Orlando TV

Blinking lights on the wing tips … spewed clouds apsiring .. the cities like ocean liners in the ark.... JetBlue flight over American night in 21 st century..

Went to Orlando. Again didn’t get to Kerouac’s house. Orlando is just a place I go to, hit the hotel, do the conference [this was Microsoft TechEd 2007], find a restaurant and go home. Got idea for future: Take an extra day and go to Cape Caneveral. [The picture at right is light on our bedroom window.. what I was glad to come home to. ]

A lot of work. Did go out to dinner. Watched some television. Red Sox playing the Yankees on Sunday night. Stanley Cup Finals Monday night. Richard Serra on Charlie Rose show [Did see 30 sec of the penultimate Sopranos episode on HBO: Tony goes to bed in a cheap garret apt with a rifle on his breast. I guess the idea is: Tune in next week.]

Yankees don't suck
Yankee-Sox was a typical tight one. I turned it off when it got tied [for the second time, perhaps at 5-5]. Think Yankees won 6-5 on an Alex Rodriquez home run in top of 9th. Last week, Alex was seen going into a Canada hotel with a blonde. Seen by the New York Post photog and pasted on front page that is. Some Sox fans on Friday night wore plastic masks, the kind from Halloween or bank robberies, of a generic blonde white girl. I thought it was funny, maybe, but unsporting.

I think it was bad karma and cant be disabused of notion given the results on Sunday night. It is blasphemy around here but I dont think the Yankees suck. Even when they are on skid they are like dead bees that can still sting you. When we were in college days some yippies in Milwaukee as I recall did some political theatre by picketing an Art Linklater speech wearing masks with Xeroxed images of his late dotter [Dianne]. She was a drug suicide victim [LSD?] and he was on the anti-drug stump. I don’t recall if the merits of that political strategy were argued in our crowd, just accepted, or even huzzahed. Was Jim H. under one of those masks?

As with the Rodriquez razzing, it made for a surreal picture. I think we are up on the series for the year by a game now. Tense.

Ducks by 5
Stanley Cups is one of those things where I know nothing about the sport or the teams. I started to pull for the [Ottowas] Senators [over the Anaheim Mighty Ducks]. Just when I started cheering, the Ducks momentum began to skyrocket, and the Senators flagged. Don’t know much about it, but zest seems to be everything in the sport of hockey. Ottowa had its heads down and its mouths open, skating a second behind, not hittin too terribly hard. They lost the game by a goal [3-2, maybe] and wnet down a treacherous 3 games to 1 as the series headed back to Anaheim. ON THE OTHER HAND THE Ducks led by guy known as Neidermayer seem to be forceful. Old Bruins coach Don Cherry came on at the break, saying the sport needs more fights, coming off like a guest on SCTV’s old The Great White North segment. Saw final game on JetBlue flight home..stopped watching when Senator inadvertendly pushed puck into own goal. Guess who won?

Cherry was like a time warp. Funny.”Dah fans love a goode fight, yknow.”

Serra
Richard Serra on Charlie Rose is really hard to describe. Very intellectual in a way. That’s probably not the word. He is an articulate artist. An artist who has an intelligible world view … a view of form, and how we can view how we relate to it. He says the idea of the inarticulate artist is false. He has a comprehensive view. Under which other things are absorbed even if unstated.

His father was a shipyard worker, he grew up on a small tract on the dunes south of S.F.; his mother killed herself. He has a vision or is seeking one, fascination with form, and a psychoanalytic view, and a bit of the engineer about him when he talks.

He talks like some other one might write. Art is the power to think new thoughts, he said. New thoughts to provide different experiences, to see the world as we have not before.

He does it with steel these days. Big shapes. Years ago I made fun of one of his contempories. Andre Cold Duck. But maybe like a lot of people I have come around to better appreciateing this stuff .. as media and Web have driven the dominance of virtuality, and accelerated the human march to irrelevance.

Lest I forget let me boil down what I though was really apt: He says the artist should invent a form. And do the work.

It is not the quality he says it is the effort.

Teilard D.C.
On plane down read Teliard De Chardin. Off beat T. I wrote about him before on the Radio Weblog. He has a world view, and a historical perspective. And is largely unintelligible today. His work is especially weird because science interfolds with spiritualism in his space. It was not weird that way in the Renaissance but things have changed.

The work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit paleontologist who died in 1955, is little discussed today. But in the '60s, especially with the backdrop of the ecology movement and recognition of 'spaceship earth' and 'earth as a biosphere,' his often mystic ruminations, at least in Catholic colleges in the U.S., were commonly considered.

His theory was that man is evolving, mentally and socially, toward a final spiritual unity. Blending science and Christianity, he declared that the human epic resembles "nothing so much as a way of the Cross." Following his cogitations involved various philosophical leaps, which his religious superiors were not entirely comfortable with. All his major works, including The Phenomenon of Man, were published posthumously [per Britannica.com].

De Chardin's apparent decline in general estimation (though it is too early in the vortex of time to tell his final estimation), can in part be laid to questions on his scientism, not the least of which was his purported role in the Piltdown Man fossil hoax. While he likely did not play a role as an instigator of the hoax according to good research, the indications that he was taken in by it, and questions of his scientific rigor, helped place his star in decline for now.

He played a fundamental role in proposing the theory of a noosphere, or global or historical mind, that is on the level of the intellect, as opposed to the geosphere, or nonliving world, and the biosphere, or living world. The Web seems to have some characteristics of the noosphere as proposed by de Chardin.

My reacquaintance with de Chardin led me to write a poem called The Phenomenon of Man which maybe should have been called The Phenomenal Man. The phenomenon of man song was inspired by the words of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and his thoughts on a certain impulsion of mankind, one that led the bloggist Jack to wonder if we are not actually the UFOs we have been waiting for. The effort here was, a P.T.D.C. put it, "in a few bold strokes, to map out the phases or successive waves of ''invasion.''

De Chardin wrote:

"Our picture is of mankind labouring under the impulsion of an obscure instinct, so as to break out through its narrow point of emergence and submerge the earth; of thought becoming number so as to conquer all habitable space, taking precedence over all other forms of life …”

Goodbye, goodbye, Orlando
Obviously most of what I have to say about Orlando happened on television with me watching. One thing I like about Orlando is the happy kids I will never be again, but there are some things I still remember. Of my young days. Uncovering things excitedly. In the usa. In summertime.

Orlando gives no aura of Kerouac. Few of us can believe that, yes, the first house he ever bought, was there. Just after the great pop of success for On The Road. But those were days before Disney incursion. Maybe it was a whistle stop for orange industry. Certainly it was a part of America, and thus known to Kerouac. For a flash waiting for van airport shuttle I saw people in the anxious moment as if in a Kerouac dream. Kerouac’s world like Saroyan’s; like my mothers. Sweet, hard, simple. People going somewhere carrying their emotional baggage. Couldn’t really be like that, now could it? Cant go back, but we, for now, seem to be on a parade to a new form of unreality.