i.
I jumped into semiretirement with both eyes open. No good reason to feel old. Then a bad reason came. The COVID-19 pandemic. Which percolated up in February and March of 2020. I’d sit in the evening, sometimes in the afternoon, in front of the TV, pondering. I have never really been a binge-style TV viewer. Until the pandemic. Which found me in the old rocking chair. Just sittin in the old rocking chair. Watching things I’d never usually watch. Flames darted from the cloud of Pandemic uncertainty: In the background of the pandemic were events leading up to Right Wing Zealots storming the US Capital intent on undoing the year’s election, rending old friendships and family ties.
I’d like to enumerate some of what I watched: Vast of Night / The Prisoner / Star Trek / Upload / The Greek Myths. More I am quite sure – all watched with the gnawing yet comforting sense that there was nothing else I really could or had to do. Nothing to say but "Emergency call from Outpost #4" or "Phasers, standby!" "I am not a number!"
It was odd how many of these things were about epidemics in one way or another. Or quarantine. Or virtual reality. Or being stranded. It’s funny I’d hardly ever watched Star Trek before, which most of my high-tech colleagues thrived on from their youngest days.
Of these moments in a binge - The Vast of Night - unlike these other citations, was not a series - it was a picture. It really starts out with a blast of mood.
It begins with a long travelling shot with no edits. And people scurrying in preparation. We enter a high school gym - with a lonesome blockhouse radio station and antennae quite nearby - in a The Blob or The Last Picture Show type of world out in New Mexico, in the Buddy Holly days, and the principal characters – a young DJ and younger switchboard operator - are fiddling with the vagaries of the era’s electronics. This as a basketball game is commencing.
The A-Bomb, the Communist Menace – all this unstated but hovering. Golden. Filtered. It’s basketball season, but there is some of the feel of summer - I guess because it is the Southwest. A lot of the background music is from the wonderful Secret Museum of Mankind series, replete with oud drone.
As I was sitting there, odd bits from my own high school days came to mind, like 3 coins rising up from an old Racine City bus coin churner in a universe in reverse.
ii.
Coin 1- The high school basketball gym – a sight of epic evenings. Always foremost the memories of playing St Joseph’s from Kenosha and remembered most there was the black leather legion that school could populate a large section of stands with, a legion with a big foot still in the 1950s. There would be a rumble after the game, all knew. The crowd in basketball is the 6th man. A dome of crowd noise is created. You could smell the sweat, and rubbery Keds on the polished floor.
Coin 2-The general feeling of a summer night where what is regular discloses yet another tone, and in a twist turns mystic. I recall the summer nights in the Midwest, in which I grew up, just driving - with what Chuck Berry called no particular place to go.
Coin 3- One time passing a Mobil Gas station, where our friend K.D.K. worked. The station was like an Ed Rusha pop painting – pumps, geometries, darkness, light from the repair stalls, red-lit Pegasus. The station was closed, but K., A.K.A. Huey, was working there. He was one of our star footballers – a line man or linebacker - and is always stuck in my mind as a visage with about a 10-stich scarred cut with a bit of blot clotted on his forehead. Some rough footballer games then. He was working on a car, and let us in the work bay. For me, the tubed fluorescent lights, tools, and car parts hummed. At one point, sitting in the car that was his patient – maybe it was his own car and he was keeping it tip top - he pushed the hydraulic lift button which he could hold as an extender box, and gave me a look that said ‘I can push a button and ascend, and I know what I am doing, how about that?’ – he rode the car vertically up into the air - up and down a few times looking me in the eyes with a look saying ‘yes this is happening.’ Our effort at a high-school poetry book, which happened before or after this was in fact called Garage. So, the episode was either inspiration, foreshadowing or flashback. Now of course it is flashback, and has the feel of being in “the machinery of the night” @#$ and all comes back to me on the signal impetus of the Vast of Night.
iii.
I have to guess at what is going on. One finds one's own peace with mystery, even if briefly. Dylan quote below (on Creativity) discusses the idea of signals being transmitted, and you finding your loci relative to that, which is closer approximation of what's going on than I can articulate. – Jack Vaughan
It’s like you’re sleepwalking, not searching or seeking; things are transmitted to you. It’s as if you were looking at something far off and now you’re standing in the middle of it. Once you get the idea, everything you see, read, taste or smell becomes an allusion to it. It’s the art of transforming things. Quoted in discussion of Dylan in Triplicate this site.
@#$ Ginsberg Howl
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night
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