sendai77 - blog

Dear Frank,

I’m hitting another milestone year. On my next birthday, I will have officially lived longer than you did.

My first one of these milestone years was when I turned 38, and I realized that I had lived as long as my dad had until he was killed in a motorcycle accident in Manhattan. I remember standing on my back porch, trying to imagine *poof*! it’s over at that age. My kids were 12 and 7 at that point, so much gone by and yet so much left to do. I couldn’t really fathom it. Can one ever?

You see Frank, you’re one of my adoptive fathers - which is to say I adopted you growing up. Stuff you said in your work and in your life resonate deeply with me. Your voice remains very familiar to me. I guess I have a few other adoptive dads floating around - John Lennon comes to mind - but I actually have dreams where you appear to me and offer me guidance and direction. Yeah, sometimes you criticize my playing too. But when you appear, you’re definitely in the role of Dad. Mentor. Father.

So today, the Day After Father’s Day, I’m mulling it over once again. What if all of a sudden *poof*! Of course, in your case, you knew it was coming because you were sick for a pretty long time and in a lot of pain. I’m sorry you had to go through that, Frank. I’m sorry you went when you did, the way you did.

I know you really loved your kids. A lot’s been written about your work habits, and how your children referred to you as that grumpy man who comes up from the basement from time to time, but look at them. They love you so much, still.

My Father’s Day present was a drunken call from my younger daughter, wanting to get picked up in the wee hours, far from home, because she had missed her train back to Boston. I declined and suggested she call her mom. We haven’t spoken since. If I could have one real Father’s Day present, it’s that she would wake up and figure out that she needs to help herself - nobody else will do it for her. She needs to stop blaming the world and take the steps she needs to take to keep herself safe and sober.

Underneath the rage and selfishness, I know she loves me. It’s just not in her this year to show it to me on Father’s Day.

Oh well. There’s always next year.

Dear Dad,

I keep meaning to write to you. Sorry it’s been so long.

Anyway, whatever, as they say. I woke up yesterday thinking about a question I meant to ask you when I was in kindergarten or first grade.

The question, as I remember it, is this:

When you’re looking at a blank piece of paper, and you’re holding a pencil in your hand, do you know which lines are going to come out of the pencil before they get to the paper? Or does the pencil have control, and you take what it gives you?

I remember imagining the pencil as being a fountain of infinite squiggly lines that I had little to no control over. The pencil was - and remains - something to wrestle with.

For example, if I wanted to draw a cat, I could make lines that would look the way a kid would draw a cat. Circle for a head, triangles for the ears, whiskers. Ovals with vertical slits for eyes.

I remember this though: if I set out to draw a cat - even accepting the fact that it would look like 6-year-old artist outline of cat - I would still be surprised by the results that the pencil would spew out on the page. Maybe the head would be too big, or the ears too small, or the eyes oddly placed.

Well, as they say, this is why you practice. You learn to coordinate the eye, the brain, the hand - and the extension of the hand, the pencil.

Let me jump for a minute to my work with the guitar. I think I’ve done a fairly good job of creating the same kind of flow, from ear to brain to finger to string. I like to say that it’s always a matter of shortening the distance between ear and string, and you have all this stuff in the way - brain, arm, elbow, finger. It’s a matter of making that intermediate stuff lightweight, seamless, transparent, invisible.

When I play a note, I react to it immediately. My reaction informs the way I play the next note. And so on, faster and faster, ad infinitum, until the end of time - which comes up fast in a piece of music.

I guess the goal is to make it all ear, with nothing in between.

Or for you, the goal would have been to make it all eye, with nothing in between. Pencil, brush, knife, piece of lumber, whatever. Tools. Not there.

But the point is - I wanted to ask YOU about how YOU wrestle with the pencil. I think I tried to ask you at one point, but I’m not sure you heard me right or understood me. After all, it’s a pretty complex question for a grown-up to confront. It might not have occurred to you what I was trying to ask when I was four or five.

After you were gone, I remember being in first grade, and the itinerant art teacher would come in once a week, and she’d hand out the blank paper and the crayons, and she’d put something on a table at the front of the room and say, “Draw this.” Pandemonium would usually reign for 45 minutes, the papers would get collected or simply sent home. The girls’ drawing were always very tidy, and the boys’ looked like nightmare recollections. I remember my reaction at the time to these “lessons” was that I was already indoctrinated to this world of art, that I had inside knowledge. But I was always horrified to witness what came out of my pencil, despite my greatest efforts at control.

Hey, I took a life drawing course last summer, Dad. I’m not Leonardo, by any stretch of the imagination. But I think I’d like to do it again. Just me and the charcoal and the model. It feels like facing a familiar opponent each time I look at that big empty piece of paper.

OK well, I’ll write you again soon. I love ya, Dad.

Your son,

Jim

I was devastated to learn this week that my pal, colleague, confidante and mentor Laurel Bowman passed away.

Wait a minute - weren’t we supposed to grow old together and sit around the Old Ad Folks Home and talk about how kids know nothing anymore and how it was back in the day? Weren’t we supposed to found the Geriatric Sound Museum where old rockers could wheel off and have another go at fame and ear drum damage?

So it’s only now dawning on me that this is the real deal and that Laurel has left us. I guess that means that I’m leaving Denial behind and about to experience Anger.

So… I remember being introduced to Laurel at 855 Boylston Street, where i worked for IQ&J/121 Marketing. (”Help Clients Win.”) I worked for Jim Ricciardi at the time, managing computer art and layout in his studio. When Laurel came on board, Jim knew her from Arnold and I got the signal that she was good people, family. They shared laughs about folks they knew in common, and I could tell immediately that Laurel was somebody I needed to get to know.

I was spending a lot of time flipping between the Photoshop/Quark workflows that fed the print production beast, and writing HTML and figuring out this new dealy-o thing called The Web. There were like maybe two other computer geeks in the building who got it (Lee Stanford and Bill Fanning), but for everyone else it was a mystery - in fact almost nobody had heard of it. So a skunkworks task force formed, and Mark Wilson came on board, and we decided to go to Management (Bink and Tom) to show them what this new medium could do and to get buy-in that we should take the agency in this direction and pursue work. Mark selected Jay Bernasconi as his art director, and Laurel as his writer.

We landed work, thanks in no small part to the fact that when Laurel entered a room, things lit up. She was a force to be reckoned with. There was no denying her presence.

Clients loved Laurel. They believed in her, because she made it clear that she believed in them. She was their partner. We got repeat business, from clients who would leave their company and brings us along to their new employers. We started to grow.

There was a period of time when it was sort of like we were moonlighting - direct ad spreads by day, interactive projects by night. At one point, Laurel and Emily Gallardo went to the Kwajalein Atoll. on a project for Raytheon. They came back jetlagged and exhausted and filled with stories. I still have a little wooden Buddha that Laurel gave me from that trip.

Ingalls moved to the Design Center in South Boston and rebranded itself. I almost got myself fired, I was so angry over the move. For the record, and to clear the air, I want to say this to Tom Block: I am sorry I was such an asshole. Now that I am older, I understand what you did, and I know my words and actions must have really irritated you. I apologize, once again.

You see, Laurel and Tom had a great rapport. Of course! Laurel and Mark helped me through that rather bleak moment in my life. I owe you guys still for that one.

But back to Southie, and the freshly-minted Ingalls Interactive. Mark brought Katie Fitzgerald on board, and we started pulling down business for real. We were full time interactive, and we became a component in most new business pitched for General and Direct - especially Direct.

You must think that all we did was advertising. Not so. Here’s the heart of the story for me.

Laurel had her band, Lumen. Through her gigantic magnetic field, she managed to pull me away from the desperate orbit I had fallen in to and helped me achieve enough velocity to rejoin the world of the living rockers. I dusted off my keyboard gear and found myself playing with Jack Frosting. I hung out and took in the local rock scene. I felt my fingers thaw and I got back into action.

One time Laurel had a gig or something and she asked if I would come along and maybe just help out a little. I said sure, of course. So we’re riding along in Walter, and we get to TT’s or some place, and we’re getting out of the car, and Laurel leans over and in a confidential voice she says to me, “You know, I’m not as butch as I look. Would you mind grabbing that amp out of the back seat?”

We went to each others gigs. We listened to each others studio roughs. We celebrated each other’s CD releases. When her copy of CMJ would come in, she’d drag me into her office and play me the cuts she thought were worth anything.

Laurel used to dog sit for my family. She took the Baby Dog when we went out of town. I recall also having Bailey come and live with us for a week at one point. What a sweetie Bailey was.

Simone glommed on to Laurel. It was sort of like watching two atoms fall into orbit and bond to form a bigger molecule. Simone insisted on being dedicated at the Theodore Parker Church and on having Laurel as her godmother. At work, Laurel was always asking about Simone.

We grew and grew. Sichon, Mel, Michah, Johnny Figs came on board. We landed a whopper from John Hancock and Matt Warren and Ryan McDonough joined the family. And we were a family, with Laurel as den mom.

Comedy was a central part of our daily rituals. We usually had a Howard Stern debrief around 11 am every day. Me and her, we did Jerky Boys routines. We traded being “Sizzle Chest” and “Liver Lips”. That’s where the concept of the Hot Mop came from, a Jerky Boys call that had us on the floor laughing. Laurel turned it into a verb, so when she indicated we should hotmop something, that meant climb up on the roof of it and fix it pronto, bud. No excuses!

Things change, the world turns, people get new jobs. Katie went to iXL, I followed about six months later. Laurel and Robert Guay peeled off and formed Red98 - a whole ‘nuther story that I really don’t know much about, since I was already drinking iXL’s Coca-Cola. Laurel and I kept exchanging dog sittings until she moved to Ipswich and I moved out and got an apartment of my own.

Laurel, Mary, I’m sorry I never made it up to Ipswich to visit. It’s totally my lack of initiative that’s to blame. But then, I guess we take each other for granted sometimes, don’t we?

Back in the old days, when I was pounding out HTML for Ingalls Interactive, I’d run across situations where the copy needed an edit or tweaking - or there was just no copy outright. So, I’d supply my own and run it past Laurel in an email. She’d either tweak my tweak or tell me “Rock on!”. The greatest honor Laurel gave me was to tell me I was an honorary member of Local 855, her pet name for her club of copy writers at the agency.

Laurel, as I write this, they’re laying you to rest. I’m glad I was with you and Mary and your mom and dad and uncle and family last night. I’m glad I saw all our family from back in the day. I love you all.

I love you Laurel. I can’t tell you enough.

Normally, I’m not one of those bloggers that post a lot of video, but I’m still savoring the recent Zappa tribute on WZBC that I did with James and Matt. Along the way, the conversation turned briefly to the famed Zappa-on-bicycle bit, so here it is - as long as it stays posted on YouTube.

I guess there’s no hope for the video on this piece - it looks like bad compression, sort of like what you see when you over-jpeg something. Sometimes, this is the best that the wayback machine can come up with. Try googling Ghoulardi and see what you get…

Think back to ancient history - like before Al Gore invented the Internet.

I don’t recall ever hearing the top story of the hour being “American Stock Exchange futures are down, due to heavy losses in Asian and European markets”. I reckon that we can now know this because we can all see stock performance around the world instantly thanks to the web, and because we have people who stay up all night following this kind of activity.

I guess I have few problems with this bit of news. For one thing, it is manipulative. If I invested in the markets (I don’t), I’d be gearing up for the bell to sell whatever shabby bits of paper I have left because - omigod - the market’s headed LOWER. I mean, when the radio tells you it’s going to rain, you bring an umbrella, don’t you?

For another thing, though it maybe newsworthy, does it deserve the lead spot at the top of the hour? When I decode the message “stock futures are down” or phrases like “pretrading”, I visualize the really rich and powerful Joe Stock Traders out there getting a jump on the stock market by betting on what it’s going to do before it opens.

When do these guys do this? As soon as the NYSE closes? Or do they go to dinner first?

When the stock market was explained to me, my grandfather pointed to a building we were passing on the Rapid and said, “Jimmy, you own a brick of that building.” Of course, I had to ask if we could go to the building and take my brick home with me, to which he patiently explained that it was better if I let the company use my brick, to keep their walls up. Later, I was taught the basic principle, “buy low, sell high - and hang on to a good stock. When it’s down, it’s down, but if it’s a good stock, it’ll go up again.”

Does anyone still believe this? Or am I just waiting for the ice man to deliver a block from a horse cart?

In other news, layoffs are coming. The American auto industry will be insolvent within 12 months. Cheerful stuff about, um, the future.

Oh yeah, it’s going to rain this weekend. Bring an umbrella.

I’m thinking hard about a site redesign for my minimalist, boring link page casually known as sendai77.com. The problem is me of course: i’m the client, the writer, the designer, the technical consultant, the developer, and the cobbler.

More about me: I’m a busy consultant for IBM. I use the word “consultant” loosely: in the Global Services branch where I serve, we’re all consultants, so I sort of can’t avoid the moniker. But a more accurate description of what I do is “IT Specialist - RIA Developer”, which, translated into Ordinary American, means I make web pages. True, I try to get on the slick projects that require Flash or Flex, but since I’m a sub genus of Consultant, I go where the work takes me.

But that’s not all. In my less lazy off-hours, I’m a musician, painter and photographer. I try my hand at songwriting and composing, and I’m not a bad cook to boot. My pals tell me that I have a “very full life”, which may be a way of saying I take on too much.

Given that, you’d think I’d have a smashing, wildly self-promoting web presence. Well, I don’t. Maybe I never will - maybe it’ll always amount to what LimeyG referred to as a few “sad, lonely blogs” which are perennially neglected.

I had a long discussion with Viv yesterday on the topic of blogs and topics. See, I feel that one WordPress is not enough. My infrequent rantings tend to jump categories, and it’s my personal feeling that WP does an inadequate job of fully presenting multi-topic content. Instead, users are force to pick the content channel out of the raging stream (or in my case, pathetic trickle) and apply the Category Filter technique of content sifting to arrive at a page that sieves the stream into, well, categories, which are basically akin to del.icio.us tags.

Well, I guess there’s nothing wrong with that…. except I’d like to write a music blog and a technology blog and a somewhat-related-but-entirely-new-thread user experience blog - in short, I sort ofwant more silos, each with the ability to categorize within themselves - and possibly out to each other.

One answer may be to skin my own WordPress in such a way that it reacts the way I want it to.

Viv suggest that I redesign my site. What I’m describing is basically a one-person magazine.

That brings up the spectre of Content Management….

So am I going to put the yellow “Digger Dude” sign up on sendai77.com? I’d rather just unveil the new site when it’s ready, rather than titllating the 1.5 readers I’ve got and letting them down when they realize that “Coming Soon” means “Coming By The Time The Sox Get To The World Series Again”.

Anyone seen my kids anywhere? There’s the barefoot ones.