Riffs: Carl Rabenaldt’s Calendar
A big shout out goes to Carl Rabenaldt for his Live Music Calendar available each week in the View. At the recent performance of Alejandro Escovedo, presented by WVACA at the Wimberley Players playhouse, we had a second to exchange a few words about the calendar. He volunteered a few remarks about the time required to compile the list and I could easily imagine the hours he spends to scour multiple websites and other sources for the information he provides. The list provides a quick reference for names, dates and times, but also shows how much music we have in our little piece of heaven. It’s an excellent tool that works for everyone involved and a welcome addition to the View. As a dedicated user, I’m definitely a fan!
Roam: Buda for Austin Typewriter, Ink’s Type-In
A group of Texas writers, artists and collectors, called Austin Typewriter, Ink., recently hosted a “Type-In” at the Buda public library. Some 25 machines were set up on tables where guests could sit and type on a variety of vintage machines. All kinds of machines were there: stately Underwoods and Olympias, a Royal, an Olivetti, a Smith Corona or two, and many other lessknown brands only a collector would know. Some typed in cursive and another one had keys with characters in Czech.
Perhaps more amazing than the variety of typewriters there, was the diversity of the people who came. A few were frustrated by the force required to pound the keys of some of the older models, but most people came in with a sense of wonder. One thirty-something fellow filled an entire page with his thoughts. The rhythmic click-clack of his keystrokes set a soothing tone for the room. A quiet teenage girl with gentle, careful fingers fell in love with her sleek powder blue machine. Others proceeded slowly, as if learning to dance with a new partner. At my machine someone had typed “The lazy fox jumped over the quick brown dog.”
Austin Typewriter, Ink. was founded in 2017 by Everett Henderson, David Torres and Jon Olivarez. A year later, the group was selected to participate in the annual Austin Maker Faire. They set up a booth with 20 vintage machines and were overwhelmed by what they witnessed. More than 800 kids poured into their booth to type on their machines during the two-day event.
David Torres, who hosted the Type-In in Buda, said there are now more than 1600 members. Besides those from the U.S., members hail from as far away as the United Kingdom, Finland, Russia, Romania, Canada, Australia, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Many, like Susan Rigby from Wimberley who invited me, exchange hand-typed letters through the mail.
There are serious collectors in the group. Torres himself has more than 340 machines that he stores in a temperature- controlled warehouse. Every so often, he rotates those he displays at home with those in the warehouse. Others, like Susan, has 130 of them. She finds them at vintage shops or trades them with other collectors. When I asked her where she puts them all, she said “Everywhere!” And I could picture them with little messages typed on them. “Sometimes,” she said, “I pass by and type ‘I love you, typewriter’ on one of the machines.”
That sparked another discussion led by Torres and taken up by Susan, “People connect with themselves through typewriters and can sit and write their thoughts in a way that doesn’t happen on a keyboard.” Indeed, Tom Hanks is a famous collector, as are musician John Mayer and novelist Danielle Steele. The late author Cormac McCarthy used his Olivetti for nearly 50 years.
Austin Typewriter, Ink. would like “all minds to discover and reimagine the creative possibilities of the typewriter.” Find out more about this group and their podcasts at austintypewriterink. com.
Rave: wikiFeet
At our house, the arrival of the New York Times magazine is a big deal. I’d like to say that it is for the longread content, but for us, the allure is the crossword puzzle inside the back page of each issue. Whoever gets it first is allowed to pounce on it and have a go at solving the 150-ish riddles each presents on arts and culture, science, business, sports, politics, wordplay and anything else the puzzler throws in. A very challenging puzzle can sometimes stump us for days and we resort to skimming a few reference books or googling what we don’t know. It’s a fun and immediate way to learn new things that we can – sometimes – remember through to the next day. This week the puzzle was not so tough and within the space of an hour or two it was completed and cast aside.
Being a crossword enthusiast has its pitfalls, and one of them is finding something else to do when the puzzle is fully inked and there is time to kill. After a few hours at the keyboard, I found myself in exactly that position and decided to actually read the magazine. I hoped to gain something that would “inspire important conversations.”
In it, among fiction, poetry and cartoons, the “Brave New World” department, critical reviews, and a photospread of designer menswear featuring “the shrunken suit” and a “business casual” codpiece emblazoned with a starfish, I found an article by Kiwe.
The celebrity model penned the piece to bemoan her inclusion on a website called wikiFeet. Not associated with Wikipedia for whom the name was appropriated, wikiFeet is a photo sharing foot fetish site dedicated to celebrities’ feet. It averages, it claims, more than ten million visitors a month.
More humiliating than her unwitting inclusion on the site, was Kiwe’s lowly, two-star foot rating of ‘okay.’ “While “okay” is technically not an insult,” she writes, “it is not a compliment, either.”
It turns out that Kiwe is not overly fond of her feet. “In my humble opinion,” she says, “feet are just ugly hands.”
Naturally, I zoomed over to the site to get a load of this phenomenon. Besides photos of feet, one can see fashion poses – some professional and many not – culled from all over the Internet or forwarded by wannabe celebs or other amateur posters seeking
attention. Some are shameless close-ups of naked feet that leave nothing to the imagination. Others are long shots in which the feet can’t even be seen. While I can appreciate a nice looking foot as much as the next person, I couldn’t help but wonder about the hours devotees spend diving down this rabbit hole.
