Alton: For those of you who don’t remember a world before MTV, the idea of home preserving may seem as alien a concept as churning butter, making your own cloths, or making do with a 1400 baud modem.

Alton: I may not be as hard core as some canners, but I do have a serious lust for good fruit preserves. I’m not talking about that goopy, super-sweet, grotesquely overpriced supermarket stuff. I’m talking homemade. I’m talking about jewel-like jams and jellies, marmalades and compotes that have this heady aroma and a flavor that’s got the power to somehow capture entire summers of your youth. It can even elevate a simple piece of toast to a culinary canvass of Proustian proportion.

Alton: We’re going to be canning, and I was hoping that you would help us gear up.
W: Alright, but let’s hurry. The keymaster over there is giving me the creeps!

W: What are you putting up?
Alton: With you!

Alton: I take out insurance. Jam purists, look away!

Alton: So, is this something you can predict, or is it like rolling chicken bones?
Daniel Stillman: No, it’s not like rolling chicken bones. This is science.
Alton: Science...
Daniel Stillman: We can count on a one degree decrease in boiling point for ever five hundred feet we go up.

Daniel Stillman: On Mount Everest, it’s, uh, 156 degrees Fahrenheit.
Alton: 156? Wow, must be tough to get a hard boiled egg on Everest.
Mountain Climber: Yeah, but at that temperature you can reach right in and grab ‘em.
Alton: Oh, like Darryl Hannah did in Blade Runner?
Daniel Stillman: She was a replicant! It didn’t count!
Alton: You got beat up a lot in school, didn’t you?

Alton: Remember, when the queen told Alice, “Jam tomorrow and jam yesterday, but never jam today,” she didn’t know what good eats she was missing!

The title, Urban Preservation I: Jam Session contains a double pun. Urban Preservation turns on the concept of urban conservation, the notion that there is value in conserving and maintaining older structures for their sense of history and heritage – preserving that heritage. Jam session is an idiom that refers to a (generally) unstructured and often impromptu musical performance (as opposed to a rehearsal or a concert, where the performance has specific objectives). In Alton’s case, of course, jam session refers to the time he spends making jam that he will then preserve.

On August 1st, 1981, MTV (Music Television) debuted, offering music videos on emerging cable systems. Since then it has expanded its programming and embedded itself into public consciousness with such catchphrases as “I Want My MTV” and concepts as “The MTV Generation.” In a certain sense, the appearance of MTV marked a cultural waypoint, and this is what Alton’s early comment captures.

A culinary canvass of Proustian proportion refers French intellectual and writer Marcel Proust, who lived from 1871 to 1922. In his most famous work, Remembrance of Things Past, he coined the term involuntary memory. The scents and tastes of Alton’s jam conjuring memories of summers gone by are an example of this; compare it to voluntary memory, which is the deliberate attempt to recall a fact. Odor and taste are among the most powerful summonses of involuntary memory.

W tells Alton that the keymaster is giving her the creeps. Perhaps he reminds her of Louis Tully, portrayed by Rick Moranis in 1984’s Ghostbusters. In the film a supernatural power named Gozer possessed nebbish accountant character Tully, turning him into the Keymaster and forcing him to stalk female lead Sigourney Weaver’s character Dana Barrett, whose character had become the Gatekeeper. United at the proper time, the characters made it possible for Gozer to enter the world, but prior to that point, Tully’s amateurish stalking of Barrett was part creepy and part comedy. The nerd stalking W inside the hardware store reminds her of Louis Tully.

The physicist on the roof is a sly reference to The Fiddler on the Roof. In 1894 Russian Jewish peasant Sholom Aleichem wrote Tevya and His Daughters, a story about a man named Tevye struggling to maintain the balance of his life in the face of many external tensions, not the least of which was his daughters’ choices for husbands. In 1964 the story was adapted as a Broadway play and in 1971 as a movie musical. The fiddler and his precarious perch symbolize the difficulty of maintaining that balance, as he plays, the fiddler’s movements threaten his stability. Alton’s physicist perches, as does the fiddler, precisely at the ridge of a very tall roof.

When a mountain climber points out that you could grab eggs out of boiling water on Mount Everest (because of the low pressure and correspondingly low boiling point), Alton remembers that Darryl Hannah did that (at 212ºF) in Blade Runner, a 1982 film. Hannah’s character Pris was a replicant – an artificial life form. Replicants possessed strength and dexterity superior to that of normal humans, as well as great resilience. For Pris, reaching into 212ºF boiling water risked neither injury nor pain. That’s why Daniel Stillman believed her feat didn’t count – and why Alton speculated that the nerdish physicist might have caught a few schoolyard beatings in his day.