Author: David Holcomb

  • Come Fly with Me

    • Icebergs? Bah! We’re not afraid of any silly icebergs!

    I know Mr Jung and Mr Freud tell us that we can learn things from our dreams. Well, last night I learned that zeppelin crews on the Rio to Lisbon route steal shoes from the passengers’ staterooms when they get bored. (Brawls have broken out over a pair of Spongebob flip-flops.)

    I learned further that if you lose your wallet during the trip you are handed over to my friend Judith Levine for safe keeping — although her response is usually just to throw up her hands, cry “Whatever!”, and sail out in a flurry of crêpe de Chine. The trip takes three days.

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  • The fine art of seeing.

    • I don’t know what you’re going on about: I see Paul Krugman.

    As I do just about every week, I stopped off on the way home from work last Friday to check a couple of books out of the Fayetteville Public Library. I usually read quite a bit, and I try to keep the beast supplied with a plenitude of reasonably nutritious fare — otherwise I start browsing things like the back of my cereal box or the ingredients list on my Twinkies, and there are some things we really weren’t meant to know.

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  • Oh, is that my hand in your pocket?

    If Big Government had its way, he’d have to go outdoors to get that tan, instead of to a salon in Westchester that can airbrush the wrinkles while they’re at it.

    When I hear politicians and pundits talking about the way Big Government is sucking the life out of this country, I can’t help but feel a smidgin of guilt: my family is one of those that has been robbing the taxpayer blind for the past fifty years.

    We can start with my parents, who, as members of the United States Air Force, were living off the taxpayers when they met. They courted and were married (by a Justice of the Peace, no less; yet another piglet sucking at the taxpayer teat) and in the fullness of time my brother, sister and I all came along — clutched firmly in the arms of Big Government, as my mother gave birth to each of us in Air Force hospitals built, staffed and run at taxpayer expense.

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  • Dream a Little Dream.

    • Hannah Höch, “Dispute“, 1940

    Last night I dreamt that my family was being studied by a world-famous psychiatrist (the doctor’s first name was Hannah, but that’s all I remember of her identity) and dozens of my relatives had been gathered together for the purpose, almost none of whom I recognized. Even my father — who died some years ago — showed up in a cheap brown suit and took a stroll through the crowd and then wandered back out the way he came, without saying a word to anyone.

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  • Message in a Bottle.

    Not good for the environment, but possibly an interesting way to meet people. http://cargocollective.com/seis/One-Disposable-Camera-Fourteen-Helium-Balloons

    Some time ago I heard about a couple of guys who were going to use helium balloons to send up disposable cameras with instructions for whoever finds the cameras to use them to take pictures of themselves and their lives and then send the cameras back.

    Then, as now, I thought the idea was a singularly bad one, mainly for environmental reasons: the balloons were almost certainly going to end up choking a sea turtle or an albatross when they blew out to sea and came to rest somewhere in the Atlantic.

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  • “There was an old lady…”

    “There was an old lady…”

    • Today the lower forty, tomorrow the world . . .

    When I was a child in Montgomery, Alabama, during the very early sixties, I can remember certain areas around town that spent much of the year buried under a green and hairy shroud that covered telephone poles, buildings, billboards, trees, parked cars, slow-moving pedestrians: the dreaded kudzu.

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  • Through the Eyes of a Child.

    • The USS Arizona, destroyed during the bombing.

    Today I’m doing something a little different, in recognition of Memorial Day: I’m inviting a guest to speak to my readers. My mother was a child living at Hickam Field on the Hawaiian island of Oahu when it was bombed by Japanese planes on December 7, 1941. Needless to say, she remembers the occasion well, and has offered to write about it here. I’ve added a few sidebar notes for historical context, and edited very slightly for length, but otherwise, these are her own words. Enjoy!

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  • In the Eye of the Beholder.

    • A generation of teenage boys seemed to feel that this was the height of feminine appeal. (Of course many of them probably did not have many opportunities for comparison.)

    I’ve recently been browsing through various online resources for artists — how-to’s, advice about materials, online portfolios, etc. — and I’ve noticed something that disturbs me: When did “Learn How to Draw” come to mean “Learn How to Draw Natalie Portman in Star Wars Makeup”?

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  • The View from the Tower

    • “The Tower of Babel” by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1563) — We used to think it was a good idea to understand each other.

    I often read novels by Latin-American authors in the original Spanish.

    I know, I know: at least part of the reason for doing it is just to be able to make statements like that — we all carve out these nuggets of self-esteem where we can find them — but the fact remains that some stars really do shine brighter in the universes that gave them birth.

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  • The Mutually Exclusive Club

    • “Black Square” by Kasimir Malevich. What happens when the artist refuses compromise?

    I’ve known a fair number of so-called “creative” people in my time — I consider myself one of them — and there is one thing that we all seem to have in common: we’re always reaching, unsuccessfully, for control.

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