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SHEP/ARTSY The mown baseball landscape
As a baseball enthusiast, would Jean Shepherd have cared about this issue?
(Years ago my letter to the editor [NYT] was printed. My argument was that Astroturf was bad for baseball. My understanding is that in recent years, this artificial abomination was, by most major league stadiums, tossed in the dumpster.)
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WHAT’S WRONG WITH MOWING BASEBALL GRASS INTO PATTERNS
The baseball field is a kind of metaphor and
expression of nature stylized/simplified
for the purpose of playing the game:
THE DIRT is devoid of stones and other roughness that would give a false bounce to the ball, and it’s configured to allow runners to run and slide safely. The form it’s given is a visual uniting of the whole infield into a neat shape—but the dirt is just there, not dappled in colored polka dots or stripes or in any other distracting way.
THE GRASS is mowed low to allow a reasonably consistent bounce and roll—the grass is there to remind us of the natural outdoors in which the game is played, not to be a decorative, man-made contrivance—as a symbol it’s just there.
MOWING the grass into formal patterns—visible lines and so forth–gives it a contrived, useless effect that only distracts from simple metaphor, and says to the viewer, “Look how clever we mowers are.” These patterns distract from the baseball metaphor and give a digressive effect of fancy cloth—suits, dresses, and jacket material (non-grass). We do not go to baseball to see someone’s decorative skills. It’s an inappropriate decoration, distracting the eye and mind from the elegant rightness of the playing field’s stylized/simplified nature—and distracting the eye and attention from the action of the game itself.
(sing lustily)
Root, root, root for the real grass!
If they don’t care it’s a shame!
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JEAN SHEPHERD Kid Story–Pearl continued some more & (148) ARTSY Gardens
She lives in the north side of town, the rich section of town. I come from the place where, every time they tap an open hearth, the temperature of our house goes up twenty degrees, every time the Bessemer converter goes off my bedroom lights up like a Christmas tree. When the fourteen-inch Merchant mill is running at full blast it’s all night long BOOM BOOM BOOM, and you just know they’re running a big lot through that mill. I live in that world, and Pearl lives on Beacon Street where there are big trees around houses that are at least a half block back of the street and there are snowball bushes out front, and where the Buicks hum as they glide home from the office. There are maids with little white caps, dusting things. Do you know what that means in a place like Hammond, Indiana?
Once in a great while, when they would put me on another paper route, I would deliver down Beacon Street. It is a place where some houses get three Chicago Tribunes delivered. What do they do with them all? I can imagine people in different wings of the house being served them in bed with their tea. Pearl lives on Beacon Street.
I’m standing next to Pearl, trying to figure out what you do. And I say, “Pearl, it’s Friday.”
“Yes.”
“It’s Friday, Pearl, a…at the Orpheum…”
She says, “Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.”
I say, “Yeah!”
And she says, “I’d love to go.”
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GARDENING
In my limited knowledge and understanding of such things,
I recognize three major types of organized gardens:
French, Japanese (done with plants and/or stones), and English.
French
I think of French gardens as symbolically the type one sees at Fontainebleau—taking nature and distorting it into an un-natural rigidity—nature’s beautiful variety shorn into a mechanistic horror. The “garden” in the film, “Last Year At Marienbad” disparages by only slightly exaggerating the fascistic stiltedness.
France’s Château de Villandry
& the “Last Year At Marienbad” gardens
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Japanese
Japanese gardens, for me, are the fusion of nature with human sensibility, adding a conscious esthetic to the not-quite-organized-enough glories of what mother nature produces. Shown here are the Japanese garden at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, and the best-known Japanese Zen garden in Kyoto, Japan (designed 15th century). I’m not sure what to say about the utterly stylized, intensely esthetic, formal rigidity of rock gardens!
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English
English cottage gardens have been described as “the perfect combination of charm and artful chaos.”
Landscape design should be a working with nature to create an esthetic synthesis. We have Machu Pichu, Scottish link golf courses, Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial. The opposite is the inhuman, anti-nature desecration of the French nobility’s idea of elegance. In a comparison between formal style and a certain abundance of emotional exuberance, I’m for life, vitality, exuberance. I think it’s obvious that I very much appreciate the Japanese fusion of nature with human sensibility, and that I’m completely enamored of the artful chaos of English cottage gardens.
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JEAN SHEPHERD Steel Mill Legend & (141c) ARTSY Barcelona and Gaudi
I say, “Okay, you want me to clean out the file cabinet, huh?”
He says, “No, just bring out the stuff. That’s your stuff.”
“This is my stuff?”
He says, “Yeah, bring them rat traps over here. I want to show you something.”
And so I take the rat traps with the big rubber band around them and some big cans of stuff. I put the rat traps on Gotch’s desk.
He’s chewing away on his first salami sandwich of the day. He says, “Alright now. You ever work a rat trap?”
“No. I’ve messed around with mouse traps once in a while.”
“Works the same way. Here, give me one of them.” He puts the sandwich down. He takes that trap and bends a piece back. “Now here, you take this little metal tongue here and hold it down, it’s stronger than hell. Be sure to hold it tight or it’ll get your finger. Put it in the little ring there. Now that trap is set. Now watch.” He takes his pencil and puts it on the trap. Bam! It busts that pencil in half.
I jump back.
“If the rat comes over and touches the little tongue here, he’s gonna get trapped. What you do is put the bait on that tongue. That’s what you’re gonna do. You’re gonna catch the rats around here.”
“I’m catching rats?”
“Yep. And I’ll tell you this. If you’re good as Stanley was, you’re gonna be damn good.”
I say, “Stanley?”
He says, “Stanley was here this spring catching rats. Best rat catcher we ever had. Fantastic. Got promoted to the main office.
“Stanley got promoted to the main office?”
Herman in the back chimes in, “Listen, kid, if you catch rats half as good as Stanley, you’re gonna be damn good.”
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Sagrada Familia
Best known of Gaudi’s works is the Sagrada Familia, a short walk from the Casa Mila. (The church is still in-process after being started over a hundred years ago.) Of course I’d visited it on my first stay in Barcelona. (The more traditional looking portion on the right front, was designed and built before Gaudi was put in charge.) I even climbed the narrow, winding stairs in one of the steeples to the point where one can see, far below, the entire city, and close up, another of the steeples.
When I was there, the exterior walls and the four main steeples were built, but the interior was still without a roof, so that it looked like a bombed-out building. Now it’s enclosed.
While in Barcelona I also visited the downtown older section with its gothic cathedral, Picasso Museum, and nearby elegant promenade with its stores, restaurants and vendors down the middle selling everything including small, colorful caged birds. This is the pedestrian street, Las Ramblas.
August 25, 2017 News Report:
Chilling moment tourists flee as van that killed 13 innocents,
speeds through bustling Las Ramblas on deadly terror mission.
I read the other day (early December, 2017) that the terrorists had been making explosives to strike the Sagrada Familia! However, the explosives accidentally detonated in the house where they were being prepared. I mentioned it to my wife, who wondered how many people would have been inside the church–and injured and killed. I had no idea. And realized, shocked at my mental glitch, that I hadn’t thought of the human injured but of how the explosion would have damaged Gaudi’s architecture.
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JEAN SHEPHERD Steel Mill Legend & (141b) ARTSY-Barcelona and Gaudi
The next morning I am all dressed up. I’ve got my new corduroy jacket that I got at Sears. I’ll be working in the office, see. I got myself a nice shirt and I got me one of those clip-on ties that they wear in the mill. And I don’t even have to wear safety shoes there. In the mill it’s considered a real status symbol if you got a job that you don’t have to wear safety shoes for. That means that you’re moving up the ladder.
I show up at five minutes to eight and all the chicks are coming to work in their blue uniforms. I see Sophie over there and I see Helen. “How are you, Sophie?” And she gives me the eye. She’s not used to seeing me here at this hour. I used to come running through with the mail. I casually walk over. “Hey, Sophie.”
She says, “Yea, what?”
“Sophie, I’m working here.”
“Here? What are you doing?”
“I don’t know. I’m working here.” Mr. Gotch’s assistant. I’m working in the tin mill assorting office!
She says, “Ohhh. See ya later.” She takes that big glove and flips a big piece of tin in my face.
I walk into the office and there’s Chester. This time he does not say, “What do ya got for me today?” He just looks up and says, “You’re two minutes late.”
“I was just out talking to Sophie.”
“You mean the big broad down there on number twelve?”
I say, “Yeah.”
“She’s alright! You ready to go?” With that he turns around and looks over at Herman, the guy sitting in the back. “Hey, Herman. How do you think he’s gonna do?”
Herman says, “We’ll see!”
Gotch says, “Alright, your stuff is at the bottom of the file cabinet over there.”
I say, “What stuff?”
“You just open it up. I’ll tell you what to do.”
I figure I’m going to have a desk like the other guys in the office, a telephone, a desk with a little nameplate on it. Mail’s going to come to me. You always have these dreams of glory. I walk over and open the bottom of the file cabinet. There’s a whole pile of stuff in there. “What’s this stuff?”
He says, “Get those things out of there.”
I reach in and I can’t believe what I get. There’s about fifteen big rat traps. “You mean these rat traps, Chuck?”
“Yeah, bring ‘em out.”
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Colonia Guell Crypt
The designs of angled columns, which people might think was a wild and ill-thought-out feature similar to those of Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia, and columns in the Park Guell, are all actually the fruits of Gaudi’s design based on carefully-worked-out angles based on engineering developed by him. He built large models with cords and weights based on the stresses of these constructions, then took photos of these and turned them upside down to incorporate the accurate physics of angles and stresses for his columns. The upper part with its spires was never built.
Photo of Model Showing Stresses for Columns
With Reversed Photo Below
Drawing of Proposed Chapel
Actual Chapel Interior.
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JEAN SHEPHERD Steel Mill Legend & (ARTSY 141a) Barcelona and Gaudi
I always looked forward to coming to that office, only one trip a day. Just going through that field of fantastic women, my safety glasses would cloud up with passion. I’d lay the mail down and say, “Hiya, Chuck.”
He’d say, “What ya got today?” At work they sort of develop a whole routine. “What ya got today?”
“Oh, just a couple of things, Chester.” I’d turn and go out and always adjust my safety glasses and I’d run through that crowd of women.
Here I am, with an unbelievable stroke of fate and fortune. Fantastic stroke. I am being assigned to the tin mill assorting office. Me! I say, “When do I go out there, Mr. Moss?”
“You report tomorrow morning at eight.”
“What am I going to do out there?” There were only three guys in that office. There was Chester, there was Mr. Kennedy, and a guy named Herman who would sit in the back with a punch stamp and pound on cards all day. “What am I going to do?”
“I don’t know. You report to Mr. Gotch.”
“Report to Mr. Gotch.”
“Yep.”
“I know Mr. Gotch, that’s Chester.”
“Well, report to Mr. Gotch. You’re working for Mr. Gotch.” At that point he pulls his hat down and he goes back to work. That means he is dismissing me.
I’m all excited. I go into the mailroom and say, “Hey, Freddy.” Freddy is my friend. We work the routes together. “Hey, Freddy, I’m getting assigned.
He says, “Where you goin’?”
“Tin mill assorting.”
“Oh my god, no kidding! Permanent?”
“I don’t know. I’m going to work in the tin mill assorting office.”
“With all those chicks?”
“That’s right.”
It is the double jackpot. Like getting assigned to heaven. You’re in charge of harp strings or something. I say, “Last day here, Freddy. I’ll see you tomorrow. I’ll drop by at lunchtime. They only work eight to five there, you know.” Of course in the mailroom we worked—oh god, what hours!
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BARCELONA, GAUDI’S ARCHITECTURE,
AND THE MARQUESA.
♠
ANTONIO GAUDI
Don’t know much about Catalonia except that Barcelona is there, and Barcelona–to me, as an innocent, ignorant foreigner who cherishes it as one of the glories of Spain and the location of most of Antonio Gaudi’s major architectural works–is as important in my imagination as New England is to the United States.
I’d discovered Gaudi’s architecture in photographs and books many year before I first visited Spain. So Barcelona had to be one of my goals when I toured Western Europe for five months in 1966. I parked my VW Beetle in front of Barcelona’s Casa Mila and was thrilled to find a sign saying “Pension Saxea” out front.
Casa Mila
Note Seaweed-like Balcony Railings.
Interior Entrance-way,
Street Seen Through Perforated Gate.
I climbed the stairs and entered the vestibule—there was an older Spanish woman, who noticed that I was staring at the interior architecture. We began talking and I found out that she was a marquesa and a relative of the Guell family who promoted and supported Gaudi in the early years of the 20th century. She lived in the pension. She told me that I needed to say that I wanted to stay in the pension a full week, and should I decide to leave earlier than that, just tell them then and leave. I got a room.
I spent many hours talking with the Marquesa of Gaudi, Picasso, Hemingway and others—she had known them all and many other cultural figures. For my European trip, I was, for the first time, growing a beard and I showed her my beardless passport photo. She responded, “Oh, don’t ever shave it off—you’d look just like ten million other Americans. I told Hemingway the same thing—don’t shave it off I told him. You’d look just like ten million other Americans!”
I wanted to see the roof of the Casa Mila. The Marquesa said it wasn’t open to the public (now it is), but she could get me access. She called her relative, a formally dressed senior who arrived in a new, black Dodge limousine (in Spain, the height of class in those days). He browbeat the pension’s manager, who finally gave in and I got to the roof.
A Bit of the Casa Mila Roof, Showing Some
of the Tiled Smoke Stacks.
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Casa Batllo
Gaudi did a lot with rooftops. Down the avenue from the Casa Mila is the Casa Batllo, the façade of which is aglow with multicolored spangles, and the roof of which, in addition to Gaudi’s sculptural chimneys, is dedicated to Saint George and the Dragon, the major feature of which is the tiled, multi-colored representation of the dragon’s scaled back. For the usual gratuity, the building’s custodian allowed me to spend time on the roof and photograph it. Downtown, what was then the city’s theater museum housed in a conventional-looking building, also had a special Gaudi roof, which, for the always necessary gratuity, I was allowed to stroll upon. The curved opening on the right side of the dragon’s back gives a view of Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia.
Casa Batllo Façade.
Note Bone-like Lower Columns and Dragon Scales of Roof.
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Park Guell
I took a bus to the park overlooking the city. This had been the first portion of the planned-but-never-built neighborhood of several dozen houses. Gaudi lived for some time in the only house built (later used as a museum to his life). The Guell Park entrance is elaborately designed, with the roof of the proposed market-place (yes, another roof) decorated with a winding series of benches covered with broken tile segments–that’s the front edge of the bench area seen in the top middle above.
Walkway Under a Park Roadway
Another major Gaudi site is the unfinished church in the Barcelona suburb that his patron, Guell, had built for people who were to live and work in the factory-based town. To get there I approached a taxi driver who was relaxing in his parked car on a Barcelona street. I told him I wanted to go the Colonia Guell to see the Gaudi chapel, stay for half an hour, and then be driven back to Barcelona. We worked out a fee and he drove me there.
Colonia Guell and more to come.
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JEAN SHEPHERD Kid Stories–HAM RADIO & (90) ARTSY–La La Land
More “Dots & Dashes”
So, by the age of thirteen I would sit in class in eighth grade and I would send code to myself by the hour, as I’m reading something—say, a geography book—I wouldn’t read it, I would send it to myself. I’d actually hear it in my head. The dots and dashes of the words. As a CW man, it got to the point when all of my world was bound by the sound of this language.
I was heading toward getting an amateur radio license, which had become an unbelievable hang up for me. I would carry my technical question-and-answer manual with me in every book I had. I’d be sitting in a study hall, supposed to be studying history, and stuck in there was my orange and black Q and A book, and I’m constantly thinking, ask yourself as if you didn’t know it: What is voltage regulation? Give me a definition of poor voltage regulation and a definition of good voltage regulation. And what percentage of deviation in voltage regulation is allowable under the law?
All the rest of the kids around me were living such an innocent world. They were going to movies and watching cowboy pictures, and I was concentrating on voltage regulation. I was concentrating on: Give the technical difference between a Class C amplifier from a Class B1 amplifier. Which is the more efficient? Why is a Class C amplifier used in RF applications and a Class AB amplifier is not used in RF applications?
It just began to pack my head all the time. At night I was lying in bed trying to go to sleep and I would hear in my head endless coded groups floating in out of the air around me. I’d hear commas for no given reason. How would you like to spend an hour in bed quietly trying to go to sleep and you’re hung up on the sound of a semi-colon? That, friends, is fanaticism.
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La La Land
Los Angeles has never interested me. It’s a land of goofy fads, Beach Boys adolescent sun and serf and sand, and the sidewalk where celebrities stick their hands in wet cement. It does have, nearby, David, a lifelong friend I hadn’t seen in decades, and his wife. Eventually, they’d take me to see a special Picasso exhibit, the Getty Museum, Venice, and a place to dip my big toe in the Pacific.
I was visiting La La Land, all expenses paid, on a Museum business trip to study a traveling exhibit I’d be designing for our museum. I’d stay with my good friend David and his family.
But, to be sure I’d see two important sites, as I got in the taxi upon arriving in La La, I asked the driver to take me to those places before he dropped me off where I’d be staying.
Eventually the driver found Simon Rodia’s
Watts Towers and he waited while I looked.
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Then the driver got me to
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House.
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From the Hollyhock garden, unexpectedly,
distantly, I saw the SIGN!
I hadn’t cared to see it but I couldn’t un-see it.
Besides, I admit, I am also a tourist.
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Yes, some of us ARTSY folk are New York snobs.
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JEAN SHEPHERD Kid Stories–HAM RADIO & (89) ARTSY Sculpted Landscapes
If anybody else had introduced me to short wave and to code, CW, I’d have said, “Aw, come on. What’re you talking about?” But because this guy played basketball (In Indiana, incidentally, basketball not only is a major religion, it is the major religion. All others sort of fade off down into the distance—Baptist, Catholic, and of that religion I can only say that there are people who are major priests of that religion). A recognized center is like a bishop—he’s near the Pope. The next ones are forwards. Forwards have a certain romantic quality about them. Then there is the guard, who, to me, is the most romantic of basketball players. He generally brings it up from the back court and sets the play. So here was Laurence, a recognized comer, man. He was a top freshman forward and was going to be in varsity next year. He was already approaching the god-status as a freshman.
The fact that he sat there and he talked on the radio—with code—knocked me out of the box. So I began to get into this thing. And it began to obsess me. I must say I understand religious fanatics. Once you’ve been a fanatic, you can understand a fanatic. You can’t talk a fanatic out of being a fanatic. There’s no conceivable way. It envelops you.
MUCH MORE HAM TO BE SERVED!
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Sculpted Landscapes—Golf Links
An unexpected pleasure for me, is my recent discovery of a special kind of golf course called “links.” Most courses seemed designed by bulldozing most of the landscape and smoothing it out for well-mowed grass of “fairway” and “green,” the natural “roughs” only allowed to survive along the edges, where golfers fear to go.
(Nature ground down and
mowed into a green-striped cloth-imitation.)
But a special kind of course, based in Scotland, the land that created golf, is situated between arable land and sea—the link between them where (because of the sandy nature of the earth there, I believe) crops won’t easily grow.
Thus, the design accommodates itself into these primitive-appearing landscapes where groomed grass becomes an integrated part of the rough and nearly untouched primeval growth. There is an accommodation, a fusion between Mother Nature and Man’s Hand. The land, even the grass-covered part, is irregular, crude nature not altogether subdued. The wind is strong, the carved out sand traps reinforced like ancient fortifications to prevent them from sifting away into themselves.
Golfers of all skill-levels, from beginners to top professionals, tend to find these playing fields recalcitrant because of their unexpected, inhospitably dystopian incivility. On the rare occasions when I watch on television, it’s not to see the play, it’s to admire the designer elegantly working with–and not against–nature. The British Open is played on links. It’s a joint activity played in a creation where expert humans interact with a stylized, slightly rough-hewn, and robustly alive nature.
(I’ve never in my life played golf.)
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