June 2021
Featuring...
MuseLetter \’myüz-‘le-tər noun
1: a personal message, inspired by a muse of one's own creation, addressed to a person or organization, in the course of which, the sender becomes absorbed in thought; especially turning something over in the mind meditatively and often inconclusively.
2: a letter from a poet, or one who envisions oneself as such, in which he or she “muses” on that which is perceived to be news, or newsworthy, usually in some ironic or absurd way.
1.
Over the Moon on Mars
With NASA’s newly developed technology on display in current probes on Mars, there has been renewed interest in the planet. And the U.S. has not been alone in its exploration. Other countries have either orbited the planet, landed on it, probed it or plan to do some variation of the three soon. Russia and China most prominent. Also United Arab Emirates, Japan and India. This last sent an orbiter to Mars in 2014 on a smaller budget than the film Gravity. True.
I’ve never thought that there was anything special about Mars beyond its odd rust-red color. But who knows? And maybe those canals of which we’ve oft heard tell suggesting that at one time it might have been the Venice of our Solar System? Gondoliers singing 'O Sole Mio with a Martian accent?
The fascination with Mars, goes back to ancient Egyptian astronomers in the 2nd millennium BCE, who first noticed it. (“مهلا، ما الأمر مع تلك النقطة الحمراء هناك؟,” or “Hey, what’s up with that red dot up there?”). But the idea that it had canals, only emerged with the first map of it in 1877. Soon, the notion of possible Martian existence kicked in. Stoked by H.G. Wells’ 1898 dystopian novel The War of the Worlds.
Astronomer/businessman Percival Lowell’s 1906 book, Mars and Its Canals, sparked furthered interest. He posited that an extinct Martian race had once built a vast network of aqueducts to channel water to their settlements from its polar ice caps. Which spawned lots of fiction. And eyerolls from his wife. Today the tally of sci-fi novels about Mars, in a quick scan of Wikipedia, lists well over 100. Short stories are uncountable.
With a few exceptions, I’m not a sci-fi reader. And if I may drop a name here from outer space and go off into another orbit for a bit… as I once expressed to Ray Bradbury— who I got to briefly chat with at gig at the Griffith Observatory in L.A. many moons ago— it’s the covers! They strike me as silly and over the top, undermining any brilliance that might lie within. I was being only partly facetious. I mean, Happy Halloween!
Ironic now, given the graphic illustration accompanying my poem in this MuseLetter. And a rather lame thing to say to a man “…whose fanciful imagination, poetic prose and mature understanding of human character have won him an international reputation” (The New York Times).
He took no offense. A rather jolly charming man, he laughingly said in words to the effect…”They are. Aren’t they.”
Remembering that encounter, and now this with bubbling vat of interest in Mars— to which I’ve fallen in— I finally got around to reading his breakout book The Martian Chronicles (1950), just a couple of weeks ago. It was a captivating read. And I even liked the cover. He had a unique way in seeing earthlings through the looking glass of Mars. And it wasn’t pretty.
He had called the book a fantasy, not science fiction really… “Greek Myth and myths have staying power.” (huffingtonpost.com; 2012, upon his death at 91).
It wasn’t until the 2014 movie The Martian, that the planet itself begin to intrigue me in a realty-based adult sort of way. It flew beyond the fantastical to something that was in the realm of scientific possibility. Which was no accident, as it was based on the 2011 novel by Andy Weir. He, a darling of hard-core sci-fi fans, has a reputation of being, oxymoronically, “a sci-fi writer who prizes facts over fiction.”
For example, he provides a detailed formula in the book for making water out of oxygen and hydrazine. Interestingly, a NASA experiment has already converted carbon dioxide, which is 95% of Mars atmosphere, into oxygen. Given, in an amount that would only provide breathable oxygen to an astronaut for 10 minutes. ("That's one small breath for man...")
As for all that potato growing that kept Matt Damon alive? It is possible to grow plants on Mars. Kind of. Weir points out that, “The main thing not in Martian soil
is the nutrients and biological materials that plants rely on to grow. It’s not there because, obviously, there’s no life on Mars.” To get biological material into Martian soil, astronaut Watney (Damon) resorts to using the only spare biomaterial at his disposal, going "Where no man has gone before." We're talking astronaut poop. Ewww! But beyond the poop, lie seven Oscar nominations including best picture, and a gross of $630 million worldwide in the process. That’s no small potatoes.
It’s been said, finding that life exists or existed on another planet, would be one of humanity’s greatest discoveries. It would transform our understanding of not only the universe but life on Earth.
It seems Mars would be the first place to look for that holy grail, despite being about 140 million miles away. Or as little as 35 million in the “off season” when the tourists have gone home. Still, it's an eight month journey. But after Earth, it’s the most habitable within our solar system.
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Its soil contains water to extract.
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There is enough sunlight to use solar panels.
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Gravity on Mars is 38% that of our Earth's, which is believed by many to be sufficient for the human body to adapt to.
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It has an atmosphere (albeit a thin one) that offers protection from cosmic and the Sun's radiation.
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The day/night rhythm is very similar to ours here on Earth: a Mars day is 24 hours, 39 ½ minutes.
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Temperatures on Mars can go as high as about +70 degrees F on a summer’s day near the equator. Though on the flip side, -195 degrees in winter.
And it does snow on Mars. Though when I shake it, all I get is a swirl of dust.
Quote of the Month
They blended religion and art and science because, at base, science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle. They never let science crush the aesthetic and the beautiful.
Ray Bradbury
The Martian Chronicles
2. "Feet" on the Ground
Perseverance with its “feet” on the ground exploring and digging for samples, continues to send back video in real time. Revealing a barren landscape of stunning colorful nuance. Watching it while playing The Blue Danube (ala 2001: A Space Odyssey), can evoke a sort of mellow remembrance of a 60’s exercise of “tunning in.” (“Heavy man”). But maybe that’s just me. And with Ingenuity resembling a dragonfly as it zips about in the thin Martian air, I see in these robotic displays, a melding of science and art. And science as performance art. This struck me even before reading Chronicles (from which a Bradbury Quote of the Month will follow).
Despite my newly developed fascination of a Mars of fact and fiction, it does come back to an existential question: do we really need to be there in our sorry flesh? Especially, as Zooming and other virtual liaisons have shown that you don't have to be in the same room to be productive. Or by extension, even on the same planet. I can easily imagine verbal communication with robots. (And arguments breaking out over where to dig next. "Then, you come up here and do this!"). Do stark scientific justifications hold enough water, so to speak? Or is it that given how we are wired, it’s simply… “Because it is there.” Which is attributed to George Mallory as to why climb Mt. Everest. By the way, in his third attempt at it, he perished.
Yes, we went to the Moon. And are going back. But Mars is not the Moon. In this context, going to the Moon is like playing in the Minor Leagues. Mars is like being called up to “The Show.” I.e. playing in the Major League. Which to boot, a planet that out-moons us.
NASA’s current Artemis program, billed as a "Moon to Mars" mission, aspires "to have boots on the Red Planet by the mid-to-end of the 2030s." With help from the private sector. Elon Musk’s side hustle Space X, received a $2.9 billion contract from NASA. (Leaving Jeff Bezos and his Blue Orbit company out in the cold). NASA doesn’t deal in fantasy. Or with kooks. So while Musk named his kid X Æ A-XII (more on that in the concluding piece of this MuseLetter), his company became the first private entity to send astronauts into orbit. This is serious stuff. And it has been a long arduous process for NASA to figure out how to get an astronaut there and back in one piece.
After first landing a vehicle there in 1976, it took until 2012 to conclude that Mars once had rivers, lakes and seas. As to where it all went? It's complicated. And though it still has some water present today, it’s probably below the surface and in the form of ice (MARCH, 2018 MuseLetter).
It took another nine years before the arrival of that dynamic duo Perseverance, the “probing rover,” and Ingenuity, the "little helicopter” that could. Our version of R2-D2 and C-3PO, though not quite as cute nor handsome.
finito
Robert Allen Zimmerman Turns 80
In the blink of an eye, a decade rolls by. And much of what stood out for me about Bob Dylan turning 70, holds as he turns 80. So I will draw chunks from that JUNE, 2011 MUSE-LETTER, interspersed with some further reflections and notes. What I left out then, and what he has accomplished since.
Forever in the mind’s eye, he is the James Deanian young man—albeit a rebel with a cause— tooling down the street on a cold day in a far too skimpy jacket.
As the woman on his arm in that iconic album cover, (shot on Jones Street in the Village) Suze Rotolo —who died at age 67 in February of this year—wrote in her wonderful memoir: It’s obvious that by then we were freezing; certainly Bob was, in that thin jacket. But image was all.
This was a breakthrough album for him. The second one he released 59 years ago this past May 27th.
Seeing that cover sitting on a side table in my cousin’s tiny studio apartment was my first awareness of him. I was a senior in high school. And who was this Bob Dylan guy anyway?
His first album in '62 had gotten mixed reviews. Robert Zimmerman had only just become Bob Dylan. In his memoir Chronicles Volume One (2004), that garnered much praise and spent 19 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list, I note...
Dylan, in writing of his time in The Village in the early 60’s, mentions in passing that:
“…I was over at the Mills Tavern on Bleecker Street where the basket-house singers would bunch up, chitchat and make the scene.”
Ever the name dropper and ever intrigued by degrees of separation, no matter how many, I went on.
No more is that ever as shamelessly in evidence, as the tongue-in-cheek piece I wrote five years ago about my dubious link to Bob Dylan in 600° of Separation? (JANUARY, 2006 MUSE-LETTER.)
And what exactly makes me such an expert on this shanty of an establishment (Mills Tavern)? It was there that my father tended bar!
Ergo, (not to mention “Eureka!”)… My father must have served Bob Dylan!
In time, Dylan moved from a more literal, to a stream of consciousness in his lyrics. Which often raised a question, as a 2004 article in Newsweek pointed out.
“…there is one question that has confounded music and literary critics for the entirety of Dylan's career: Should Bob Dylan be considered a songwriter or a poet? Dylan was asked that very question at a press conference in 1965, when he famously said, "I think of myself more as a song-and-dance man."
Either way, songwriter or poet, how can one not “dig” such lines as these from Subterranean Homesick Blues:
Look out kid
Don't matter what you did
Walk on your tip toes
Don't try, 'No Doz'
Better stay away from those
That carry around a fire hose
Keep a clean nose
Watch the plain clothes
You don't need a weather man
To know which way the wind blows.
Then at some point down the line when we weren’t looking, Dylan morphed into that classic horror film actor Vincent Price. It’s called aging, and with any luck, we all will get there.
And along with that exterior transformation, the voice got raspier and raspier. Which is fine and has served him well for the material he has written for himself. But if one is ever in the mood for a chuckle, listen to him mangle Latin in the Christmas carol Adeste Fideles (O Come All Ye Faithful) on his Christmas in the Heart album.
So what’s he been up to in the last decade? He released five new albums:
Tempest
Shadow in the Night
Fallen Angels
Triplicate
Rowdy and Ready Ways
This last was released surprisingly last summer in the midst of the pandemic. It was his 39th studio album.
The standout on it, is the 10th and final track, Murder Most Foul. Which had also been released as a single, running 17 minutes. It's his longest song since Highlands in 1997; a mere 16 1/2 minutes.
2012
2015
2016
2017
2020
It ain’t It Ain’t Me Babe. It’s Dylan in that now raspy voice, speaking in couplets over rippling piano and violin, addressing "the assassination of JFK, in the context of America’s greater political and cultural history."
With this album he became the first artist to reach the Billboard Top 40 with a new album in each decade from the 1960s to the 2020s. And in keeping up with the times that are ‘achangin, it was number one on Billboard's US Rock Digital Song Sales chart.
Critic Amanda Petrusich of the higher-than-thou-brow New Yorker, described it as feeling “unusually attuned to its moment.” Which is echoed in the Wall St. Journal under a headline
Bob Dylan, a Genius Among Us. Wherein former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan pronounces that, "Great art is always about right now. If time travels, Mr. Dylan's music never settles down into the past, it's dynamic..."
Ho hum. Yeah, but where does he go from here?
What’s in a Name?
To respond to the question Shakespeare famously asked in Romeo and Juliet (Act II, Scene II), a lot if it’s X Æ A-12. Which is what Elon Musk and his girlfriend Grimes (nee Claire Elise Boucher), named their newborn son. We're told it's in homage to the couple’s favorite aircraft, SR-17, and the "elven (i.e denoting or characteristic of an elf) spelling of AI."
However, they soon discovered they would have to change the moniker, as Californian law dictates that names on birth certificates must be written using only the 26 alphabetical letters of the English language. Although apostrophes and dashes can be included. (Phew). Therefore, Musk-Grimes decided to change their son’s name to X Æ A-XII, opting for roman numerals to represent the number 12.
To further clarify, that birth certificate (and I can see birther claims that he was born on Mars, if one day he sought the highest office in the land. Our land), indicates that the baby’s first name is X. His middle name is AE A-XII. And his last name is Musk. And I wondered just where would you put the III if the name runs three generations? ("I'd like to buy another hyphen, Pat").
In this photo Musk posted on Twitter (where else?), the proud father is seen here going all Martian-eyed as he looks down at his little earthling. And he went on to outline the pronunciation of the kid's full name. "I mean it’s just X, the letter X. The “Æ” in the name is pronounced 'Ash'.”
Now before we get snarky and call dad an Æhole, it’s not as if he didn’t warn us. In his appearance on SNL last month as host— which by all accounts including my own, he killed— in a playful, yet refreshingly honest piece of self awareness said:
"Look, I know I say or post strange things but that's just how my brain works. To anyone I have offended, I just want to say I reinvented electric cars and I'm sending people to Mars on a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill normal dude?"
And then his mother joined him on stage, as the show had a special mother's day themed opening. Yes, he is not from outer space. And has a real live mother. And I can't help but wonder what she thinks of her grandson's name.
I really first began to take note of him when he launched a $100,000 cherry-red Tesla Roadster,“navigated” by a dummy (and no, not a “crash dummy”) named Starman and with David Bowie’s Space Oddity playing on the car’s speakers (MARCH, 2016 MUSE-LETTER When Pigs Fly). Captured in the photo below which is real and not an artist’s rendering, the Starman is going at a 25,000 MPH clip!
Done playing, back to the kid. In which I imagine little X Æ A-XII's class Show 'N Tell project about his summer trip to Mars and some of the rocks he brought back.
But who knows. This sort of name might be prescient. And though it might be an Elon eon into the future, do you think a race of Cyborgs in 2161 will be walking around with names like Scott? Tom? Tiffany? Sue? And that California (assuming it survived the Big One), still will not allow numbers in a name? Nah. "Hi, I'm . I'd like you meet my binom . We met on .com." .
Salacia
Designed and written by Ron Vazzano
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A Post-presidency in Oils
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Poets in Passing
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345 Madison Avenue
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Quote of the Month
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Taking the Afghan off Our Laps
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