Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1338
A lot of words about graphomaniacal old men (Caro and Tolkein) by a graphomaniacal old man. Blueprint printing and Agfa imagesetters.
Good morning, hello, how are you? Well, I hope. Happy Friday. I am back in Chatham county. It is dark, very dark. It is raining. Jane is off from school today. We just got breakfast. Took her to a restaurant, maintained masking and social distancing, which my wife is insisting upon, owing to my shenanigans Tuesday night. What… you think the hipsters and Italian Tourists of Dimes Square are dirty? Why, I never. My doghouse ends tomorrow morning.
There was a Taylor Swift lookalike wandering around LGA the day after the VMAs and not a single person thought it could possibly have been the real Taylor incognito. We are smarter than people give us credit for, us Americans.
I’m sorry I do not have tales of Walmart and collection center for you this Friday morning. It was raining and I am postponing till the rain stops. Also I have a company meeting in two hours where I am going to explain options and stock to the employees as our situation is a bit complex and, unlike every other tech CEO in America, I am going to actually explain this stuff and offer opinions. My lawyers are not super thrilled. But I am committed. Not enough companies explain this stuff to their employees. I am such a good CEO man I really am great I don’t have a self-defeating or self-deprecating streak at all what are you talking about.
Listening to the Release Radar in Spotify. Seems to be a new Tears for Fears single? That is promising. new Duran Duran. New Reds, Pinks and Purples. And of course the new The The is out today we will check that out later. New remixes of “Blue Monday” and the best new Taylor song, “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart.” New Ethel Cain, new Pan American, Nilufer Yanya yeah this is a pretty good playlist. Lotta filler, though. Lotta artists I never heard of.
The Power Broker is 50 and Robert Caro is on a press junket again, his first since his how-to-be-a-reporter book Working came out a few years back. Oh and he has finally consented to allow The Power Broker to be released as a kindle. I have so many thoughts about this. So many thoughts!
First: Robert Caro has learned from his subjects and he is a master of staying on message. You can read 50 interviews with Robert Caro and they will all say the same thing. This happened with Working and it is happening now. I’ve got a Google Alert on the guy, he never says anything new. As a Caro fanatic this is both impressive and frustrating. New information comes out in dribs and drabs, from the occasional seriously-in-depth piece reported on by a real investigative reporter, which is rare, or from an unexpected question from an audience member. But even those he is usually spectacular at getting it back on message. Seriously, he is a disciplined master. Dude coulda been a politician.
Second: There exists, of course, the drama of whether he will finish his fifth-and-final installment of his magisterial (and superior, in my opinion) series on LBJ. His editor has died. He is 88 (though seems to be in good health). It is a drama! It is intense! I personally theorize that, if his word is to be believed about the pace of his writing, at this point that his wife, partner, and first reader Ina (who deserves way more credit than the already copious amount he gives her, honestly she should win her own Pulitzer) could finish it up in his absence. I also believe that, all else being equal, it is likely that the last book of LBJ will be two books. He let that slip once, hasn’t repeated it, but it makes sense. It’s been forever and there is a lot to get through. Given Caro’s thoroughness, it is hard to believe that civil rights, the great society and the Vietnam war — never mind his resignation and later life — can fit in one book.
Third: The real drama, though, is the missing 300,000 words from The Power Broker. Caro has been mostly clear about this: the are gone, do not expect them to ever be in print. BUT he has also been very clear that it killed him to cut them and they were really good. Most notably are the over one hundred thousand words about the battle between Robert Caro and Jane Jacobs et al about the freeway through SoHo, the one we still see the scars from the early efforts in the form of Delancey street. This issue is arguably the defining issue, the defining moment in modern urban planning, and Robert fucking Caro wrote a hundred thousand words about it, interviewing most (if not all) of the major players. It is invaluable, it needs to come out, it needs to be its own book. I was present at a talk where an audience member asked him about it, the audience applauded, and he dismissed the thing as unworkable, said the pages were gone.
But the thing is: we know the pages are not gone. He has said as much. He has shown reporters the cubby above his closet where he explicitly says that he has stored a carbon copy of every page he’s ever written. AND Robert Caro is donating his entire archive to the New York Historical Society. That cubby should make it there eventually. Now, I do not blame Caro for not wanting to take this project on: the pages are literally stuffed into a cubby, who wants to revisit words you wrote 50+ years ago, he’s got enough to do with his LBJ book and harbors a dream to get an autobiography out on top of that. He does not have time. And I have seen photos of the cubby, it’s a mess. Some of the pages are actually crumbled. But they are there. It may take twenty years, but those pages can come out, must come out and, barring some hellaciously-restricted will (and why do that and donate the archive), or Ina’s post-mortem intransigence delaying things further, I suspect they eventually will come out. Who will be the brave soul to do the deed? The deed is one of the most noble in literature, and the deed must be done.
And I would super love it if it got done before I died.
Speaking of authors who wrote way to many words and left them to future generations to deal with (a club which I clearly aspire to join), I finished The Silmarillion last night. End snuck up on me, thought I had 30% to go after the story of the forging of the rings, but nope. Rest was a glossary and an index and family trees and whatnot. Man I am so all in.
For the first time, I have now grasped the relationship between the one ring and “the time of elves is ending.” I always thought that whole thing where the elves, after millennia, just had to peace out of Middle Earth when Sauron was coming back, but it turns out it was not a coincidence. Those three rings! The rings of the elves! Those rings worked great, but the minute Sauron got the one ring back — which Elrond was always worried about and knew it was possible — or the ring got destroyed, those three rings of the elves would stop working. And Rivendell and Lothlorian’s strength and vigor were directly tied to the rings of power worn by Galadriel and Elrond. I never really grasped that before.
Also, Cirdan’s the bomb, he’s the real hero of Middle Earth. The lazy-ass Valar send their servants — the Istari — to Middle Earth to deal with Sauron instead of doing the job themselves like last time. And so this boat arrives at the Undying lands out of the blue and a bunch of Wizards hop off the boat. Cirdan knows what’s up, oh, yeah, these peeps have been sent by the Valar to clean up shop. And! He sees the group of Wizards, five in all, and decides that his specific one, Mithrandir — not their leader — is the one who’s gonna matter and get the job done. He pulls him side and says “bro you’re gonna need this ring, it will help in your quest” and gives him the freakin ring of fire. Doesn’t tell the supposed-head-Wizard who, of course, later turns bad. Cirdan knew!
So the third Elven Ring of Power is on this perpetetic old wizard dude who goes everywhere, and I never really thought about it before but everywhere he went, then, he was sprinkling Ring of Power fairy dust on all of the good parts of Middle Earth. Nice little subplot. He is partially responsible for just how nice the Shire is, since he liked to spend so much time there.
Looks like the correct next thing to read in my Tolken Legendarium completion is Unfinished Tales. I bought it on the Kindle but… a bunch of friends tell me I have to read John Williams Stoner sooner, rather than later, in life. So I am taking a short (hopefully) break from Middle Earth to hang out in… Missouri I think? We shall see, we shall see. Apparently Stoner does not involve any stoners or cannabis. I am dubious.
I have obtained the pool company blueprint printer from my partner Ricardo and I am working on four sets of blueprints for the entire RV & Boat storage facility. Each page is 24x36, coming off of a 36” roll. There are 18 pages in the set. Which means one set takes up 36 feet of a 100 foot roll of paper, which means I will need 2 rolls of 100 foot paper to complete this single project. Rolls of paper are about $40 each. I will also need a ton of ink, maybe $20, and binders, which I bought 500 for like $50 so, you know, $0.40 for binding. I calculate each set will cost about $16-20 to print. Staples charges us $300 a set. I am so into this job. It is a nice throwback to my pre-press life before the internet came along. Back when I owned an actual imagesetter, with baths of developer, stop, fix and wash. You printed from your computer and a laser exposed film into the exact image, and then the bit of film was cut from the roll and guided through these baths, coming out the other side all dry. Then you took four of those — one for each color — and did another complicated process to make a Matchprint™ of the film to ensure it all worked.
There was a $5,000 card that slot into the NuBus (NuBus!) slot of an old PowerMac in order to print to the film machine.
And, in explicably, the whole thing came with a $10,000 dongle. Like just a little serial port dongle you had to have installed to make it work, as if, you know, you somehow stole an $80,000, one-ton machine. I almost lost it once, that was stressful.
Anyway, I am very happy printing blueprints. It’s a great function for me: highly technically skilled, but once you know how to do it, it is incredibly tedious and repetitive. Collating. I freakin love collating. it rules.
Jane came and woke me up today. I had to put my mask on but she climbed into bed and said she missed me so much when I was gone and she was excited for “Daddy Daddy time” and my god it was the greatest thing, I am feeling very lucky as a human being this week.
We royal we present to you today the eighty-third installment of the celebrated playlist series “W Hotel Lobby in a Better, Alternate Universe.” Now, I, myself, have not been to a W Hotel in quite sometime, but you, my readers, my spies, my little birds, often send me field recordings of W Hotel lobbies from throughout the world (thank you, keep it up!) and I am assured that the W Hotel Lobbies in our world have not, in fact, shaped up and copped our style here. I remain ever available for music programming.
And that is it for this week what a week, talk to you next week with, as I have already promised, so much noble pedestrian domesticity. It’ll be great.