lornamatic

There was a pretty scary morning a few weeks back, when the sky opened up and came crashing down on Newburgh, Indiana. Mike grew up in Newburgh. That morning, it took a while to get in touch with loved ones living in town, and I’ll never forget the feeling of loading a news website, just part of my normal routine, and seeing that main story. Thankfully, everyone we know was safe.

Tragically, many people lost their homes, and some people lost their lives. Thankfully, the community banded together and churches and community groups offered rescue, shelter, and assistance.

We are in town for the holiday, and today, we saw some of the tornado damage. After witnessing the destruction, I am amazed that the number of fatalities was not much higher. Thankfully, the weather has turned cold, hopefully ending this season’s thunderstorms.

Devastation is probably too light a word to describe the ruined areas. My heart broke at some of the scenes I saw today. It looked like this:

Rows of perfect houses and manicured lawns and one of the houses is missing some shingles and then there’s a little debris by the side of the road and then suddenly there’s nothing but debris. Broken trees, ruined furniture, artifacts of someone’s daily life reduced to scraps. Shattered windows, clumps of cotton candy insulation, blue tarps covering wrecked roofs.

I saw a cracked-open kitchen wall, a slate blue front door hanging off its hinges next to oak cabinetry, brass fixtures, a phone jack with a broken cord leading to nowhere. Between three perfect, intact, untouched houses.

I saw a ruined brick building, shattered windows, second story and roof gone, twisted aluminum siding wrapped around the edge, and the remnants of rescue workers, spraypaint on the walls, caution tape on the door, and an American flag hung from an exposed wooden beam.

I saw a home ripped open as if with a huge electric saw, one entire wall cleaved off, leaving three rooms open to the elements. On one side, the exposed room held only a rocking chair. The room on the other side held a computer monitor, a changing table, and a quilt. The room in the middle used to be a playroom - in one corner was the obligatory pile of dolls and toys. There was a hobby horse, the painted plastic kind, on springs, with a metal base. It was upside-down, tossed across the room from the force of the winds and pressure.

I just can’t get the image of that house out of my head - I can’t stop thinking of that family and hoping they are OK. I hope they were able to give thanks together today. Were they able to gather around a table with family and friends, eating too much turkey and stuffing? I hope so.

We did. And I’m truly thankful that we could.

When you take introductory design classes, you often hear a piece of advice: See the world as if through a child’s eyes.

It’s good enough advice, although maybe not so simple to do in practice. It’s so rare to see that actually happen, especially when it comes to the most simple concepts. Everyone knows what color is. Everyone sees color, every day. But how do you talk about color, really?

When was the last time you played with a superball? Up close, so close you could smell the rubber, feel the torn and scarred surface, holding the nervously contained material between your fingertips, just waiting to let loose and send it flying so high it might never land. And the colors, oh the colors: pure dayglow, or white, red and blue marbled plastic. My favorite was the clear plastic style with swirled pigment inside, the superballs that looked like they might be made out of glass, like a cat’s eye marble. Like something you should never, ever throw as hard as you can at top of the tallest cement staircase around, because it would shatter right away, but it doesn’t shatter… it bounces in enormous arc after arc, startlingly graceful. Hypnotic.

So why not unleash a superball at the top of the biggest cement staircase you can find? Why not film it? In fact, why not drop 100,000 superballs? In San Francisco, that’s even better than a staircase! Wouldn’t that make a great TV commercial?

Of course that’s a stupid idea. Superballs cost money, and they bounce all over, they are a pain to clean up. We’d have to block off an entire city block, or more. Someone would have to cover all the NO DUMPING LEADS TO BAY storm drains. What’s the point? We have sophisticated computer graphics, we can just CG the whole thing.

But when you see the world with a child’s eye, it’s clear there’s really only one way to do it. And they did it.

I can’t stop watching the new Sony Brevia ad. They just put the extended version online, and it’s truly gorgeous. I don’t know much about the TV they’re selling, but I can look at superballs bouncing pretty much all day long.

The ingenuity of man has been excercised for years past to add to the beauty, convenience, and attractiveness of bird houses. One quite pretty cage brought out a few years ago has a fish globe on top of the cage with a hollowed center, thus allowing the bird to come up into the dome, so that by looking through the fish globe it looks as if he were standing on a perch in the center of the water. These cages are not popular, however, as they are quite expensive, and the glass being of such peculiar shape it is liable to crack from variations in temperature. See illustration, page 4.

- from Feathered Pets, Chas. N. Page, 1898

I’ve been meaning to post this gem for a while, and the release of Bernd Brunner’s new book, The Ocean at Home, an Illustrated History of the Aquarium, gives me the perfect opportunity.

I wonder how many unfortunate Victorian-era canaries met their demise from a wet crash caused by an errant sunbeam. Thankfully, our generation benefits from space age polymer fish containment technology, and the canaries of the future will assuredly be safe from this dreadful fate.

I wonder how much it would cost to have the nice people at CASCO build one of these.

I had the privilege of attending a screening of “Raiders: Adaptation” tonight at the Silent Movie Theater.

If you haven’t heard about this movie already, you will shortly start hearing about it everywhere. The back story goes like this: In the 1980’s, three kids in Mississippi decided to film their own take on Raiders of the Lost Ark, scene by scene, on home video (betamax!). That’s not the unusual part.

The unusual part is that they actually did it. The entire film. Including the car fight / chase scene, the bar on fire scene, the boulder scene, and even the melting Nazis. They didn’t have desktop computers. It took them seven years to complete.

The sound is horrible. The picture quality is horrible. In a few scenes, the kids age years right before your eyes. But the movie - the movie is fantastic. The creativity and the resourcefulness of these kids was really inspiring.

See, we grow up and we get old and we get told NO a lot. Eventually we just stop trying, learn to lower our expectations, stop trying so hard to reach a dream. We believe in No. After all, it’s a lot of work, and failure sucks, and hey, that desk job drains my soul but it pays the bills… and this is how the world works, anyway, people don’t follow their dreams- that’s why they’re called dreams, stupid.

Chasing your dreams costs money. It will cause you to lose sleep. It might wreck your credit, break your heart. You might fail. People might laugh at you. And along the way, there’s temptation: give in, give up - there are a thousand easier choices to make. Chasing a dream is hard work. But when you’re 10 years old, you don’t really know about that part, so you dive right in with all the optimism and innocence in the world. The thing is, sometimes, you succeed.

Go download the trailer.

Craig Clevenger is promoting his new book Dermaphoria at 7PM tonight at the WeHo Book Soup. Will Christopher Baer will also be promoting Phineas Poe.

You should be there, too. Really, you shouldn’t pass up a “wild night of amnesia, meth lab explosions, and the internal landscape of Hell’s Half Acre.”

update:
Great reading. I enjoyed watching the audience squirm during Will Baer’s reading of Penny Dreadful. Craig’s reading was so compelling I started wondering when we’ll be treated to some podcasts (hint, hint). He had the entire room pretty well mesmerized throughout the Infamous Chapter 10.

Go check out Mike’s awesome photos of the event.