day 2011
perched around the edge
of the smokestack, gray pigeons,
shoulder-to-shoulder

~Reverend Leroy Eenk’s ‘Beer Belly Blues’ | Illustration: Bob Gnarly~

This month’s special guest — The Reverend Leroy Eenk — adds a little bit of literary sophistication to the second printed edition of the Kitsap Smokestack Smut Rag, with a couple thousand words on the dangers of growing old and selling your soul to the devil in ‘Beer Belly Blues’ . . .

When Jack arrived home from the tavern, he discovered a small man in a blue suit had stowed away in his coat pocket.

Jack asked the traveler his name.

“Rutherford,” the tiny man replied. “But everybody calls me Smelly … Smelly Jackson.”

“I’m Jack,” said Jack.

“Sorry to hop a ride in your pocket, friend, but as you can tell, it’s hard for a fellow my size to get around these days.”

Having tended pet hamsters as a kid, Jack considered himself an expert at handling small, fragile creatures. He carefully plucked Smelly from his pocket and placed him on a couch cushion. . .

“Got a cat, Jack?” Smelly asked, sniffing the air.

“No,” Jack said.

“Dog?”

“Nope.”

They sat on the couch next to each other and didn’t say anything at first.

Then Smelly said, “Lookey here, Jack, I don’t want to waste your time, and you’ve been gentle handling me, so let me just tell you, I’m looking for the Thing.”

“The what?” Jack asked.

“The Thing,” Smelly repeated.

“The what?” Jack asked again.

“The Thing, man. You haven’t heard of the Thing?”

“No.” Jack said.

“Well, I’ll be,” Smelly said. “It’s not everyday.”

“You mean the comic book ‘The Thing’?”

“If you don’t already know, I probably don’t have the right to tell you.”

“You have to tell me now,” Jack said, lifting his eyebrows and holding out his hands.

So Smelly told Jack about the Thing.

“Oh yeah,” Jack said after hearing out the tiny man. “I’ve heard of that.”

“I was going to say… So you know where I can find it at?”

“No,” Jack said, shrugging. “But you can hang out if you want.”

Jack offered Smelly a drink. Both of them were already drunk. Throughout the night, Jack kept repeating, “That’s so cool that you’re pocket-hopping, man.”

Smelly was 87, but he didn’t look it, mostly because he was so small. He had a scratchy voice and was a famous bluesman from the greater Shreveport area some 70 years earlier. Within minutes the two musicians realized all they had in common and stayed up, talking and drinking all night. Smelly talked mostly.

The next morning, Jill woke up to start her day and found Jack sitting on the couch. She asked why he hadn’t gone to bed. He lied and said he got wrapped up in writing songs. He hated lying to her, but Jack didn’t want to introduce Smelly until he could prove he wasn’t a hallucination.

Jack was 30 years old and felt like he always had a hangover — an especially obnoxious one the morning after he met Smelly. He held down a job as a shipping clerk and didn’t plan on being a rich and famous rock star anymore, so every morning he pulled himself out of bed when the alarm rang and struggled to button his jeans.

Jack’s mom rousted him Sunday mornings, that’s how he learned to fight through the a.m. pain. At age 15 he started playing clubs on Saturday nights, every Saturday night. Jack and his underage friends hid in toilet stalls, drinking Schmidt beer until they went on stage. He slept in his clothes, reeking of beer puke and cigarettes.

“C’mon, John,” his mom would say from the doorway, in her Downstate accent. “It’s the Lord’s Day.”

If she ever noticed the smell, she never said a thing.

Jack had a big brother named Paul. And because of his big brother, Jack started smoking weed and listening to Led Zeppelin, and everything changed at age 10. He was going to be a rock star, everybody agreed, and guilt dragged his headache to church to pray for big brothers everywhere.

He played almost every venue in the city, toured the states once or twice, toured the Northwest numerous times, opened for some big names. All when he was a kid, when he worked a job simply to smoke weed every day.

He married Jill a few years ago, his high school sweetheart. They’d known each other ever since they could remember, from around the same time Jack had started playing guitar.

On the drive to work he caught a whiff of the alcohol venting from his pores and threw up.

This was a morning like all the others, only Smelly tagged along to keep him company. And that made it a good day.

Jack couldn’t hide the conversation he was having with his pocket friend for long — he was still drunk. His coworkers noticed right away, exchanging glances with tacit implications of… “It’s happening.”

They kept their distance and stopped asking why he wouldn’t take off his coat. Jack spent his lunch hour walking in the park, in the rain.

The rest of the day flew by with Smelly chatting up a storm.

“Did I already tell you about the time in ‘47 when Blind Gimpy Garrison and me shared a box car with Jesus Christ Himself?” Smelly gabbed from Jack’s coat pocket. “Now there’s a story I’ve told too many times.”

“No, Smelly,” Jack glanced down the long shipping desk, pretending to read an invoice.

“Sure enough,” Smelly started, retelling a story he hardly had the energy to retell. “Memphis to Chicago. At least that’s who he said he was, and I was inclined to believe him, he was one square dude. He done up and turned our wine into water, man, made us play ‘He Walks With Me’ until I jumped somewhere in Arkansas. The train went into the hole and I, I had enough. I didn’t feel bad about splitting up the act with Gimp. I took my chances in the cotton fields.”

“Wow, Smelly.” Jack said.

“Turning a man’s wine into water?” Smelly shook his head. “That’s just extreme.”

The company Jack worked for sold ribbon. The good stuff, made by professionals in Japan, China, and the Philippines: organdy, satin, silk, taffeta, plus a few novelty ribbons like abaca. Jack’s job, which he took less seriously than his employers would have preferred, consisted of collecting little spools of ribbon off the shelves, putting them in boxes, and taping the box shut. Man work.

“Did I already tell you about Maimed Pigeon Jefferson?”

“Is that the guy who stole your dentures during the Decatur Folk Festival of ‘63?” Jack asked.

“You’re thinking of Lame Pigeon Jefferson,” Smelly said. “But you mention dentures. That reminds me. Not to pry into your business, but I noticed you didn’t brush your teeth this morning.”

“I know,” Jack said.

“If I could do it all over again, I would have taken better care of my teeth, they don’t make dentures for people my size,” the tiny man waved off his digression. “Anyway, Maimed Pigeon Jefferson, harmonica player. We used to work together, a bar band in Gulfport, before the war. Nice fellow. Never figured out what about him was maimed. He seemed healthy enough to me. One afternoon I was hanging out at the bar, minding my own business. I was about your age, maybe a little younger, in the prime of playing. All of a sudden, these cops come rushing into the bar, looking like they hadn’t slept. Kind of like you, Jack.”

“I know,” Jack said.

“Since I was the only man in the room, they all stomped on up in my face. They wanted to know where Pigeon was. I told the man I didn’t know. Turns out that Pigeon, according to this deputy, had stolen his Thing. Maimed Pigeon, I couldn’t believe it. He asked if I was a musician. Yeah, I’m a guitar player, I told him. So he told his men to break my fingers with a hammer, and they did.”

Jack stood back from the shipping desk. “He broke all your fingers?”

“What?” said the guy next to him on the ribbon line.

“Broke both my hands,” Smelly shook his head. “I had to learn how to play all over again.”

“What a dick,” Jack said.

“Who?” His coworker asked.

“The cops,” Jack said, turning to Lou. “They broke Smelly’s hand so he couldn’t play anymore.”

“They were going to get their Thing back,” Smelly butted back in. “Rumor was Maimed Pigeon tried to skip town but those men caught him in the freight yard.”

“Wow, Smelly,” Jack said.

The guy next to Jack was Lou. He was a lot older than Jack. They had worked next to each other for the better part of a year but rarely said a word to one another.

The shipping desk phone rang, It was for Jack.

“How you doin’, Jack?”

The voice on the other end belonged to Bob, a minor rock star. They’d known each other many years, since the days of hiding in the mensroom, drinking cheap beer, waiting to go on stage. Jack played guitar on his last solo record.

“Hey, Bob,” Jack said.

Bob apologized for calling at work, then asked if Jack would be his guitarist for a five-week tour of Paris, Italy and Greece.

Jack was speechless. He’d never been overseas before. He paused. “I’ll need to get back to you on that, Bob,” he said.

“The best tracks on the album are the ones when you sing and play,” Bob said. “You’ll get three thousand dollars, plus expenses.”

“Good,” Jack said, then got back to work.

Jack let Smelly out of his pocket to stretch his legs and watch the news. Jill never noticed him. She worked as a nanny. After dinner Jack started the dishes and Jill went to visit with the neighbors. He put Smelly onto the counter to keep him company.

“You’re married and still got to wash the dishes?” Smelly couldn’t believe his minuscule eyes.

“We take turns,” Jack said. “Hey Smelly, can I ask you a question?”

Jack stopped washing plates, letting the water run.

“How come you’re so small?”

“I’m surprised it took you this long to ask, Jack,” Smelly said.

“I didn’t want to be rude.”

“I’ll say this … you ever hear the stories about guitar players meeting the devil on the corner and trading their souls for some drop tuning?”

“Like Robert Johnson?”

“All those corny stories, well, they’re true.”

“No they’re not, Smelly, those guys made those up. They wanted to get an edge on other knife-fighting bluesmen. I read all about it in a book.”

“If it isn’t true, Jack, how would you explain my present circumstances?

“Are you saying it was the devil that shrunk you?”

Smelly nodded, “Only, in my case, I didn’t want to play better, or get some woman, or revenge, or a color television set. I had all that stuff. I just wanted the Thing. If I’d of asked for something selfish, like all them, I’d been dead a long time ago. But the devil doesn’t like it when you try to trick him. Every year on my birthday I’ll shrink a little more. It’s been twenty-two years since I had a guitar small enough for me to play. I can’t never play again, but I’ll live forever. Shrinking every year until I become a piece of dust floating in the air.”

“So what happened to the Thing?” Jack asked.

“Don’t remind me.” Smelly waved him off. “It’s gone.”

“What happened to it?” Jack turned off the water.

“It’s just gone,” Smelly said firmly.

Jack shook his head, “Sell your soul to the devil to get the Thing, and then lose it. Wow, that sucks, Smelly.”

“Story of my life. I’ve been looking for it a long time. I can trade back on the devil if I find it and die with my soul intact. It works like that, I don’t know why. A man in New York City told me so. He said it might be here. So here I am.”

“It’s here?”

The front door opened.

Jack grabbed his coat and shoved Smelly in the pocket.

“Jack!” Smelly squeaked. “Watch the ribs! I’m bound to meet your lady at some point.”

“No,” Jack said. “It would just be awkward.”

“Jill?” Jack called.

“Yeah?” She said from the other room.

She turned on the television set and made her way to the kitchen.

“Are you cold?” she asked.

Jack said no and put his coat in the closet. He hated lying to her. Just having Smelly there felt like a lie, even though he had technically only lied to her once. They made popcorn and watched television, but Jill noticed he was distracted, he didn’t laugh once.

It wasn’t the lie he couldn’t stop thinking about, but the call at work. He imagined playing rock and roll on the Mediterranean, getting drunk on strange liquors. But he didn’t picture himself, he pictured somebody else.

He probably should have told Jill. That’s what they mean on talk shows when they say married couples need to “communicate.”

Jill went to bed after a couple hours. Taking care of someone else’s kids can take the fight out of a person. Jack fetched Smelly from the closet and sat up with him. Usually Jack had questions, like where Smelly found such a proportionally tailored blue suit, but neither wanted to talk, so they sat in silence, irritated for some reason.

Jack worried it meant alcohol was the only thing they had in common.

Waking up hurt. Jack had sweated through the night. He should have felt great for not drinking. Smelly tagged along to work, not speaking until lunch while they shared Jack’s sandwich.

“I’d give anything to play a guitar one last time,” Smelly said. “Maybe just tune a guitar. An old piece of garbage. One that won’t stay in tune no matter how you bend it.”

“I haven’t touched a guitar in days,” Jack said.

“That’s a shame.”

Jack was a good guitar player. He used to be great. He used to have speed and accuracy, enough to complicate an unremarkable punk cover until it sounded like high art. All he did was practice. He didn’t write as much then, that came as he got older, when he stopped practicing. Some evenings after dinner he would sit down and write three or four songs, record them on a modest 4-track, all before brushing his teeth to kiss Jill goodnight.

But often enough he’d get an idea for a song he just wasn’t good enough to play anymore, and instead of writing it down, or recording what he could do and worry about the rest later, he just let it go.

It bothered him to think up a song, work out the verses, a chorus, a bridge, make it up in his mind, and then not know how to bring it into the world. And it bothered him that it didn’t bother him to give up on a song.

He used to be able to play that way.

Lunch hour ended and Jack walked upstairs to the business office and knocked on his boss’ door. Mr. Ludwig sat at his desk, eating a sandwich and reading the newspaper. Jack took a seat in front of him and they had a conversation. Mr. Ludwig said if Jack left to go on tour, his shipping clerk job would not wait for him.

Jack walked back downstairs to the warehouse and called Bob, the rock star. He thanked him for the offer, but said he couldn’t do the tour.

After he hung up Smelly asked Jack, “Why?”

Jack didn’t respond. He started working again, taping cardboard boxes together. Jack hadn’t even known about the Thing until Smelly told him. Thirty years old and he never heard of the Thing.

“You did the responsible thing, Jack,” Smelly said.

“I’m old and fat,” Jack snapped back.

“You want to end up like me?”

“Small?”

Smelly glared up at Jack. “You know what I mean.”

After dinner, Jill started on the dishes and Jack went to the corner bar to meet friends. Smelly wanted to tag along. Not ten minutes later, Jack noticed Smelly wasn’t in his pocket. He hopped into someone else’s coat and Jack never saw him again.

At the end of the night, as the bartender rousted all the drunks onto the sidewalk, Jack stood on the curb outside the front door, hanging onto a parking meter for balance, waving at everybody’s crotch, saying, “Bye, Smelly.”

. . . Send your Short Stories, Poems and Prose to kitsapsmokestack@gmail.com for possible inclusion in upcoming editions. . .

This last image is in loving honor of the smokestack in the righthand side of the shot.  Just two weeks ago it passed on and flew away to join all it’s old friends in smokestack heaven. See a beautiful shot of the demolition (in HD) here.

MacDonald Hall at the University of Ottawa. This building is the home of the Department of Physics. The smokestack behind is part of the heating plant, not MacDonald Hall.

Web site: www.robhuntley.ca
Click on the image to go straight to the same image on my website.

11/11/09

11/14/09

As some of you know, the Smoke Stack was sold to a developer who is going to build an affordable housing complex, including a park.  That is very exciting for the citizens of Frankfort and Elberta, for shoppers it’s a sad thing.

The Smokestack was a consignment warehouse. It must have started off as a storage facility though, because it was called Smokestack Storage.

In the summer time you could find treasure there that came from some of the swankiest addresses in the area.  When we first moved here, the Smokestack was in its hay-day.  You could find handmade French dining room furniture, gold pocket watches, old irons, used paint,  screws, dressers, lamps, plates cups, skis, accordions, doors,  shelves, toys, books as well as the sailboat that won the 1925 Chicago to Mackinaw Island race and more and more and more.  The building was pretty dilapidated. It would rain in there, there were critters living in the old sofas and upholstered furniture and you always felt like the roof was going to cave in at any moment.  It didn’t matter, everyone went there anyway.

In winter they would store your boat or car or both there, if you have both   
Everyone was so excited when spring came and the doors to Sesame would open again.  Year after year and season after season it was fun to dig in there.  We actually had quite a few guests who came to stay at the Wayfarer specifically to go shopping there.  Nancy L. would come with her girlfriends on the last weekend of the season because then everything in the store would be half off.

So, now it’s gone. They tore it down yesterday.

The Smokestack how it looked a few weeks ago

And how it looked this morning at 7:54 am.

The brown building in the middle-left and the long building on the right need to come down still. I bet when I go to school this afternoon to deliver 100 cookies to the football team ( yikes)  those buildings will be gone.

Happy Friday everyone.
Tonight’s football game will be played in Frankfort against Manistee Catholic.  Not going to be easy, but we can do it.

Go Panthers!!

10/10/09

10/10/09

Look at that! The Cowell Smokestack’s Memorial is almost complete, and to be honest, it looks really nice!

Right now, the Walnut Country Community Fair and Smokestack Celebration are being planned by the Cowell Homeowners’ Association to celebrate the completion of the project.

For all the latest, including the date of the party, visit the Cowell Smokestack’s Official project page by clicking HERE.

Thanks to “Radar” for the picture of the memorial!

Flagler College smokestack and moon. © Calvin Palmer 2009.

Zeiss Planar T* 1,4/50, ISO 400, 1/80 sec, f/2.8, Canon 40D.

The Lahaina Restoration Foundation is hosting a three-day event celebrating the town’s plantation heritage.  “Lahaina Plantation Days, Then and Now” begins Thursday July 30 at the old Pioneer Mill site near the historic smokestack on Lahainaluna Road.  The event will feature entertainment, food booths and exhibits.

Image Courtesy Lahaina Restoration Foundation. Click image to enlarge.

Event hours are 7:00 pm to 9:30 pm on July 30, and 4:30 pm to 9:30 pm on July 31 and Aug.1.

The event will feature entertainment by cultural groups and popular musicians, restaurant food booths, coffee garden, beer tent, a Kid’s Zone with nostalgic activities, historical displays and exhibits, a “Camp Reunion Tent” honoring those who lived and worked in the West Maui plantation camps, and a preview of the proposed Pu‘ukoli‘i Village project by Kaanapali Land Management Corp. which builds on West Maui’s past.

A special film presentation will be shown outdoors on a large screen on Thursday.  The 60-minute documentary directed by filmmakers Eddie and Myrna Kamae, “Lahaina: Waves of Change,” highlights Lahaina’s rich history as the first capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom and later the center of the sugar industry in West Maui.  Film gates will open at 7:00 pm with the feature film starting at 8:00 pm.

Historical displays, coffee tent, beer garden, mini laulau and chowfun booth will be open on July 30th.   Admission on all three nights of the event is $3, seniors are $2 and keiki 12 and under are free.  A special three day pass is available for $5.

The public is also invited to buy a brick as part of a fundraising campaign to restore the mill’s 225-foot high landmark smokestack in West Maui.

Image courtesy Lahaina Restoration Foundation.

In 2008, Lahaina Restoration was granted a 20 year lease by Kaanapali Land Management Corp. to undertake the complete restoration of this smokestack and to build an interpretive display at its base.

The Pioneer Mill had a 139-year history on the Valley Isle.  The final demolition of the Pioneer Mill Company’s buildings came in 2006, however, the memories of these plantation days remain.

“This new Plantation Days event honors our West Maui’s roots,” said Theo Morrison, Lahaina Restoration Foundation executive director, “It’s an exciting opportunity for visitors and residents to learn about the people who labored in the mill, toiled in the fields, and raised their families in West Maui’s plantation camps. Their triumphs, sacrifices, courage and contributions made a significant and lasting impact on Maui.  It is their lives and this important era of history that this Lahaina Plantation Days event will celebrate.”

(Posted by Wendy Osher; Photos, Graphics and Information provided by the Lahaina Restoration Foundation)

Amazon’s electronic reading device known as Kindle is not exactly as “Green” as it is cracked up to be, but now we have another reason to reconsider the merits of paper-based reading: Censorship.

Kindle users may not have anticipated it, but Amazon can recall an e-book purchase at the push of a virtual button. Need those annotations for a book report? If your digital reading material is recalled, Amazon removes those too.

Tough luck.

Amazon claims they are working to amend a hasty retraction process that resulted when an allegedly unauthorized source made available a number of e-books to which the lawful copyright holder objected, reports the New York Times in “Amazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle Devices“. Refunds for the illicitly encoded material are on the way, but the questions have only begun. And well they should.

In an ongoing series on the transformative impact of high tech, the Social Critic aims to explore the lesser known consequences of the virtual world. In this instance, we find a stark reminder that in the digital universe the price of “virtual” amounts to easy come, easy go. You can’t share an e-book. You can’t recycle an e-book reader — at least not in the Green manner one might have hoped [see "GreenSmart vs. GreenDumb"]. And you can’t take for granted that you “own” anything in the virtual realm in the same physical manner it is possible to own DVDs, books, magazines, newspapers and the like.

What this article doesn’t touch upon is disturbing in its own right: The questionable health effects, particularly on the eyes and brain, of exchanging the tangible for an imperceptibly flickering digital view screen. Over time, exposure may blunt brain development in children, promote sleep and attention disorders, lead to career-limiting repetitive strain injuries to the spine, elbows, wrists or fingers — or more commonly still, eyestrain and headaches — all while aiming electromagnetic radiation at our craniums (of which cell phones and CRT monitors are among the worst EMF offenders). None of this, however, takes into account the fastest growing concern of all: the controversial notion of Internet addiction. Until recently, in fact, China took a very heavy-handed approach to digital addicts: electroshock therapy.

Library systems, in a sign of the times, are taxed, meanwhile, not by people who wish to check out books but by the number of people who wish to access the Internet. As discussed in the aforementioned post, the billions of computer users plugged into electric grids around the world, connected, in turn, by scores of Internet data centers, come at a profound environmental cost that most of us fail to appreciate. In the US, these electrical requirements translate into burning more coal, a process that for all the talk of “clean“, is anything but.

In the irony of all ironies, this Digital New Age appears to have brought us full circle: From transnational trains at the turn of the last Century belching out billowing clouds of coal-black ash to power plant smokestacks “sequestering“, at best, billions of short tons of the same in the opening decades of the 21st Century. Much of this progress arrives under the trendy guise of going Green — paying our bills online, killing time on Facebook and surfing for free media content on the web even as news and content providers go broke for their efforts. Talk about unsustainable — in more ways than one!

In exchange for the privilege of conducting increasing amounts of our business and personal lives virtually, we pursue nifty new interfaces — costly electronic devices, cell phones and seemingly essential hardware and software packages, which we have been conditioned to frequently upgrade as a result of wear, tear and obsolescence. All of this lends itself quietly but effectively to privacy-intruding remote processes most of us fail to comprehend. Ours is an inverse relationship with technology: As the devices of our supposed need or pleasure become exponentially complex, our appreciation for how little we control, own and regard as personal and private diminishes.

Are our ownership claims even worth the virtual paper they are printed on?

Probably not.

Have you read any virtual fine print, for that matter, lately?

Who does?

Arguably, it causes more eyestrain — a greater headache literally and figuratively — to read a large body of typewritten material on a bright, brazen, backlit surface largely devoid of eye-resting “white space”, much of it jam-packed instead with ad-based imagery begging for attention. So what’s a person without an entire day to spend sifting through this chaotic “information soup” to do? Answer: Go in search of the news, information, social contact and entertainment we want — not necessarily that which we need.

In spite of our collective fascination, electronic interfaces are simply too fatiguing for many users to devote a great deal of voluntary attention to any single task. Real-world books, newspapers, magazines, DVDs and music albums are carefully crafted, edited, designed and packaged, whereas in the virtual world we are often gatekeepers and content generators — empowering, to be sure, but demanding nonetheless. For instance, few of us went to the time and expense to crop, retouch and “develop” our own photos years ago, but nowadays the time, expense and effort of digital photography — the self-service we euphemistically refer to as “creative control” — is a common undertaking by many a digital camera owner. But what happens when time, attention spans and the digital format itself are limiting factors?

It stands to reason that as the novelty of this digital medium wears off, we will increasingly reserve our limited energies for learning a whole lot more about a whole lot less, particularly in comparison to our analog-based predecessors. The information at our fingertips may be limitless but our patience is not. More disturbing, the digital landscape may not be as boundless as we would like to believe. Not only does the virtual printing press make it a lot easier to remove unflattering stories from the electronic record, it’s also a lot easier to let the news we can use fade into a backdrop of dizzying digital distractions, the search result that never appears, the umpteenth page we never click.

For all his technological high hopes, would the late, great newsman, Walter Cronkite, be impressed?

When a resource is rare, even something so amorphous as “the news”, it is perceived as valuable and desirable. When it’s easy, cheap and pervasive, we take for granted that it will always be there, and that nothing will escape us even if we opt out entirely. If an asteroid were headed our way, many of us would learn of it from a coworker or a friend on MySpace — the proverbial grapevine now stronger than ever, the “herd immunity” theory, if you will, applied to social awareness.

Witness the phenomena of college-educated individuals passing along hoaxes, chain letters and urban legends via email without so much as a 30-second effort to verify the claim. Technology may make it easier to avoid making fools of ourselves, but that doesn’t mean we’re making the best use of it. The Digital Age, in this respect, presents a curious duality: People who are inclined to believe almost anything they see and read in an email or on YouTube, and those who become so wary of sloppy citizen journalism and anonymous email assertions that eventually mainstream media sources are lumped in the same suspect category. Such is life in the disposable e-universe: The democratization of information on the one hand, the responsibilities of liberty diminished on the other.

As much as technology connects us, a prevailing counterforce threatens our capacity for common experience, shared culture and community values. In the virtual world we lose, most notably, what art, literature and history buffs refer to as a “sense of place“. As our digital future progresses, we are certain to experience less and less of the hallowed, snapshot-in-time sensation of looking back on an old photo, magazine, newspaper, yearbook or, for that matter, the tactile experience of turning the pages of a letter or book sans mouse and keyboard.

There’s something we’re sacrificing in this brave new world, and it’s more than the paper it is written on.

Welcome to the here and now. It’s great for contract attorneys and high-tech moneymakers — a deceptive deal for the environment, news providers, and consumers alike. Still, we’re eating it up, one “IT” gadget off the production line at a time. Pay off that home or car loan early? Save money for the kids’ college tuition or your retirement fund? Embark on a once-in-a-lifetime road trip from coast to coast? Naw. We have more pressing pastimes to spend our digital dinero on. And they’re lovin’ it.

Psst! I hear Sony makes a pretty cool e-book reader, too. Circuit City, anyone? Their virtual doors are open for business!

###

Resources:

Printed Copies of Orwell Books Pulled from Kindle | Yahoo News

Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others | David Pogue/NYT

Internet Use Burns Coal, Report Says

Better Technology Needed if Carbon Sequestration is to be Viable | TSAugust

The Internet Begins with Coal

The Internet is Big and has a Carbon Footprint to Match

Data Center Overload | NYT Magazine

User Demand for the Internet Could Outpace Network Capacity by 2010

The Sustainability Challenge: Can the Internet Help?

The Illusion of Being Well Informed | The New Ledger

When Computers Attack: Protect Yourself from Computer-Related Health Problems

Ergonomists: Kids too are at Risk from Repetitive Strain Injuries | Science Daily

Nighttime Computer Users May Lose Sleep

Look What They’ve Done to My Brain, Ma

Brain & Behavior: Blame it on the Box

Mind Control by Cell Phone | Scientific American

Is Google Making Us Stupid? | The Atlantic

Is Google Making Us Smarter? | Seed Magazine

Men as Internet Victims

Do Social Networks Bring the End of Privacy?

Pittsburgh Cancer Institute Issues Warning on Cell Phone Risks

Teens Risk Health with Night Texting, Talking

Social Networks: Primates on Facebook | The Economist

Who Really Owns Your Phone?

Did You Hear About Censorship?

Internet Censorship in the US? Or Just Law Enforcement?

Top 25 Censored Stories for 2009 | Project Censored

Is Professional Blogging a Sustainable Business Model?

The Economy of Free is Stupid | Social Media Explorer

Free is Not a Business Model

Are the Days of Free Internet News Coming to an End?

Internet Companies: The End of the Free Lunch — Again

Advertising Is Not a Sustainable Business Model for the Web

Thoughts on the Costs of Digital vs. Paper

The Future of Reading — Digital vs. Print | Seattle Times

The site has been cleaned up, and only a few feet remain of the destroyed landmark.

The orange/red line you see in the top picture marks the 2-foot level of the Cowell Smokestack, which will be left to create a “memorial”.

Thanks to “Radar” for the updated pictures!

What once was a beautiful smokestack is now a pile of rubble. The Cowell Smokestack is officially gone.

Thanks to “Radar” for the top three photos, and “John Moses Browning” for the bottom two pictures of the destroyed historical landmark that now stands only about 5-feet-tall.

The Cowell Smokestack is all but gone, with only a few feet left of the historic landmark, I thought it’d be a good time to look at some of the best pictures we’ve had of the smokestack throughout the years on CLAYCORD.com, ending with the very sad demolition.

To watch the slideshow, just click on the “play” button, and enjoy!

Thanks to all who’ve contributed pictures of the 235-foot Cowell Smokestack to CLAYCORD.com, these are some of the best!

The Lahaina Restoration Foundation launched a Buy a Brick fundraising campaign this week to raise funds for the restoration of the historic Pioneer Mill Smokestack.

The landmark stands 200-feet-tall and dates to the 1860s when the mill was founded.  The mill was one of Hawaii’s last remaining sugar plantations at the time of its closure in 1999.

Plans are to restore the top of the smokestack which was removed several years ago for safety reasons.  Cost of the restoration project is estimated at $300,000.

Bricks are being sold for between $100 and $750 depending on size and inscription.  The bricks purchased will be used to create a circular walkway around the base of the smokestack. Individual bricks can be engraved with the donor’s name, the name of a loved one, company name or logo.  Proceeds from the sale of these bricks will help offset restoration costs of the smokestack, installation of interpretive plaques and landscape features.

Bricks are being sold for $100 for a 4” x 8” brick with engraving on 2 lines, $125 for a 4” x 8” brick with engraving on 3 lines, $500 for a 8” x 8” brick with engraving on 4 lines, and $750 for an 8” x 8” brick with one’s corporate logo engraved.  Agency officials say the first 100 people to order a brick will receive a free replica brick to keep (a $50 value).

Lahaina resident and active Foundation volunteer Sam “Sammy” Kadotani is tasked with leading this fundraising campaign.

“Whether you want to buy a brick to show your pride in Lahaina, your connection to the mill, or want to memorialize a loved one or even yourself, now is your chance,” said Kadotani.  “Many of us remember this landmark growing up and for those who worked in the mill the smokestack has become a beloved part of our family history – something that can never be replaced.  Now is our time to give back.  Today, this landmark needs our attention and our dollars,” said Kadotani.

To buy a brick, contact The Lahaina Restoration Foundation office at 808-661-3262.

(Posted by Wendy Osher © 2009; information provided by the Lahaina Restoration Foundation; Photo by Wendy Osher © 2009)

Here in the City of CLAYCORD, we love great photography, and great photography is what you’re getting while looking at this picture!

I was browsing the web tonight, looking for pictures of the Cowell Smokestack, and this one came up on Flickr.

I quickly emailed the photographer for permission to use on the blog, and he obviously said “yes”, since you’re looking at it right now.

Here’s the backstory to the photograph, provided by the picture taker, “Matt Granz”….

After shooting from several locations around this immediate area, I made the decision to hike up into the local hills and even went off trail to get to this particular vantage point.

The demolition crane can just be seen in the top right portion of this capture. A car was traveling down Bailey Road when I shot this and you can see the shape of the path it took by its light trail.

Several cars passed by as this shot was being taken, but they didn’t show up due to the high amount of light from streetlamps etc…

Being all alone up in an undeveloped area with tall grass and not being able to see where you are going (forgot my flashlight) was a little unnerving, but I was okay with it…until I saw a flashlight turn on and then off, maybe a hundred yards up the hill from me…maybe it’s just me, but I have no urge to meet someone on a dark hillside in the middle of the night…so I packed it up and called it an evening.

Probably a wise decision! Thanks to Matt Granz for the awesome picture and the story being the photo!

For more of Matt’s pictures, you can click ON THIS LINK.

When my Mom was a little girl, she lived beneath the Cowell Smokestack in a place called the Cowell Hotel.

From what I understand, the hotel wasn’t really a “hotel” like we think of today, but more like an indoor apartment complex that housed several families.

She remembers playing under the stack as a little girl, when the Town of Cowell still existed and factory buildings were still standing.

She’s very saddened to see the stack coming down, and has purposely avoided the area since demolition began, just so she didn’t have to see the smokestack in such a sad state.

Well, the other day she forgot, and took Ygnacio, and saw the smokestack, and that sucked, since she was trying to avoid it.

A lot of people might not think this demolition is a big deal, but to us locals who grew up here, and have lived in its shadow for our entire lives, it’s horrible to see this thing go, especially so slowly. To some this may be a project, and the demolition might be fun. But to others, including me, it’s like your taking a part of our history, something we’ve seen every single day of our lives.

Like I’ve said before in a previous post, the former Town of Cowell is slowly disappearing, and it’s a big part of our local history that many seem to overlook.

If you want to learn more about the history of the Town of Cowell, I encourage you to visit “Cowellian’s” blog, the “Cowell Historical Society”, click HERE to check out all his hard work and documentation, it’s worth a look if you want to learn a little.

Also, for a picture of my Grandma in front of the old Cowell Hotel, click HERE.

Thanks to “Michael” for the photos on top of the Cowell Smokestack!

Thanks to “Radar” for the great picture of the vandalized smokestack! Doesn’t it look like it’s flipping off the World?

Everybody knows the Cowell Smokestack was the most historical landmark in the City of Concord, but since it’s being demolished, it will no longer hold that title.

So, landmark or not, what’s would you consider to be the most famous or noteworthy piece of history in Concord?

Live Oak Cemetery? Todos Santos Plaza? The Masonic Building? Helen Allen? Naval Weapons Station? The Cowell Firehouse? The Pacheco Adobe, or the recently discovered Concord Coliseum?

You make the choice, when it comes to history and the City of Concord, what comes to mind?

I got a message from a very nice CLAYCORDIAN named “Val”, who said she made this old Cowell cake for her good friend “Jim Dunn”….

Jimmy has for the past few months been very interested in the “plight” of the smokestack, as he used to live in Cowell as a child and has fond memories of playing there.

Recently my family and I gave Jimmy a surprise birthday party and for the fun of it, I “attempted” to make him a “Old Cowell” birthday cake, including the old streets, Firehouse and Smokestack !

Val, I would say you did more than “attempt”, you did an awesome job! Thanks for sharing the picture with all of us

I’ll be honest with you, although these pictures are great, this really sucks! I hate to see this landmark go, and to think that this wasn’t restored years and years ago is just a sad, and proves how much our city doesn’t appreciate the history around us.

Wait, I forgot, they do love non history, they want to pay $500,000 to move the masonic building from one location to another!

Thanks to “Radar” for the great, but sad pictures from the demolition. You’re an awesome photographer, thanks for documenting this moment for us.