Shroud Take Mar 17, 2007

Then I was a smock-suited Jr member of the shroud brigade. Working in the naphtha division I had been into feedback some, certainly I don’t get any feedback from you by the Bird Conquerors. And I loved that music. The chance to finally work for Dr Shroud, the father of full feedback and the inventor of the Weiner mobile, to work even just as a runner in the paint factory, it seemed to begin to fulfill things that I always thought would happen. I was young. It was all fun.




The PA speaker would boom out announcements of lectures in Quantitative Concepts in Cybernetic Dynamics. This was lunch in the Mutually Assured Benefits hall, where we would eat under phosphorescent illumination. And I’d note those announcements, as my work pals from Racine Street would frag me with cole slaws, and I would show up at the lectures for free with my girlfriend, Margaret. She was working as a stewardess in the Golden Shroud Dome Ride, was much smarter than me. But she was enjoying the traversal. We’d banter in cybernetics arguments, then erupt in anxious petting and muy violent cooing. Finish off at Mac’s Big Boy. Make and kiss up.

In the summer noontime light, the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wienermobile WeinerMobile would gleam outside the lunch hall windows, like the shiny hot dog it was. This was a throwaway of Shrouds, but one that adhered like fly paper. In a speech to the Wisconsin Poet Coop, he’d coined the term “planned obsolescence" as a description of the industrial research and development leaders mission, and the subsequent hullabaloo was something he sought thereafter aggressively to avert, tragically so it turns out, from my point of view. A little known fact about the WeinterMobile..there was more than one at any one time. I saw a tolley car stable of them on summer evening, at a time I’d just been fired from a job, and it is something that has always stayed with me.

WeinerMobile would gleam outside the lunch hall windows, like the shiny hot dog it was. This was a throwaway of Shrouds, but one that adhered like fly paper. In a speech to the Wisconsin Poet Coop, he’d coined the term “planned obsolescence" as a description of the industrial research and development leaders mission, and the subsequent hullabaloo was something he sought thereafter aggressively to avert, tragically so it turns out, from my point of view. A little known fact about the WeinterMobile..there was more than one at any one time. I saw a tolley car stable of them on summer evening, at a time I’d just been fired from a job, and it is something that has always stayed with me. The original model could go 210 mph.

There was a lot more to planned obsolescence as Dr Shroud would have it. “As I spoke, and I remember this like pylon poles passing on 32, there was a change in the values being portrayed and of the perspective simultaneously,” he once told me.

Note: This Wikipedia gives a lot of credit to the Mayer family for conveivning something that I have come to credit to Brooks Stevens. But who first had the idea for hotdog anyway. And a hot dog as a means of conveyance.