[Kzyxtalk] Traish LaRue and the Lemniscate of Gerono.

[Marco McClean]

Subject: Traish LaRue and the Lemniscate of Gerono.

/"At first I didn’t believe it, that this woman who looked as fertile as 
the Tennessee Valley could not bear children. But the doctor explained 
that her insides were a rocky place where my seed could find no purchase."/

The recording of last night's (2021-05-07) Memo of the Air: Good Night 
Radio show on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg is right here:
https://tinyurl.com/KNYO-MOTA-0435

This show has poetry by Paul Modic, Notty Bumbo, John Sakowicz and even 
Robert Herrick (1591 – 1674), among others. Stories by Sebastian of 
RelatoCorto, Mark Scaramella (and others) of the Anderson Valley 
Advertiser, Alex Bosworth, and more. A couple of extended music breaks 
are all about food and proper (and improper) food-related behavior, some 
of that related to your choice of food's effect upon colon health, 
including truncated pitches for various quack products to supposedly 
clean out that important often overlooked organ, by nature self-cleaning 
as the ear, the nose and the vagina, for example.  Here I refer you to 
Paul Theroux's swell book Millroy the Magician*, whose message can be 
oversimplified to the spiritual urgency to “minimize colon transit 
time”. And [I refer you to] the film Death to Smoochy, which I associate 
in my mind with the book Millroy the Magician in the same way as the 
films /The Prestige/ and /The Illusionist/ call to each other, and the 
films /Lucky/ and /The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot/ call 
to each other, and so on

Besides all that, at https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com there's a fresh 
batch of not-necessarily-radio-useful but worthwhile items that I set 
aside for you while gathering the show together, such as:

As long as the chiropractor and the mechanic don’t break anything, this 
is a great deal. Compare it to any wedding costing hundreds of times 
more and involving more stress than anything in your life besides moving 
house, or a loved one dying, or getting fired.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2021/05/wedding-package.html

Fascinating slow motion shots of starlings bird-bathing. Before 
industrialization the sky was often gray-black with these creatures. And 
they aren't the only birds who murmurate, but they're famous for it. 
Look up starlings murmurating... Okay, wow, I was so wrong. New York was 
infected with starlings as late as 1890 by Shakespeare fans who intended 
to introduce to North America all the birds the Bard mentioned in his 
plays. From the initial 80 birds, their population spread out and 
burgeoned to hundreds of millions in the early 1900s before eventually 
being cut back to manageable numbers by pesticides, climate change, 
shifts in food webs, but mostly pet cats. True fact. People who complain 
that windmills kill birds conveniently don't mention that thousands of 
times more birds are killed by crashing into glass windows and being 
predated upon by pussies.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2013/04/starlings-take-bath.html

The sound of the cracking ice is my favorite element here. All the 
vignettes turn out okay for the subjects; you don’t have to be on the 
edge of your seat worrying for them. There's a surprising number of 
interruptive ads, but that's okay. I never minded commercials when 
they're clever. When I was small, and I'm thinking maybe four-to-six, 
here, and watching teevee in my grandmother's house while the grownups 
were all across the alley working in the restaurant, I'd memorize the 
ads to perform for them when they came home. The cigaret ad songs, the 
situations; the Mr. Bubble ad in particular delighted me. And my 
attention was riveted to the series of Hertz rent-a-car ads where at the 
end a man and woman /fly down out of the sky/ to sit in a convertible 
car that's speeding down the highway, driverless, expecting them. By 
now, to me, convertibles are horrible, almost as bad as a motorcycle, 
with the wind and noise, and belongings and bugs and grit whipping 
around and getting in your eyes and mouth, but if you could fly down 
into the car it would be worth all that… Of course, if you can fly, why 
do you need a car; and you'd need goggles and other protective clothing 
and maybe earplugs anyway. But that's now. I'm thinking about then. And 
it reminds me of when Jessica Jones is asked, “Can you fly?” and she 
thinks about it a moment and says, “It's more like jumping and 
controlled falling.” Speaking of which:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJk0ADCpN7E

And these are not self-driving cars. When you see a rare story of a 
self-driving car making a mistake and bumping over a mailbox, and it's 
presented as though that means self-driving cars are a bad idea, think 
of what a massively stupid idea it is for millions of people just like 
you and me, with all our maladies and tirednesses and preoccupations and 
internal distractions and quick little passions at something that just 
flitted across our monkey mind, not to mention glancing down to turn the 
heater up or change the channel on the radio or /looking away from the 
road entirely, to the person on the seat next to us, or even in the back 
seat, to see how they like what we're saying/, all in the blender of 
traffic together, and four in ten of us on drugs. There's no comparison. 
And we're never getting smarter or better at it; the A.I. are, and 
they're looking in all directions at once, they can see in the dark and 
communicate with nearby vehicles and recite poetry at the same time-- 
poetry in ultrasonic frequencies that repel deer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsbQCYNIATo

*An analysis of Millroy the Magician:
https://www.enotes.com/topics/millroy-magician/in-depth

p.s. Email me your written work and I'll read it Friday night on the 
radio on the very next MOTA.

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