Strawberry Alarm Clock
This morning the Ebony Hillbillies were trying something different, a more abstract banjo-and-fiddle arrangement that sounded like something Steve Reich would have turned in for a Coen Brothers movie -- or actually a lot like Paul Giger's "Tropus" [RealAudio; jump to 48:10]. Gigantic and panoramic music if you could listen to it up close, but from so far away it sounds muted and small, separated from the Times Square morning by a vast gulf of time if not perspective. Like someone chasing the horizon, you approach, but until you stop you'll never actually get there. It's interesting that this sort of ancient music should re-emerge out of the train station where normally the Scientologists and the crunk swim uninterrupted. These old faces can haunt a family.
The train itself was reasonably competent today, a pleasant change from weeks of unmitigated amateur hour. If the yellow and red lines are any indication, the entire city is distracted almost beyond the point of functioning. Maybe allergies, maybe the weather, maybe politics: if there's a difference. Either that or everybody's becoming a tourist, which is an interestingly eschatological image. And yet today there was a huge ripe strawberry on the platform and the commuters stepping efficiently over it.
Here in the city for a while to come it reminds me of the forest and this bit from Heinrich Zimmer again:
Merlin dwells in the "enchanted forest," the "Valley of No Return," which is the Land of Death, the dark aspect of the world. The magic forest is always full of adventures. No one can enter it without losing his way. But the chosen one, the elect, who survives its deadly perils, is reborn and leaves it a changed man. The forest has always been a place of initiation, for there the demonic presences, the ancestral spirits and the forces of nature reveal themselves. There man meets his greater self, his totem animal. And thither the medicine man conducts the youths of the tribe in order that they may be born again through gruesome initiation rites as warriors and men. The forest is the antithesis of house and hearth, village and field boundary, where the household gods hold sway and where human laws and customs prevail.
And I'm reminded that hell and heaven are both cities.
8. 3M Co. [MMM]: Something of an underdog, the nice-guy "penny candy" maker among the giants, which leads many Wall Street boys (and the occasional starry-eyed engineering type) to develop a certain ticker crush on this perennial next big thing. It was born in 1902 as the "Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing Company," but this was eventually abandoned for both efficiency and accuracy, since they haven't actually done any "mining" in at least a human lifetime. In fact, MMM was originally formed to dig up grit for sandpaper. The grit wasn't any good (they'd hoped it was the full corundum) and they struggled to do anything right until they fixed their glue a full dozen years later. After that, they were in the inventing business, especially where adhesives were concerned. They invented tape and teased Scotchgard, recording tape, the thermofax and Post-Its out of it. They're taking it into the realm of weird photosensitive textiles and other things I haven't adequately digested, plus they've got a foot in plenty of other areas as befits a real diversified conglomerate. At one time I recall they were investing half their profits in R&D and, remembering the secret origins of tape, encouraged everyone to tinker in their spare time. An assistant bookkeeper named William McKnight was deified not only as a gifted salesman and manager but because he was on hand when they invented a better emery cloth. He always wore a suit in the office. His parents hoped he'd become a farmer. For their hundredth birthday they got their first CEO ever who hadn't grown up among the lab rats; he was from GE and taught them Six Sigma. History will decide.
The train itself was reasonably competent today, a pleasant change from weeks of unmitigated amateur hour. If the yellow and red lines are any indication, the entire city is distracted almost beyond the point of functioning. Maybe allergies, maybe the weather, maybe politics: if there's a difference. Either that or everybody's becoming a tourist, which is an interestingly eschatological image. And yet today there was a huge ripe strawberry on the platform and the commuters stepping efficiently over it.
Here in the city for a while to come it reminds me of the forest and this bit from Heinrich Zimmer again:
Merlin dwells in the "enchanted forest," the "Valley of No Return," which is the Land of Death, the dark aspect of the world. The magic forest is always full of adventures. No one can enter it without losing his way. But the chosen one, the elect, who survives its deadly perils, is reborn and leaves it a changed man. The forest has always been a place of initiation, for there the demonic presences, the ancestral spirits and the forces of nature reveal themselves. There man meets his greater self, his totem animal. And thither the medicine man conducts the youths of the tribe in order that they may be born again through gruesome initiation rites as warriors and men. The forest is the antithesis of house and hearth, village and field boundary, where the household gods hold sway and where human laws and customs prevail.
And I'm reminded that hell and heaven are both cities.
8. 3M Co. [MMM]: Something of an underdog, the nice-guy "penny candy" maker among the giants, which leads many Wall Street boys (and the occasional starry-eyed engineering type) to develop a certain ticker crush on this perennial next big thing. It was born in 1902 as the "Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing Company," but this was eventually abandoned for both efficiency and accuracy, since they haven't actually done any "mining" in at least a human lifetime. In fact, MMM was originally formed to dig up grit for sandpaper. The grit wasn't any good (they'd hoped it was the full corundum) and they struggled to do anything right until they fixed their glue a full dozen years later. After that, they were in the inventing business, especially where adhesives were concerned. They invented tape and teased Scotchgard, recording tape, the thermofax and Post-Its out of it. They're taking it into the realm of weird photosensitive textiles and other things I haven't adequately digested, plus they've got a foot in plenty of other areas as befits a real diversified conglomerate. At one time I recall they were investing half their profits in R&D and, remembering the secret origins of tape, encouraged everyone to tinker in their spare time. An assistant bookkeeper named William McKnight was deified not only as a gifted salesman and manager but because he was on hand when they invented a better emery cloth. He always wore a suit in the office. His parents hoped he'd become a farmer. For their hundredth birthday they got their first CEO ever who hadn't grown up among the lab rats; he was from GE and taught them Six Sigma. History will decide.