It’s hard for me to write this post, but not because the story pains me to tell – in fact, I love this story and it’s one of my favorites. It’s hard for me to write because how do I even begin to share the experience with you?
Two poems I have already written about it; two poems – one private, another even more private. I have posted briefly on Instagram about it just to say it is special to me. The poems are too vague, the prose too frank.
So I’m going to share some of the adventure of finding this tree and leave the rest up to the wind. This is fitting because when I found it the first time I too was missing much of the story.
My company, Automattic, currently employs over four hundred people scattered across the world. Last week I was attending a meetup in Dublin – a jam-packed week where a few of us get together “in real life” to work together. While transiting through the Dallas airport I bumped into Steve, a coworker of mine who I hadn’t yet met. He was wearing a WordPress pullover and maybe something else with a logo on it. Seeing those, I showed him my WordPress bag from Timbuk 2 (something many of us have) and asked if he worked with me. It’s not too rare to meet with coworkers en-route to a specific meetup destination, but Steve was taking personal travel. On my way to meet coworkers in Dublin, I met another coworker at random in one of the larger and busier airports in the US.
It was one of those “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world…” feelings, though only in the probability sort of way
After my meetup, I came to England for the Word Camp London event, a gathering of WordPress developers, users, agencies, hosts, etc… When I realized that I had a few extra minutes before I needed to leave in the morning to catch the tube, I decided to go downstairs and grab some of the free food available for breakfast at my hostel. As I stood there starting on my yoghurt, a woman was staring at me with a confused look on her face. After a short pause she asked, “Dennis?” and I realized that it was Britta, one of the friends Amanda and I had in Hannover while we were there last year. In the middle of one of the biggest cities in Europe and in the basement of one probably two hundred or more hostels in London, I randomly met a friend from another place and time.
If the probability of these events happening on any given day were one-in-a-million and considering that I’ve been nomadding for about two years, then we find that the chance of this happening at least twice in that timespan is a little more than one-in-four-million (or a probability of 0.000000265956).
When I was young, under ten years old, my parents took me to a pizza joint in Indianapolis that doubled as a roaring organ theater. That place left me with fond but fuzzy memories I have cherished over the years. When I recently discovered that the concept wasn’t unique to Indianapolis and even more so when I learned that there still existed such a place in Mesa, AZ, I knew I couldn’t miss the opportunity to experience it again.
The Paramount Pizza Palace
Theater organs were originally installed in, you guessed it, theaters. They were the source of sound and effects in silent films. However, as films started to ship with audio tracks and theaters built their own loudspeaker systems, the organ’s role vanished. Several decades later, these old organs turned up in places such as the Paramount Pizza Palace in Indianapolis (whereas the Paramount theater, the original home of the organ, served as its namesake).
Granted, in my years since I have toured some incredible European churches and cathedrals with significantly better-sounding organs and more highly-skilled organists, but there is a different vibe from the luster and opulence of the mighty Wurlitzer and its company. Beyond a few registers of pipes, these organs connect to drums, cymbals, bubble machines, trumpets, ooga horns, lights, accordions, and every other instrument imaginable. As an inquisitive boy I was also sucked in to the impressive display built up around the wind machine that powered the whole contraption.
The tremulants produce a vibrato in the organ pipes
In fact, the most clear memory I have of the place in Indy revolves around the giant window into the room with the bellows. Geometric boxes breathed in and out, pumping air while lights of all colors dressed them up. These were the mechanical heart of the machine that made it tick. I’ve still never seen the air source for the large cathedral organs.
I remember a bird that cooed, bubbles that fell from the ceiling, colors, pizza, and ice-cream. Beyond that, I was afraid the other memories were lost forever.
Organ Stop Pizza, Mesa, AZ
While in a daze watching an organist play on a revived Wurlitzer console at the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, I started to try and share some of these memories with a friend of mine. The music was great but the pipes and bells and whistles were absent where a synthesizer took their place.
“Surely,” I thought, “somebody online should have a picture of the old place.” So I looked on Google and found stories, pictures, clips on Youtube, and some discussion from the son of the owners. To my amazement, he mentioned that another such place existed in Arizona.
Sure enough, there’s one about two hours from here. This one took the organ out of a Denver Theater. It’s almost identical in every way to the place in Indy, though I hear the pizza is better (they also have gluten-free pizza, a double-win). It was only a matter of weeks between learning about its existence and going there twice.
Memories refreshed
Back in high school some friends and I thought it would be fun to re-watch a childhood favorite: The NeverEnding Story. That was a bad idea because the film turned out to be much better for very young children than for adults. My memories were shattered, but thankfully it wasn’t that big a of a deal, just a few hours wasted. How would going back to the pipe organ and pizza stop support or revoke my cherished childhood wonder?
Thankfully, this experience gave me everything I remembered and more. It was just as enjoyable as an adult as I remember it being as a child. Today I’m more aware of the mechanics of how the organ produces its sound, what it takes to train for the skill to play it, and what kind of market dynamics are required to sustain such a business, but I still found myself plastered again at the window to the bellows-room and leaning over the railing to watch the piano magically play as the organist directed.
The organist plays with both hands and both feet, a feat of coordination and independence that must take extreme focus.
This marimba (one of my specialities from high-school band) hangs from the ceiling.
We are rarely able to hear some of the music that these pipe organs play. Our speakers can’t reproduce the notes they do, probably the best example being the tones booming from the 32′ pipe, which can be shatteringly loud at around 8 Hz. All in all, the organ has over six thousand pipes and other instruments!
At the center of all my wonder concerning this instrument is the simple fact that someone decided to build it. Somebody thought they could attract enough interest to spend all this money and effort to construct this marvel and bring in a profit. Although some might consider it pandering the way the lights and gimmicks accompany such songs as, The Theme for The Pink Panther, The Imperial March, and other Hollywood classics, the experience is an art in itself of a different kind than found in the halls playing Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.
This moment comes from the climax of one of my favorite songs, “Rhapsody in Blue”
Never stop wondering, never stop being inspired.
People do tend to poke fun at the way I stare at the instruments and the wind machine and the console, but these are the kinds of things that inspire, and that inspiration creates wonder. While it’s too hard for me to objectively identify the role the Paramount Music Palace played in my taste for music in general, I know that it furthered my interest in designing big engineering feats whose result is artistic expression.
Art captures something in us that can’t be verbalized. It captures emotion and passion and I love to sit in a big reverberating room while a pipe organ blasts away. How do they create those notes?How does it all work together? How could someone build this thing? Questions like these drive discovery and my visits in Mesa rekindled some of those questions.
Anyway, despite the plethora of keys on the organ console, there’s no Like button, no Share button, and no This is a waste of taxpayers’ dollarsbutton. I hope that you too can get the opportunity to experience something like this or relive old memories from similar places around the US or around the world. I hope that you can put on some music and forget about the pragmatic cares of everyday life and listen and engage in something so abstract, so useless, so ars gratia artis, that it inspires you to something new and valuable and memorable.
Good organ music is made even more pleasant by a jolly organist.
The organist’s reflection in the window to the regulator and tremulant room.
Trumpets jut out from the balcony
There were too many instruments to capture in photos, but here is an array of drums on the left, all driven by hydroulic-mechanical systems (air is the liquid in this case).
P.S. The devices I described as bellowstechnically aren’t. They are actually tremulants, which control the vibrato sound of the pipes. Since I just learned this while writing this post, I chose to leave the incorrect usage in the main text.
Next to my AeroPress, my Hario grinder has been the most significant contribution to my coffee repertoire. It’s a hand-cranked burr-grinder and it does a mighty-fine job, letting me make extra fresh coffee one cup at a time.
Before my last round of trips, the washer mysteriously disappeared. It’s literally the smallest piece of the assembly – a small translucent annulus that reduces friction between the rotating burr assembly and the stationary bearing. Technically I could still use my grinder without the washer, afterall, it’s just plastic and metal and hand-crank speeds, but the engineer in me couldn’t pull the handle.
Hario’s a big company and I didn’t have high expectations of reaching anyone who could help me. I thought about just picking something up at Ace Hardware, but the employee at the local Ace had been pretty rude to me a couple times and so I decided plan A would be better – call Hario and see if they could ship me a replacement.
In fact, after leaving an email explaining my sadness for losing my fresh grinds each morning, I received a quick response from someone who wanted to help. I ended up corresponding with two different people and both went out of their way to make sure I could crush once again. If you know how I usually handle these kinds of logistical things, you can imagine the obstacles they faced. Luckily Eileen was persistent with my sloth-like responses over the holidays and got what she needed – $1 for the washer, $1 to ship it, and an address to ship it to.
That’s not a handwriting font, it’s actual handwriting.
My washer just arrived in the mail and I can’t wait to pull out the AeroPress and see if my old bag of beans has any of its berry vigor left after sitting alone in the drawer these past couple of months. I was surprised and impressed when it came in a hand-addressed envelope with a personal message warning me about the dangers of opening a folded post-it containing washers. In fact, if it weren’t for M.L, God bless his or her soul, I might have lost the replacement and sighed anguish instead of relief over the empty mug in my hands.
the afterburner 