GRABBINGSAND

Tonight. And every Friday and Saturday night from now until October 13. One Sunday, too. Now, I’d love to stay and blog, but I’ve got a show to do …

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate.*

Not always, you withered St. Louisian. You transplanted Londoner. Not always. Of course, I tend to forget you were once and maybe always a banker. Banker’s hours are nothing like our own.

We open in two days.

How are we? Not bad, I think. We’re missing some lights, hopefully to be provided by our reliable electric benefactor. Two of our mic cables are faulty, but replacing one is all we need. The sound cues either need to be cut or I need to direct my actors to work through these musical distractions now covering their entrances and exits. We’ve just a few remaining set pieces to stitch together and stabilize. Posters are up along Canton Street and elsewhere. Our big banner should be greeting traffic at the corner of Hwy 120 and Hwy 9. Lines are good. If the dialogue is not altogether rock solid, at least it is setting and hardening and will be ready in time. Scenes are moving steadily from one to the next with only a few rough places remaining.

And everyone looks good. Even given our limited budget, let it never be said that any of our actors take to the grassy stage looking less than awesome.

But time? We just don’t seem to have much of that luxury at all.

An artist needs a niche. You can’t get much more niche than illustrations of 19th century monks getting drunk. And so, let us celebrate today the singular art of Eduard von Grutzner (1846-1925). His art is featured this week at the Hollywood Animation Archive blog. His work reminds me of Hogarth, only a century later and less grounded in moral lambast.

One of Grutzner’s more famous works was a painting of Falstaff, the original Shakespearian party animal. Falstaff, by the way, is a character in Merry Wives of Windsor.

Fall is here. Summer may snap back in a week, but for now, humor me and let me believe that fall is here.

Some of my fondest memories of falls long past center around Saturday mornings and afternoons spent in downtown Chattanooga. When I was in high school, a term paper assignment was a license to do weekend research at the Bicentennial Library. My nerdy friends and I, we would go to the library around 9 or 10 in the morning, driven there by my mom. Usually, we’d find the books we needed, check them out quickly, then ask the librarians at the front desk to hold our bounty until we returned. From there, we’d strike out to explore the alleys and parks and storefronts of downtown.

But sometimes, books would not be enough. Every once in awhile, we’d be given assignments that required the temporal immediacy of ancient newsprint. And back then, if you wanted to travel back in time to read a century-old article, the only way to make the journey was via microfilm. Or microfiche.

Of the two, microfilm was more fun. Once you tracked down the article you wanted (by subject), you’d find the spool of archived 35mm film (by date). These were kept in wide-drawered filing cabinets, spans of years in labeled boxes. The Bicentennial Library had microfilm for not only the local Chattanooga newspaper, but the New York Times as well.

For your first time, you’d best let the media center supervisor assist you. But once you’d seen it done a couple of times, it was a simple matter to run out a bit of film from the archived roll, then thread it from one spool to another. The microfilm reader was this monstrous console with a large glass screen. When seated at the reader, it felt a bit like a arcade racing game, like Pole Position or Outrun. The screen was at eye-level and a bit above. At your fingertips were controls to manipulate the spooled microfilm forward and back. Just sitting there, threading the spools or reading an article, the reader gave off a steady mechanical hum. But when you moved the controls to go forward or backward in time, the reader roared. It whooshed, moving faster or slower by manual command. Articles (complete with ads) streamed past so quickly, but you’d find your date eventually. And once you found the date, you could scan for your article.

But then came the greatest thing of all. You could take copious notes, of course, just sitting there and staring at the projected text, but the far better thing was to take the article home. And to do that, you’d have to select the portion of the film you wanted by easing the controls backwards and forwards carefully. Once found, you’d tell the reader to print, either through a marked button or some odd manipulation of the controllers. Printing sent the reader into a different cycle of noises, followed by an accompanying scent of mimeograph ink being baked onto tabloid-sized paper. The smell was just incredible. It smelled like the library, like history. And once it printed, big as life and close to actual, original size, not only did you have a resource for your research, but something almost real.

You could paste those printed articles onto a piece of poster board, three across. Add to that a couple of pages about panning for gold and a rough drawing of a bearded prospector, and what you have is a truly impressive presentation about the the 1829 Georgia Gold Rush. Not only a guaranteed A (or a B, at least), but also something truly classic that would be remembered fondly by teachers for years and years to come.

And so, it pleases me greatly to see that the New York Times has not only ceased their proprietary Times Select subscription service — the means through which they hid their “better” content behind a paid password — but they’ve made over a century’s worth of archives available online, some of them as PDF’d scans of the original articles (like this Merry Wives theatrical review from 1898). A search for most anything returns thousands of results.

Admittedly, a PDF document isn’t nearly as satisfying to the senses as a time-traveling microfilm reader, but at least you can get the look and feel. You just have to make the humming and whooshing noises yourself.

And while we’re talking about Merry Wives, perhaps you’d like to see some Merry Wives of your own?

Ominous, originally uploaded by grabbingsand.

Ominous

100 comments in just over two years. On one post. Wow.

Somewhere around the 50th comment, I started to wonder if I needed to do something. Once the count reached 75, I stopped wondering. And so, I made myself a light promise. If the comment count on that single post ever hit the century-mark, I would make a concerted effort to act on … well … whatever is behind this odd home improvement movement.

Now that I’m here, what do I do? This question is not rhetorical. What does it mean when your single most popular post is about a quest for satisfactory customer service? Do I need to establish a forum for all of these Hampton Bay customers to come frolic and play?

So tell me … what would you do?

Last night, I talked to my cousin for the better part of an hour. Via phone, she went along with me to the drugstore to pick up a prescription. Then I/we went home where I paced about the kitchen, doing dishes quietly with my free hand. They’d piled up a bit in the sink. These little slips of household maintenance happen when we’re in the middle of rehearsals like we are.

She calls about once a month these days. Though the two of us were quite close growing up, being about the same age, going to the same church and always tagging along with our parents for family get-togethers or road-trips. My brother is so much older than I (thirteen years), so I guess she filled a kind of sister role.

Lately, she’s become more and more involved in her church. She’s a lay minister now, meaning that she’s occasionally leading prayer in Sunday service or handling announcements and so on. This is a role once held in our home church by her father, my uncle.

We talked about what she’s been doing with her prayer group and what we’ve been doing with the theatre company. She talked about feeling a call to serve and how much she enjoyed making a difference in the lives of others. In a way, I said, that kind of effect is why the Drama Club continues like it does. When we’re only days from opening and the costumes aren’t quite done and the lines aren’t word-perfect and the sets are still only ideas on paper, it seems so much easier to just call it all off. But we don’t, because we know that the end result will be worth it. An actor will realize their potential. An audience member will recognize an appreciation they never thought they would.

We exchanged some polite gossip about people we both know from home, more informative than malicious. And we talked about how life was much different for each of us not so long ago. For her, so much about that change can be traced back to six years ago this week. 2001.

And maybe the same goes for me, at least in part. But not back to the anniversary you might think. Four days after the tragedy that still haunts us nationally, my uncle — her father — died.

As I recall it, he hadn’t suffered for very long prior, but his decline was swifter than we’d anticipated. Perhaps he’d been ill for longer than any of us knew or at least longer than his diagnosis allowed. But in less time than will ever seem fair, he was gone.

My uncle was one of the kindest human beings I’ve ever known or ever will know, family or not. One of the funniest, as well. In many ways, I’ve my uncle to blame for my sense of humor. He loved me very much, I know. I can’t help but miss him.

We talked a bit more. I told her about how I always suspected that my mother wished that I’d gone into the ministry, but given the turns she’s taken, maybe the minister ought to be her. She thought I was joking, being sarcastic as I can often be. I wasn’t. She let it pass. Then we both took notice of the late hour and said our goodbyes. As I was about to hang up, she told me she loved me, I said the same.

Since my grandmother’s passing the other week, my mom has been closing her calls the same way.

One more thing.

When I think about six years ago, I remember the color blue. That morning, something made me pay very close attention to the sky above me. I remember getting out of my car that morning, having just arrived at the Carter’s offices in Morrow, and looking up. It was beautiful. Maybe the prettiest sky I’ve ever seen. A stunning shade of blue with almost no clouds at all.

“… it didn’t get there by itself.”

From the upcoming Annie Lennox album, Songs of Mass Destruction. (Now that’s an album title.)