RUDIMENTS

RUDIMENTS, pt. 181 Making Cars I'd never been told much about things from my father, in the  short time I had anyway. He  seemed always under a lot of  pressure, whether to get things done or to somehow surpass some invisible goal of showing  he was as good or better than  other guys. (It never worked out). It colored everything he did, and I never figured it out. I couldn't think why someone would want to live that way  -  those were things that just weren't important in my mind,  what someone else 'saw' you as,  or where you yourself were within  some 'pecking order' of what really  was your own imagining. Yet, to him  that all was important, and it was  pretty sad too, in the sense that the  achievement being sought was not  really anything special at all. It was  all bargain basement stuff. When  you're all caught up in the low end  of things, every little extra clothespin  means an advancement,

RUDIMENTS, pt. 180 Making Cars One time a guy walked into a room full of my paintings (I'd done up the walls with my hangings), and he said, 'I like this; these are all mineral colors.' I hardly knew the guy except for that afternoon, and that comment threw me. They way he'd just blurted it out. Like an art critic adept. It surprised me, and then later as I sat around I began to realize what he meant. I don't and didn't often approach a painting or a work from the angle of color. I use color, yes, of course, and it plays a role, but I was always more interested in line and content. Those colorist guys and all their abstract swirls and blotches  - I got along with all that, but it was never foremost. I saw what he meant; the reds and browns and ochres in what he'd looked at were all earth-tones and soil colors. So I got to work on checking out some color theory and history  -  we'd been taught some

RUDIMENTS, pt. 187 Making Cars Poverty led me to black coffee because milk cost extra and had to be refrigerated. I never liked black coffee at all. Half the time I never even liked coffee, especially back then when coffee was most apt to be dead, overdone and stale diner stuff. Mud, commonly called, tending to gray. In 1967 there was no awareness of coffee at all, nor quality nor roasting nor any of that. Let alone coffee places just for the drinking of. Everything was in urns, kept hot and going stale all day long. It was terrible stuff. Drinking it black just made it all worse. The only public awareness of coffee was Savarin, Maxwell House, and this concocted coffee-inspector guy on TV called El Exigente. Supposedly a happy but tough-assed mule-rider who went through the fields inspecting beans for quality  -  good enough for somebody. I don't even remember what brand. It was all a crock, an advertising jumbo-campaign. And

RUDIMENTS, pt. 178 Making Cars You can't take a canoe on the ocean, but they're the same letters. Hmmm. I guess you could, but no one does. Or is it that no one dares? I wonder. Maybe it's no one reads. (Same letters, once more, as 'dares'). So many things are always happening. The guy who wrote that Christmas song, Silver Bells, he was Jay Livingstone, a sidekick of a songwriting guy name Ray Evens, with whom he teamed up. Before he was Jay Livingstone, he was, from birth, Jacob Levinson. All those Christmas carol guys were Jewish : Sammy Cahn, Jule Styne, and Irving Berlin. 'Silver Bells' was written as 'Tinkle Bells,' but the publisher changed it because of the common connotation of  'tinkle.' Livingstone also wrote the theme for 'Bonanza,' and 'Mr. Ed,' TV shows, and he also wrote 'Que Sera Sera,' 'Mona Lisa,' and the other Johnny Mathis hit, 'All the T