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31 July 2004
I got my first hits to this website from Google today. Apparently someone Googling "fishtail parka" was sent
here because I wrote about this item of military clothing in one of the web log entries (see below.) Previously, no combination
of search words I could devise would result in a Google citation.
I don't know how Google finally decides to take note of a web site. I've been told that it has bots out there searching
for new sites, and also that a Google listing is based on the number of hits a site gets.
Whatever the case, it's an awesome development, because in cyberspace you don't really exist unless Google can find you.
Google opens your site up to chance discoveries by people looking for other things -- which is where the magic of the Internet
begins.
Speaking of the fishtail parka, which I discovered in the pages of William Gibson's novel "Pattern Recognition",
I get a lot of hits from the discussion section on William Gibson's official website, where I posted a link to my site. There's
a lot of interesting stuff on the Gibson site, including a now discontinued blog by Gibson himself, which is filled with references
to cool things. Here's the link, posted in the spirit of reciprocity, which is another element of Internet magic:
http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/
Let a thousand flowers bloom on a thousand paths to nowhere . . .
10:43 am pdt
10 July 2004
In the course of writing an episode of "Nowhere", Jae Song did some research on Korean kites and got inspired
to build one.
The basic Korean kite is flat and rectangular, with a hole in its center. Jae decided to build one that was three feet
high by two feet wide, with a center hole about the size of a dinner plate. Traditional Korean kites use a bamboo armature
-- Jae used some thin wooden sticks he got at a kite store. These he notched and tied with string into a structure with two
horizontal cross pieces, two diagonal cross pieces and a central axis piece. He made the paper face out of brown grocery bags
taped together, with two paper streamers for stability.
He attached a three-point bridle of kite string, and attached that to the main string on a spool.
He did all this in the loft one night, in such small spaces as I could clear in the wreckage.
It's a custom in Korea to write down on the kite the names of whatever demons are bedeviling you at the moment and then
cut the kite loose when it's airborne -- at which point the demons depart from you along with the kite.
When Jae had finished building the kite we each wrote down some personal demons on the paper face and instantly got excited
about the idea of sending them off elsewhere, and though we'd planned to test the kite sometime later in the week it looked
so beautiful and promising that we took it up on the roof to see if we could find some wind up there. There was some wind
but it was gusty. Jae got the kite a few yards into the air at one point but then it veered to the right, over the side of
the roof and banged into my neighbor's windows on the floor below. If he noticed this, he must still be wondering what it
was.
Jae reeled the kite back up and it wasn't too badly damaged and we put it away for another try in more favorable conditions.
Two days later we took the kite over towards the Hudson River bike path. We gave it a couple of tries on 29th Street just
before we got to the West Side Highway, because the street was fairly empty and the wind seemed to be strong and steady there.
When released the kite would jump quickly into the air a few yards and then veer downwards. I thought this was because it
needed more string more quickly, so we headed over to the bike path looking for more space.
We tried to put it up on a stretch of riverfront promenade just south of the heliport at 30th Street, but we had no better
luck. The wind was stronger so it would jump up quicker and a little higher, but then it would crash back to ground ever harder.
Twice it made it over a ten-foot chain link fence into a locked vehicle lot, and we had to climb to the top of the fence and
fish it out carefully.
It was getting pretty banged up. Jae repaired it as best he could with some tape we'd brought, but the whole thing was
very discouraging. Jae thought it was time to call it a day. He felt he'd made some dreadful miscalculation in the design
or construction of the kite.
In fact, I had.
Just before we'd headed out I'd discovered some cloth ribbon stuck at the back of a shelf for some forgotten reason. It
popped into my head -- at the prompting of some demon, I now realize -- that this ribbon would make nice additions to the
kite's streamers. Jae obligingly attached two pieces of it to the paper streamers he'd already made.
As we prepared to head home with the battered kite I said, "Maybe it's the cloth streamers -- maybe they're too heavy."
Jae was sure that wasn't the problem but I took the cloth streamers off and urged him to give it one more try.
I held up the kite while he backed off from it, unspooling string. I let the kite go and it sailed straight up onto the
air -- WAY up into the air . . . sixty feet and climbing. It was unbelievable. It flew perfectly.
The bridle of the kite is designed to give the kite a slight tilt forward in relation to the line of the main string,
so that more air will rush under it than over it, providing the lift -- which is of course the basic aerodynamic principle
of the airplane wing.
The weight of the cloth streamers had obviously been counteracting the tilt created by the bridle and keeping the face
of the kite flat to the wind, making it erratic and impossible to control.
Now it just wanted to climb -- to fly.
The wind shifted suddenly, though, and it started to lose altitude. Jae couldn't get tension on the line quick enough
and the kite plummeted back to earth -- landing on the top of the fifteen-foot chain link fence around the heliport, where
its line was snarled in the barbed wire at the top of the fence.
Jae climbed up with a pocket knife and cut it loose, but the kite was wrecked now, its paper face ripped, its stick frame
undone.
We tried to send what was left of it into the wind, still hoping to lose those demons, but even the paper alone wouldn't
let itself be blown away.
We threw the remnants of the kite into the Hudson River, hoping that its stream would carry the names of our demons out
to sea. It just didn't seem right to carry them home with us.
We walked back to the loft still shaking our heads at how amazing the moment had been when the kite took flight. It was
thrilling and inspiring. Jae said he was going to start work on another kite immediately.
I can't wait.
9:40 am pdt
7 July 2004
I've written before about the Buzz Rickson's reproduction U. S. Air Force flight jacket featured in William Gibson's novel
"Pattern Recognition". The book features another piece of vintage military clothing -- the M-1951 U. S. Army fishtail
parka. This is a wonderful piece of cold-weather gear from the early 50s, with a wolf-fur lined hood and a button-in lining
for extra warmth. The "fishtail" is a v-shaped notch in the rear with snaps which I think is intended to tighten
the lower hem for a closer fit to keep out drafts. The parka saw a lot of service in Korea and I assume was designed for cold-weather
conditions there.
A character in Gibson's book wears one of these parkas during a daring motorcycle ride to the rescue in Tokyo, and the
Buzz Rickson's web site also mentions that Gibson is a big fan of the parka, though Rickson's doesn't offer a reproduction
of it. I wanted one and went looking for it on e-Bay.
The basic design of the jacket didn't change for many years, but it was later made with a synthetic fur hood-lining. The
later versions aren't hard to find from any merchant dealing in surplus army clothing, but I wanted the original version and
sure enough I found one on e-Bay, being auctioned with a reserve price of $9.99. I bid $15, which turned out to be the only
bid, so I got it at the reserve price and it arrived in the mail from Colorado a couple of days ago. It's in almost perfect
condition and unspeakably cool. The seller was kind enough to tell me where he got it -- from his dad, who bought it at a
garage sale on a visit to my seller and his wife in Colorado Springs. His dad sells a lot of stuff on e-Bay, most of which
he picks up at garage and estate sales. He encouraged my seller to see what he could get for it on e-Bay. Not much, as it
turned out. On the other hand, my seller's wife shipped it off to me just before they left for a vacation in Hawaii -- which
must have been some consolation.
This is the magic of the Internet. An eccentric guy in New York wants an obscure piece of U. S. Army equipment from the
50s -- that very piece of equipment finds its way to him from a garage sale in Colorado Springs, largely through a series
of mouse clicks. Gibson's book is sort of about the strange new connections like this which the Internet allows.
Something tells me that with the right description I could sell the parka on e-Bay for a lot more than I paid for it,
for enough indeed to more than justify the speculative purchase by my seller's father -- and something also tells me that
I never will.
It's just too cool.
7:34 pm pdt
5 July 2004
The convergence, largely imaginary, between bohemian and bourgeois culture, identified and to a degree celebrated by David
Brooks in his book "Bobos In Paradise", has a contradiction at its core which Bobos seem to be unaware of. Mayor
Bloomberg, in his war on the countercultural nightlife of New York, is executing the social desires of his largely yuppie
constituency -- the soi-dissant "bohemian" yuppies of Manhattan. These are generally corporate functionaries who
see themselves as liberal and culturally adventuresome. They are the sort of people who desperately wanted to hang out in
East Villages dives with genuine bohemians, where they could pick up all sorts of hip attitudes and advanced fashion tips,
but were horrified to discover that those places were full of cigarette smoke and very loud -- you could hardly breathe or
hear yourself think in places like that! The subversive physical assaults of the dives violated the notions of social hygiene
which invariably accompany the tidy liberal attitudes of yuppies -- so Bloomberg came to the rescue. He banned the cigarettes
and began enforcing ancient cabaret laws to suppress dancing and general late-night noise in bars. His latest move is to remove
the requirement from the noise laws that police actually measure the decibel level before citing a joint for excessive noise
-- now the police can act if something just sounds too darn loud, which will allow them to selectively harass anyone they
want to.
Problem solved. The Bobos can now rub shoulders with the counterculture in something resembling middle-class propriety.
It doesn't seem to have occurred to any of these dimwits that the counterculture would simply go somewhere else, some place
where the tragically unhip and unadventurous didn't make the rules. No genuine counterculture would put up with that for a
minute -- which is precisely what makes it a counterculture.
It will take a while for the genuine bohemian culture of New York to drift elsewhere, so the leeching out of the city's
creative juices will be hard to register -- but one day, sooner than one thinks, the Bobos will be grooving out in ultra hip
downtown dives, look around suddenly . . . and see only other Bobos around them. The party will have moved on.
9:03 pm pdt
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