Author Archives: Larry Franz

So This Is Love, Real Love

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It’s funny how you can immediately recognize a song you haven’t heard in decades. “So This Is Love” by an obscure California group called the Castells has been locked away in my brain since around 1962. I heard it the other day and it was like bumping into a very old friend.

The Castells lasted about five years but never had a big national hit. “So This Is Love” only got to #21 nationwide, but went all the way to #9 on KRLA in Los Angeles, my station of choice in the early 60s.

By the way, if you want to see how one of your favorite songs did on the record charts in Los Angeles in 1962, or New York in 1969, or Jefferson City, Missouri, in 1971, you can visit http://las-solanas.com/arsa/index.php. It’s a non-profit site that does an amazing job presenting such information, especially for the mid-60s, when just about everybody listened to their favorite AM radio station.

Coincidentally, Chuck Girard, one of the Castells, later became a member of the Hondells, who I wrote about earlier this month. I hope he’s enjoying all this belated publicity.


Art Is Long, Life Is Short, Lunch Is Important

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I took this picture a couple days ago. You might wonder what these people are doing:

IMG-20130920-01161

They were at an exhibit by the artist James Turrell. I’d read about him and written about him, so I figured I should go to the exhibit. It was at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the one that looks like this:


The part of the museum that looks like a funnel is open from the floor to the ceiling. The people on the floor were looking up at this large work by Mr. Turrell: 

Installation Views: James Turrell

Unfortunately, due to a combination of ignorance, impatience and bad timing, when we looked up at the ceiling, the view wasn’t that impressive and we didn’t hang around long enough to see if it got any better (which it did, since it was designed to go through a series of changes).

There were some other works by the artist on display, but the best one had a long line of people waiting to see it. The wait was said to be one hour, so we moved on. 

As someone once said, ars longa, vita brevis.

Lunch, on the other hand, was excellent.

What Made the Big Bang Bang?

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Physicists believe our universe began with a “Big Bang” about 14 billion years ago. The evidence suggests that the universe was infinitely hot and infinitely dense before it rapidly expanded, resulting in the still-expanding universe of which we are a tiny part.

But the physicists don’t know why the Big Bang occurred or what, if anything, existed before it. Maybe an earlier universe collapsed upon itself and then bounced back in a tremendous explosion. Maybe our universe resulted from some kind of random quantum fluctuation — or from a really cool experiment carried out by a kid with blue skin and 12 eyes.

Another hypothesis, of course, is that God kicked off the Big Bang. I wouldn’t bet on that, but you never know (although you might get to know if you ever join the choir invisible).

It’s also been suggested by some physicists that a black hole in another universe may have had something to do with the beginning of ours. The latest theory along those lines is that a star in a universe with four spatial dimensions (not our familiar three) ended its life as a supernova, creating a 4-D black hole at its core and simultaneously ejecting some debris out into 4-D space. Our universe could be a 3-D sliver of this 4-D cosmic debris. Or something like that.

Something immediately struck me when I read an article about this latest theory. It wasn’t the plausibility of the theory, which I’m almost completely unqualified to judge. It was the sudden feeling that we’ve now figured out why the Big Bang occurred. And no god had anything to do with it! It’s just the cosmos and us after all!

If I were religious, this momentary reaction might be understandable. But I’m not. So why did the idea that there’s no god out there pulling strings make me feel suddenly lonely? I guess it’s hard to escape your upbringing, no matter how old you get. And all that space out there can make a person feel a little bit alone, even on a planet with 7 billion people and 3 billion internet users.

Of course, God could have created that other universe that gave rise to ours, or the even earlier universe that gave rise to that one, or the one that came before that other one, and so on and so on, but somehow it’s just not the same once universes start giving birth to new ones all by themselves. 

http://www.nature.com/news/did-a-hyper-black-hole-spawn-the-universe-1.13743

More Insanity

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I started this blog 14 months ago, a few days after the massacre in Aurora, Colorado (the one in which 12 people were killed and 70 injured during a Batman movie). The title of my first post was “Insanity”.

Now we have another 12 people murdered in Washington, D.C. And their killer shot dead by the police.

According to an article called “Facing the Real Gun Problem” in the New York Review of Books, there have been 1.3 million Americans killed by firearms since 1960, either in suicides, homicides or accidents. The author of the article, David Cole, argues that we should strengthen background checks and improve gun safety in order to reduce the ongoing toll of death and injury. He thinks gun owners would support these kinds of measures if they could be convinced that their right to own guns wasn’t threatened.

For that reason, Cole doesn’t think we should try to ban assault weapons, since relatively few people are killed with assault weapons and gun owners fear that a ban on those guns would eventually lead us down a slippery slope toward banning all kinds of guns. I don’t agree with him about the assault weapon ban, but he makes some good points, including the need to decriminalize certain drugs and reduce our prison population. He believes that guns are here to stay in America, so we should do whatever we can as a nation to limit the carnage.

To get a sense of how guns are used every day to kill and maim, you can check out a blog called “The Gun Report” in the New York Times. One of their columnists, Joe Nocera, uses the blog to discuss gun-related issues, but he also presents a daily list of shootings from around the country. It’s a daily accounting of American insanity.

There are 19 incidents described in today’s entry of “The Gun Report”. Here are a couple, chosen at random:

Lance Wilson, 3, was shot in the head and killed at a mobile home park in Michigan City, Ind., Sunday afternoon. 24-year-old Zachariah L. Grisham, who is romantically involved with the victim’s mother, was charged with reckless homicide. Investigators found that Grisham and the victim had been playing a game, with the boy using his hand to pretend to shoot Grisham. During the game, Grisham took out a handgun and, thinking it was not loaded, pulled the trigger.

A man was shot in the face and critically wounded after a verbal altercation in the Caddo Heights neighborhood of Shreveport, La., Monday afternoon. Police said someone in a car opened fire on the victim, who was in a Toyota Camry. A white SUV was spotted leaving the scene.

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Facing the Real Gun Problem:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/jun/20/facing-real-gun-problem/

The Gun Report:
http://nocera.blogs.nytimes.com/

People Who Live in Glass Houses

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Having lived in suburbs most of my life, I know one reason people live in such places. To get away from other people.

It can be a stunningly beautiful day, all’s right with the neighborhood, but if you take a drive, you’ll rarely see another person who isn’t in a car. If you take a walk, you might hear a child’s voice here or there, or see someone walking a dog, or bump into a jogger or two, but you’ll usually be the only person around. It’s as if you’re visiting a Potemkin village set up to advertise the beauty of suburban living.

There is something strange about living so close to people you can’t see. Which has sometimes made me wonder what it would be like if the walls of our houses or apartments were made of glass. Would we still ignore our neighbors? Would we lead better lives if we were always on display? What if the lights were always on? Maybe God was invented because our ancestors didn’t live in glass houses with 24-hour lighting.

Coincidentally, I recently got around to reading Lolita. Humbert Humbert had something to hide, so it’s understandable that his thoughts ran in this direction too:

“… all along our route countless motor courts proclaimed their vacancy in neon lights, ready to accommodate salesmen, escaped convicts, impotents, family groups, as well as the most corrupt and vigorous couples. Ah, gentle drivers, driving through summer’s black nights, what frolics, what twists of lust, you might see from your impeccable highways if Kumfy Kabins were suddenly drained of their pigments and became as transparent as boxes of glass!”

And later:

“I often felt that we lived in a lighted house of glass, and that any moment some thin-lipped parchment face would peer through a carelessly unshaded window and obtain a free glimpse of things that the most jaded voyeur would have paid a small fortune to watch.”

As the fortune cookie says, people who live in glass houses should put up lots of curtains.