He Knew All The Words

You see that little link over there on the right that says Concettina Died and Other Storied of the East Side? Well, it’s been since January of 2009 that we had an update from Marco. Until today.

When Stephanie, Joe, and I were visiting Mom and Dad over Labor Day, Dad told a story that we’d heard before, but that never gets any less funny for the retelling. Something made me think of it today and I realized that it’s a classic that really shouldn’t be left out of Marco’s story archive over there at the Concettina Died section of my old site. So I asked Dad to write it out. He obliged within the hour.

Marco writes:

After high school graduation, my parents, who were busting their buttons because I was the first in the family to go to college, decided they would drive me to Athens, Ohio, where I would start classes at Ohio University. The journey was about four hours, and took us through winding country roads, and it seemed, through every small township and village in southern Ohio.

In one of these villages, a traffic jam had Papa’s car at a dead standstill. It was a two lane street, through the middle of that village, with the opposite traffic directly across from our car. September can be very hot in southern Ohio, so all the car windows were rolled down (no air conditioning in 1956). Papa, who had little patience when he thought the fates were acting against him, cursed in his native Italian, and was generally beside himself over the delay. In the car directly opposite ours, traveling in the opposite direction, a rather elderly little lady sat behind her wheel, patiently waiting to move forward. I seem to remember she looked at us, and smiled. Papa smiled back, and in his broken English, said to her, “eh ladee, thisa yu town?” She, probably expecting some nice word about her village, answered, “Yes, yes it is.”

Then with all his frustration ready to be unleashed, Papa leaned out his window and yelled to her, “Wella, poo! Go to hella you eh you town!”

Unable to believe what had just taken place, I slid as far down into the back seat as I possibly could, hoping for the traffic to begin moving soon. And that’s how my college days began!

I’ve added this story to the full archive, and if you haven’t done so recently I recommend going back through and reading all of Dad’s stories again. They’re funny and touching and it’s a wonderful blessing to have them written down. Thanks, Dad.

This is just a test of the WordPress app for iPhone. I’m hoping having remote access to the blog will allow me to update a bit more regularly.

Of course, we’re all gonna have to pug up with more typos since this keyboard is not the easiest thing in the world to use. And the autoxorrext is really not so great. See what I mean?!

Updated to try adding a picture, taken just now with my phone:

this was an antlered buck of empty nostril
sexy dancing
kevin clifton burn the floor
harryreidasshole
big gay words
sculpted hedges
i love elvis poem
paris from above
italian sculpture
vagina dentata
boozy lunch
mad parents
chris stout is white
fuck ny senate
gay males pen pals jail david zaza
una furtiva lagrima the goonies
why do i like vaginas

They are all search strings that brought visitors to this blog. My favorite is “gay males pen pals jail david zaza” (and no, I don’t have any imprisoned pen pals. I’m desperate, but not that desperate). I’m also particularly proud that someone searching for “harryreidasshole” lands at this blog. Means I’m doing something right. If I ever change the name of this blog it’ll be to “Senators Are Assholes (Except for Feingold).” And finally, to whoever was searching for “why do I like vaginas”, I’m sure if you have to search the web for the answer to that question that you’re pretty much guaranteed to NOT find the answer here at davidzaza.com. Good luck with that….

Well, I haven’t had much to say these last few weeks. That’s not true, actually. I’ve had plenty to say, but all of it filled with bile and venom and then shrouded in an ugly veil labeled “I don’t care.” Which itself is a lie. I do care. I care that Maine voters are 53% bigots. I care that Democrats feel it’s necessary to abandon core values in order to pass a shitty health care reform bill. I care that the economy is recovering for bankers but not for anyone else. And I care that many good things — movies, music, internet stuff, successful work and personal experiences — have come and gone without me passing any of it on to you here on these pages. But sometimes I need a break from paying attention. And I’ll tell you what — it’s felt great to not worry about this blog for a few weeks. If you missed me, sorry. If you didn’t, well, I didn’t miss you either. I honestly didn’t. (See what I mean about the bile?)

Anyway, one way to rejuvenate my interest in updating this thing would be to follow-up on a long-standing initiative that’s been languishing on the road to ruin since mid summer. With Thanksgiving coming, it seems a good time to pick it up again and make something of it. It’s called the Favorite Picture Project.

Back in early August I sent an email to family and friends that read:

Dear Friend,
If you’ve taken a picture within the last year that you love, and feel like sharing it, please email it to me. Anything at all. I want to compile such favorite pictures from a whole slew of different people and put them together in a blog post. You’ll receive credit and I’ll let you know when it goes up.
Love, David

The intention was to collect these pictures and make one massive blog entry that presented the pictures in a collage of the world as viewed through my loved-ones’ eyes. Well, they say that when God doesn’t answer your prayers he actually is answering, with a big ol’ “No.” And my friends and family responded in fewer numbers than I really needed in order to present the massive world-through-my-loved-ones’-eyes collage. I don’t blame anyone, of course — I mean, we’re all busy and frankly, most of us don’t really take any single picture that’s worthy of sending to anyone as a favorite. But let me tell you, the baker’s dozen of people who did send me pictures really came through with flying colors.

So the modified version of this project will be to present each picture individually, with a bit of writing about it or about the person; each as it’s own entry. The first edition of this project is coming up next. I hope you love these pictures as much as I do… Stay tuned….

To anyone using davidzaza.com email — Marco, Marie, Adge, Diane, Patsy, et al —

My web host changed their mail server configuration. If you are still receiving your email as always, do nothing. If you are not, you need to change your settings in your mail client. Contact me for details.

If you haven’t noticed, I’ve been updating the links in my blogroll to include some new blogs and sites that I like to check in with regularly. All the links in the “Others” department to the right are worth checking out every now and then, but these are the three that I’d love you to see right away…

Do go take a look at Jessica Fenlon’s new video on the homepage of her site drawclose. She’s doing something she calls “datamoshing,” which is taking the messiness of data compressions — known as data artifacts (or artefacts), you know, those weird effects you see in digital video that’s been compressed wrongly — and creating something new from them. Of course, Fenlon’s just doing what she always does: taking the ugliness of the world, filtering it through her unique vision, and feeding it back to us as something beautiful.

A new find for me is And I’m Not Lying, the blog of storyteller Jeff Simmermon. No only is he a very smart and funny observer of life and New York City (and life in New York City) but he’s also been telling his story of fighting testicular cancer, which he does with grace, humor, and touching insight. Go back a few pages into his archive and read forward. It’s very worth the time.

Indexed is the brainchild of Jessica Hagy. She takes the whole world and sorts it out for us in very witty, mathematical charts and diagrams. It’s like math nerd heaven, but you don’t actually have to be a math nerd to enjoy it. Go there every weekday morning for a laugh or an “ah-ha” moment.

God damn it. I just accidentally deleted almost every comment made in the last two weeks. I don’t think I can restore them. Sorry, all.

After living with one of their default layouts, I finally got around to customizing my Twitter page background. If you tweet, follow me here.

gxakfhr6p3

If you don’t follow me on Twitter but are curious as to what I tweet about, well, here’s a word cloud to show you.

[nonmobile][/nonmobile]

[mobile][/mobile]

I’m going out tonight to find myself. I’ll have him update this blog tomorrow.

If you’ve bookmarked “blog.davidzaza.com” you’ll want to update that bookmark to simply “davidzaza.com.” It’s been a long while coming, but this site needed to be refreshed. I’ve abandoned the bright pink background to make for easier reading. If you miss it, go to the link in the right-column navigation called “Archive of Pre-2009 site.” All the old stuff is there.

In redesigning the site I’ve also changed platforms. I’ve switched from Movable Type to WordPress, and I have to say I’m very impressed with WordPress. It’s easy to use, very flexible, and a heck of a lot faster. And it allows me add a few nice features I couldn’t before.

First of all, everything is all on one page. No more separate sections. The right-column navigation features links to me and others elsewhere on the web, a search feature if you’re looking for a particular thing I wrote in an entry, an archive of past entries archived by month, and a tag cloud. Yes, finally, the entries will be tagged. If you want to see only entries about family (or politics, or photos), click the appropriate tag. The tag cloud shows which tags are most used by making them larger.

Images, too, will no longer have their own section. As I’ve been doing for the last year or so, I’ll be posting a few images within individual entries, and then linking to complete galleries of images at my MobileMe account. Apple has simply made it too easy for me to upload those galleries from my computer for me to try to do the heavy-handed photo-editing and individual uploading of images I used to do. Furthermore, images in the blog entries are now in “Lightbox,” which is a format that allows for small thumbnails that open up onto same-page full-size images. Take a look at the 40th-Birthday entry below, and you’ll see that when you click on an image a large black background opens and the image scales up. You can click on the right side of an image to go to the next image, click the left side of the image to go to the previous image, or click the close box at the bottom to return to the blog.

The best new feature for those of you who have both boring meetings and mobile devices: this blog is now mobile optimized. If you have an iPhone or a Blackberry or some other web-browsing phone, the site will look something like this:

Another feature is that comments will now have to be approved by me before they appear on the public site. This will prevent the spam comments that I’ve often received and which then I have to go back and delete. I promise I’ll be quick to approve comments, because I know sometimes you all address comments to each other….

In terms of content, nothing on my end is changing, with the exception that I’m going to try to have a few guest bloggers at various times. I know so many interesting and smart and funny and talented people, it seems a shame to keep them all to myself. More on that as it develops.

I hope you like it. The new layout is more straightforward and much more mainstream blog-like. But I’m 40 now, not some naive upstart who’s looking for anything fancy. So there it is. There may be additional design tweaks over the next couple of months as I get a feel for the new layout… Thanks for reading!

You might not know this, but this blog’s raison d’etre is the little corner of cyberspace called “Concettina Died and Other Stories of the East Side.”

You see, before DAVIDZAZA.COM existed, I blogged in secret on one of those journal sites where everyone posts under a fake name and tells the whole world all their secrets. I loved it, and I made a number of friends there–people who actually became real life friends. But it seemed somewhat ridiculous to be posting all the comings and goings of my life for just those few friends and a whole universe of strangers–mostly angst-ridden teens who are the people that populate those journal sites. So the DAVIDZAZA domain was purchased, the site was designed by a friend with mad skillz at all things interweb, and this little site was born.

But underlying all of that was a long-time goal of mine to get my dad to write down the family stories he often told. They were always entertaining, and given their very personal nature, they were part of our family’s collective history and heritage. My sister, my cousins, and I all wanted to be able to keep them long into the future. And Dad had always hinted that he’d like to write them down. In fact, he already had a title in mind–”Concettina Died and Other Stories of the East Side.”

Various ideas were mentioned, and plenty of cajoling was offered, but no stories appeared. Finally, I thought I might get a better response if I myself organized the project, to basically take the pressure off of Dad having to figure out what to write, when to write it, how to write it, how to distribute it, etc. So, I more or less took this bull by the horns, created a subdomain of DAVIDZAZA.COM in the form of CONCETTINA.DAVIDZAZA.COM and –eccola– the new repository of Marco Zaza’s stories was born. Dad wrote his stories, and I acted as his editor.

After producing over twenty entries, Dad’s frequency started to slow. He told me he’d pretty much finished with what he wanted to write. I arm-twisted him into a few more by asking him to commit the immigration stories of my four grandparents to paper. (Uh, screen.) He agreed. In the midst of those four requested stories he added two or three more of his own.

And now for an announcement: I’m working on a new design and structure for this blog. Nothing is forever, not even Big Pink. But as soon as I started working on DAVIDZAZA.COM v2.0, I realized that only three of those four immigration stories had been written. So at long last, Dad has produced Grandpa LoBasso’s story. How wonderful to have a new story again over in that section of the site! Here it is.

So my little experiment was a success. I got Dad to write out his stories. My sister and cousins and I (and the kids in the generations after us) get to keep them forever. Thanks, Dad!

But you know, isn’t it true that an experiment is really only successful if it can be replicated?! I mean, it would be a shame, wouldn’t it, if in version 2.0 of this blog mine was the only voice. So yeah, I’ve got a bunch of ideas about the content of the new blog. Don’t worry, Dad, I won’t be making any demands–and in fact, yours is not the only voice that is going to be tapped for these alleged future experiments. But more about that later. It will take me a good long while to get the new site up and running. So for now, enjoy my now daily (!) updates, enjoy Marco’s new story, and take, if you will, a minute to go back and re-read all of the stories posted in the CONCETTINA section–I did last night and can say with confidence that they’re all worth another look….

I, David Zaza, being of totally unsound mind, do hereby resolve to update this blog at least once every single day from today, Tuesday, January 27 through Monday, February 23, 2009. Four solid weeks of updates. Now, I make no promise as to the length or quality of these alleged posts, but given the sheer quantity involved I’d say that at least some of them are bound to hold your interest for at least the time it takes your mind to wander back to the news, your sex life, politics, sports, your friends’ new baby, President Obama, the damn TV, your upcoming vacation, or the new Cavafy poem in The New Yorker.

So there. 1 day down. 27 to go.