(Surfeit of superlatives warning [some people just attract them] as in highest degree of respect) Charles Barsotti was an exceedingly creative and charming fellow and an amazing chronicler of human feelings, often through cartoons of animals, talking pasta and, sometimes, snails, hot dogs and St Peter; I was privileged to meet him at his home for a sunny afternoon of relaxed talk and not a little laughter. I remember him fondly and so do generations of his many fans, readers of The New Yorker and a dozen other publications. Here’s a June, 2014 NYT obituary (link) which examines his delightful humor and some of his past life. RIP, sir. (If you encounter a paywall, you can sign up for a freebie with your email address as I did)

  Lowrider. The voice in this version hails from Olathe, Kansas…

This song has always been a day-brightener for me, (link) with its clicks and catches and horns; a bit like Mongo Santamaria’s (and Herbie Hancock’s version of) Watermelon Man (link) which was credited for bringing Afro-Latin jazz into the mainstream. Lowrider combines an addictive percussive musicality with a driving bass line, and alto sax and a harmonica riff by vocalist Charles Miller (he also performs a siren-like sax solo toward the end--and this is a guy who downplayed his abilities on these and other instruments—he merely said he plays some other stuff). I hope it makes your day better—it has that effect on me.

Prime ribs of desk—my kind of office furniture

Sculptures you can use. Mirrors, chairs, desks, candelabra, settees; all manner of often useful items that are also eye-stopping sculpture. Francois-Xavier and Claude LaLanne, the husband and wife team who made these unusual pieces, said “Museums don’t know where to put us. (I would know. Everywhere. The Palace of Versailles knows. All over the place.) Their work just captivates me. Downgraded for years as decorative arts sales and such pigeonholed auction descriptions, their work has come into its own in recent years, sadly years after their death. Discover their art at Artsy (link) and Kasmin Galleries (link), two links with lots of information depth and stunning photos of more of their magnificent sculptures.

Two fairly lengthy book reviews, and then I’m outa here…

Burn Book, A Tech Love Story, (link) by Kara Swisher, and Sing To It, (link) by Amy Hempel—these reviews will have to be the “much more” I referred to in the main headline. I have big lawns to mow, chores to do at WiseAcres that I can now, thankfully, perform, not being confined to a walker anymore (graduated to a cane! and walking all over the place) thanks to a great support team (Freddie, her daughter Rhonda, and the visiting physical and occupational therapists at Enhabit) and some positive, “want to” thinking. I have miles to go (thank you Robert Frost).

No Burn Baby, Burn Book, but an informative, entertaining “Burn Book. A Tech Love Story” (!)

The parenthetical screamer above is mine; maybe too much of a love story, actually, is what I’m commenting on there. Burn Book’s author, tech journalist Kara Swisher, names names, but with a big wink. Even an affectionate wink. She doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t know about the self-congratulatory yet often self-loathing nerds of Silicon Valley and points east, but some of the shenanigans are exposed and ugly. Ugliest of all are our so-called lawmakers, who sit thumbs-in-butt while the tech billionerds clearcut the info forests for their own gain. Could it be the fat envelopes are making their way to these inactive folks’ accounts in digitized form? I’m just asking. If ever lobbyists existed, they would be an art form viz-a-viz SV nerd protection.

The book; not great, not bad, much better than “meh” with a mid section of family photos and those taken at All Things Digital events, and many including the Silicon Valley…humans. I say humans because their failings are, well, totally, disappointingly human.

They may not be the skull-sucking fangbats and soulless feral pirates that Swisher now and then hints at, love affair notwithstanding, but more like failures of the most banal kind, they succumb to absolute power and mountainous big bucks abso-frigging-lutely, (and quickly) the jury still out on some; like Gates who has shown an interest in improving worlds that sorely need it. Jobs, we know, was cool genius with quirks.

Elon gave the book this blurb, “Kara has become so shrill at this point that only dogs can hear her,” perhaps before proffering this one: “You’re an asshole.” (Oh, Elon…) Both adorn her book. My sense is that Musk is simply undergoing a pronounced, all too public mid-life crisis and will pull out of it in plenty of time to helm his impressive empire with fewer self-defeating tweets and/or odd mega-purchases. I am reminded here of when the Hunt Brothers (yes, those Hunts, the oil rich Texas non-techie Hunts) got bored and tried to corner the world market on silver; it didn’t work. But the Hunts are still in the game. As is Elon Musk.

Unlike some other SV mega-nerds, Musk’s kingdom is not a symphony with but one or two violins; rockets, cars, space exploration, Starlink, tunnels, implants, solar energy, batteries, chips, interconnections and subsets of each—it’s the way his mind works. A restless genius. We count him out every week or so due to his vitriolic X blurts. How we love to trivialize accomplishment. Burn Book, on the other hand, bows in respect to billions, trillions. Dollars, it would seem, are still the mile markers to great achievement. Fine. But responsibility lags. The “data-rapacious” (another great Swisher term) are also libidinous about compiling the dollars. “Anything that can be digitized would be,” is a recurring Swisher mantra; unconscionably digitized with no regard for ownership, authorship, or what used to be referred to as privacy.

This is where the book fell somewhat short for me and my thirst in this area was far from slaked; I wanted a seething, countercultural kickass outrage with Klieg lights on the slimier corners of SV and our own bicameral bodies, the house and senate, presently occupied by preening, smug, oddly coiffed (have you seen that guy from Kentucky? What is that perched on his head? Put it on a leash and give it a bowl of milk) people who all look vaguely unhealthy and pasty, yet oddly pleased with themselves as they march from one hall to another in a group to seek impeachment. Impeachment of whom? It doesn’t seem to matter any more to the impeachment impaired. This time it was an official in Homeland Security, unimpeachable by law.  I digress. So do they. Heigh-ho, heigh ho, it’s off the charts we go (in chipmunk helium-sing).  

I wanted more than just that mushy old softball “Truth to Power,” which is meaningless in today’s mouth-breathing polarized atmosphere. Trump/Biden (that’s a choice? RFK? I mean, no shit, really? Is that the best we can do? If so, well, quit reading right now, and start soaking up Revelations and Nostradamus and buy yourself an empty nuclear missile site and a 26kw Generac. I mean, let’s get some phonies that, at least, fool us some of the time.)

Do these people not know that a rather large percentage of voters are sick to puking with these smirking house and senate dickheads? That the vitriol level is bubbling over? That it’s patent that “public service” now simply means offshore accounts? (Digitized, now—so much easier.) I’m just reporting, here. Write to your “representative” and you get treacly non-answers from AI and interns that thank you for your interest and your valued input.    

So, Swisher’s heart and head seem in a better place; I do take minor issue with her grokking locutionisms but not with their etymology (Stranger in a Strange Land—it has gotten at least that weird out in SV and the Beltway and Murdochville.

Here’s a headline I saw recently while scrolling through my godawful email: TikTok Mishandled The Data Of Hundreds Of Top American Advertisers. No surprise here. None. But Jesus, lawmakers, make some laws and enforce them. Or resign, if the task of PUBLIC SERVICE is just too daunting, woke or unwoke. The law heading toward the books now signifies nothing other than a deep distrust of the New China Syndrome, or “Horrors—a big country is pulling our kind of crapola now.”

More than once in Burn Book, Swisher alludes to the fact she could have used empirical knowledge of billionerd behavior and certain “tells” to make a few bucks of her own, but didn’t. No slouch in the earnings department, she and cohort reportrepreneur* and mentor Walt Mossberg did well with their All Things Digital conferences, seminars and talks, under WSJ’s banner, then under NBC/Windsor Media as Shut Up And Listen, LLC.  The behind-the-scenes machinations moving from one entity to the other were far from simple, and attest to the Swisher/Mossberg match being right people, right time.

The book is, for any of its minor faults, a trove and a must-have for any and all SV and technophiles, and anyone with the slightest twinge of alarm in their sensing mechanism about the tipping point (hint: we passed it at high speed like it was sitting up on blocks, years ago—and here comes another wave called AI).  On that note, remember the Swisherism, “Anything that can be digitized will be.” With impunity.

*(another Swisherism—you’ll find many peppered throughout, and you may, like me, find them delightful. She has a way with words.)

(End)

When danger approaches, sing to it. I snapped up this book when I saw it; Amy Hempel’s “Sing To It.” After reading her “The Collected Stories” I was an entrenched fan. On one hand her stories don’t often make me feel very good; on the other, “It’s the language, stupid!” and it feels quite good.  She inhabits her language, her contract with it. The contract must read, in part; thou shalt not make of a dog shelter’s euthanasia program a tawdry tearjerk; thou shall make the words a bridge to hope and affirmation and searing humanity where the dogs count every bit as as much as the humans, or thou shalt not write it.

Upon reading some of “Collected Stories” a year or so ago, I wrote this poem. (I’m a poet, a writer, and though this might be simply a sneaky way of linking my name with Hempel’s, I’d much rather like to think it’s solely a paean to her and Didion, another heroine of mine.

So, these two gifted women have admittedly made me lightheaded, damn near swooning at their language, at their word combinations, reading and re-reading sentences over and over (I did that, also, with Nabokov and Proulx and McGuane trying to discern what made some mind-spinning word-glomerates so magical, so lyrical and attractive, so much more than the sum of their parts, but came away with a half-baked crossroads theory, that, like Robert Johnson and that guitar, there may have been another contract. Or, perhaps they simply wrote and rewrote until the zaps and sparks appeared.)

Not many can do this, not with any regularity or musicality; think of all the pianists in the world (and the thousands of books written weekly), think of Ahmad Jamal, then think of Amy Hempel. Chords. Music. Fill your mind. Arrangements of words like no other.

The book offers one-page stories, micro to novella length, and in all her subjects, she truly sings to them. (When danger approaches, sing to it is an Arab proverb, as she explains in the twelve-line title story, all twelve lines pulling at you like a poem I wish I could write.)

Hempel inhabits her stories, as did Didion. She reports back to you from within. You are made aware of more than the moment she somehow describes without overt description, there is often no “then this happened,” or particular reaction on anyone’s part—in fact a lack of reaction defines one, or…it’s hard to explain. Good writing is so hard to explain. Look up Hemingway; many “explain” his writing. Hard-ass work, I think—that’s my assessment. There’s so much of the not quite good out there. And the lesser than that; it makes me shrink from buying new books at high prices just to throw them across the room. And I’ve done that. My own books have found flight. Propelled by me. Some day I’ll write a really good one.

I choose at random. She bridges one paragraph from another with; “In an unshaded city park I walk through sometimes, a young woman I have seen and said hello to before tells me that her divorce has finally gone through. We had never spoken of a pending divorce; I didn’t know she was married. But I congratulated her…”

Just a small gem like that keeps me glued to her pages. I reread passages. The book is slim. I don’t want it to end. And that is my highest praise. I sing to it. And learn. And thoroughly enjoy.

  That’s it for May—see you in June. xoxo G