Magic, And Amy As Only A Memory

As I type this, it is early in the a.m. hours of Monday. I haven’t been to sleep yet, so for me it is Sunday night.

I stayed up to watch the live NASA feed of the Curiosity rover landing on Mars. I didn’t believe the complicated descent stage would work, but apparently all the technology performed flawlessly and put the Curiosity rover down safely right on target. Before I clicked away (watching TV on my broadband connection eats up an incredible amount of bandwidth) the first rough pictures were coming in from Curiosity. I am so happy I was wrong and that the descent went perfectly. It’s almost beyond science fiction—the mission itself, and the fact that I and millions of others could watch it happening in real time, watch the first thumbnail images coming in, sitting here at a computer just like so many of the engineers at NASA and JPL were sitting at their computers watching their computer screens. The times we live in. It’s almost beyond science fiction. It is almost fantasy.

*

Just a couple of hours before the Curiosity rover touched down on Mars, I took a pair of binoculars out back and checked out the western sky. The sky here around Chicago is awful for astronomy, but there in the west, just a little south of straight west, there in the west was an almost perfect equilateral triangle of stars. In our bad skies, to the naked eye the three stars appeared very dim, almost hard to see unless you knew where to look.

Only one of the three stars was a real star. Through binoculars the scene becomes more clear.

The star to the lower left is a real star, the beautiful blue-white Spica. (I talked about Spica in Waking Up (Not) Lost In Space.)

Above Spica the star at the peak of the triangle really is the beautiful gold ochre planet Saturn.

The star to the lower right really is the beautiful orange planet Mars.

Over the next few weeks the motion of the Earth around the Sun will cause the planet Mars to appear to shift position in the sky and move, night by night, between Spica and Saturn. Right now my wide-angle binoculars can capture all three objects in one field of view, but they are at the very edge of the field. As Mars moves between Spica and Saturn, the threesome will become even more beautiful—gems in the sky, blue, orange and gold, all in a line.

We humans have the Cassini spacecraft in orbit around Saturn. And now we have a large and capable rover on Mars.

It’s almost beyond science fiction. It’s almost fantasy. The times we live in.

*

It was an extraordinary experience to sit at my computer and watch the NASA and JPL engineers study the telemetry coming from the spacecraft as it lowered the Curiosity rover down to Mars.

But it is extraordinary, too, being able to go outside and look at the sky and see Mars there for real, without any intermediary computers or scientists. Just a pair of binoculars. And knowing where to look. (I think about this all the time. This knowing where to look thing. And I can’t stop—I don’t want to ever stop—thinking about Amy Winehouse: This Bright Old World Of Ours As A Rune)

The colors of Spica, Saturn and Mars are among the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. But in an objective sense they are far less intense and more dim than almost anything a person might see on a computer screen or television set.

Colorful planets spinning against the blackness of space. Scientists and their spaceships. And everybody going about their business.

To me this seems beyond science fiction, beyond fantasy and squarely in the realm of magic.

The things you see if you know where to look.

The Loch Ness Monster Versus Pretty Flowers

I fall backward into the water of Loch Ness
and continue falling through the cold dark water
too fast like I am made of lead but I struggle
but I keep falling and I keep falling backward
though I struggle trying to change my position
trying to swim do anything to slow my fall
but I keep falling for almost eight hundred feet
then I hit mud that I can feel but I can’t see
then I hit clay but it is only like thick mud
but I keep falling till I smash into bedrock
but I still don’t stop because the bedrock shatters
and still on my back I crush down through the bedrock
and everything behind me that is under me
fractures and fragments and the Earth too cracks in half
and the blackness around me is the black of space
colorful planets spinning fast isolated
all the planets revolving around a center
where the Sun is bright and hot enough to melt lead
but instead of melting me I become solid
and the light is glare in a woman’s angry eyes.

“You son of a bitch!” she says. “Did you fall asleep?
Sitting on my couch? While I am talking to you?”

I say, “I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night.
I didn’t fall asleep. I just kind of dozed off.”

“Oh,” she says, “you didn’t fall asleep, you dozed off.
Well what the hell’s the difference, you son of a bitch?
Maybe you’re not too tired to go out to dinner,
maybe you’re just too fatigued to go out tonight.
Oh! Oh! You’re laughing! Now you think this is funny!?”

She goes to the kitchen. The refrigerator
opens and closes. She comes back holding a can
of Red Bull. She sets herself, then throws it at me.
I catch it, and the can makes a loud slapping sound
against my palm. The impact knocks my hand backward.

“I did not throw that at you,” she says. “I tossed it.”

Then she goes back to finish putting on her clothes.

I open the Red Bull and drink straight from the can.

She begins telling me, again, about the flowers
she found at a garden shop coming home from work.

I want to tell her about my Loch Ness dream but
I’m wide awake now. I say, “The flowers are pretty.”



*



Take a look at this picture. This is a screen grab from Wes Craven’s 1997 film, “Scream 2.” (It gets larger if you click on it.)

This is from a scene that takes place in a college library. Cotton Weary has just had a loud confrontation with Sidney. The police think he attacked her, so they shove him up against a bookshelf to cuff him and arrest him. When the police shove Cotton against the bookshelf, for an instant the camera gets a close-up of the bookshelf itself. It’s a library, and there’s a little sign that says, “New books, check us out!” and look what book we see in close-up:

It’s a copy of “Our Dreaming Mind,” by Robert L. Van De Castle.

I’ve read that book. It’s pretty interesting, but I didn’t like it all that much. I found it kind of scattered. But interesting.

And I thought it was interesting, too, that the director, Wes Craven, positioned that book—a book speculating about the nature of dreams—so visibly in the middle of a movie full of some very interesting imagery, very interesting action sequences.

This summer there have been a lot of big budget, high profile movie releases. Some of them got a lot of media attention even though I personally didn’t think the movie had a lot to offer.

Of the big releases this summer my favorite was Ridley Scott’s return to the “Alien” mythos with his oddball film “Prometheus.”

At an internet forum, a lot of people were ridiculing “Prometheus,” pointing out the flaws and absurdities. I defended the film, saying that there were a lot of things that didn’t make sense, there were a lot of things that seemed absurd, but, I said, “It is cinema as a dream. In dreams, people act strangely. One sequence doesn’t seem to match, exactly, to other sequences. It’s cinema as a dream. We think about it. We wonder about it. We project our own meanings onto it. It’s not something a real cinema buff complains about. It’s something we pay extra for.”

Of course, a lot of people thought that comment was as absurd as they’d found the film.


And to be completely truthful there is no way to really tell if Ridley Scott purposefully made “Prometheus” the way he did, or if the project just got screwed up and he simply did the best he could to salvage something, anything, out of a disjointed script and an ill-conceived production.


You never know.

But that’s a cool thing. Sometimes if everything makes sense and there is logic and order and everything is very skillfully put together, the end result is boring and you just shrug. Even if you admire something, you just shrug.

Dreams almost never are boring. And you almost never just shrug, when a dream is enough—of whatever it is—that you remember it and go through it consciously.

I like dreams. Even if you never know.

The Fons Et Origo Of Lost Worlds

I spend so much time lost in fantasy
that it feels strange to feel so terrified
at having slipped away for an instant
but I ask myself what if this woman
had a voice that sounded like the actress
who played “Lana Lang” and had noticed me
looking at her and had smiled and said, “Hi.”

I don’t think I’d be here typing these words.

The Fons Et Origo Of Mad Laughter

I don’t have much today, and what little I do have is a bit sadder than I like to post, but this is all I have right now.

I’ve been sad ever since I heard the news about Gore Vidal passing away.

And other things are difficult right now, too.

Almost all the corporations we interface with to deal with the internet are fighting among themselves. And they are all making changes to their software to manipulate users—one way or another—in their damn corporate squabbles.

So Microsoft is making changes to Windows. And Hotmail. And Google has made changes to Blogger, forcing people to use their Chrome browser. And Google has updated Chrome, causing lots of little glitches. And Adobe has updated Flash causing lots of little glitches.

It’s the 21st century and nothing works.

The whole online world is radically different than what it was when I started this blog six or seven years ago. Back then the online world was a world of individuals. Now it is a world of corporations.

And things do not seem to be getting better. In fact, there doesn’t even seem to be hope for things to stay the same. Rather I expect the corporate maneuvering to become more intense, and I expect users to be forced to make stranger and stranger choices about what software to use to deal with the internet.

I’m a pretty opinionated and judgmental guy to begin with and I strongly dislike all these corporations engaging in practices like this.

I can’t imagine what will be happening a year from now and, to be honest, right now I don’t want to try.


*


When I’m unhappy I almost always turn to astronomy or music, and much of Thursday I spent sitting at my keyboard workstation playing music. Playing this, and endless variations of it:

I originally conceived of this little melody as a kind of duet for flute and guitar. On a keyboard workstation I can actually play it as such, with my left hand playing chords as a strummed guitar sound and my right hand playing flute.

But instead of playing the chords as written:

A C A A G G

I make it more interesting by playing:

Am7 CM7 Am7 Am7 GM7 Em7

Or something similar.

I know it sounds stupid for me to say this because I wrote it myself, but this sounds so beautiful to me that I just get lost in it. I haven’t made up any words for the melody yet, I just love listening to the synthesized flute sound quaver and fluctuate as the digital signal processors simulate breath moving against the flute.

I love having this kind of technology around, I mean the keyboard workstation, that lets me listen to a flute and a guitar playing together. It doesn’t have anything to do with the internet. It doesn’t have anything to do with a corporation. It’s just music I make up, music my fingers strike on the keyboard and then the sounds become real.

I’ve written a lot about a cartoon I once drew of a young woman and a llama. I drew that many years ago. If I remember correctly, I first drew that, I think, before I was regularly visiting the internet. It was just me and a blank sheet of paper and a couple of good pencils.

This is all I have. Sorry for being so sad.

Dead From Golgotha

The emerald ash borer (EAB), Agrilus planipennis, is a very destructive insect pest of ash trees (Fraxinus spp.), the only known hosts of this borer in the United States. This exotic borer is a native of Asia with its natural range including China, Japan, Mongolia, Korea, the Russian Far East and Taiwan.

It was first discovered in North America in southeast Michigan in June, 2002, although it was likely introduced at least 10 years earlier. It has since been found in the U.S. states of Ohio (2003), Indiana (2004), Maryland (2006), Illinois (2006), Pennsylvania (2007), West Virginia (2007), Wisconsin (2008), Missouri (2008) and Virginia (2008). It has also been found in the Canadian provinces of Ontario (2002) and Quebec (2008). In May 2009, it was discovered in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Emerald Ash Borer
Jeffrey Hahn, Entomologist

“Are you looking for the monster?” he asked, almost yelling. “Or are you trying to see all the way back to Los Angeles?”

“Don’t yell at me!” she said. “This is very hard for me. In Los Angeles people don’t just sit and do nothing.”

“Yeah,” he said, “in Los Angeles people work away really hard at doing nothing.”

“Oh, shut up,” she said. “Are we done?”

“Yes,” he said. “I think we are.”

Looking Back: The City Or The Monster

Tall and with a haughty baritone not unlike that of his conservative arch-enemy William F Buckley Jr, Vidal appeared cold and cynical on the surface. But he bore a melancholy regard for lost worlds, for the primacy of the written word, for "the ancient American sense that whatever is wrong with human society can be put right by human action".

Gore Vidal dies aged 86
The Guardian

Gore Vidal died Tuesday in an area of Los Angeles called ‘Hollywood Hills.’ As places to die go, that’s better than some, worse than others. I wouldn’t mind dying there. I even wrote about it in, The Loch Ness Monster Vs. Los Angeles.

But now that Gore Vidal has done it there is no way any other writer could do it without thinking of themselves as a copycat, a bad plagiarist. Although there are certainly worse people to plagiarize.

Plenty of other writers have died in Los Angeles, of course.

Throw a stick and you’ll probably hit half a dozen of their corpses, dead writers I mean, some with names, others who hadn’t registered with the Writers Guild yet before they ran out of whatever it takes to stay alive in this world.

But now I’ll always think of Los Angeles as where Gore Vidal died.


*


When I first moved out of my parents’ house I was very young and I wasn’t earning a lot of money, working just as a general office clerk for a company that made orthopedic shoes. I’m not very good managing money now and I was much worse way back then. One time a few days before pay day I simply ran out of money. I had put aside enough for bus fare so I would be able to get to and from work, but I had nothing left over for food. Some friends stopped by and at some point had a bit of a laugh looking around my kitchen—the cabinets were completely bare, the refrigerator was totally empty. Somehow, without the situation getting maudlin and unpleasant, someone loaned me two twenty dollar bills so I could buy some food. Later, by myself, walking to a grocery store, I walked past a bookstore and saw that the bookstore had just gotten in a new hardcover collection of Gore Vidal essays. I thought of the two twenty dollar bills in my pocket and I thought of the food the money could buy and I thought of the Gore Vidal book the money could buy.

I bought the book.

I no longer remember exactly which collection it was. But I enjoyed it and when I was finished reading it I sent Gore Vidal a letter with a little comment about his view of America as an empire. Gore Vidal sent me back a little handwritten note from Italy. I still have it. The penmanship is almost incomprehensible, but every second or third word is legible and it is a nice note, an interesting note from what I can make of it. Although a couple of years ago I donated the hardcover book to a library and those fuckers wonderful modern librarian people probably have tossed the book in the trash or sold it for a quarter to someone who hoards books without ever reading them, I have kept Gore Vidal’s letter.

I have two letters that I go back to and re-read now and then as if they were books themselves.

One is Gore Vidal’s letter which is almost unreadable but I enjoy trying to struggle through it. I believe at one point he writes, speaking of the difference between those who govern and those who are governed, between victimizers and victims, “All governors share the same ‘culture.’”

The second letter I keep is from Julian Jaynes. Jaynes’ letter is typewritten and speaks very briefly about some of what he hoped to write about in the sequel he planned for “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.” Jaynes died—not, so far as I know, in Los Angles—before that sequel was published.

Here in this part of my mind, this blog I mean, I’ve quoted Gore Vidal once and I have a second post where I was thinking of him but didn’t mention him.

My favorite Gore Vidal book is “Duluth” and I quote from the final bit of the insect takeover a couple of times here, in ‘Bankrupt Centipedes From Outer Space’ and in Insect Pathology And You: The Musical.

Gore Vidal also wrote a book called, “Live from Golgotha.” It is a very interesting book. It’s not my favorite Gore Vidal book but I enjoyed reading it. I think what I find most remarkable about it is that while the book is—of course—cynical and cutting (or undercutting) about Christianity, it is never, I don’t think, mean. It is never to use the modern word just snarky. And, in the end, or, you know, in a Golgotha sort of way, I thought it even was kind of respectful of Christianity. I was thinking of that Gore Vidal book when I posted a photograph I took, in Electric Golgotha.

As I type this, there are unbelievably loud noises outside my window. Work crews are cutting down a lot of trees around here. The trees were killed, forestry specialists say, by an invasion of little bugs called emerald ash borer beetles. I’ve seen a couple of the bugs on my car. They’re beautiful little insects, but they’ve killed thousands of trees around here. Now there’s just the noise from chainsaws and wood chippers and stump cutters.

Gore Vidal was a real writer. I wish almost more than anything that he and his world could have gone on forever.

Playing The Dawn (Or To The Dawn)

Moonlight
Above a dark street
Below a streetlight
That switches off

Music
Played on a guitar
Sung in a soft voice
Measures time at night

Sunlight
Comes from the music
Or with the music
And night retreats


*


So recently I made up that little melody on guitar. I usually harmonize it simply, something like:

G G E F#
G G E F#
G G B A
G

But the fun of a simple melody is playing it out, then modifying the rhythm a little and then maybe a little more and seeing just how much you can change things around or add substitution chords while still keeping the basic sense of the melody and harmony.

After I made up the melody on guitar I moved over to a keyboard for a while. On the keyboard I could play this with automated accompaniment and experimenting with all manner of instrument sounds.

But after not too long at the keyboard I switched it off and went back to guitar.

I like technology and I love all the amazing options a keyboard workstation provides. But at the same time I experience—just subjectively I mean, just personally I mean—I experience the same intensity of pleasure musically just sitting on my bed finger-picking my guitar and singing along as I play.

And the world seems to turn toward dawn just as fast regardless of if I’m strictly acoustic or if I’m keeping time along with digital signal processors.

Sometimes if I don’t play or sing anything at all I get the feeling—just subjectively I mean, just personally I mean—that time has slowed down or even stopped and dawn will never come.

It’s especially nice on those kind of nights just to pick up a guitar and stay acoustic and play something and maybe sing something. It seems, then, that just fingers brushing against steel strings and just six thin strings vibrating can make the whole Earth get to spinning around again.

A digital workstation, unlike an acoustic instrument, can record a performance very easily. But pressing PLAY, then, is entirely different from actually playing something.

Or so it seems just subjectively I mean, just personally I mean.

I wonder about that last thing. I actually mean it objectively and not just subjectively but it is hard to think of how or to imagine how I might prove it so I guess it’s best to phrase it as just a subjective, personal observation.

But the mad scientist in me would be happy testing it, somehow—

Maybe in a mad scientist type of laboratory overflowing with sparking gadgets that buzz and hiss, and a wild-eyed scientist crafting together the most complicated digital recorder anyone has ever imagined, and pressing the PLAY button, and having the whole Earth grind to a halt, or having the crust start slipping around the core, and mountains crumbling, and oceans sloshing over continents.

I’d just give a mad scientist laugh and spread my arms and yell, “See!”

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .



On the Cover: The Rise of Deadmau5
at Rolling Stone


Deadmau5 Clarifies 'Press Play' Comments About Fellow DJs
at Rolling Stone


“we all hit play”
at the Deadmau5 Tumblr


*


Merica Uns On Unkin


The Mad Scientist And The Dawn Chorus


On The Edges Of A Dawn Chorus



Aberrant Forms

The Many Faces Of Mary (Elizabeth Winstead)

Uncertain Mary

She’s a paleontologist and a famous scientist asks her to drop everything and join his team in Antarctica. But all he can tell her is there is a structure and a specimen. And she must decide right then and there if she will accompany him.



Amazed Mary

The structure under the Antarctic ice is revealed to be a huge spaceship. All she can do is stare at it.







Professional Mary

The specimen is revealed to be an alien creature frozen in the ice some distance from the spaceship. Mary studies the situation and tells the scientists she can excavate a block of ice with the creature in it in less than a day.


Sad Mary

The other scientists want to drill into the block of ice she excavates to get a tissue sample of the creature. Mary advises against it but they won’t listen to her.




Grief-Stricken Mary

The creature has broken out of the ice and killed a scientist. If only they had listened to her.







Puzzled Mary

If the creature was simply eating the scientist how did the metal surgical appliance become detached from the scientist’s arm bone?





Suspicious Mary

The strange pieces of metal look like dental fillings. Did the creature take over one of the other scientists and expel the metal dental fillings from its new body the way it had started to expel the metal surgical appliance from the first scientist it ate?



Horrified Mary

If only she had figured out the dental fillings mystery in time to warn the helicopter pilot before he took off and got attacked by the creature he wouldn’t have crashed.






Vindicated Mary

Now that they’ve had to use a flame thrower to destroy three more of their party who were half-human and half-monster, everyone believes her and they agree to use science to destroy the creature.



Fighting Mary

Science hasn’t helped as much as everyone had hoped it would. Now there is only life and death and fighting.





Desperate Mary

The hand grenade will destroy the monster and start a chain reaction that will blow up the spaceship. Now there is only running.





Cunning Mary

The only other survivor used to have a metal earring in his ear. Now he doesn’t. That can only mean one thing. Luckily Mary still has her flame thrower. Now there is only Mary.




Existential Mary

Mary has killed the creature and destroyed the spaceship. But what will become of her? She knows she can’t go back to civilization herself because she knows she herself might not be human anymore. What is she and what will become of her?




*


The 1951 version of the “The Thing” is a great movie, a cinema classic. Great writing, great acting, great filmmaking. An extraordinary film.


The 1982 version directed by John Carpenter of “The Thing” is less good, but stylish and fun to watch.


The 2011 version of “The Thing” is really awful. One or two of the computer special effects somehow manage to look worse than the special effects from the 1951 version. But the actors and actresses give it their all, trying to make the best of the almost nothing the writer and producer and director have given them. And, of course, it does have Mary Elizabeth Winstead.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .



Limits Of A Gadget: A Love Story


In that post “Limits Of A Gadget: A Love Story” I say:

I like gadgets. Gadgets seem to like me.
That is better than being a creature
from another world stuck at the North Pole
with military men and scientists.

I know the difference between the North Pole
and Antarctica! But the 1951 version of
“The Thing” for some reason was set
up north and the other versions were set
down south. When I make a reference
to this as a mythos I never know which setting
I should refer to. I sometimes use
the North Pole just because the 1951
movie is the best, and because
in “Frankenstein” (I know, a different
story, but also a story about
an intimate confusion of
creatures) the narrative ends
in “...the most northern extremity
of the globe.”

A Failed Post (And A Little Something Extra)

Today’s post didn’t work out the way I’d planned. Big fail. I feel the internet let me down.

I had planned a post comparing an actual, real bit of reality to a famous bit of fake reality that was presented as realistic.

So today’s post was going to be all philosophical and, almost predictably for me, I was going to say a lot about the young woman in this image. Without looking at the paragraph below the picture, does everyone recognize her?

That’s a young Cindy Crawford, of course, in a Victor Skrebneski photograph for an old Chicago Film Festival poster. That’s from somewhere in the early 1980s (the guy is Dolph Lundgren). I found the photo at this website.

In today’s post—the way I’d planned it—I was going to compare a famous fictitious photographer and his fake work, to the particular point in Victor Skrebneski’s career when he made Cindy Crawford famous (or when Cindy Crawford made Skrebneski even more famous, whichever way that worked).

But I ran into a problem.

Apparently because of the big falling-out between Cindy Crawford and Victor Skrebneski when she decided to let other photographers take her picture, a great deal of their relationship has been—to use the modern term—‘scrubbed’ from pop culture. It is hard to find classic Skrebneski photographs of Crawford on the web. His Wikipedia page only mentions her once. Her Wikipedia page only mentions him once. And as far as I can tell at their personal websites (his is Skrebneski Photographs and hers is Cindy) they don’t mention each other at all.

[Sighs]

I’ve lived in Chicago my whole life. I’ve loved photography almost my whole life. This is how I remember the Victor Skrebneski/Cindy Crawford business. (Or affair. Or business and affair, whichever way that worked.)

In the early 1980s Victor Skrebneski and Cindy Crawford were the very biggest thing happening in the photography world. The images—so far as I know—never were considered ‘art’ the way, for instance, Ansel Adams images were considered art, but they were the most popular pop photography images of that era. They really created and defined that high-contrast, up-close, sexy and beautiful style of image making. Skrebneski had already been a successful commercial photographer but he became, for a while, a house-hold name like Peter Max or Leroy Neiman. (Almost exactly like them, in fact.) Cindy Crawford went from being an almost unknown young nobody to be being the era’s defining supermodel. She wasn’t an actress, she wasn’t a celebrity. She was just Victor Skrebneski’s model and those still images alone—his images of her, the way he saw her—turned her into a supermodel.

Then Cindy Crawford—apparently always the businesswoman, always Cindy, always thinking ahead—decided that it would be foolish to allow her images to be associated with only one photographer, one approach to her look. So she decided to leave Chicago and work with other photographers.

And Victor Skrebneski got upset and, so far as I know, the feud lasted a very long time. I have no idea if they are friends now thirty years later, but it is certainly hard to find documentation for their amazing work together.

So now it is just an episode from real-life pop culture that happened, but, in a way, the reality will be lost to young people since a chronicle of those events doesn’t exist in any easy-access place on the internet. (I suppose the most easily available account is in Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women but I haven’t read that in a long time so I don’t remember how detailed it was.)

[Sighs]

And I couldn’t really use it as an example for today’s post since—for all practical purposes now—it never happened.

It makes me think of my post: A Squirrel And A Donut For Ever And Ever

[Sighs]

So that’s why today’s post failed. I just assumed I could find lots of Skrebneski photos of Cindy Crawford to use and I just assumed I could find lots of accounts of their relationship I could link to, but when I looked around I found almost no references to them that I could use at all.

Maybe someday I’ll come back to this. There are a lot of people who appear to me to be something like con men—they make up prattle about this-or-that approach to entertainment and build their prattle around this-or-that kind of commitment to what they call realism but their prattle is just exactly that: Prattle. (I don’t mean Skrebneski and Crawford were con artists—just the opposite, I meant to use them as examples of what is real, actual realism.) It bugs me and someday when I find other illustrations from actual real-life reality that I enjoy talking about as much as Cindy Crawford and Victor Skrebneski I will return to this topic and re-build this failed post.


*


I do have something extra since my real post didn’t work out.

I’m not exactly sure what this is, but it has been knocking around my awareness for something like two years so it is about time I put it here on the blog so I can get it out of my mind.

One of the very first brand names I talked about here at the blog is the North Face.

I like many of their camping products and I own a (red) North Face jacket that I like a lot. And I posted about an unpleasant moment I had with someone who didn’t like North Face jackets.

I also mentioned the brand in: Ephemera And Antiphony

Anyway.

A couple of years ago North Face popped up in a place I never thought I would see it. It was, sort of, in a political context. Or, more exactly, an espionage context.

I don’t much like politics. About the only time I like politics is when it touches on something that seems impossible or, at best, unbelievable. When I think of politics I think of posts like these:

Affannato

Turning Away From A Bookshelf

This Bright Old World Of Ours As A Rune

Distance From Paris To Berlin

The Monster Thought Of The Waldensians

The Application Of Beyond Understanding

A couple of years ago North Face popped up in a real-life news story about the bizarre murder of a wiz-kid British spy.

The guy was found naked, folded up, and stuffed into gym bag and the gym bag was found pad-locked from the outside and placed in the guy’s bathtub.

And who made the gym bag? I bet everyone can guess. Yep.

It was a North Face gym bag.

I didn’t mention the story at the time because, well, it was just so bizarre. But I’d always remembered the reference to the North Face.

It’s worth pointing out that the very phrase “north face” typically refers to the north face of a famous mountain in Europe, the Eiger, and a very famous spy novel was written about a spy trying to climb the north face of the Eiger, “The Eiger Sanction.”

So anyway a couple of years ago a dead British spy was found folded up inside a North Face bag.

The story was back in the news a couple of months ago when WIRED magazine, for some reason, did a pretty detailed follow-up of the original story.

I’m mentioning it now for two reasons.

One reason is because it is related to the other mentions I’ve made of the North Face. So it something like a loose end.

Secondly: When the police searched the dead spy’s apartment they found a bunch of weird stuff. In classic espionage, so-to-speak ‘fan’ mythos, his death scene had elements which are ‘traditionally’ associated with CIA activity—i.e., weird sexual paraphernalia.

One item listed just sounded absurd two months ago. Today, after the Colorado so-called Batman shooting, and the almost endless media pictures everybody has seen of the apparent shooter and his bizarre orange hair, that one item now seems something more than bizarre.

This is something on the other side of the application of beyond understanding.

Here is an excerpt from the WIRED story, and a link to the complete story (I’ve added emphasis to one phrase):

Williams flew up to four times a year to the U.S. to the NSA’s headquarters at Fort Meade HQ. His uncle, Michael Hughes, told the British paper the Mirror that Williams would mysteriously disappear for three or four weeks.

“The trips were very hush-hush,” Hughes said. “They were so secret that I only recently found out about them – and we’re a very close family. It had become part of his job in the past few years. His last trip out there was a few weeks ago, but he was regularly back and forth.”

He is believed to have returned from a trip abroad on August 11, 2010. He was last seen alive on August 15, eight days before his body was found.

Investigators, however, said they have ruled out that Williams’ death was related to his work, although they have not revealed how they arrived at this conclusion.

There were rumors leaked to the press that the coder’s death had to do with sexual play. The browser history on Williams’ computer and one of his phones showed that he had visited bondage sites, and former landlords testified that they once found the coder tied to his bed wearing only boxing shorts. He told them he had just been “messing around” and had tied the bindings too tightly. Investigators also found more than $30,000 worth of women’s designer clothes and accessories in his apartment, as well as a woman’s brightly colored orange wig.

MI6 Codebreaker Found Dead in Bag
Was Likely Killed, Coroner Says
WIRED, May 2, 2012

Tours Of Intimate Confusion

The Turn of the Screw is a novella written by Henry James. Originally published in 1898, it is a ghost story.

Due to its ambiguous content, it became a favourite text of academics who subscribe to New Criticism. The novella has had differing interpretations, often mutually exclusive. Many critics have tried to determine the exact nature of the evil hinted at by the story. However, others have argued that the true brilliance of the novella comes with its ability to create an intimate confusion and suspense for the reader.

“The Turn of the Screw” at Wikipedia

SARA: “Turn of the Screw” isn't really a horror story. It's more of a mystery. Did the governess kill the little boy or did the ghost do it?

GIL: Well, it's only a mystery if you believe in ghosts.

“CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
“Turn of the Screws,”
Season 4, Episode 21

I recently read a book—not “Turn of the Screw”—in which the author, something of an academic, describes ancient mysteries from around Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

I’m not going to promote the book by naming the title or the author or even the subject matter. Those would be, so to speak, dead giveaways.

I read a lot myself. And I have a reasonably good memory. While I was reading the book I noticed that, in describing many ancient so-called mysteries, the author was using quotations from books sometimes without the context around the quote that would have changed the very meaning the author was reporting. And I noticed that the author sometimes used translations of texts where one or two words were the author’s own or obscure translations of words rather than the commonly accepted translated words.

And I noticed that readers can call their travel agents and book cruises and tours built around the author’s books because throughout the year the author leads groups to the various places he writes about and lectures about the various mysteries from his books.

Hmmm.

I think about that book and the author and his lecture tours a lot when I’m clicking around the internet.

And I think about this link from Wikipedia: Snake Oil

GRISSOM: “There are three things in human life that are important. The first is to be kind; the second one is to be kind and the third one is to be kind.”

SARA: Henry James.

GRISSOM: Very good. Author of one of the greatest horror stories ever written. Turn of the Screw. And I'm looking for one.

SARA: A screw?

GRISSOM: Yes.

NICK: Oh, well, technically these are eccentric shafts, not screws. (GREG hands him a container full of screws)

GRISSOM: Well, as long as you can screw a nut on it, it's a screw.

SARA: Turn of the Screw isn't really a horror story it's more of a mystery. Did the governess kill the little boy or did the ghost do it?

GRISSOM: Well, it's only a mystery if you believe in ghosts. (SARA gives him a look. He holds up a screw) End threads are stripped.

NICK: Means the nuts were loose. Excessive play on the screws would have worn down the threads.

GRISSOM: And the nuts would have popped off.

GREG: Nuts just don't pop off by themselves. (GRISSOM gives him a look)

“CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
Season 4, Episode 21
“Turn of the Screws,” at TV.COM

“Did Lightning Hit This Tree?”

Regionally, ComEd spokesman John Schoen said, more than 300,000 customers had lost power at one point, including more than 40,000 in the South Region.

“It wasn’t a long event, but it was a powerful event,” Schoen said. “The high winds and lightning strikes caused a lot of damage.”

Airlines cancelled at least 100 flights at O’Hare, and delays of up to 45 minutes were reported at Midway on Tuesday morning.

The power was out all day at the village hall in Homewood, as well.

Storms leave trail of damage on Chicago’s Southwest Side
Southtown Star, July 24, 2012

Oh but it’s hard to live by the rules
I never could and still never do
Rules and such never bothered you
You call the shots and they follow

“Talk of the Town”
Chrissie Hynde

I place my hand against the inside of the tree.

The tree is ripped in half, torn straight down the middle.

Half of the tree is in the street. The other half
somehow is upright, taller than a nearby house.

I place my hand against the inside of the tree.

“Are you trying to take its pulse?” a woman asks.

I say, “Was it wind? Or did lightning hit this tree?”

“I think it was only the wind,” the woman says.
“We were just over there in our back yard. The wind
had the tree bent in half, scraping against the street.
I looked away. So I didn’t see it happen.
When I looked back the tree was split, half in the street,
half standing up, still waving around in the wind.”

My hand is on a spot where the wood is pure black
and rock hard, not fibrous and shredded like the rest.

I say, “It looks like lightning hit where the wood’s black.”

“I think it was only the wind,” the woman says.

Her husband points at a house. “The guy that lives there,
he and his family are at Disney World right now.”
He points at the tree in the street. “When that guy’s home,
he parks right there. This thing could have been so much worse.”

I am wondering if lightning had hit the tree.

My hand is still flat against the black patch of wood.

Am I touching, I wonder, a spot where lightning
had come down out of the sky and destroyed the tree?

“The winds were eighty miles an hour,” the woman says.

“The guy parks right there when he’s home,” her husband says.

The tree is ripped in half, torn straight down the middle.

I say, “It looks like lightning hit where the wood’s black.”

“I think it was only the wind,” the woman says.

I’m touching the wood. But she was there when it split.

Maybe tomorrow
Maybe someday
You’ve changed
Your place in this world

“Talk of the Town”
Chrissie Hynde

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .


The Iceberg Addendum: Atlantis Iceberg

Eccentricity: A Note On Yesterday’s Photo

I mentioned in yesterday’s post that it was the third month in a row that I grabbed a photo of the young Moon, although the photo I took Sunday started with me being interested in the outline of a tall tree.

But another thing happened three months in a row, too.

In May when I took the photo from “The Moon And Venus Beyond The Fox Point” a man and woman walking behind me struck up a conversation about what I was doing.

In June when I took the photo from “People Born Illuminated” a car full of young women slowed down and the girls yelled, “Cheese!”

Sunday when I was taking the photo for “Almost Like The Mast Of A Sailboat” a middle-age woman stopped her pickup truck alongside me and watched me taking the picture. She smiled and said, “Didn’t God send you a beautiful picture? It’s nice of you to appreciate His work.” (I just kind of smiled and made polite small-talk and she chatted for a bit and then drove off.)

I don’t know that this means anything, but it seems to me that a person standing around taking a picture has become such an odd thing that people feel a little imperative to comment on it. The act of picture taking has been reduced to being considered normal and acceptable in situations like taking pictures at parties or for special occasions. But people taking pictures just for the sake of taking pictures doesn’t seem to be all that common any more.

I didn’t consciously, explicitly notice this until the woman stopped her pickup truck Sunday. But I think I noticed this at some visceral level in some unconscious way a while ago and that is why I felt so uneasy about trying to take a photograph of that praying mantis in the parking lot that I decided not to do it. (And thinking back, I may have started noticing this years ago when I stopping wearing my orange hat: My Orange Hat In Theory And Practice)


Being eccentric used to be something about trying to have fun and something about trying to be creative. Now being eccentric seems to be the mark of unpleasant lunatics and disgusting bums and posturing bores.


This makes me uneasy because after half-a-century of effort I seem to have gotten a little relaxed trying to be eccentric and that means the best I can hope for in the modern world is to be a posturing bore.

I need to give this more thought.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .



Songs For Hippies Don’t Scare The Pigeons


Change: Sudden, Incomprehensible And Deadly

Almost Like The Mast Of A Sailboat

It looks almost like the mast of a sailboat.

The wires look a little like standing rigging
keeping the mast upright as it drives the boat.

It’s not a mast. It’s a utility pole
holding up an electric line or phone line
under a tree and clouds and sky and young Moon.

The Sun below the horizon still colors
the sky as if it were water changing depth.

This looks far away. Farther than Hollywood,
farther than France. It looks like a pretend place
so far away only imagination
can make it real like movie special effects
or modern hyper-realist painting techniques.

It looks like a boat and it looks far away.

It’s the view from a corner three blocks away.

I’ve been there. So far away. But I came back.

“Is this a new hobby?” she asked. “Moon pictures?”

Wondering if it was the truth, I said, “No.”

She looked at me. She made one of those faces.

I said, “No, really. I saw the tree’s outline
against the sky and I knew I could expose
for the Moon, turn the tree to a silhouette,
and then the irregular tree silhouette
would look like a coastline against an ocean
and the blue sky would look like bays and inlets,
but with the Moon there next to the tree, the sky
would look like the regular sky. Then the post
would look like a post or the mast of a boat.
I thought I could show an impossible scene
that was real, just the view from three blocks away.
That’s what I was thinking when I photographed
the young Moon. It wasn’t just about the Moon.”

She looked at me and made a face but this face
was a different face than the first face she made.
“That post,” she said, “does look like a sailboat mast.
Tomorrow, will you take me to that corner?”

I nodded. “Of course. It’s just three blocks away.”

With a new face, she said, “I’ve always wanted
to go someplace impossible. You promise?”

I liked all her faces. I said, “I promise.”

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .


I took that photo Sunday evening. The young Moon
was just a few hours short of being four days old. It was
about 16% illuminated. This is I think the third month
in a row I’ve taken a photo of the young Moon, but
this month I was thinking about the tree first,
I really was, I promise.



“People Born Illuminated”


The Moon And Venus Beyond The Fox Point



Wild Randomness


We’re Going To Need A Bigger Boat


The Margins Of Water In The Wild


Coastal Creatures


Puddle Monsters: Creatures Of The Edge



Distance From Paris To Berlin


This Bright Old World Of Ours As A Rune

Associative Editing Techniques

Don't Look Now is a 1973 thriller film directed by Nicolas Roeg. Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland star as a married couple who travel to Venice following the recent accidental death of their daughter, when the husband accepts a commission to restore a church. They encounter two sinister sisters, one of whom claims to be clairvoyant and informs them that their daughter is trying to contact them and warn them of danger. The husband at first dismisses their claims, but starts to experience mysterious sightings himself. It is an independent British and Italian co-production adapted from the short story by Daphne du Maurier.

While Don't Look Now observes many conventions of the thriller genre, its primary focus is on the psychology of grief, and the effect the death of a child can have on a relationship. Its emotionally convincing depiction of grief is often singled out as a trait not usually present in films featuring supernatural plot elements.

As well as the unusual handling of its subject matter, Don't Look Now is renowned for its atypical but innovative editing style, and its use of recurring motifs and themes. The film often employs flashbacks and flashforwards in keeping with the depiction of precognition, but some scenes are intercut or merged to alter the viewer's perception of what is really happening. It also adopts an impressionist approach to its imagery, often presaging events with familiar objects, patterns and colours using associative editing techniques.

Originally causing controversy on its initial release due to an explicit and—for the time—very graphic sex scene between Christie and Sutherland, its reputation has grown considerably in the years since, and it is now acknowledged as a modern classic and an influential work in horror and British film.

“Don’t Look Now” at Wikipedia

I love that movie and I love that phrase
‘associative editing techniques’
although it’s been a long time since I’ve heard
anybody discussing that movie
or anybody even filmmakers
discussing editing using that phrase.

I was in high school when that film came out.

But it could have been yesterday to me.

I stood on a side street staring upward
at the marble and glass of a building
but I was making up a melody
and I was thinking about a woman
and I was thinking about the ocean
and I made up a song by that building
although the woman I wrote the song for
didn’t live in that apartment building
nearly a thousand miles from the ocean.

A small blue car drove by not on that day
but the deep blue color of the small car
reminded me of deep ocean water
somewhere sunlight cannot reflect upward
off the sea floor too far down to be seen.

In my whole life I think I’ve only known
one woman from France but if I pictured
right now a woman in a small blue car
absently singing a song as she drove
past a very tall apartment building
I’d picture someone like Sophie Marceau
or someone like Marion Cotillard.

Tomorrow or maybe the day after
I see two women laughing and one says—
“Don’t look now but I think he pictures you
as some kind of movie actress from France.”

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .



Beautiful Impossible Math Thing


Orbis Non Sufficit And The Status Cow


In Shanghai We’re All Dramatic Chipmunks





Given how much I like the word “associative”
it is strange that I’ve only used the word three times
here at the blog. But that is what the Blogger search engine
returns, just three hits. I’m not sure I believe
the Blogger search engine, but here are what it returns:


Get Well Soon, Marianne Faithfull! #1: A Groupie Metaphysics


Inca Roads (Introduction)


Inca Roads: Bassoon And Marimba





Possibly someday a really high tech search engine
might ask if a search for the word “associative”
should also report hits on the word “metonymy”
but nowadays a person has to enter that
as a separate search manually. If we can believe
the Blogger search engine, these are my posts
where the word “metonymy” appears:


The Landscapes With Figures Of Berthe Morisot #3


Freedom From The Wild/Lost In Metonymy


There’s No Pain In The Sky


Exotic Snows And An Ink Drawing Of Plants

A Cool Kaossilator 2 Tip

Today’s post is about music and it’s going to be kind of trivial, but I’m going to do it for at least four reasons. First, this is part of something that I’ve been thinking about for a very long time, in fact from way-back-when when I first started to learn to play guitar. Second, this relates to something I did a post about a few years ago. Third, this is about a new gadget I bought a few days ago and this gadget will be appearing on the blog a lot, I think, in the future. (I actually bought the gadget for Little Plastic Doll, so she can have a real instrument to play in films, but that is going to take a while to happen.) Fourth, most simply, I’m just kind of proud of myself for figuring out this little tip so quickly after buying the gadget—It’s the kind of thing that should have been mentioned in the instruction manual but isn’t because these days instruction manuals are almost always awful.

I haven’t prepared any audio or video to go along with today’s post, but at some point in the future I will have audio and video of this gadget.

I’m talking about this thing. From the Japanese company Korg, this is their second generation Kaossilator, the Kaossilator 2:

One — Why I’m Interested In This Thing

For as long as I’ve been interested in music, I’ve been interested in instruments that can approximate the freedom of whistling: Discrete or absolutely smooth transitions from note to note, total control over dynamics, and easy integration with emotional expression without requiring great manual dexterity.

Fretless string instruments like violins, cellos and various basses come closest to matching these characteristics. I posted a little about this a couple of years ago: In a perfect world I suppose everybody would play the cello. But fretless instruments require exceptional dexterity to play and a good ear. The very best musician I’ve ever known was a studio guitar player who one time played a fretless bass in a Vegas stage show. He said it was wonderfully expressive, possibly the most expressive instrument he ever played, but he simply found it difficult because it required such concentration to play in tune, especially if you needed to play two strings at once and he never attempted to play chords during a live show.

I don’t have a well-trained ear and I’m not physically talented in any way so fretless instruments are not something I’ve ever even considered for myself.

But these days technology is extraordinary and new generations of instruments are possible that couldn’t even have been imagined in the past.

Korg has a whole series of products called the “Kaoss” line that is built around performing on what is called an x-y touchpad. In the photo above, the x-y touchpad is the little square at the bottom of the device.

I’ve been paying attention to this kind of thing for a while, but I never took it too seriously because technology in the music business sort of comes and goes. The traditional stuff sticks around and usually high-tech stuff is just a fad. But since the iPad has become so popular, music companies have been developing amazing tools built around touch-screens so I’ve come to believe that some variation of x-y touchpads will be around for a very long time.

The Kaossilator 2 is a reasonably inexpensive x-y touchpad device that can do a heck of a lot and it runs on batteries so I bought one.

It’s an amazing gadget. First of all, you can experiment with x-y touchpad performing. Second, you can generate all manner of instrumental and synthesizer sounds. Third, you can record what you perform. Fourth, it can play along with you [!] because it contains looping hardware and software and many of the synthesized sounds are patterns. Fifth, it is a sampler, so any new sound you enjoy can be incorporated into all of its existing technology. Sixth, it has reasonably good output that can be routed into the line input of my current keyboards and other technology.

So I bought one.

Also I like the fact that it is small, so Little Plastic Doll can perform on it. And—this is a kind of extra bonus—some of the built in synthesizer sounds are classic so-called ring modulator effects so the little Kaossilator 2, almost all by itself, can pretty much duplicate the entire soundtrack of the movie “Forbidden Planet” [!] if you buckle down and accumulate the effects with a sound-on-sound recorder.

So it’s a very cool little gadget that I think will have a long future in front of it, both here with me and among music fans in general. And Korg even has a “Pro” version of the device so any routines a musician develops on the little gadget can become as elaborate as he or she may want to take them. And, as I said, iPad resources are becoming available that use similar x-y touchpad input so performance skills will have a future, too.


Two — My Kaossilator 2 Tip

The little x-y touchpad is so powerful because it can be defined and re-defined from one performance to the next, from one sound to the next, or in any style for any reason in any way a person may choose to re-define it.

For instance, the melody for that John Lennon demo song, “Free As A Bird,” can be performed simply within a single octave. So an x-y touchpad can be defined to play simply eight notes arranged from left-to-right, and motions up and down can be used to control, say, volume.

On a device such as an iPad where the touchpad is also a display screen it is easy to touch the notes you want.

On the Kaossilator, if you define the pad as two or more octaves everything is very close together. But if you set the pad as a single octave each note is roughly about the width of an adult fingertip.

(I’ve seen people put a marked rubber band around the Kaossilator 2 or a marked hair-band or bracelet or similar band to provide a reminder, visual feedback for where to press.)

But there is a more interesting issue here.

On the little gadget, the Kaossilator 2, you can re-define the x-y touchpad, but only in certain ways.

For instance, you can control the range of the touchpad, one octave, two octaves or more.

You can control the arrangement within the octave. You can have a complete scale. Or certain intervals. Or a chromatic scale. Or other arrangements.

And you can control the root note which appears at the far left of the x-y touchpad.

But real-life practicalities immediately bring up some interesting issues.

For instance I will use the wonderful John Lennon demo song “Free As A Bird” as an example.

In the key of G, the basic melody, the “free as a bird/it’s the next best thing to be” part, is roughly a descending III-II-I sequence, then a V-VI, and back to a III-II-I. So with a G-root, you need to be able to play the notes B-A-G, D-E, B-A-G. The other part, the “whatever happned to” part, is roughly VI-VII-I, and also VII-I-II, so you need a lower E, F#, G and F#, G, A.

So it’s all within an octave, but you need the octave to start at E and go up, in the key of G, to the next higher E.

The Kaossilator 2 doesn’t explicitly do that. If you set the root to E, it defaults to an E-major scale, and you can’t go in and set or reset individual notes.

However the Kaossilator 2 does allow you to set the root and then also re-set what it calls the scale type.


This is a little annoying because many people these days, even many musicians, don’t particularly know much music theory and many musicians don’t want to be, as they might put it, “bothered” with learning music theory.

So those people will have a hard time getting the most fun out of their Kaossilator 2.


However, if a person has some music theory background, they know that if you can set the root to an E and then re-set the scale type to Aeolian, you get the same notes as a G-major scale, but starting at E.

Similarly, if you want the notes of the G-major scale but starting at A, on the Kaossilator 2 you can set the root as A and the scale type as Dorian.

If you set B as the root and the scale type as Phrygian you get the notes of the G-major scale but starting at B.

A C-root as a Lydian scale gives you G-major notes starting at C.

A D-root as a Mixolydian scale gives you G-major notes starting at D.

I’ve mentioned that E-root plus Aeolian gives you the G-major notes starting at E.

Finally an F#-root as a Locrian scale gives you G-major notes starting at F#.

And of course this works for any key. You just pick the I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII note from any key, and match it to the what is normally called the mode for that step, Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian or Locrian.

That gives you the freedom of setting the Kaossilator x-y touchpad to the smallest possible range (for the largest possible finger area to touch) while still giving you the ability to choose which eight notes you want available in the octave.

Obviously this is why Korg gives you the option to change what they call “scale” but most people in the West use the word “mode” to refer to the particular arrangement of half-steps and whole-steps derived from a major scale. And in the West, sadly, many musicians don’t pay much attention to modes anyway.

So it would have been better if Korg had included a section in their instruction sheet describing how you can control the x-y touchpad in this way. But they didn’t. But this is a good tip and maybe it will come in handy for someone.

The “scale” function on the Kaossilator 2 has even more options than the traditional modes, so the more a person knows about music theory the easier it is to make use of the various settings.

I certainly recommend the Korg Kaossilator 2 to anyone looking to experiment with modern high-tech performance techniques. It seems to be able to do a little bit of everything. But like almost everything else, the more you know, I mean really know, the easier technology is to control and have fun with.

The more you know, the more fun you can have.

But that’s also a selling point of a really good gadget like this. Because it can help you learn, too. It teaches you. Because the more you experiment and have fun—if you experiment carefully!—the more you learn.

I love cool gadgets.

Pluto’s Fifth Moon Has No Name (Yet)

It's hard to believe, but the arrival of NASA's New Horizons spacecraft at Pluto is just three years away. The logistics of the high-speed flyby, already challenging, just got more complicated: Pluto turns out to have a fifth moon.

Although for now its official designation is S/2012 (134340) 1 — "134340" being the minor-planet number assigned to Pluto — the new find has been nicknamed "P5". (Easier to remember, don't you agree?) Its existence was announced last night by the IAU's Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams

... It's no coincidence that all these moons orbit in the same plane as Pluto's equator. Most likely they formed from debris tossed out when a renegade object struck Pluto long ago. Collisions in this distant region of the solar system are typically so slow that most of the resulting fragments couldn't have reached escape velocity, which is a bit under 1 mile per second for Pluto. So most of it would have stuck around.

But that doesn't automatically lead to satellite formation. Ballistically speaking, any stuff that lingered should just have just fallen back onto Pluto itself. However, tidal interactions among the most massive chunks could have allowed enough of them to remain in orbit to form Charon and the other moons.

Pluto's Moons: Five and Counting

All the moons of Pluto are very small.

Pluto itself is smaller than our Moon.

Pluto itself is smaller than our Moon
but Pluto has five moons and maybe more.

Here on Earth our Moon is often featured
in romantic poetry and love songs.

It must be very romantic out there
with five moons always circling overhead
and the Sun so far away and so dim
that it’s always something like twilight time.

The most romantic thing to do out there
probably would be to point toward the Sun
and then a little way off to the side
and lean up against the person you’re with
and say, “See that bright blue star? That’s the Earth.”

And the five moons of Pluto would circle
around you both as if Pluto itself
were surrounding you and keeping you safe
so that you could lean against each other
and share the romance looking far away.

It must be very romantic out there
by Pluto and the five moons of Pluto
where it’s always something like twilight time
and it’s always so very far away.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .


That image comparing the Moon to Pluto
was generated by Wolfram|Alpha by typing:

compare diameter of the moon to diameter of pluto

I’m not sure which is more amazing to me,
that we know so much about this tiny planet so far away,
or that Wolfram|Alpha provides this kind
of wonderful resource to everyone on the web.
It’s all too romantic for words. Almost.




Moonlight Becomes You


Pluto In Magic And Alchemy


The New Horizons Spacecraft As Julia Adams


A Spaceship That Sparks


How Pluto’s First Moon Got Its Name