[Kzyxtalk] The objects below.

[Marco McClean]

Subject: The objects below.

The recording of last night's (2020-08-07) Memo of the Air: Good Night 
Radio show on KNYO-LP Fort Bragg is right here:
https://tinyurl.com/KNYO-MOTA-0396

Hiroshima and Nagasaki stories never told until recently. San Francisco 
Mime Troupe: The Good Cop; it’s kind of a Twilight Zone story, because 
the world is kind of a Twilight Zone story now. The two-bit obits 
including the San Francisco Chronicle’s memorial to beat poet (r)uth 
(w)eiss. Andrew Scully's The Albion Incident. A chapter or three of El 
Sereno by Jay Frankston. The Lucky Strike, by Kim Stanley Robinson, 
about an alternate world where one man with a functional imagination 
(because of being a reader) was on the crew headed off to drop the first 
atomic bomb on a city full of people, so things went a little 
differently than they did for us. Announcements, petitions, alarums and 
excursions, the usual unusual, and it ends with Doug Nunn's latest Snap 
Sessions podcast, minus the fifty-minute interview with Bill Stoneham, 
creature-maker for films, among other talents he has. If you want to 
hear the whole unabridged Snap Sessions session, or any of them, that's 
here:
https://soundcloud.com/user-741665314

Furthermore, at https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com you'll find a fresh 
batch of dozens of links to not necessarily radio-useful but nonetheless 
worthwhile educational items I set aside for you while gathering the 
show together. Such as:

"The only rational frying and shortening medium." Really? I remember 
being little and asking my mother or grandmother, “What is short'nin',” 
They said, "It's this," and showed me. Shortening is white fat. It's 
like melted soap. "Why is it /shortening/?" And they're like, "It’s 
this. Taste it." /But why is it shortening?/ That was years before I 
read Pogo, Stepmother Goose, the part about Simple Simon and the Pie Man 
("Let me taste your ware." "I'm where? I’m here." "No. Your ware. Your 
ware. Let me taste it!" /SPLORTCH/. And it was even longer before I 
heard /Who's On First/. And only just now, this late in my life, it 
occurred to me to find out, so look, from HuffPost: "Shortening got its 
name because of what it does to flour. Introducing fat into baked goods 
interferes with the formation of the gluten matrix in the dough. As a 
result of its interference, gluten strands end up shorter which in turn 
creates a softer, more crumbly baked good. It's the reason that cakes 
and pastries are soft and breads not so much." Oh, sure, 200 years ago 
they knew about the gluten matrix? No. Continue: "Shortening got its 
name way before anyone knew anything about the chemical reaction of fat 
and gluten, and that's because the word short used to mean tender in 
reference to food." Ah. Thanks. Three little children lyin' in bed, two 
were sick and the other one dead. Call for the doctor, doctor said, Feed 
those children short'nin' bread…
http://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/cottolene

The Beach Boys sing Short'nin' Bread. Apparently Brian Wilson was 
obsessed with this and he arranged hundreds of different versions. They 
had to distract him with other things to get him away from it. He'd go 
back to it, they'd have a meeting about what to do, sure, why not, 
record it, maybe that'll get it out of his system, like in The Wedding 
Singer when Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore are each engaged to someone 
else but are uncomfortably attracted to each other, connected by an 
invisible rubber band; of course they belong together, but their 
families and fiances will be hurt and confused, and Drew Barrymore says, 
"Maybe we should kiss just once, you know, get it out of our system." 
And the other person in the room, Drew Barrymore’s girlfriend, looks 
away and sighs. That was a golden moment in cinema for me. I could hear 
in my head all the other people who ever watched that movie getting to 
that point, and going, "Oh, no," because that's not how people work, and 
at the same time, "Oh, good. Finally," because that's how people work. 
That moment was the kernel of the screenwriter's dream. The whole story 
before and after that is just a scaffold for that moment. You need 
everything else, but then you don’t. It stays up there by itself after that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxs2mnrRgsA

And the music really makes this. You can feel how hard they were trying. 
It’s not just silly and pathetic. They tried so hard. I especially like 
the one at about 6:12, where he brushes a wing on the ground, drags the 
other wing on the ground, and /continues/, gets up in the goddamn air! 
and of course crashes– but then, /tadahhh!/ The triumphant gesture, he’s 
fine! He’s not killed. He flew in the air. It really worked for a 
second. Worth it all. Back to the drawing board. Next time, you’ll see. 
Next time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9Yww9LG3gw

-- 
Marco McClean, memo at mcn.org,
https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com