I am absolutely thrilled to report here that I will be spending a year in Antarctica, having just finalized a contract as a grant-supported scientific writer for the United States Geological Survey.
This is a truly enviable position for which I am very grateful — especially to Eugene Landings and his fellow board members of the USGS Mid-Atlantic Division in Washington, DC. The final candidates for this federally supported position were indeed a competitive group, and I am honored that the board selected me to fill this important short-term consulting position. Thanks too to Mr. John Blair, Senior Biologist at Outpost 31 of the United States Antarctic Research Program, for the time he took to interview me via telephone.
I am also quite grateful to R.J. MacReady, my Mary Washington College Alumnus, for alerting me to this position and motivating me to apply. I wouldn’t have sat down to fill out that lengthy application if it hadn’t been for R.J. assuring me that I had the chance. Thanks for the confidence you instilled in me, “Flyboy!”
Those who are fluent in the natural sciences know that the USGS, despite its low profile, fulfills a critically important national mission — studying new frontiers, their landscapes, their natural resources, and any threats to those resources. As part of the USARP, I will employ my technical writing experience to document some our nation’s leading scientists in exploring Antarctica and its geological infrastructure. I might also be working with their European colleagues, as Norway operates a separate research facility 50 miles away.
I will be staying at “Cosmos House” at Outpost 31; Mr. Blair sent me the pictures you see below.
Here’s The Thing — you might not be hearing much from me for … maybe another 13 months! I will need to leave for Antarctica on May 6th, and I’ll need to bundle up and make all sorts of personal preparations before I depart. Then it’ll be a full year with a very busy schedule and somewhat limited Internet access. Communications specialist Robert Windows has explained to me that all communications are routed via satellite, and they are occasionally hampered by weather.
I’ll update you all further as additional details develop! In the meantime, please wish me luck!
I have entered into a period of my life at which fiscal responsibility is of paramount importance. So of course I bought a $35 skull-shaped interactive lightning-shooting plasma lamp with no warranty last night from Spencer’s.
This is possibly the best decision I have ever made in my life. Aside from the massive coolness evident in the pictures below, it has the added feature of actually being possessed. Consider the following:
It is impossible to photograph. Those photos you see below? They were yielded from a Google image search. Something goes wrong every single time I try to snap a shot of my product in action — you cannot see the sublimely excellent rainbow lightning shooting from its base to the inner circumference of the glass skull. It just shows a whitish, otherworldly flare! Like angel fire! Or the wrath of Abbadon! Or anything, ever, in a J.J. Abrams movie!
The MOMENT after I attempted these photos, the battery light on my digital camera flashed and the entire device went dead. COINCIDENCE?
EVERY time I turn it on, my computer malfunctions. I SWEAR I am not making this up. Whenever the lamp is activated, I lose all control of my cursor, which simply leaps and twitches and shudders around my screen like a terrified jitterbug. (That is a real species, right?)
Anyway, I cannot articulate how wicked this thing is. It’s a damn fine product. Like any plasma lamp, when you touch it, the caged lightning shoots to the point where your hands make contact with its surface. [EDIT: “wicked” is early 80’s slang for something that is very, very good, and very, very impressive.]
This product will be an outstanding muse for a horror writer who hasn’t published or posted anything in a very long time. (I know you people have been totally cool about that. Would you believe I have a bunch of handwritten short stories that I just need to typeset and submit? There’s a really cool time travel story!)
It also has an “audio” function which is kind of a mystery to me … apparently this is a function in which only sound activates the lightning? I switched that on, then clapped a few times, but nothing happened. I was perplexed. (The third photo below illustrates me being perplexed.) Then I just began shouting random words at it. I started with “NATE WADE!!!” I have no idea why; apparently there’s some free association thing going on there that I can’t explain.
Still no luck. I consulted the packaging but found its instructions sparse. They reminded me that this product indeed has a “Sound Responsive Mode,” but says little of help beyond that. Then the box exhorts me repeatedly to “GET THE PARTY STARTED,” but those are redundant instructions, because, Christ, I do that every time I breathe.
Tonight I am going to blast Slipknot’s “Psychosocial” to find out if that will do the trick. I figure that’s just the song to placate an angry ghost. I’ll also replace the batteries in my camera, and this time try to shoot video.
Unless my camera now is just too demonically damaged. We’ll see.
Here’s something I’ve been meaning to post for a while now — I am the proud owner of two “photographic virtual silkscreens” by the talented Alexandria artist Steve Miller. I mentioned these prints on the blog when Steve sent them to me, but I never posted photos.
Steve is an old friend of mine, and a fellow graduate of Mary Washington College. (No absurd “UMW” appellations will appear on this blog.) As I’ve mentioned here in the past, some of my favorite memories of college were partying with the gang at Steve’s room in “The Tunnel” between Mason and Randolph Halls. (I was a nervous and hyperactive freshman in the Fall of 1990; Steve and a few other upperclassmen there took me under their collective wing, and taught me to chill out and listen to the Beatles like a respectable Virginian young man.) Steve is the tall guy in the shades in our group photo below.
But Steve was also a great friend because he’s one of the first true artists I had in my peer group. He was a great creative influence, and taught me to dig good music, laid back friends and offbeat, unusual art. I’d like to think it made me a far more well rounded young person. To this day, whenever I hear The Allman Brothers (whose work was gospel to our crowd), I think of The Tunnel.
Steve’s work with virtual silkscreening was my introduction to the medium. It’s cool and trippy; I love the vibe it brings to my place.
Let’s see if I understand the story here … if you reach the top of Maine’s Cadillac Mountain during autumn or winter, you can see the sun rise over the United States for the first time that day? Hot damn if that isn’t a great excuse for a road trip. I’ve been hoping to take a long journey to Maine with a couple of buddies of mine in New York — this would be a perfect destination.
Mount Desert Island, where the mountain is situated, is so far north that I figure it must be easy to just hop on a boat and hit Nova Scotia. That’s a place I’ve always wanted to see, ever since we studied it in Geography 101 at Mary Washington College. I might have gotten a “D” in that class, but Nova Scotia’s beauty was still not lost on me.
The first group of photos here is from the “Bulletin of the State Normal School” in 1915. The last one was captioned “The Cannon Pits.” Wikimedia Commons, from which I took all of these, often includes the original yearbook texts.
I wonder if the mounds of dirt we see as “the cannon pits” here are the same ones that still existed in the woods just south of Bushnell Hall in 1990. I lived at Bushnell my freshman year and wandered over there a few times; it hid a nice vantage point overlooking William Street heading downtown — it was where I smoked my first cigarette.
A few of the kids said those mounds were the remains of Civil War gun emplacements; at least one reported speaking with a ghost. The site was overgrown and entirely unrestored when I was a student. Are these the same?
This photo was taken from the 1916 “Battlefield” yearbook. This is “the Dramatic Club,” and the caption for the photo appears to include a reference to the World War I occupation of Belgium by Germany: “Since its organization, the Dramatic Club has presented, on an average,two plays a year. The proceeds have usually been given to the Deco-rative Committee to be used in decorating the School. Last year, one-third of the proceeds was sent to the Belgians. The aim of the Club is to studyas well as present plays. We have joined the Drama League of America, from which we hope to gain beneficial results.”
These photos are taken from “the Bulletin” in 1917. I get the sense my “Generation X” alumnae studied slightly different curricula.
The girls in 1917 also had a far more generous assessment of the City of Fredericksburg than the kids that I remember: “Its climate is ideal, and we know of no city that has a more favorable health record. It is progressive in its government, and has recently adopted thecommission form of government. The city is favored with superior telegraph and telephone facilities, ample mail service, water supply,gas, electric lights, and all the usual city conveniences.”
Here’s what they had to say about their dorms: “The buildings, as the photographs show, are large, convenient, and handsome, and are equipped with all modern conveniences for the comfort of the students and the work of the school. The dormitoriesare of the Ionic and Doric types of architecture and are the shape ofthe letter H. The students and several members of the faculty livein the buildings. Every students room is well lighted and ventilated.In fact, there is no dark room in the building except a few rooms used exclusively for storage purposes.”
A couple of Facebook posts last night cheerfully proclaimed the 30th Anniversary of The Beastie Boys’ “Licensed to Ill.” That’s mostly right, I guess … the album was released in 1986, although it came out on November 15, not the end of February.
I remember “Licensed to Ill” being a phenomenon when I was a freshman at Longwood High School — reverence for it transcended a lot of high school subcultures. (And at Longwood, I think those subcultures overlapped considerably more than your typical John Hughes film would suggest.) The preppie kids loved the album, the jocks loved it, and a lot of the honors kids were into it too — not to mention just mainstream kids and random weirdos like me. My favorite song was “Brass Monkey;” I was thrilled whenever it was played at parties. (I can’t feature it here, as there are no authorized videos of it online.)
This album had what I remember as a unique vibe to it in 1986. People online call the Beastie Boys “the first white rappers.” I don’t know if that’s true. (Some people said the same thing about Vanilla Ice only four years later). And I’m guessing such a distinction shouldn’t be important. But the Beastie Boys were different.
Previously, rap was perceived only as a kind of counterculture art form for disaffected, young, urban African-Americans. The Beastie Boys were a rap group specifically with which suburban white kids could identify. I hope I’m not saying anything politically incorrect here — of course we all realize that any music can be appreciated by anyone, according to their tastes. (People are occasionally surprised when I myself can recite the Geto Boys as easily as W. H. Auden’s poetry.) And all sorts of kids in the mid-80’s liked Run-D.M.C. and The Fat Boys — they just didn’t have the huge, visible mainstream appeal that the Beastie Boys had.
The Beastie Boys had a wider appeal. Their music was irreverent — they sang about “Girls,” liquor, and the “Right to Party,” in a manner suggesting that they’d probably never been altar boys. They were drunken, pot-smoking malcontents, and expressed some not terribly progressive attitudes toward women. Yet it was perfectly natural, or culturally expected, to hear them blasted at a parentally approved, non-alcoholic party for young teenagers at a suburban, middle class home. The same preps who wore “Ocean Pacific” and played with hacky sacks also played the Beastie Boys. So did some kids in Key Club and the honors classes. A couple of cheerleaders I knew had crushes on Mike D. And it never seemed unusual or ironic, like that time when a nearly all white, suburban crowd chanted along to Boogie Down Productions’ “South Bronx” at a Longwood Junior High School dance.
For some reason, the Beastie Boys’ broad fan base was never really evident among the student body at Mary Washington College — although The Jerky Boys and the Geto Boys both had their share of fans there. I don’t remember them being played once. I think maybe it was because that small southern college subculture leaned so heavily on classic rock and the new “alternative,” with new wave and punk having strong, visible minorities of fans. (Man … if I had a dime for every time time I heard The Allman Brothers in college, I could have paid off my student loans a day after graduation.)
Strangely, I wound up listening to “Licensed to lll” the most often about two decades later, when I was in my mid-30’s. I was going through two weird phases in my life. The first was a newfound love of hip-hop and rap, because I am a weird guy, and I’m always late to the party with these things. The second was a bizarre, temporary sense of financial responsibility. I was constantly saving money. (I think maybe I wasn’t eating right or something. It didn’t last.) But I was constantly listening to old or cheap secondhand CD’s, instead of buying new ones or one of those newfangled mp3 players. (At the time, the iPod’s antecedents seemed just too high-tech and opulent to me.) So there was always a leather case of 80’s and 90’s music CD’s riding shotgun with me in my 1992 Ford Taurus.
I was driving frequently between Whitestone, Queens and my girlfriend’s apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn, rocketing up and down “the 278,” the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. The Beastie Boys were my miscreant co-pilots; “No Sleep till Brooklyn” was both a kick-ass song and situationally apropos. I played the album constantly, along with L.L. Cool J.’s “Mama Said Knock You Out,” and the “MTV Party To Go Volume 2.” Then I’d swap those out with Toad the Wet Sprocket’s more mellow, sensitive “Fear,” just to remind myself that I really was just a softspoken college boy who’d grown into a nerdy thirtysomething (“nerdysomething?”).
I found out recently that Adam Yauch (the Beastie Boys’ member “MCA”) died of cancer. This happened four years ago, I just hadn’t heard. For some reason, it was especially unsettling to learn that a rebellious entertainment figure from my teen years had died from an illness that I usually associate with people older than me. I never loved the Beastie Boys as much as I loved U2, Depeche Mode or Tori Amos, but I found it more troubling than I would have expected. I’m not sure why, but I’ve decided not to dwell on it.
At any rate, if you still love Ad-Rock, Mike D. and MCA, you can play the embedded videos below. But you absolutely should pull up “Brass Monkey” on Youtube to get your full 80’s vibe on.
That headline isn’t a typo — the name of this group actually is “The The,” which made them incredibly hard to Google for me for a very long time. Turns out song titles help out a lot in online searches.
I used to opine that Depeche Mode was a sexier Pink Floyd with a faster beat. (Relax purists, I know that absolutely no one can truly compare to Pink Floyd.) I like to think of “The The” as though they were a low-tech garage-band equivalent of Depeche Mode — like maybe somebody crossbred Mode with Weezer, and threw some saxophone in.
Anyway, this 1993 album, “Dusk,” brings back college memories for me in the same way that “They Might Be Giants” or “Three Dog Night” probably does for my classmates.
Mary Washington College, just under two years before America entered the First World War.
Is this Monroe Hall? The trees behind it appear lower, suggesting the slope down to Sunken Road.
It’s amazing. I lived on the campus for four years, but almost never stopped to ponder (or even bother to ask) how old those buildings really were. If this is Monroe, then those twin basement windows, far right, were where a good-natured “Macroeconomics 101” teacher gently advised me that I “could have done better in” his class in the Spring of 1990. It was the mildest of reproaches; I think he only meant that I was bright and should have studied harder than a “C” student.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 