The Song of Soda
Here’s how I’ve been frittering away my time recently: the X.3 version of the Macintosh OS supports a version of iTunes that allows one to display the cover art of the album in conjunction with the song playing. The Jaguar version didn’t do that, and so I find myself with a staggering 1150 songs — mostly acquired in 1999 during the heady days of AudioGalaxy… sorry, Copyright Cops — with only the barest handful linking to an image file. And there doesn’t seem to be any way of sorting the tracks by available cover artwork, so it’s difficult to mount a planned mission to fill my remaining slivers of hard drive space with 200 by 200 pixel JPEGs.
So if I find myself with an idle moment or — heaven forfend! — doing some reading for my Adolescence class, I turn on Clutter and keep my fingers resting near the keyboard. Clutter searches for album cover artwork through Amazon.com, which one can paste into the system easier than if one was trying to drag and drop the data from the otherwise impeccable Firefox. Useful little toy. Because Clutter associates the artwork with the album file instead of the individual track, it’s difficult to know how many songs I have artwork for. Still and all, I’ve acquired 133 folders of artwork for 443 folders of musical artists. Not bad.
Speaking of iTunes, a very attractive married woman comes up to me yesterday and hands me a bottle cap, and I take it from her, wondering briefly if this is some variation on the old grade school pull-tab code, and how she’s going to take it when I remind her, gently, that she’s married. However, the cap’s got some sort of PepsiCo iTunes code under the cap that allows me to download a tune for free. I’m reminded of the album and a half of varied songs languishing in my virtual shopping cart and am well pleased. More pleased, perhaps, than if she’d handed me a pull-tab.
Anyway, I must say, it made me go out and buy a Pepsi-brand soda in attempts to get another free download. Hard to argue with the fiscal logic: spend 34¢ for twenty ounces of sugar water and buy a song I was going to buy anyway. Or, alternatively, spend a mere 84¢ for a soda and get half off the cost of a song. iTunes wins, the record labels win, PepsiCo cleans up, and I’m happy; everyone is happy, in fact, except for the communists. Good thing the offer ends tomorrow, or I could see this behavioral pattern getting well-entrenched into my buying habits.
And speaking of downloadable music, the other vernal song that frequently occupies my mouth and mind during this time of year is Tom Lehrer‘s blissful “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” from the Another Evening Wasted With Tom Lehrer album. Sublime stuff.
Digital
I’ve been meaning to do this for two years now.
The choreographic digitial accompaniment of Kieron Gillen:
Someone should make a set of Sign Language-slash-Taking With One’s Hands emoticons from these. Gillen can put one at the end of each of his posts to indicate how strongly he feels about whatever it is he’s saying. As a professional writer, he shouldn’t feel that he can convey such things through his words alone. No, the proletariat require visual confirmation. Click on the image for video (now hosted on YouTube!) of the conversation.
EDIT: What timing! Mr. Gillen’s national import has just been reported, albeit with some fairly weak writing, in The New York Times. The link may require registration.
Leon the Unprofessional
Please note that the following entry contains vulgar language. Those of a more delicate nature may wish to grow up and join the rest of the English-speaking world.
An Open Letter to Benjamin Leon Russell:
Pay your fucking bills.
In 1995, a year into college, I got a call from SallieMae asking me why I’d defaulted on my loan payments. I informed them that I was still in college, and therefore wasn’t supposed to begin repaying my loans until I’d completed my studies. So something must be wrong. It turned out that a different Benjamin L. Russell was fucking about with non-payment. And despite the fact our Social Security numbers were radically different, and that SallieMae uses SSNs as personal serial numbers, this other Benjamin L. Russell’s credit record was somehow bleeding into mine.
You may have guessed by this point, Mr. Benjamin Leon Russell, who this other Benjamin L. Russell is. But considering you seem unable to comprehend the basic social contract of paying one’s financial dues, you may actually have the intellectual capacity of the end product many generations of incestuous Afghan Hounds, thus producing the stupidest member of the stupidest breed of the stupidest animal on the planet. So, to wit: it is you.
Due to the slightly unethical but immensely charitable act of a woman working for SallieMae, I know your Social Security number. It was given to me so that I could protect myself against any asinine actions you might take in future. So far, I have only used it for said defense. Do not force my hand so that I begin using it in a series of offensive tactics, linking your name, address, and SSN to a series of home loans, car loans, credit card buying sprees, and mail order sex toys the likes of which H.R. Giger only dreamed of.
It’s been ten years since your foul sewage spilled over into my fiancial records, and I rather thought perhaps you’d grown up enough to learn how to settle your debts responsibly. However, I have received two calls recently from different banks asking me to pay your bills. Here’s a thought: PAY YOUR FUCKING BILLS, as I am not willing to do so in your name.
Comedy Reruns
Be forewarned: I shall be waxing speculative about High Concepts in this entry. Feel free to ignore anything remotely philosophical and simply look at the pictures.
Right. What with Spring Fever and all, I was feeling that I rather needed to get out of my bleedin’ apartment and shake some of the cobwebs loose from my rafters, so I was pleased to find upon reading The Valley Advocate, my local free (but invaluable) entertainment tabloid, that the Second City touring company was going to be in Keene, NH the next evening. I had found out about a SC troupe performance in Manchester last year in even more immediate circumstances, and tickets to good seats had still been readily available, so I wasn’t overly concerned that I would be able to gain admission on such short notice. What did worry me was whether the show was ready for me to see it again so soon. It had been about 45 weeks since my attendance at their previous performance, and my hand hovered over the “confirm ticket order” button as I tried to guess how much repeat material I was signing myself up for,
In an interview with Steven Wright I once read, he said that in the sixty-odd shows he performs each year, he adds about eight new yokes to his routine, discarding an equal amount. In this way, he replaces about a third of his act each year. I saw Wright in 2000 and again in 2002, and in the interim he hadn’t rotated out enough jokes to keep my interest during the second performance. So I worried, would the Second Citizens be doing enough new material to keep me laughing? Or would I be a chilly spot of jaded in difference in the Colonial Theatre mezzanine? I decided to gamble on the being sufficient potential to risk it, based on my need to get out of the house and my awareness that a significant portion of their act was improvisational… and that material is never likely to be repeated.
I turns out that there are three different touring troupes from the Second City, color-coded blue, red, and green in an thankfully unpatriotic sidestep. Despite this, I ended up seeing the same troupe I had seen in Manchester: Green Company. Of this I was glad, as it allowed me two luxuries: the ability to better judge how much skit rotation had gone on in the interim, and the chance to learn the names of the comics. For a organization with such a rich history of performers and writers, the Second City doesn’t seem to go out of its way to provide its audiences with the ability to recognize and track their alumni/ae. There are no programs given out and no introductions made, so if Megan Grano or Mike Bradecich go on to national careers in the footsteps of Joe Flaherty and Tina Fey, who will know? No one from New Hampshire, I’m guessing.
All in all, I’m guessing I only saw six repeated skits between the two performances, an excellent track record for a two hour show. And most of those repeated skits were what Second City calls “blackouts”, short comic strip-esque skits, with a set up, a punchline, and a general exeunt omnes in the space of between 15 and 45 seconds. A marvelous technique, and one that probably requires a great deal of practice, as each one has a lot to do with acting as much as comic timing, as the participants need to establish relationships and characteristics in body language, stance, and vocal tone almost instantly. Good improv, like the classic Freeze exercise, emphasizes this technique: within a pair of lines, the actors need to have clearly communicated to the audience and to each other the necessary information for the skit to continue. That level of speed in craft was unfortunately absent in recent performance of The Upright Citizen’s Brigade I saw recently. The casual, gregarious atmosphere that the UCB members seemed to be trying to instill in the room and their audience was nice, and interesting, but it didn’t lend itself to the sort of sheer laughter and enjoyment that Second City was able to accomplish with their accelerated timing.
And I think that timing must make the difference between being willing to hear a joke repeatedly and being bored. When Jon Stewart performed at The Bushnell in late January, I had been regularly watching The Daily Show for about two months, and so every time he cribbed from a broadcast in his stand-up routine, I remembered. And because of Stewart’s pacing of his delivery, complete with reflective pauses and minor tangents, I had the ability to settle back in my chair and wait for him to change topics, to move on to fresher pastures. Towards the end of his set, he was riffing on the lack of connection between Easter and eggs, and I was able to compose whole paragraphs about the history of the word “oestre” and its relevance to the topic at hand because of his casual pacing. For me, that could have been a deadly joke to end his routine on, as it didn’t cover anything that I considered to be inventive or worthy of commentary (he was able to redeem himself, by the way, with the concept of “the Judas Egg”). And as inventive and jaw-droppingly clever as Steven Wright can be, his deadpan deliver and timeclock pacing was deadly to someone who knew the jokes. I still think I need to wait another year or two before I can see him live again.
And yet I still don’t know how to distinguish between the mood state that makes one joke predictable and one joke anticipatory. My first ever venture into live stand-up comedy was in watching Phil Jupitus in London. I was drawn there by watching clip of him do a routine on the character of Chewbacca in Star Wars. And when he worked his way ’round to that part of the script when I was watching him live, I giggled cheerfully in the pauses as he set up the joke, ready for him to say it, like it was a favored movie I was watching on video, ready for that perfect line that I could recite by heart. I have always dismissed the incessant repetition of great lines from comedy films as behavior based more around the experience of solidarity than in actually revisiting the funny moment. People quote Python or The Simpsons or whatever Michael Myers/Will Ferrel/Owen Wilson film is current in vogue amongst the proletariat not because the lines are fiercely funny out of context, but because they are recreating the context with their friends in The Know. But last night, there were scenes when I knew, I was certain what was going to be said next — without ever having seen the skit before — that were funnier because the audience had to wait for the actor to take his time, savouring the delivery of the punchline. And the expectation of those lines made it better, as it made even the long, awkward silences part of the note-perfect metronomic timing.
It Might As Well Be Spring
Spring is such a shameless flirt. I recall blogging a couple years ago about the most vehement, school-stopping snowstorm of the year happening on the Vernal Equinox, so I am well aware of the fact that a few sunny days and an active moist breeze does not Spring make. But despite any intellectual pattern recognition and despite the fact that we have only just passed the midpoint of the slow computer morph of lion into lamb, I have caught Spring Fever. I am disappointed every time I realize that while it looks glorious outside, it’s still too chill to abandon my heavier wool topcoat in favor of my more traditional black cotton.
Still, the seven inches of show we received last week melted away within two days, and the crusties and hippies have emerged, blinking, from the heated confines of Café Koko and started lingering outside in a cloud of smoke and grime, so while Spring may not actually be here, we are certainly well into Thaw.
Celebrate early with me. Have a listen to Stacey Kent‘s marvelous, swininging “It Might as Well Be Spring” from her Rodgers and Hammerstein collection In Love Again.
Brothel-Day! Year Two
Happy second birthday to the Brothel! Long may it be a venue for interconnectivity and frivolity. Until Delphi starts costing too much money, and then it’s over to Beehive.
Motivational Punishment
From AllPosters.com:
It doesn’t surprise me that someone has discontinued the above Punisher Motivational Poster. It also fails to surprise me that someone in Marvel’s increasingly omnipresent marketing department — I’m not willing to track down the webpage of the new venture partnership they’ve embarked upon where one can pay for Marvel Superhero Clip Art — thought it was a good idea to to have a gun-toting, skull-wearing vigilante on a cubicle-sized motivational poster.
No, that sort of appalling ignorance is in perfect keeping with the sort of marketing folks that create children’s action figures based upon characters in Rated-R movies. And I’m not even talking about the MacFarlane Toys line, as those action figures are primarily designed for adult collectors, no I’m talking about the vintage TERMINATOR 2 action figures and the like, before the “Grown-Up” Toy Market really ballooned. Marketing execs are soulless freaks, embodying a particular combination of fierce imagination and total lack of social awareness. And besides, the Punisher was in a recent film (although the poster has been around for about two years) and is therefore a recognizable commodity.
No, what really gets me is that someone felt that a Captain America Motivational Poster about patriotism would be a suitable substitution for the sort of person who would be buying a Punisher Motivational Poster in the first place. That’s just mind-boggling.
By the way, the “motivational” text on the Punisher poster is as follows: “To fight when others fold, pursue while others retreat, conquer while others quit, and make right when all else is wrong.”
Woo! Makes me want to buckle down and improve my corporate efficiency rating, I tellya!
MillSweeneys
Pulitzer Prize-winner and my former writing professor Stephen Millhauser has a story in the most current issue of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern. McSweeney’s is edited by the polarizing Dave Eggers and sold in highbrow periodical sections of the most rarefied booksellers. Actually, the only place I’ve ever seen a copy of McSweeney’s was in Cambridge’s cluttered comic book store, Million-Year Picnic, which, despite its maze-like selection of odd, independent comics, hardly qualifies as “rarefied.” The only thing hard to come by in MYP is room to swing a cat, or, indeed, turn around in a narrow personal revolution without knocking some DC Direct action figure from his personal nail.
Hipper people than I read McSweeney’s, and so I am pleased that this may introduce them to his work. Previously, the best chance a random acquaintance of mine would have had of encountering Millhauser would have been in the fiction section in The New Yorker, and I know I never read the fiction section in The New Yorker. Reviews, yes; cartoons, obviously; but anything that’s longer than two pages? Highly unlikely. Still, if any of you have random issues of The New Yorker kicking about, see if you still have the issues from April 19, 2004 or November 22, 2000. That’s my guy.
Should the above publications be unavailable and should you be too bleedin’ lazy to go to a library, I picked up three spare copies of Enchanted Night from the remaindered fiction pile specifically so that I could give them out to people. Interested? Drop me a line.
February Thaw
Apologies for the lengthy delay in updates. My previous resolution to make sure I had at least one new entry every week has been partially scuppered by the destruction of the BenCam. The BenCam is a cheesy Logitech webcam that I was sent in the mail — Free! — years ago for ordering DSL or something. The corporation that sent it to me didn’t care that I had a Mac; they sent a Free! webcam to every new subscriber, and if it wasn’t compatible it wasn’t their fault. Things probably only cost 47¢ to manufacture anyway. And while it was not wholly compatible, I was able to find a couple of freeware workarounds that at least enabled me to use the thing for its intended purpose: low-res, low-quality pictures to be uploaded to a website.
Then I upgraded to Mac OS X, and I had to find a new workaround, which required me to use a cam module that recorded Quicktime films, and then save a frame from the movie. And then when I finally upgraded to Panther last month, even that functionality was lost. If I want a webcam now, I probably have to drop $144 on the iSight, something that’s not going to happen in this lifetime. So, no more pictures unless I have film developed and then scan the prints. Which is hardly going to keep my ongoing plan for web-portraiture current.
N.B.: The real snarl about the upgrade to Panther is that my OS no longer supports my ATI XClaim (Pro) dual-monitor card, which was probably my favourite thing about my set up. A 15″ monitor may be lame by today’s standards, but two of them combined into one desktop is a whole lot of real estate, and I’m still adjusting to the sudden halving of my virtual property.
And while I haven’t had the ability to sling any photos up on the web, my usual ‘blog-thoughts have been directed towards homework, as I am required to write semi-weekly internet entries for my current class on YA literature and development. Said entries can be found over on what I’m calling m3lbatoast west. (My teacher needs to be able to make comments, and I can’t seem to enable comments successfully on this monster.) So if you’re looking for Ben Content for the next twelve weeks, you’re much more likely to find it there, even if it will primarily be book reviews.
So, for alternate entertainment, I offer you the following: firstly, the probably obvious photo of my brother and his pudgy genetic receptacle. Judging from all the reactions to her from her most recent visit to New Hampshire, cooing is apparently mandatory behaviour. So… coo.
Secondly, I point you towards Aileen “Ozymandias” Chute‘s most recent ‘blog entry about attempting to push-start her drained vehicle. I found it highly amusing. I have probably twenty letters and maybe three times as many e-mail messages from her, all written in a slightly more frenetic version of this storytelling style. I hope she gets famous so that I can publish our correspondence and she can lob lawsuits at me. I feel certain that her grounds for Cease and Desist would be based largely upon the legal precedents of “Shut up!”, “Because I say so!”, and “Oh, yeah?!? Huh? Huh?” Which, actually, succinctly describes about a quarter of our correspondence.
ALA Winter 05
Attended a day of the Winter 2005 conference of the American Library Association. But not really. My fellow library school students and I were encouraged to register with the ALA and attend the conference, so that we could go to the lectures and the roundtables and the discussion forums and absorb the issues that currently form the topics of professional conversation for contemporary librarians.
And when phrased like that, it sounds vaguely interesting (except to my bevy of non-LIS friends, who are starting to avoid asking me, “So, what’s going on with your life?” as they find my answers about my current course of study and it’s content to be intensely stultifying), but ALA membership and Conference registration didn’t strike a harmonic chord with the contents of my wallet. So I forgot about it, despite repeated e-mail messages from the college, attempting to convince me how much of an opportunity it was that the conference was so close by and so accessible.
But it turns out that I could get a free pass to the gig from my mother’s workplace, YBP, Inc. (formerly “Yankee Book Peddler” before they went international and discovered that “Yankee” has negative connotations in the rest of the world. Which shouldn’t have been too great a shock, as it’s not the most complimentary of terms in the majority of the States, either), which allowed me access to the Vendors’ Exhibition, but not any of the serious librarianing. Still, free is free, and I figured I could learn a lot about the “issues that currently form the topics of professional conversation for contemporary librarians”, sociologist-stylee, by observing what the vendors were trying to sell the contemporary librarian.
Which turned out to be a lot of fun, as the Vendors’ Exhibition contains the part of librarianing that my studies have so far scrupulously avoided: books. The vendors were almost overwhelmingly publishers, booksellers, and distributors, and so I got to wander past table after table of books, books, and books, all displayed with their glorious cover designs turned out to face the world. It was marvelous. I wish that more free Uncorrected Proofs of books that interested me had been available, or that the comics folk in the Viz, Tokyopop, and Diamond Distribution booths might have had anything for free. That’s not quite fair, as I did get a cool Batman pin and a useful guides to interpreting the manga boom. But actual comics would have been nice.
Actually, while I saw a great many people loading up on the freebies and discounted books available (“Complementary shower curtain!”), lugging Baker & Taylor and BATMAN BEYOND bags full of loot, I emerged from the floor relatively free of free stuff. Three potentially good finds, though, the first being BWI Public Library Specialists guide to stocking quality and age-appropriate graphic novels in a library. I need to read this more carefully, but my first impressions is that it contains a staggering amount of useful information, but that their evaluation of what is age-appropriate is slightly off in places. JENNY SPARKS at ages 12+? POWERS and 100 BULLETS at ages 14+? TWO-FISTED SCIENCE as a “Graphic Novel For Girls”? Anyway… not a perfect publication, especially when they mention CALVIN AND HOBBS [sic] in the introduction.
Second, Julie Hearn’s THE MINISTER’S DAUGHTER was also picked up, for four reasons: 1) it was free, 2) it had a gorgeous cover, 3) interesting fonts, and 4) the promotional text featured the phrase “from a student of Philip Pullman”, which I find almost as amusing as the “suggested by” screenplay credit in the recent I, ROBOT.
And third, the best time I had at the conference was the twenty minutes I spent standing in line waiting to be able to chat for a minute with illustrator Christopher Bing, who was singing copies of his books, and selling out of every one. I hadn’t realized that last bit, and left the booth intending to return when there were lesser crowds and get a copy of his adaptation of CASEY AT THE BAT signed. Upon my return, all copies had flown out of the booth, which I should have anticipated. CASEY is a gorgeous book, by the way, with some of the most elegant, detailed, and magnificent verisimilitude I’ve laid eyes on, this side of the majestic Irene Marsh. And, of course, CASEY costs $20 for 32 pages of beauty, whereas a single painting by Ms. Marsh will run you upwards of £1000. Mr. Bing was extremely friendly and courteous, signing personal notes, getting a feel for the person for whom he was signing, open about himself and his art, and happy to talk technique. An extraordinary gentleman.
Lastly, let me say that I truly believe that the people chosen to run these booths were at least partially selected on the basis of their attractiveness. It wouldn’t be a bad technique, after all, wouldn’t you be more likely to talk about check-out systems if an attractive young person caught your eye and greeted you warmly? Just on the off chance? Comic book conventions, of course, take this idea to a farcical extreme by hiring booth bunnies, and while I don’t think that sort of prostitution was in evidence here — everyone I spoke with was clearly good at his or her job and well-informed — the ALA vendors still employed a staggering variety of truly attractive people. All of which is to say that if the young woman from Hyperion Children dressed in slim black were to ever drop me a line, I could be in New York for a cup of coffee before you could say “Peter and the Starcatchers.”
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