Scottunder

Tom Petty's excellent adventure

I saw Running Down a Dream, Peter Bogdonavich's documentary on Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. I intended to sit down and eat dinner while watching the beginning, but it was so compelling I watched both DVDs, over three hours worth of stuff. Possibly the best straight-ahead music documentary I've seen.

The movie paints a picture of a guy with a charmed career, which is not to take away from his great skill as a songwriter. From popular Gainesville bar band to BFF with Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Stevie Nicks, Jeff Lynne, Dave Stewart, Jimmy Iovine, Rick Rubin, Johnny Cash, and others, he's been doing his radio-ready rock for 30 years and seems to have never given in to musical self-indulgence, and each step led to the next with an organic inevitability.

Bogdonovich (or Petty) mostly glosses over the requisite tragedies of business and life. Benmont Tench talks about too much drink and coke, and of course their second bassist, Howie Epstein, had a heroin addiction that killed him, but only a few years ago, not during their most excessive period -- and that episode is redeemed by the return of their original bassist, Ron Blair. Petty's first marriage is mentioned early on, and then a divorce and new marriage many years later; one daughter talks about the arson fire that destroyed their home and possessions. His childhood is lightly examined for clues to his drive and anger -- which seems to manifest only in his songs. Petty is a laconic guy offstage.

Favorite moment was an obviously joyous Eddie Vedder talking about Petty, and the video of him singing "The Waiting" with TP and the Heartbreakers live. Vedder has such a great voice, you're suddenly reminded that while Petty's is distinctive and evocative, it's not, well, it's not Eddie Vedder voice, certainly.

Drifting along...

I was driving nails into a tight space the other day, so I grabbed a drift, a tool which is simply a metal rod, often called a punch. But why is it called a drift? Off to the dictionaries: drift is derived from drive, which comes from a root meaning push from behind, a fertile root that drives off in too many directions for me to follow in depth.

     Drift punch

In addition to a drift tool, there's drift in linguistics, in genetics, in plasma physics. There's drift in geology, which is different from continental drift, and in geography, as a South African placename where you ford a river; Rorke's Drift is the scene of a famous battle in the Zulu War. Famous in Britain, anyway.

Drift verbs itself as well, driving aimlessly by current, breeze, whim, or inattention. My car drifts out of its lane, my boat drifts downstream, or my mind drifts away from -- what was I talking about?

You can aimfully drift a car, too, using power and oversteer, which is how high-speed drivers take their cars picturesquely sideways through turns, and how there are three Fast and Furious films (one of which was called Tokyo Drift).

Our conversation might drift off-topic, unless someone gets the drift of what we're talking about. Tumbling tumbleweeds drift, too, and I guess a drifter just gets pushed by the wind, the way driftwood gets pushed ashore by the currents and waves, and the way the wind makes snowdrifts. Hank Williams had an alter ego as Luke the Drifter, and his band was the Drifting Cowboys. "Drifting Blues" is a Charles Brown song, covered often. The difference between bums and drifters? Motion.

Drifters are also fishing boats that use drift nets. Miners and others use drifters, a type of rock or ground drill that moves -- drifts -- on a rail feed. A drift is a sideways passage in a mine, related to drift mining, which may all amount to the same thing, going sideways through something rather than down.

From drive -- push from behind -- we can understand driving cattle, driving nails, and driving Miss Daisy, as well as more abstract uses like driving me crazy or up the wall, or driving my point home or in the ground. One can be driven to succeed (from within) or to despair (from without).

We also get the noun forms, like a drive in the country, which leads to a name for the road on which we drove. A drive can also be a planned event with an intended outcome, like a charity drive, a sales drive, or a blood drive. These all may come from cattle drives, in which large herds were walked to a far-off destination to be sold. A driveway (or driftway) was originally a path to drive animals, whether to pasture, to market, or to traps and slaughter, as the word was commonly used to describe a hunting technique.

A group of cattle or sheep that's been driven to market is a drove, brought there by drovers. (A drove is also a stonemason's tool, which gets us back to the neighborhood of my drift punch.)

I'm unable to find a good explanation for why computer storage devices started to be called drives, though it seems to have occurred when they moved from drums to discs in the '50s. A software driver seems more obvious, in the sense of driving a vehicle, but a disc drive was at first purely a repository, and I don't think it drove anything. Certainly not in the way the warp drive engines propelled the Enterprise through space.

One of my guides tells me drift is to drive as thrift is to thrive, but I'm gonna have to ponder that for a little while.

Timelines

I went over to Timetoast and made a couple simple timelines: Cars and Homes. It's an idea I was thinking about doing in Excel, and I'd still like to see more than one at a time, as well as lifespan of some events, rather than only start dates. But, still, fun and free.

Art by Michael Kontopoulos

I liked this video of Michael Kontopoulos's Machines that Almost Fall Over. Mr K is an MFA student at UCLA, and some of his works, including Machine that Tries to Draw Circles, remind me of Arthur Ganson's excellent machines.

Kontopoulos's Moon Theatre (a collaboration with Nova Jiang and Andres Colubri) is in a different vein, a participatory piece for large crowds, and it will appear next at Sundance.

Two boys make hand shadows here...

...that get projected as shadow puppets on a large moon some distance away.

The coast is clear

MAYOR.:
See the coast clear'd, and then we will depart.
Good God, these nobles should such stomachs bear!
I myself fight not once in forty year.

I was driving down the coast, and I started thinking about the forms of that word: the coast of the ocean, coaster brakes on a bike, coasting down a hill, a coaster for your drink, coasting in your life (cough), and such like.

My pile of etymological books says that the word comes from the Latin costa, rib, and thus side or flank. This survives in anatomical terms, as in intercostal, between the ribs. Thus, the side of the land is the coast, and was once applied to rivers as well as larger bodies of water, especially the lower Mississippi.

The French also used it to describe the side of a hill, and in North America this described a slope down which one rode a sledge (later, sled) in the snow. In time, one coasted down the snow-covered hill, and that usage led to the sense of riding without power in wheeled vehicles like bicycles or automobiles.

By extension, anything we do without effort is coasting, as in "she coasted by on her good looks." Nelson Algren, in The Man with the Golden Arm, used coasting to refer to intoxication, whether by drugs or music. Here, Frankie Machine visits his dealer to ease his withdrawal pain:

That first fix had cost him only a dollar, it had quieted the everlasting dull ache in his stomach and sent him coasting one whole week end. So what was the use of spending forty dollars in the bars when you could do better at home on one?

In the early 20th century, coaster was a generic and branded term for toy wagons, which were put to use when the snow had melted (not unlike the development of skateboards as street versions of surfboards).

       Liberty Coaster #4

In some places, snow sleds were also branded as coasters, especially those I think of as saucers.

Rollercoasters are another branch of the tree. The idea of coasting railcars down inclined railways predates the term rollercoaster, but which came first, sleds or rails?

A couple guesses on origins I can't find evidence for: a coaster brake on a bicycle, maybe because the braking action was applied to the freewheel rather than the tire or rim; and coaster for a drink, probably similar coasters for furniture, which go under the legs to help avoid scratching the floors.

Other word relatives: accost, come up to the side of; cutlet, a small rib, derived from French cotelette; and costermonger, an apple-seller, from an apple with prominent ribs called a Costard.

Finally, "the coast is clear" gets used by Shakespeare (as "the coast clear'd" in the excerpt from Henry VI above, and later in Twelfth Night). The phrase predates him, first referring to a ship having safely sailed away from the coast, but Shakespeare's use is more in line with the modern sense of "there's no one watching us," which seems to have taken on the connotation of smugglers unloading a ship of contraband.

There, having cleared coast from my brain, I'll get back to work.

Niki de Saint Phalle

Another highlight of our trip to the San Diego area was discovering the work of Niki de Saint Phalle. I had seen a picture of the Sun God sculpture on the UCSD campus (and later saw it in person), but it looked cartoony and didn't particularly intrigue me. It turned out we stayed with friends near Escondido, and they told us to visit a nearby sculpture garden, Queen Califia's Magical Circle, and then I understood it a little more deeply.

The artist did really amazing work here, creating a kaleidoscopic collection of walls, totem poles, and statues covered in colored glass, rocks, tiles, and mirrors. The pictures we took are lively but can't convey what it's like to walk around the site. Here's a photo of the entrance, showing the only opening in the circular snake wall, a portion of the black-and-white maze wall, Queen Califia, and a couple totem poles in the rear:

And another look at the 24-foot-tall centerpiece, Queen Califia riding an eagle, holding a bird aloft.

Hidden in the shadows next to Susan is a golden egg that also apparently serves as a fountain, though not when we visited. The underside is a star-covered dome with inset images. Unfortunately for the photos, we visited when the sun was nearly overhead, but the the park is still delightful and inspiring. We will surely return on our next visit south.

Some time later, we visited the Mingei Museum in Balboa Park, a lovely collection of folk art, craft, and design from around the world. And, oh look, in front is another one of Niki's pieces (we were on a first-name basis by now):

On our final day before heading to the desert we came upon one last Niki when we decided to eat lunch in downtown Escondido and happened to walk by the Mingei Museum's other branch, which had a free admission sign in front and an extraordinary exhibition on central European yurts -- and there, hanging from the ceiling, flies another feminine figure, with wings, pouring electric water between two vessels in her hands. Sorry, no picture, but I'll leave one last memento, Niki's signature, found in the underside of Califia's eagle.

The rest of the de St Phalle photos we took are here on Picasa.

Back from the desert

We spent a couple days last week camping in Anza-Borrego, driving through Joshua Tree on the way home. Everyone knows Joshua Tree, and in fact the place was completely crowded, a combination of widlflowers in bloom and Spring Break. Anza-Borrego was definitely the better choice, if maybe a little subtler in its colorful offerings.

Here's a palm oasis we hiked to in the southern portion of Anza-Borrego:

And here's a scene from a cholla cactus grove at Joshua Tree:

Love the desert, and wish we could have stayed longer.