Compendiantics
I feel like it’s too soon to have another compendium post, despite the fact that the last one was in June, and was therefore some time ago. However, despite a plethora of incentive to ruminate, I have little of substance and only little substances to commit to writing. I have an unfortunate pattern of behaviour that when I am in transition, I cut off all of my friends and acquaintances. I shut down all communication until I have reduced the complexity and instability of my life back to a coherent and manageable ambiguity.
It’s my version of Douglas Adams’ Improbability Drive, using isolation and time to reduce the incomprehensibly large number of factors and possibilities down to a handful of threads that can be comfortably cats cradled. All of which is why I have been quite of late, on this front, over on Jehanne, and at the Brothel, as I’ve been attempting to once again find the pitch and yaw of normalcy, or what passes for it. I’m not expecting total stability, just the ordinary level of stuff I have to cope with.
Anyway, compendiantics:
+ I am once again in digital transition, trying to balance a lack of high-speed internet at home with the labyrinth of inaccessible sites at work. As of Friday, there is the possibility that DSL will once again make life easy, and I look forward to that. Although it will certainly mean that my flatmate and I will suddenly have even less of a reason to actually converse and interact with each other as we hunch over our respective monitors, sluicing data from the stream. We’ve been talking about getting accounts on World of Warcraft, and even if it means we’ll be interacting virtually, through avatars, in adjacent rooms, well… at least we’ll be carving out time to spend together.
+ My brother Peter is my flatmate, as he treads his way through a year of stressless retail activity before he plunges back into the self-rigors of higher academia. Neither of our diets are built around an exquisite palate, mine because I prefer bland repetition and his because he has S.A.D.-related hunger issues. All of which renders our refrigerator a large, electricity-sucking, magnetic joke. There are no vegetables and hardly any meat in the fridge, which is dominated by various sweetened beverages and bread products. In a snacking mood during the first week, we stared into our snack-less fridge, and Peter hit upon the idea of making a Bread Sandwich: a piece of oat bran bread sandwiched between two pieces of white. A week later he pioneered the French Toast Sandwich: a cooked and egged piece of honey oat bread slapped between two slices of oat bran. We’ve also seen a lasagne sandwich, just to include a different starch-between-starches concept. I’m beginning to see the makings of a running gag.
+ I’ve been getting up at 5:45am in order to be out the door by 6:30am in order to be at work by 7:00am, so this whole bread thing may seem far, far funnier to my deteriorating consciousness than it does to the outside world. I’m just sayin’.
A Valid Opportunity
Actual card I had prepared to give out last Saturday in case anyone asked me why I’d shaved off the beard the previous Monday. Shaving was a mistake, despite the fact that I know my Van Dyke makes me look like the Evil Duke of Norfolk and slightly less approachable than I’d like to be when starting a new job. That said, I still have a pouchy, jowly face that won’t be interesting until I’m as old as Phillip Baker Hall. Until then, I’ll continue to rely on a sharply trimmed beard to provide my face with the illusion of an undercarriage.
In other news, despite repeated listenings to Vienna Teng’s “Daughter” from Waking Hour, I did not engage in any summer flings or romances. I have, however, fallen in love with the Righteous Babe label’s technique of releasing entire albums via streaming QuickTime. Not impossible to rip, but just annoying enough to prevent any but the most dedicated of freeloaders. In this manner I have been listening to Andrew Bird’s The Mysterious Production of Eggs and Ani DiFranco’s new release, Reprieve. The latter is a fun return to form, with an equivalent number of instruments and studio work as something like Little Plastic Castle, but with a greater idea of how to use them to good effect, instead of the effect of “Hey, look! Instruments!” I especially enjoyed the opening bass lick, the structure of which echoes “You Had Time“, and subsequently got me to put up with some rhythmic inconsistencies later.
Pennies to Heaven
In the year 2001, I was given an enormous jar of pickles by a friend who thought that it was be an amusing gift. It was, particularly because I hate pickles. I brought the jar to a department meeting and they were cleared out in moments by ravenous faculty members, and I took the jar home. I’m not entirely sure what possessed me to do this, except that it had been a gift and while I abhorred the contents I still wanted to enjoy the spirit of the gift in a tangible manner.
The jar became, by dint of random chance, the jar into which I dumped my excess pennies. There’s a new attempt to get rid of the penny, as previously documented on The West Wing, and I occasionally find myself agreeing with the prospect. And these times, by total lack of coincidence, tend to fall on occasions when I have seventeen cents in copper weighing down my change purse, and no other money on my person. We don’t even have a ¢ key on the standard western keyboard anymore, f’r cryin’ out loud! So, I would keep four cents for the purposes of exact change, and the rest would get habitually chucked in the pickle jar. Five years later, I still hadn’t filled more than about two inches of the jar, so perhaps the problem wasn’t as rampant as I thought, but when wandering around my apartment trying to find stuff to discard for my upcoming move, well… a giant glass jar of change seemed to meet the basic requirements.
Luckily, my local supermarchet has what’s known as a Coinstar machine. Truly, a brilliant invention. One takes one’s giant pickle jar of pennies to the supermarket, and dumps them in a scoop. The machine counts the pennies and either turns them into actual, useful money (while removing a percentage for the service), or — and this is the really cool bit — turns the pennies into gift certificates to useful megaconglomerates like the iTunes music store or Amazon.com.
Back in the day I rowed crew, and every day on our way to practice we would stop at a Dunkin’ Donuts to buy a 20-pack of chocolate munchkins for $1.99 (which should give you an idea of how long ago this was). After a concentrated four seasons of this, we had enough pennies left over from the change from $1.99 to buy a 20-pack of munchkins: one hundred and ninety-nine pennies. It was an event, and we were proud. I figured I’d have a similar amount saved up today, enough to buy one of the two remaining episodes of The Office that I hadn’t seen. Imagine my surprise when the machine clinked and clanked up a count of 978 pennies.
Wow. That was a really good gift, even with a slight briny cent, sorry, “scent” (no pun intended, really) lingering over my pentennial accumulation of spare change. I’m now totally excited to go to one of the five Coinstar machines within easy distance of my new apartment and pour in a whole new bucket of petty cash. Too bad it’s going to take a few years to accumulate an equivalent experience.
Light Raillery
I have totally fallen in love with the word “persiflage” today. I read an article about how the romantic male lead and one of the main writers of NBC’s The Office had gone to grade school together and tripped over the word. I’d never encountered it before, and it so perfectly summed up the way I feel about my own verbal contributions to the wider world, that I decided to make it my new identity. I’ve been tired of “m3lbatoast” for a while. In college, being on the fringes of a bunch of self-proclaimed n3rds and 31337, I enjoyed the alphanumeric thing. But it’s hard to write out. And it’s hard to say simply. “Is that a numeral one or a letter ell after the three? What does that say? Emm-three-ell-ba-toast?” I have grown tired of it.
Unfortunately, adopting “persiflage” as a new web-identity isn’t that simple. Despite my inexperience with the word, it is a standard enough vocabulary word, which means that someone thinks it’s marketable. Specifically BuyDomains.com, which seems to think that the persiflage.com address is worth a cool seven thousand dollars as a personal site. Now I can’t wonder what their dedicated evaluateers would have quoted as a price if I’d said that I wanted the site for a business page or for a film tie-in. Persiflage.net has been similarly sat upon by BuyDomains. I assume that .net top-level domains are less desirable and might cost a grand or so less, but even that is eye-rubbingly ridiculous. It’s a nice scam if you can get someone to swallow it.
I have come up with a suitable username that will link to the persiflage brand and concept, and have been wandering all over creation solidifying my stake. It’s a fake word, so it hasn’t been that difficult, and now my potential new web-identity has it’s seat saved over at Blogspot, Gmail, WordPress, AIM, Flickr, and Yahoo!. But while it makes for a good username, it’s not really URL material, outside of the free hosting that someplace like WordPress provides.
The difficulty arises when one tries to avoid paying BuyDomains or GoDaddy. What do I go with? persiflage.biz? persiflage.co.uk? I am so through the whole three-for-e thing, and besides I’m not really seeing the aesthetic appeal of p3rsiflage.com. “m3lbatoast” has a visual aspect to it that is pleasing, and the reversed substitute digit makes itself almost immediately self-apparent. “p3rsiflage” and “persiflag3” fail to create a similar intuitive grace, or indeed to embody any visual aesthetic.
I have my eye on a couple of work-arounds that have a certain charm — but they will not be mentioned here so as to prevent any vicious cybersquatting. However, suggestions are welcomed as I scrutinize my bank account and ponder redesigns, server hosts, functionality, and longevity.
Too Darn Whiny
It was really, really hot for a while, and it’s still quite warm in some places. The National Weather Service issued warnings and people dehydrated to the point of death in their close, inhumane apartments.
The heat has produced record electricity use and enormous air conditioner sales and it becomes apparent that a culture that uses “the lifestyle to which I am accustomed” as a legal measure is never, ever, ever going to learn how to conserve, no matter how unexpectedly charming and urbane Al Gore is, nor how amazing one finds his PowerPoint presentation.
I was going to write about the heat and the humidity and the awful disgustingness of it all, but the weather has actually been quite variable and marvelously comfortable at times. And last year at this time I couldn’t do anything except sit and my apartment and drip with perspiration… This year, it hasn’t been nearly as oppressive. So while I’m still going to encourage you to listen to a marvelous rendition of Ella Fitzgerald singing the sexy standard “It’s Too Darn Hot“, it really isn’t.
Lower the Speculator Boom
Just a brief couple notes to wrap up the Fun Home experience.
I waited a while to read the book because I wanted Ms. Bechdel’s live presentation of the material to stay with me as long and as clearly as possible. It was a performance, in the classic theatrical connotation of the word, and despite the fact that she performed the same slide show and the same narration at bookstores and colleges around the country, it was a live reading that had its own foibles and tremors and delicacies. And it was an affecting experience. And I knew that when I read the book on my own, the stillness and the solidity of the images in my hand would quickly begin to overwrite my memories of momentary experience of having the graphic novel read to me. Just as my memories of watching Suzanne Cryer as Tracy Lord have been blurred and conflated with repeated viewings of Katherine Hepburn as just as the mystic glory of hearing Natalie Merchant perform “Verdi Cries” as a duet with piano and violin has almost totally been supplanted by the oft-spun recording, I know that my memories of the event will soon be overwhelmed by my re-reading of the graphic memoir. And so I tried to solidify and preserve the live memories of Ms. Bechdel’s reading before I read the book for myself. Time will tell whether that will be successful.
It’s an interesting read. Meticulously structural in places and with an elevated literary scaffolding, the essential technique of the interwoven visual and captioned narratives works well throughout the book. There’s a scrapbook quality to many of the reminiscences that provides a particular blank honesty to the storytelling and which helps offset (and highlight) the acknowledged distance that creeps into the narrative voice. A stupendous vocabulary and the regular occurrence of introspective, borderline epistemological queries occasionally make the narrative musings feel as if they could fly off into abstraction, and the connection to the curious domesticities over which they hang seems as if it could snap. The book never spirals off on such a zephyr, and the juggling of tone, perspective, and timeline make the overall work feel like quite an accomplished act of dexterity… but not, overall, an effortlessly masterful one. Affecting and effective, but not yet with the fine grace that belies the effort that went into it. But that’s only in terms of the overarching written structure of the work; visually, it is indeed a meisterwerk that is deceptively simple and elegantly complex. And that is almost certainly due to the meticulous prep and reference that Ms. Bechdel used in order to capture a natural, casual line in the figure work, particularly, but also in the scenery and layouts.
However, to be ridiculous for a moment, I must say that one of my favourite parts of the volume is the dust jacket. During the early nineteen nineties, comic books were plagued with an overabundance of gimmickry in their selling points, and a frequent offering were covers that were die-cut (like a classic V.C. Andrews paperback) or embossed with a metallic or fluorescent inks, foils, holograms, and prismatic papers to give the cover image that extra glimmer of collectible value. Fun Home is, in concept, scope, and execution, about as far from Ghost Rider #50 as it is from an eggplant, but the covers for both have shiny foil paper and die-cut hollows revealing pieces of the sub-cover beneath. Many people have looked askance at the current resurgence in ’90s-esque marketing techniques in the world of superhero comics, but I don’t think that anyone would have guessed that Alison Bechdel would have presaged a parallel collector’s movement within the autobiographical and literary graphic novel community.
Comics For Which to Watch Out
Every so often, life conspires. How often have you gotten a summary of posts to a listserv that seem wholly irrelevant? For those of us who subscribe to listservs, the answer is “daily”. So it’s especially joyous when those collections of announcements and updates and queries and classifieds actually contain something of note. Case in point: despite the fact that I have well and truly graduated from Simmons College, I still receive daily updates on the parking construction, upcoming campus events, and job opportunities in Boston. Now, considering that I don’t live in or around Boston, these announcements are less than useful, and have been for two years now. And the fact that I didn’t unsubscribe from this list the moment after I’d joined the alumni association would be an utter mystery, if the universe hadn’t rewarded me for my patience. Because midway through last week, the was an announcement that comic-strip artist Alison Bechdel would be giving a lecture on campus. A quick glance at her website indicated that she would also be heading westward for a stop in Northampton, thus making herself available to the twin poles of the Massachusetts women’s college communities.
Northampton used to be home to the Words and Pictures Museum, as well as other brainchilds of Kevin Eastman and Denis Kitchen, and has therefore been the New England seat of a thriving comics community (which may have moved north up Interstate-91 these days), but aside from the occasional hosting of a 24-hour comics event, it hasn’t been the most happening comics or “comix” spot in the recent past. So it was nice to hear that Ms. Bechdel was choosing to stop there on her promotional tour for her new graphic novel, Fun Home.
It also gave me the opportunity to do something that I don’t do very often: be exposed to something about which I know nothing.
I am very review conscious. I don’t always allow myself to be influenced by critical response, but I read trade magazines and hype magazines and reviews and large swathes of the internet, and so it is seldom that I come across a film or a comic that I know absolutely nothing about. I have usually encountered early gossip or a plot summary, or I know something about the directors, actors, or creators. I have some degree of context and familiarity. However, I had never read anything by Ms. Bechdel. I’d heard of Dykes to Watch Out For, but never encountered it, and therefore had no previous exposure to its content as comic material, as fiction, or as artwork. And because I am conscious of the fact that I am very review conscious, I occasionally try to make sure that I read or watch something about which I possess no pre-knowledge. It’s harder than it sounds, and the fact that I even recognized Ms. Bechdel’s name could be construed as a bit of a cheat, or at least of compromise.
However, I was once again glad of the vicissitudes of circumstance. I’m not sure I would have been so impressed with the artwork or the multimedia presentation that was the heart of Ms. Bechdel’s appearance had I been familiar with her earlier work. As it was, I found the linework, the compositions, the color, and the overall technique to be marvelous and moving. The fact that she blew up each panel to be projected upon a screen allowed for one to see with considerable clarity the intricacies of the artwork. Also fascinating was the presentation itself. Comic books, as a medium, are perhaps singly effective at being able to present to the reader two parallel and interactive narratives simultaneously. The words, usually in captions, can tell one story while the images tell another. The intersections and echoes between these two narratives is often what demonstrates the most clever and evocative comics work — pristine examples can be found in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, for example. Bechdel read the captions from her narrative in tempo with the pictures, and allowed the audience to “read” the images on the screen. This was an extremely effective way of recreating the experience of actually reading the book. Comics are difficult to give live readings of, as the interplay of caption, dialogue, image, and voice don’t create the flow that reading from prose can have. And Bechdel’s presentation would not work for every graphic novel… But it was astonishingly effective for her parallel narratives.
For those interested in her creative process, Ms. Bechdel gave a brief presentation in between the two chapters she read from in order to give a visual demonstration of her artistic process. She had given a similar demonstration in a streaming YouTube video, detailing the sort of modeling she does in order to capture body language so effectively. While this video doesn’t demonstrate the second half of her interlude — the transformative process of layering in lineart, word balloons, and an ink wash — it still gives an interesting view into her particular artistic endeavors.
Waiting for Superman
I AM CONSUMED! I have allowed the spirit of Superman to ride me like the loa. This is necessary like breathing, because right now the only thing keeping me from curling up into a ball of impoverished, jobless depression is the expectant, bubbly pre-joy at the prospect of Superman Returns. I even researched where the closest 3-D IMAX cinema was (1 hour, twenty minutes away in Manchester, CT) in case I decided that I wanted to get not just consumed but utterly bloody immolated with Superman-anticipation.
To aid me in this obsession, I have been logging on to the Quaker Oats ‘Win Superman Merchandise’ website every day and duly plugging in the little “no purchase necessary” code. And this morning, I won some Silly Putty! It’s not called Silly Putty, of course, because it’s not made by Binney & Smith. And despite the fact that it looks an awful lot like Gak or Gloop or something patented by Nickelodeon, consumer reports indicate that it’s essentially Silly Putty. No word yet on whether it can reproduce mirror images of the comics page from the Daily Planet. Anyway, that was nice, seeing as I had failed to win either free tickets or a laptop in various other Superman-related sweepstakes.
Until then, I rely on music to keep my eagerness on a quiet simmer. Chris McLaren, blog commenter extrordinaire, once pointed me towards a miscellany of Superman-related MP3s, which claimed to be the Top 20 Superman Songs. I was bemused by the fact that they named the post after a Sufjan Stevens song that they didn’t include, and noticed one or two other discrepancies in opinion. As they make sure that their links are no longer valid after a brief period of time, I have compiled my own list of top Super-tunes, which I will have on high rotation until Wednesday:
- Lazlo Bane, “Superman“, Scrubs soundtrack
- Crash Test Dummies, “Superman Song“, God Shuffled His Feet
- Iron and Wine, “Waiting for a Superman“, Yeti Compilation #2
- Sufjan Stevens, “The Man From Metropolis Steals Our Hearts“, Illinois
- John Williams, “Main Title March (alternate)“, Superman: The Movie soundtrack
Also of note is the ReFrederator cartoon podcast, which is going to be making a classic Max Fleischer Superman cartoon available to watch each day next week. The cartoons aren’t long on plot — or indeed, dialogue — but they are lovely to look at, and truly exemplary of the sort of three-dimensionality that hand-drawn animation can exhibit. As you count down to Wednesday, I hope you give ReFrederator some of your bandwidth.
Not a Jot Nor Tittle
Jottings and small thoughts:
+ I had occasion to go to a florist a few weeks ago, and it had been a considerable amount of time — at least a few years — since I had had occasion to visit a florists’, and so I may have looked a little out of sorts as I stood patiently at the counter. However, despite any sense of experience I may have felt I possessed, the proprietor of the shop seemed to think I looked sufficiently at sea that I must be a teenager buying a corsage for the prom. You know how women will say they like getting carded because it makes them feel young? I can’t actually imagine wanting to be a teenager again, except for the marvelous metabolism, but I decided to take the comment in the same spirit: as a twisted, misguided compliment.
+ Went to a Chuck Palahniuk signing in Boston at the Brookline Booksmith. I’d never read anything by Chuck, but he was giving out free gelt to people who stood in line: bunny-ear headbands and stuffed rats. I got a plush snake, which he signed, “Chucky P.”
+ Hem and Vienna Teng, who I saw play a gig together at the Iron Horse last year, are both coming out with new albums this summer. This is Hem’s fourth album in three years, so I’m a little worried about quality control, but Ms. Teng is releasing her first album with Rounder Records, so I hope that it combines her excellent songwriting and technical expertise with their stripped-down, schmaltz-resistant sensibilities. I like her music, but it’s a guilty pleasure, as she does tend to have records produced with that extra dose of cheese. I found out about the releases on NPR’s All Songs Considered, which is darling enough to have RealMedia full-length previews of a track from each album. We’d prefer MP3, but we’ll make do with what we have. The Hem track is called “Not California“, and the Vienna Teng is quite good and titled “Blue Caravan“. Hem also has a zipped MP3 available from their website, a live recording of “Reservoir“.
+ Superman Returns is due out soon, and I’m all aflutter for its eventual release. However, for some unknown reason, Warner Brothers marketing people are trying to get in the way of my peaceful coexistence with commercialism as brokered by the fine folks at Universal Studios and as recorded in the previous post. Listen, WB: if you’re going to get Superman plastered all over the cereal aisle, at least contract out with General Mills or with Kelloggs… those guys are whores, and they will make sure that their cereals contain crappy toys. Crappy toys that I will lust after and buy cereal in order to acquire. You, however, have decided to go with Quaker, who are more wholesome, and are content to offer coupons and “Memory”-stylee matching games on the back of their boxes. This is insufficient. I require more crass commercialism with my blockbuster DC Comics movies, and you are not giving it to me. Admittedly, it is pretty damn cool that there’s a red cereal that turns the milk blue, but that’s not technology that I can place around my computer monitor and shoot at my students.
+ Lastly, on the cereal front: the “Memory” game? It comes on packages of Life, with a different set of eight cards on each flavour. Of the four pairs of cards, the first three are different pictures of Superman, Lois, and Lex Luthor. The fourth pair of cards is a location. And on the plain box of Life, that location is “SPACE”. Look, guys… I know you’re already lame, because you’re trying to pass off cut-up pieces of recyclable pressboard as a toy. But you couldn’t come up with three locations from the film that didn’t include “SPACE”? You have the entirety of the Warner Bros. press machine to provide you with material for this sham of a promotional item, whereas I’ve only watched the trailer. However, I can come up with three locations from that limited footage. Actually, more: Metropolis, Smallville, The Daily Planet, the Fortress of Solitude. Even allowing for the fact that the use of “Smallville” might involve sticky trademark issues, that’s still three better “Memory” cards than “SPACE”. Now that wasn’t so hard, was it?
+ I have more free disc space on my e-mail account than I do on my computer. How did that happen? Gmail really has caused a paradigm shift in the base expectations of what webmail should and can provide. That and the fact that my harddrive is only considered “sufficient” by pre-BitTorrent and DVD-burner standards. Ah, the quaint days of 1999.
‘Bout Damn Time
I began watching Firefly on September 20, 2002. I bought tickets to Serenity on April 27, 2005, and joined the Browncoats message boards the same day. After seeing the film eight days later, as part of the whole “fan premiere” promotion effort, I spent a while on the boards to find out which of the stars had appeared at which of the locations, and then wandered off to less focused internet nerditry.
But then the boards instituted a merchandizing scheme that allowed people to get free stuff for participating on the site and accumulating points. Reading posts and watching videos and getting other people to click on links and submitting fan art could get one points… so all stuff that cost nothing but time and patience. And after some silly drawings and some failed attempts to have my friends click on links to get me points, I finally accumulated enough to earn a patch. This all reached a pitch because the site was closing down with the release of the DVD, and it was all a bit of a scramble to increase my participation points by more than 200% before they stopped doing promotions. I got my last clicks in, and resigned myself to the fact that I would never be able to accumulate 15,000 points for an autographed Josh Middleton illustration of Summer Glau, and ordered the patch on November 5, 2005. Two to four weeks for delivery, the invoice said.
The site closed down on January 3, 2006. Still no patch. I had mostly given up hope by that point, but faint vestiges remained. But as I have felt the month of August looming closer, and my eventual move from my current address became more imminent, these cobwebs of hope had been blown away, and I had well and truly accepted that the patch would never grace the sleeve of my nerd overcoat (which already showcases the emblems of the Ministry of Space, Couscous Express, Death of the Endless, GIR, and Jill Sobule). Then, today — seven months since I ordered it — the patch is in my hands. And it will soon adorn my sleeve. Thank you, Universal Studios promotion intern; you’ve restored my faith in marketing.
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