider’s note: you want to be on The Counselor’s right-hand screen. If you’re on the left-hand screen, your piece is coming back to you for a rewrite, marked up in the infamous purple ink.)

Sanctum Sanctorum: The Counselor's Editing Station

As you can imagine, there’s a lot of advanced technology underlying this massive enterprise. Most of you will marvel at this state-of-the-art installation, and I have to admit that some of it confounds me, although some of you younger readers will be at least somewhat familiar with it.

Internet connectivity and communications routing …

IP stack

… which receives constant supervision by our IT staff …

One of our unsung heroes behind the scenes

There are massive rows of servers …

Server farm

… and a massively complex central processing unit.

Central Processing

This complex operation is managed and supervised by Huck and Buck, up in what we refer to as “Mission Impossible Control.”

Huck (left) and Buck

There’s a constant, heavy demand placed on people and machines. A big part of my job is to do all I can to provide the best possible working environment for the employees (I’m about to sign off on the design for the new bocce court). The equipment needs a lot of TLC, too. For that, we count on “Doc,” who can fix anything.

Doc

Doc hates the term, “Miracle Worker,” but it immediately comes to mind when you see what he can do with an oscilloscope and a soldering iron.

When it’s all done — stories researched, written, edited; artwork created; photographs shot, retouched and set into the layout — The Counselor gives the go-ahead to Huck and Buck, who uplink the final product to WordPress from the transmission unit out at the Remote Support Site.

UWS Uplink BNMSV777

Within seconds, it’s another blog post for your reading enjoyment. Just another day at Under Western Skies. Hope you enjoyed the tour.

Consider this a cautionary tale.

Recently, I posted a series of blogs describing portions of a trip my dad and I made to the state of Washington. In the final entry in that series, “By This Distant Northern Sea,” I used the occasion of standing on the northwesternmost point of land on the continental United States as an opportunity to recall some famous poems about the sea. One of the poems was “The Seafarer,” a widely anthologized work in Old English that’s studied in most introductory courses on Anglo-Saxon language and literature. I know, I know: I’d get more traffic on my blog if I would write more about vampires or the lyrics of Justin Bieber or the court proceedings of Lindsay Lohan, but I rather like the irony of using the social media channel to write about things originally recorded with a quill pen on parchment.

Now, more than a week after I posted that article, I received an unusual comment on it. Here’s what the unknown commentator said:

Lines 27-30: The speaker constructs another opposition, one between himself and the comfortable city dweller who puffs himself up with pride and drink. This city person cannot possibly know of the seafarer’s suffering. The wilderness experience of the speaker cannot be translated for the sheltered urban inhabitant. The landlocked man cannot possibly understand the seafarer’s motives; however, like all people, he will eventually be held accountable for his choice of lifestyle. This theme becomes predominant in the poem’s second half.

That’s unusual, to say the least. My blog, like — I assume — every and all sites on the WWW, gets a lot of spam. The administrative function of the WordPress infrastructure alerts me to some likely spam messages in the “comments” section and allows me to determine whether to publish them or delete them as spam. Almost without exception, I delete them. Additionally WordPress automatically deletes a significant volume of messages it identifies as coming from known spammers without my intervention. As I write, the current count of such deleted messages from the 2-year history of UWS is 4,482 that equals 20% of the bona fide hits the site has received; by anyone’s estimate, that’s a lotta spam.

I paused over this one, though. If the content of the message seems plausible, the tiebreaker for my approval/disapproval is the source of the message. In this case, the address of origin was not obviously some phishing site (like, workfromhomeforbigbucks.com, etc.), or pornographic (many are), or other suspicious malware. The last thing one wants to do is blithely click on one of those Web addresses out of casual curiousity. One could immediately find one’s computer in possession of a virus.

What puzzled me most, though, was the text of the comment. It seemed familiar. I cannot count myself as a scholar of good ol’ Anglo-Saxon. Scholarship demands knowing not only the works themselves — the primary sources — but the secondary literature: criticism and commentary by other scholars. One of the greatest tasks the aspiring scholar in any field faces is mastering this secondary literature, which can be vast in scope if one sets out to study well-known work, regardless of the field, whether it’s the works of Shakespeare or the mathematical theorems of Riemann or the physics of Einstein.

But I had read this before. Nor did it read like something an ordinary person had dashed off as a comment. The language is somewhat stilted and maybe even a little dated: perhaps from the ’50s or ’60s. If it was something I had read (and I have a reasonably good retention of what I read), it most likely would have been in the introductory comments of one of my old Anglo-Saxon texts, a few of which I scanned though before I did that piece on The Seafarer. However, since this blog is a hobby and not my profession, I didn’t really want to invest the time required to read through the commentaries and introductions. I took the easy way out. I pasted that first sentence of the comment into the Google search bar. Why don’t you try it? I invite you to try it. I’ll wait.

If you did that, I know what you found: NUMEROUS exact matches that contain that entire paragraph.  All or nearly all of the hits are “online study guides” which — one deduces — are used by students to crib papers about works they haven’t read or don’t want to take the time to write themselves. (If you didn’t try it yourself, CLICK HERE to see just one of many of these sites that invite plagiarizing.)

Apparently, someone back there in the mists of Internet time lifted this commentary from some scholar’s work. It’s now propagated multiple times into all sorts of online “resources.” (After all, the original writer of that ur-”study guide” was plagiarizing to begin with, so they obviously have no recourse to prevail against others plagiarizing the same work!)

This is a problem that teachers face every day. While we can assume that the greatest percentage of material on the WWW is pornography and another big chunk is worthless political and religious railing of every stripe, there is a vast pool of STUFF that students can copy and paste into their reports on The Causes of the French Revolution or Raw Materials of Peru. It makes me weary to think of the task that teachers face in sorting through the duff that fills their students’ homework to determine which ones have only demonstrated their skill at the copy/paste functions. At the top level, in the halls of Academe, it’s not quite so difficult. There, the instructors ARE, typically, scholars of at least some modest accomplishment, familiar with the secondary sources for their fields. But for the 7th-grade teacher grading the annual Missions of California reports from their students, it’s a daunting task.

I did finally look at the site that posted the plagiarized comment. It was in Spanish, hawking a variety of — I think — various cosmetic cure-alls. It boggles the mind to consider how someone trying to get a link posted in the comments section of Under Western Skies found a blog post about The Seafarer, pasted in some text from one of those study guides, and posted it here. Are there ‘bots so sophisticated that they can do that? Wow.

Be careful what you click on out there. And be careful about believing what you read online. It’s still the Wild West on the WWW, and the Marshall’s all the way up in Dodge. He doesn’t get out here into the back country all that often to keep things in line.

I’ve previously written several articles about the amazing spam that arrives here. For just one of them, CLICK HERE.

I’m one of those cats who remembers anniversaries … usually. I can tell you the day that I graduated from college and when I arrived in California and, above all, the day on which I had my first date with a certain brunette who went on to become “The Counselor” in these pages. But, I recently missed one: the second anniversary of the launch of Under Western Skies.

I launched Under Western Skies on November 4th 2009. My ambitious goal was to write five days a week on whatever interested me, and to do so well enough that it might interest others, too. After a year of that regimen I pulled back to a biweekly schedule, which — give or take a week — I’ve done. Two years later, this is the 298th blog entry. In total, those blogs must contain well over a thousand photographs perhaps half a million words. You, faithful readers, have provided more than 22,000 hits. Thanks. Truly, sincerely, thank you. Together, we’ve traveled across the U.S. and a few places outside our borders. We’ve explored an eclectic, varied range of subjects; some have been serious and some have been fairly wacky. My very special thanks go to The Counselor, who has read every one of these half million words and has consistently made productive suggestions and corrections.

Change is constant, and some things have altered while the world whirled twice ’round during this time. I was — I imagined — firmly set in my career in the corporate realm when I began Under Western Skies. I started the blog as a spur to drive me to explore a more creative side of writing after nearly 30 years spent writing every day in a business context. Now I am self-employed. That change makes available more of my time for writing Under Western Skies, while simultaneously putting a higher premium on any time NOT spent developing my business. I’ve tried to strike a balance between those opposing positions, and have taken advantage of the occasional free hour to go see some local point of interest that I might not have visited during the precious weekends (especially the stories on LAFD Fire Boat 2, the Nike missile site and the coastal gun emplacements).

The spur now is on the other foot. I plan to apply this practice of regular publishing to a business-oriented blog that I’ll launch soon. I find that to be an interestingly ironic shift. Under Western Skies will continue, and I look forward to having you here with me. Certainly, the world will never lack for things to captivate us. I’ll let you know when the business blog launches, and you’re welcome to read along there, too, if you like, but it’ll be a different animal stabled separately from UWS.

Thanks again for all the hits, comments, likes and re-posts. It’s a big world out there. Who knows what we’ll find?