Internet | The Gad About Town

Opus 40

Posted on March 19, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

There are a handful of places and objects on the planet that photography under serves. Opus 40, in Saugerties, New York, is one of them. Built in an abandoned bluestone quarry in upstate New York by one man, Harvey Fite, Opus 40 is a contemporary American version of Stonehenge or the collection of Easter Island moai. It is one of my favorite places.

An aerial view. Photo by Tom Bookhout

Fite was a sculptor and fine arts professor at nearby Bard College when he purchased the bluestone quarry. If you have ever walked on a sidewalk in Manhattan, you have walked on bluestone from this or a nearby location. Using the rubble that had not become NYC sidewalks, Fite filled one six-and-one-half-acre section with hand-laid circles of bluestone paths and ramps, leading nowhere and everywhere, from fifteen feet below the ground level up to the magnificent centerpiece, the obelisk, a nine-ton, three-story-tall single stone, which from different perspectives seems to point at the nearby Catskill Mountains, join with the range, or appear to be the reason the Catskills are there. And Fite did it all alone, using ancient techniques. At first intended to be a showcase for his sculpture, over the next 37 years the site itself became Fite’s life work. He died in 1976.

Hurricane Irene in 2011 and Hurricane Sandy the following year delivered a one-two punch to the sculpture park; Irene saturated the ground beneath the ramps and walls and Sandy’s damage included a collapse of a very tall support wall. Fite’s stepson and his family have engaged the efforts of master stonewallers and stonemasons, who are using those stones that fell and can still be fitted together and finding others from local quarries to repair the damage and rebuild the broken sections. Where possible, they will employ Fite’s own tools and techniques to complete the repairs.

An estimated $30,000 is needed to fund the first stage of the work, and here, non-ancient techniques are being employed: an Indiegogo campaign is currently underway to raise the funds. Almost two months remain in the campaign, and over $6000 of the $30,000 has been raised as of today. The website has details of the perks sponsors will receive in return for their financial help.

If I had not been a student at Marist College, where Harvey Fite’s stepson was teaching, I quite possibly would still not know of Opus 40’s existence, even though I live in the same county. My teacher-friend grew up at Opus 40 and still resides there. In the early ’90s, I attended a friend’s wedding at Opus and in the summer of 1998, I volunteered there, helping direct parking for that year’s music acts. The quarry is a natural amphitheater and the obelisk is an eye-grabbing stage set; the concerts that summer included a blues festival, Orleans, and Pat Metheny.

Here is a brief video of Orleans performing at Opus 40 from around that time period:

The video below, made for the fundraising campaign, documents some of the landmark’s artistic significance and its cultural importance—with clips of Sonny Rollins performing there and Steve Earle, Chevy Chase, and Bela Fleck speaking about Opus 40—and details the amazing work the stonemasons have already contributed to the restoration project.

And this video features my friend explaining in greater detail the history of the quarry, his step-father, and how Opus 40 came to be.

About My About.me Page, Online Friends, and A New Award

Posted on March 17, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

On March 3, I went viral. My “About.me” page was featured on that website’s “popular” list, and my page, which usually receives about 150 views per day, was seen by 3051 other About.me users, 2000 within the first hour of being listed. Another 1300 visited the next day.

It was like being famous, minus the fame or anything fame-like.

According to its own publicity, About.me profiles are viewed 150 million times per month, which sounds an awful lot like publicity. The online identity service has about five million official, registered users, most of whom, like me, use it for free. In 2010, AOL purchased the site, and in 2012, its founders purchased it back from AOL, when AOL discovered (faster than it usually does) that it was not going to become bigger than Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn combined just by adding free subscribers.

Even the founders of About.me (the link is to the company’s WordPress blog) do not seem to harbor ambitions for it to be all of those websites rolled into one; instead, it is intended to be an online identity website. It’s a virtual business card service. As you can see from my personal page, it is the only location where one can find a connection to all of my pages (Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn), and—in several places, at the top of the page, at the bottom of the page, and twice in between—to my blog. The blog you are reading. It has a nice spooky photo that I took at Olana last year and a selfie I took with the laptop I am using right now.

Now, as far as I can see, there is no reason for anyone who is already reading this website right here—my chief means of expression in the whole, wide world—to visit my About.me virtual business card, and I am not advertising for the company here. But what happened on March 3, when I went viral, told me a lot about social media and online expectations. Since I launched this website in January, the number of direct visits from About.me to this blog is 22. Total. This includes that momentous day when thousands viewed my page and saw my links and (mostly) ignored my hints to check out “The Gad About Town.”

There is a show business saying that if a performer is a great enough talent, “you could put him (or her) behind a brick wall and he will still find a way to entertain.” While I believe this to be true in idealistic theory, I also think that not putting him behind a brick wall would be very very helpful. If a website is going to be worth a visit, publicity is going to help get that visit.

When an About.me user visits one’s page, their page appears on yours. I started to see a few users re-appear and then three-appear on mine. About.me added features such as a “Like Your Photo” button, and some of these individuals became correspondents. A few dozen correspondents became Twitter acquaintances. And a handful now communicate with me via “The Gad About Town” and their own blogs. So those 22 visits out of 49,000 views (my total so far since November) are very valuable, as they resulted in real readers who are becoming that rarest of thing: real, online friends.

One of these real, online friends, Tazein Mirza Saad, lives in Singapore and maintains a very energetic, inspiration-filled website with about 3000 followers. She awarded me the fireworks trophy seen at the top of this post, the “Wonderful Team Membership Award,” a name that is a mouthful. But I still accept it.

2014 WordPress Awards Season

As with all of these WordPress awards, there are rules, which include: “1. The Nominee shall display the logo on their post/page/sidebar. 2. The Nominee shall nominate several best team members. 3. The Nominee shall make these rules, or amend rules keeping to the spirit of the Wonderful Team Member Readership Award. 4. The Nominee must finish this sentence and post: ‘A great reader is …'”

Among the readers whom I met first via About.me, then Twitter, and with whom I now communicate via our blogs, I am grateful to have “met” Tazein; Terry Irving, who gave me a big boost on his great website about writing and journalism within a couple weeks of my WordPress debut, and whose first novel “Courier” is due out in April; and Catherine Townsend-Lyon, who has created two huge and hugely helpful websites dedicated to helping people in recovery (“Recovery Ramblings” and “Just a Recovery Author Learning to Be a Better Writer“), and who has shared encouragement with me several times. All three are “great readers,” active readers who generously give other writers encouragement. My thanking them here does not require them to do anything. How’s that for an award?

There are several other writers with whom I communicate via our WordPress blogs, and I only hope both lists continue to grow. We aren’t behind any brick walls here.

An Award-Winning Blog

Posted on February 5, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

A nomination for a “Liebster Award” is something of a blogger’s—or at least a WordPress blogger’s—rite of passage. In German, the word “liebster” means “dearest” or “beloved,” so sharing a nomination for the award and asking the nominee to pass it on (which is one of the stipulations of the award) is a way to make the world a little more dear. Billie nominated me this week, so I am a dear in her headlights. Please visit her website—it is worth your time, and her design and approach have given some direction to my plans for this website.

As I have detailed elsewhere, my column won a prize from the New York Press Asssociation some years ago, but most of my pride that day was for the writers I edited who won awards for their work, themselves. Those were some of the best phone calls I have ever been asked to make. This is the first time work of mine has been nominated by someone other than my employer. A Liebster Award nomination is the same thing as winning—as long as I pass it on and nominate several blogs that have fewer than 1000 followers each and give them some props and ask them to take part. (This award is kind of a pyramid scheme, minus the con. It’s actually just a cool way to build readership and showcase some blogs that are worth getting to know.)

Besides “Ireland, Multiple Sclerosis & Me,” my nominated blogs are “Mywordsontheline,” “Words, Words, Words,” “Read. Write. Teach,” “Writing with Purpose,” and “black is white.”

If I have nominated you, and you choose to accept my nomination of your blog and continue with the Liebster award process, here are the rules:

1. Thank the person who nominated you, and post a link to their blog on your blog.

2. Display the award on your blog—by including it in your post and/or displaying it using a “widget” or a “gadget.” (Note that the best way to do this is to save the image to your own computer and then upload it to your blog post.)

3. Answer eleven (11) questions about yourself, which will be provided to you by the person who nominated you.

4. Provide eleven (11) random facts about yourself.

5. Nominate five to 11 blogs that you feel deserve the award, blogs that have less than 1000 followers each. (Note: you can always ask the blog owner for this information since not all blogs display a widget that lets the readers know how many followers they have.)

6. Create a new list of questions for the bloggers you nominate to answer.

7. List these rules in your post (You can copy and paste from here.) Once you have written and published it, you then have to then:

8. Inform the people/blogs that you nominated that they have been nominated for the Liebster Award and provide a link for them to your post so that they can learn about it (they might not have ever heard of this prestigious honor).

Here are the questions that were sent to me and that I now send on with my replies: (in the case of the first question, change “Ireland” to “upstate New York”)

What do you think of when you think of Ireland?
The Hollywood version, probably: “The Quiet Man,” etc. I studied James Joyce in graduate school and have ambitions to reread “Ulysses” this year. I also have ambitions to see Ireland in person someday …

What food is too much work for you to eat?
Anything too hands-intensive. Lobster. I can still work chopsticks.

Did you ever have a tree fort growing up? How about a secret club?
My dad laid some planks in a tree in our backyard, and I remember some steps nailed to a tree. I never liked climbing trees or even jungle gyms. I seem to have developed my healthy fear of falling from the start, before ataxia.

What technology (if any) in today’s world are you suspicious of?
Anything controlled remotely or automatically—drones, online bots.

What is the first thing you do in the morning and the last thing you do at night?
Start boiling water for coffee (I love my coffee press). Fall asleep watching Netflix.

What (if anything) would you absolutely refuse to do under any circumstances? Why?
Physically injure an animal.
Hum. I don’t hum.

If you could ask one person one question and get a completely honest answer, who would it be and what would you ask?
Maybe my great-grandparents (great-grandfather, I suppose) on my mother’s side about what made them leave Russia and move to America.

What is the first thing you learned to cook? Did you enjoy the experience?
The first thing I actually remember cooking for myself (or knew that I knew how to) is french toast.

What thing sucks most of your free time away? Do you enjoy it?
Online social media. Yes, I enjoy being in touch and expanding my circle of friends.
When my health insurance starts up again, I will be spending a lot of time in doctors’ offices. Because of my ataxia, I have a neurologist and a cardiologist.

Describe a time when a small decision by you brought big consequences (good or bad).
If I knew that the night I drank my last drink was going to be the night I had my last drink … it was not a decision, not one made by me, at least, and it was small in the scheme of things. The universe did not change when I stopped, but when I stopped, my universe changed.

What major historical thing(s) happened in your lifetime? Has it changed your life?
In my lifetime, there have been many major news stories. There were two presidential impeachment cases, one of which provides me my earliest memory of a news story, and the later one I wrote about in a newspaper. Space exploration accidents. The realization that climate change is happening and more man-made than not.
Mandela.
The social neuroses caused by the Cold War. I probably still have those echoing in my psyche.
September 11.
Chernobyl.
The announcement last year that Voyager 1 had left the solar system affected me deeply; the “pale blue dot” photo.

Eleven random facts about me:

1. The number four is my lifelong “secret lucky number.” (Anyone who has gambled with me knows about this. Read: The Gad About Town: Against NYS Proposition 1.) Now, I know that in most of the world’s luck traditions, if one declares out loud that something is secret and lucky, one has immediately kiboshed all secrecy and luck out of that thing’s existence, but that is the beautiful thing about my “secret lucky number 4”: It remains lucky and maybe even grows in power every time I speak of my special relationship with it.

2. I left New Paltz in 1995 to work in Narrowsburg, NY, and moved back to New Paltz in 1997. I left New Paltz again in 2000 to work in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and returned to New Paltz in 2006. (There are legends about New Paltz and eternal return and gazing upon the nearby Wallkill River—I am legend, I suppose.)

3. Depending on my relative levels of optimism or pessimism, I may refer to my spinocerebellar ataxia as an “illness” versus a “condition.” The latest feature of this condition that I have been noticing of late (first noticed last year) is that when I can not see my feet, I lose track of which is which. I may think I’m tapping my right, but it’s my left that’s annoying people around me. After going to bed, I may think my left leg itches, only to scratch it and find it was my right, or worse, that I am scratching the mattress.

4. I pretended to write before I knew how to write. There may even now be pieces of furniture at my family’s house with my crayon scribblings on and in them—I did not draw, I wrote, wavy lines that I would then interpret to my parents as a story. I’ll guess I was about three or … four. See? It must have been a lucky number.

5. I am one of the least ambidextrous humans on earth. When I sprained my right side a few years ago (falling asleep in an office chair), I learned that I could not write my name left-handed. This was a severe disappointment, as I spent many hours as a child trying to become ambidextrous and had trained myself to write at least my name with my left hand. The skill has left me.

6. I am very audiologically sensitive (I do not know if that is even a term). I can identify voiceover actors, even when famous ones are used anonymously. The downside of this is a sensitivity to certain noises … if the faucet in your kitchen sink is dripping, I will excuse myself from your living room to see if the tap can be tightened or if the faucet swung away from any container under it. Sadly, this sensitivity does not translate to any musical ability. I have none, just an appreciation for music and performance.

7. I see words as I speak them.

8. If you have a trivia team, I am an asset. My areas are American political history, baseball, English literature, broadcasting history.

9. My favorite animals growing up were dinosaurs. My favorite dinosaur was the triceratops. In the children’s books about dinosaurs, the triceratops always seemed to get into a tangle with the T-Rex and walk away.

10. I remember most people’s names after one hearing, especially if I also saw it written down. I can not, however, remember jokes or poems.

11. Formal logic is a weakness. In Geometry class, it once took me eight steps in a proof to establish one leg of a triangle equal to itself. It amazes me that I can design this webpage.