A Flashback to 2009

Occasionally I attempt to sound as if I have read something - generally when applying for a teaching position.  Here's an attempt from 2009.  Odd as it sounds, I actually believe this...

Some Thoughts Regarding Education

Through the education of others we educate ourselves. It is the responsibility of each member of any given profession to relay not merely the facts of the profession to the next generation, but also the evolved understanding that experience engenders, to put flesh to the skeleton; an over reliance on desiccated scholastics will create a generation lost in a sea of unprecedented knowledge, uncertain of goals, frustrated and rendered cynical by the journey.
The professional must, however, develop the tools to communicate the knowledge. The initial training process in any profession can be, in itself, a Byzantine maze that precludes the time necessary for introspection. The how is learned by rote; the why must come with experience; it becomes a challenge to communicate the why. Peering into such an abyss tempts the abyss to peer back--easier to follow the advice of Candide and "tend to the garden" than to show the future generations that the sun also rises for every sunset.
So with the rigors of one discipline we must consider the addition of another. After a time of working our craft, we must again put to work on framing it for others to see, or better, to understand. The talent is not always innate; creative approaches often need to be scavenged with truncheon and guile. But once honed, the new talent cannot help but enrich the base of the original profession.
Certainly, there have been those for whom education has been for its own sake, an insular amusement designed to foster a patronized derision of others. May they be content in their solitude, for a secret not shared is lost, and a perception not spoken is stillborn.

John Dewey felt that education should be life itself, not a preparation for living. Now, having poured over many a forgotten volume, having made lapses great and small, having the germinal understanding gained by every misstep and every success, I turn to the second phase of my responsibility–to educate others so that I may continue to educate myself.

McPharmacy on Youtube

This is rather a classic, from Youtube via Xtranormal, and it pretty much sums up a week in a retail pharmacy setting....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOzRt1x2FPk

Post #10 - Video Memorial for Harry Middleton, Part 2

Material mainly from 1987-2007....

Video Tribute #1 for Dad

This is a youtube link - this runs about 7 minutes - and WHOA just realized I have a box of about 500 SLIDES to transfer too.... anyway, this is material from about 1928-1985.

Post #9 - Harry Middleton Remembered 2011

3am phone calls are never good news, and so came the announcement that my father, in decline for several years and hospitalized while in Mexico since late April, had died following a heart attack.  He would have been 83 this July.

Our family has never been one for funerals, so we will be coordinating a memorial either in or near his Michigan home sometime soon once arrangements can be made to transport his ashes back to the States.  Our concerns and cares are now for his widow, my stepmother Irma, who has been at his side for nearly 25 years.

Harry Middleton, age 82, went to tend his final garden during the early hours of May 31. After several years of declining health, he died of a heart attack in Puerto Vallarta, several hours from his Mexico winter home in Cuernavaca, Morelos.

He married Winifred in 1953 and with her had two sons, James Harry of Battle Creek, and David Alan of Grand Rapids, Michigan. They both survive. A stepson from Winifred’s first marriage, Robert Albright of Lindsay, Ontario, also survives. Winifred succumbed to cancer in 1986.
His subsequent marriage to Irma Woo of Mexico City was a triumph of perseverance over challenges of communication and distance, aligned with a desire to live where, if one mentioned snow, "they never heard of it, and if you mentioned ice, they put it in a glass." Taking on the new role of grandfather, he especially encouraged the education of "Monstero," now Dr. David Rosas. Irma, her three daughters, and their children also survive.
Harry attended college at Ferris and the University of Kansas before beginning his career with the Michigan Consolidated Gas Company (now DTE Energy), starting as custodian in Big Rapids and working his way up to district manager in Escanaba, and finally, regional manager of the Taggart Field gas storage facility at Six Lakes, Michigan. He retired from there in 1978, following several years of increasing blindness due to macular degeneration.
Harry had been a member of the Big Rapids Elks Club, was a long-time member of the Lakeview Lion’s club, and he loved gardening, recycling, sharing a story, and tipping waitresses with tiny onions. In keeping with his wishes, there will be no funeral.

An openhouse/memorial celebrated his life in 2011.

A facebook page has been created in his memory, for the comments and reminiscences of friends and family: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100002542415970

Site A - Mt Carmel, Big Rapids:

Site B: Lakeview Cemetery, Lakeview, Michigan:

And there was wicked weather the evening of the memorial...but the sign remained lit!

Memorial Day, 2016:

 Sparrow salutes Sgt. Middleton

And 2018:

 2019:

 

And 2022:

 

2024:

2025:

(It appears like someone at the memorial garden drove over the headstones - and removed an urn - had to exhume the stone a bit. Time for a new foundation!)

 

Post 8 - Pawing through the archives...."1961" broadcast

In 1991, just before doing "impossible things before breakfast" became "doing breakfast as an impossibility,"  I worked with the Grand Rapids Radio Players on a 30 year anniversary celebration of WGVU-FM's first broadcast.  When the program aired a month later (after much shameless self promotion and talking it up among friends and family), I discovered my entire performance wound up on the editing room floor.  Such is life.
Anyway, I did have some old VHS material of some of the rehearsals, and they remained unwatched until very recently - tonight, actually.  Also, I found the S-VHS material for the live performance - one reel was only the soundtrack, the other was never actually watchable - the camera dropped every other frame during recording, resulting in a damaged document.  This was, sadly, the only video record that was made of that evening.
So, I tossed in the rehearsal footage with the crumbling remains of the live performance of that evening in October of 1991, and now place it here to show those who may have wondered that, yes indeed, I did participate in 1961: The Year That Time Forgot.

It still remains a happy memory....

Post 7 - Another Random Sketch

Like I mentioned, it was a looooooooooooooong seminar.....now I need a new sketchbook!

Post 6 - Tick Tock in Dearborn

May 20 - 2011 - Dearborn - After about six hours of a conference on pain,  I became slightly distracted by an elderly gentleman nudging his way along the table in front of me. His gluteal muscles being maximus, he succeeded in knocking over each and every empty (and one partially full) cup of Starbucks' brew near the edge as he used the table as a guide for his travel.

That and my aching lower back probably served as an inspiration.

Post 5 - After a four year nap.... let's rouse the keyboard

So little to do, so much time....

Post 4 - Oskar Fischinger Saved My Life

OK, we can’t take it literally. We never met. In fact, when I first heard the name Oskar Fischinger, he had been gone for over ten years.
Nevertheless, this German artist awoke a dormant portion of my skull. It was 1977, it was a Sunday, and I was housesitting for a professor on summer vacation, staring at a stack of sketches I had made for still another professor’s lab manual on organic chemistry. My brother called from the family home (he had the summer off) and told me that Camera Three was going to run a program on "some guy that worked at Disney."
At 11am, I tuned in on the professor’s TV, and by 11:30 I was no longer a pharmacy student facing a mind-numbing future being an insurance monkey for a corporate chain. Well, let me rephrase that–I was still facing that bleak pharmaceutical future, but my mind would not be the property of a Cunningham’s, a Walgreen’s, or a Rite Aid. That afternoon, I set the lab manual sketches aside and began making random circles and lines, one atop the other, in the traditional animation style I had set aside while pursuing the "proper" career of becoming a pharmacist...a few weeks later, I filmed them with my Super 8mm camera and spliced the results into the middle of another animated film I had also set aside for the sake of academics.
In the meanwhile, I had written a note to Camera Three expressing my thanks for their program. A few weeks later, I received replies, not only from Camera Three, but from the widow of Oskar Fischinger, Elfreide, who sat on the discussion panel that Sunday morning between poet- filmmaker William Moritz and moderator-animator John Canemaker.
She thanked me for my comments and recommended Dr. Moritz’s extensive article on her husband in Film Culture written in 1974 (if you can find a copy, get it, No. 58-60), of which she had several copies. I bought one, and read it to ribbons. Our communications were periodic after that, and when VHS became an industry standard, I bought a copy of her husband’s films from her. I have also nearly run that tape to bare mylar as well. We exchanged Christmas cards, I continued to fumble around as a pharmacist, first in the Detroit area, then in Battle Creek, and still made short animated films on super 8mm for the festival circuit. Pharmacy paid well enough for me to pick up 16mm copies of Fischinger’s work from Elfreide as the years went on, and I built a tiny archive of his work.
In 1988, we finally met. I was attending the Ottawa International Animation Festival when ahead of me I saw a couple walking. It was Elfreide Fischinger with William Moritz. She was attending the showings, and he was putting on a program of abstract animation featuring Oskar’s work. It was a wonderful encounter. She told me her younger brother was a pharmacist in Germany contemplating retirement (it is true everywhere–pharmacists never retire), Dr. Moritz told me gossip surrounding Viking Eggeling and Hans Richter, and we all met the next day for breakfast.
We continued our written communication, supplemented by the occasional phone call, and when I first married in 1992, she sent a beautiful poster for one of Oskar’s retrospectives as a wedding gift.
So when Elfreide passed away in 1999, it was not just a name being wiped from the upcoming 2000 census, it was the loss of a friend.
Dr. Moritz completed his testament to Oskar Fischinger, Optical Poetry, just before he faded away in 2004. This book is in print. Get it. Get two. (Indiana University Press, www.iupress.indiana.edu)
And John Canemaker, the host who brought both of them onto CBS that Sunday morning, remains a champion of animation history and independent production -- he has finally won an Academy for his animation work and is helping bring Disney to the realization that their unsung heroes have populated their archives with astonishing works of art.
I have come upon a new DVD of Fischinger’s work, from the Center for Visual Music (http://www.centerforvisualmusic.org/) that is an incredible, beautifully preserved and digitally restored collection of ten of his films, as well as offering a huge selection of photographs and filmed experiments. For anyone interested in how abstract animation can actually work, both as an art form and as a source of entertainment, this is the place to begin.
It could save your life.



(Here's a teeny version of my Sfumato #1, inspired by Oskar Fischinger, circa 1999)

Post #3 - A Day in the Day

Unexpected Holiday at a Clinic Pharmacy
In mid-January, the snow in Michigan fell and joined some random ice capades, allowing the Battle Creek site to explore its options during a complete power failure. Shivering was one, sorting the highest stack of prescriptions while wearing mittens was another. However, since it was dark, the prescription numbers were out of sequence, so they were all taken outside and resorted on the dashboard of Kurt’s Camaro, which drove rings around Jim’s Saturn in a fit of irony.
Meanwhile, inside the clinic, some talking beavers began driving motorcycles with a somber Abraham Lincoln. No, actually, that was the advertising clock on the wall, which kept time with its AA batteries (actually, double-A, since AA meets only on Wednesdays), pacing the passage of hours in Bangalore, India. This has been a goal in Battle Creek: to have a "wall of time" to coordinate G***a activities world-wide. The steady clack-clack-clack-clack (not to mention clack-clack) could be heard over the, well everything, since there was nothing humming with electrical current.
By 10am, it appeared that the power outage would be permanent. So, having resorted the prescriptions by number, then by size, then by shades of hue (Hugh was also late that day, being caught by his undertoad, but that’s a tale for later), these G****en denizens of the Surreal City (formerly known as the Cereal City) went in search of caffeine and warmth.
Caffeine came in the form of coffee, warmth in the form of huevos diablos. The ice continued unabated, and the coffee was abated by cups (and these cohorts were in their cups after a bit of caffeine, which begged the question of how many cohorts in a gallon?). By noon the clinic remained in the dark, with the electronic doors responding only to prying arms. At this point the agency had rescheduled their clients by cell, and the cells at the agency were desquaminating quickly. Knowing that an evacuated container may create its own vacuum, and that a vacuum can create a giant sucking sound, the mighty pair themselves evacuated to regions downtown in Battle Creek and held high and lofty discourse with other agency émigrés around a pyre of smoldering disappointment.
Much was said, donut holes were shared, a few things were written down on the backs of napkins. By lunch all was forgotten. "We must do this again!" said Jim. "Must we?!" quipped Kurt, and they slid their separate ways.
By morning, the birds were buzzing, the geese were snoring, and Battle Creek awoke from its restrained enuresis to the hum of alternating current. The mourning doves cooed, the clients queued, and once again, the world spun in greased grooves.

Post #2 - A Tentative Attempt - A Blog Within A Blog

To check the ongoing commentary by my animation students, here is their collective consciousness -- www.kcccartoons.blogspot.com

 

(A later observation - not much remains at this spot - blogs were fading fast even in 2006)

The First Posting - Young Frankenstein on a Friday Morning

Amid promises of a serious bit of nasty weather--the local meteorologist offered the snow in ranges of 2 - 16 inches (truth to tell, we barely made 1/2) -- the college educators were hoping for a three day weekend on the heels of a four-day Thanksgiving holiday.
Sadly, we wound up having class anyway.
The initial lecture for the day was on endocrine disorders, and that evoked images of exophthalmos secondary to Grave's disease, and who better to demonstrate that visually than Marty Feldman. I ran his introductory scene from Young Frankenstein at the midpoint of the presentation to an audience of 20-somethings who had never been exposed to this classic ("I never knew those old black-and-white movies could be so funny!" one of the students told me later, and I realized that 1974 is further back than they, and that I have ties that old and that at that moment I would have rather retreated into my office with Young Frankenstein instead of performing a segueway to the effects of high-fructose corn syrup on the pancreas).
I then remembered how thrilling my first viewing of Young Frankenstein was, how neat is was that Mel Brooks made TV trailers for it that actually were funny, and that the novelization of the script was packed with added material that didn't make the final cut (the film being better for the excisions), that Playboy had the entire charade sequence dialogue in one of its issues, and then I realized that the class was staring at me, pretending to be actually interested in the autoimmune consequences a viral infection could have on the beta cells of the Isles of Langerhans...
So I decided to chuck it all and just run the movie a little longer...up to the "What knockers!" gag... no up to the first "Frau Blucher" gag... no up to the "Put The Candle Back" routine... no, up to the "I Ain't Got NoBody" gag... by the time I got to the Zipperneck line, I realized I had completely lost track of the time, that the class had been over for 20 minutes, and that I was sitting in the lecture hall, laughing til I was crying, with a couple of other students who decided to chuck it all for a Friday morning that really had little else to offer besides fact after dreary fact.
They'll always come up with more facts.
There's only one Young Frankenstein.