McHuston Booksellers

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Tag: book store (Page 86 of 104)

New stuff. Magical.

April 13, 2013 /

Maybe it isn’t considered the age of Invention and Wonder, but the years of my youth included enough newly imagined products that it may have de-sensitized me to the process. I didn’t grow up during the Industrial Revolution, but the latter part of the twentieth century did bring out eye-openers like the cellular telephone. And the weedwacker.

(That’s probably not a good description of the range, but you get the idea.)

There were many new items on many new fronts. Microwave ovens. Video games, beginning at Atari. Pong. Oooh. Calculator watches (I didn’t say all the inventions were keepers…)

In the days of my growing up – my youth – we’d turn around and something new would hit us in the face. Sometimes literally. (I got whacked on the forehead by a Frisbee at a Jethro Tull concert at the Convention Center. Ironically, I had just turned back around after warning my buddy Mike to be on the lookout for flying disks. It was his first concert, and I was the experienced venue-pro. Naturally, it hit me instead of him.)

I’ve never surveyed it, but I imagine some people believe these things have been around since the dawn of man. Nah. In a historical sense, many of our everyday comforts are recent contrivances. I remember when Mountain Dew first came out. Yellow liquid that looked a lot like – well, let’s say it didn’t look particularly appealing when poured in a clear glass. That’s why it came out in a green bottle, I suppose.

Something new would come out, and it seemed to be generally accepted without a lot of hoopla or fanfare. I don’t remember lines of people camped out overnight for a chance to buy a portable Compaq computer. (They were so large as to be only marginally portable.) No midnight-opening events for the eight-track tape players. Or the cassettes. None for the VHS, BetaMax, or VideoDisk either, as I recall. (Early DVDs were the size of vinyl records, but I’m betting few of you recall those beasts.)

They might generate a brief Wow, or Hmmmm. The more elaborate items could draw out a Cool! (Or Far-Out, as it tended to be expressed back then.)

Now, though, I find myself taking the time to actually marvel about the products being introduced. Not the phones. I know some of you live and breathe for your cels, but – old school as I am – those are still just telephones to me. And I’ve never been that keen on phone conversations.

Bluetooth, now – that definitely rates a ten on the coolness scale for me. Here, I’ve just berated the cellphone and now I have to backtrack and admit I like being able to take a picture with it and – through a series of onscreen menu choices – send it through the air to my computer. Wireless. Cool. Far-Out. Awesome.

Here’s another. The image is of an approaching storm the other evening. I wasn’t near a television or radio, and knew there was a threat of nasty weather.

“Where is that storm?, I wondered aloud, talking to myself as I am wont to do these days. “How can I find out?”

There is an app for that. Downloaded a powerful weather radar program that even allowed it to email the radar-sweep to someone. I sent a copy to myself, just to see what it looked like on the other end. Click on it and you’ll notice the first wave of severe weather has already moved east of Tulsa and the big blob is still approaching. The calm between the storms was the impetus for my downloading the application. They’d said another wave was coming, and I just wanted to be able to see it. Bam! There it is. Oooh.

The picture of the storm is a still image, but the application does the whole deal, the line that sweeps around in a circle like the second hand of a clock, updating the intensity-color-shades as it passes. Just like the toys of the big TV boys (and girls).

I’m still marveling at the fact that I have access, 24 hours a day, to the same sophisticated technology that the meteorologists have. Of course, I have little or no understanding of what the different settings and screens are for, but I know the big red blobs are danger, Will Robinson. Green? Good. Red, bad. Green, good. Awesome.

There you have the summary of my weather-radar savvy. Color-based.

Cool.

Associated Memories…

April 2, 2013 /

This one works for me. Grusin’s Mountain Dance. I think if I awoke to this song everyday, each morning would be a pleasure. It’s playing just now on the bookshop’s radio.

We all like different things, of course. Otherwise, there’d be just one song and we’d listen to it over and over. And we’d love it. We’d love it so much we wouldn’t need any other song. If we all liked the same things, we’d like the same book and would never have to read another – that’s how much we’d love that favorite one. We’d just read it until the pages fell out (or the Kindle went dead).

Naturally, I don’t expect everyone to have the same feelings about the music of Dave Grusin, but I know you know him – one way or another. If his name is unfamiliar, maybe his music isn’t. He won an Oscar for his musical score for the film The Milagro Beanfield War. He was nominated for his music for The Fabulous Baker Boys, The Firm, On Golden Pond, and others. His original song, “It Might Be You” for the Dustin Hoffman film Tootsie was nominated for an Academy Award. There was a TV show called St. Elsewhere that had a really catchy theme song. Dave Grusin was responsible for that one too.

There are nearly a dozen other movies that have his music as the soundtrack.

Mountain Dance – for me – is just a great, uplifting song; it’s one that has memories associated with it. Just hearing it reminds me of morning drive on 92.9 and that era when they let me run down to the music store and pick out songs to play during my shift.

It may be presumptuous to offer it here, but – should you feel curious – you can click HERE to give Mountain Dance a listen.

I was like a kid in a candy store. The Rippingtons. David Benoit (it was his music on those Charlie Brown animated TV specials, another feel-gooder…). Chet Atkins. Yellowjackets. Pat Metheny. Bob James. Some people called it Weather Channel jazz back then. It was never background music for me, though. I can play ol’ Dave front and center.

Those days are long gone, I assure you. Not just my time on that radio station, but the days when deejays could select their own music. It always had to fit in with the format, of course – but at that time Dave Grusin’s Mountain Dance fit – just fine.

You shouldn’t think that I sit around pining for those Good Old Days. Nah. I don’t have a lot of time for things like that. But those things that strike a genuine chord – like White Divinity (that’s another hardwired associated memory, but another story entirely) – there is no way to avoid the brain-splash.

And it’s nice when the sudden reflection evokes good memories.

Don’t have Dave, but there are scores and sheet music – along with some biographies – over in the music section…

Come visit!

McHuston

Booksellers & Irish Bistro
Rose District
122 South Main, Broken Arrow OK
918-252-3301

Back when dinosaur tech was Normal…

April 1, 2013 /

The suspect’s car disappeared around a corner, and the police – slowed by a backing dump truck that momentarily jutted into traffic – lost sight just long enough to end the chase.

“Over there,” said the officer riding shotgun. “We’re out of our jurisdiction. Better call it in.”

The car had barely stopped rolling when he threw open the door and trotted over to the phone booth, jerked the handset off the hook, and slammed a quarter into the slot.

Phone booth?

Dr. Who fans will recognize the “callbox” but there are plenty of folks who have grown up as dinosaur technology has gone extinct. I was reading a book by suspense novelist Sue Grafton – the first in her long-running series – and was taken aback by the prehistoric references. The novel was written in the 1980s. Some things have changed a little. Some things have changed a LOT.

I should have gone into it understanding that it was historical fiction at this point. The forensic pathologist (and I think Ms Grafton was a little ahead of her CSI-time back then) and her associates had to share a behemoth computer that squatted on a desk like an elephant. There was a point where, if I remember correctly, the police DID have to pull the patrol car over to make a phone call.

It was before cell phones were in wide enough usage for readers to be familiar with the terms.

John Nance writes fiction set in the airline industry and one of his early works has the pilot comfortably smoking in the open-door cockpit as the passengers are boarding. Airline-related stories are certainly among the most-dated. The rules of flying changed dramatically post-911.

Tom McBride and Ron Nief have put together a collection of generational ‘Normals’ and called it the Mindset Lists of American History. They don’t list every year, but skip five to seven years in documenting what was important to graduating classes in their own diploma-year. For example, the Class of 1983 were mostly born in 1965, and include comedian Chris Rock and actor Robert Downey Jr. For this class, Malcom X, Alan Freed, and Nat King Cole were already historical figures.

There was no armed forces draft, the ecology movement had been around forever. Radio ads for cigarettes were long gone. Separate-but-equal facilities for different races were a thing of the past. Those of the class of 1983 never did and never will see the Beatles in a live performance. They never saw a slide rule in a classroom, and did not have to wait until age 21 to vote.

Plenty of things that I considered ‘normal’ are completely unheard of by younger groups. Rotary-dial telephones. CB radios. 8-Track tapes.

It seemed like it was only yesterday that the corner grocery offered S&H Green Stamps with every purchase, to be pasted in a book and saved until redeemed for some frivolous purchase at the ‘Stamp Store.’ Now, it seems that even US postage stamps are threatened.

The authors make some bold predictions for future classes as well, including an outbreak of ‘carpel thumb syndrome’ brought on by excessive texting.

We’ll have to see how that turns out. Meanwhile, I’ll keep tapping away on the massive laptop that my son-in-law makes fun of, the one with the Cinemascope-sized screen and fonts the size of billboard lettering. You know – something big enough for me to see.

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