April 30, 2001
Dumb and happy
What a dandy birthday weekend that was! Saturday was a birthday party cookout (involving my first purchase of meat in many, many years, as I picked up two packs of Hebrew National hot dogs for my meat-eating guests). Much beer-drinking occured as we enjoyed the lovely day. Hart and Chas took turns on grill duty; I ate mushroom caps and veggie burgers and potato salad and crackers and avacado cheese dip and potato chips and corn chips and salsa. A random homeless guy swung by and was given a hot dog. Books and the occupation of teaching and non-profits and computers and housing in Boston and divinity school were all yammered about. As the evening lengthened, the hardcore among us -- Andrew and Greg and Amy (celebrating her new job as an assistant to legal counsel in the *cough* adult entertainment industry) -- settled in for more beer drinking and penny poker. Sunday was sleeping in and heading downtown to buy myself a present and walking around in the bright sunlight and eating mozzerella sticks while I read my new book, then coming home to watch The Limey. Thanks to all my friends for making the weekend so lovely. Special thanks to Fey, who wrote a poem to celebrate:
Today is the birthday of the mighty Steve:
From our endless sorrow we are granted a reprieve,
Ere clouds of gloom descend once more upon our brows.
Let us seize this opportunity to get smashingly drunk.
Amen to that.
April 27, 2001
Happy birthday to me
Whee, it's my birthday! Before I head off to see Superchunk, let's pause a moment in appreciation of the author of "Happy Birthday." (Not the Weird Al version, or the misbegotten knockoffs they trot out at Chili's and the like. The normal one.) The Hill sisters got the royalties, but credit is due to a largely-forgotten scofflaw, Mr. Robert Coleman. Wherever you are, Mr. Coleman, I thank you. America thanks you. And the descendants of the Hills thank you, as they light their cigars with twenties.
April 25, 2001
Flickering light
As my birthday looms ever-closer, gifts are starting to trickle in. My parents gave me the DVD of Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc. Thanks, Mom and Dad! This is an amazing movie, probably the most contemporary silent movie I've seen. Falconetti gives one of the most raw and riveting performances I've ever seen; Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert don't sing her praises enough. But it's a minor miracle that I got to see this movie. The original negative was thought lost in a fire; Dreyer composed a second version, editing alternate takes, and that was thought lost as well. For decades, the only way to see Passion was through a reconstruction. In 1981, in a supply closet at a Norweigan mental institution, a seemingly-perfect print of the first version was found. That's the DVD Criterion sells; that's what I watched.
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April 22, 2001
La cucaracha!
The phrase "he wouldn't hurt a fly" has always struck me as somewhat odd, perhaps as a lingering result of my early exposure to the Disney version of the Grimm story of the brave little tailor. Who wouldn't kill a fly? The tailor killed seven with one stroke! (The tailor is a subset of the more general Jack the Giant-Killer folktale; as I am not Vladimir Propp, I'll leave it at that, with the sole caveat that the tailor is the only giant-killer I know of who started his career as an exterminator.) Maybe Jainists or Buddhists wouldn't hurt a fly. Maybe a strict vegan wouldn't. But even though I'm a pretty easy-going guy, I know I would. You know what else? I could poison a roach.
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April 19, 2001
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five
Yesterday was the 226th anniversary of the midnight ride of Paul Revere, one of those classic "did you know that..." events. Although Revere was the one celebrated in verse, he never finished the ride; Dr. Samuel Prescott -- the man to whom the Battle of Bunker Hill order "don't shoot until you see the whites of their eyes" is attributed -- was the only one of the three riders to actually reach Concord. Why Longfellow chose Revere as the subject for his poem is a mystery to me, but Prescott just doesn't seem to be a popular subject for poets; a Dawes-leaning parody version of Longfellow's poem was written in the late 1800s, and it doesn't mention Prescott either. Maybe it's the lack of satisfying rhymes. In any case, the "one if by land, two if by sea" message was delivered, the riders warned the militia that British soldiers were coming, and the spectacularly improbably American Revolution was underway. Nonetheless, one can't help but wonder what would have happened if such a message had to be transmitted a few years later, after Claude Chappe invented semaphore and the French built a network of towers to distribute information at the unheard-of speed of seventy miles a minute -- "Listen my children, and you shall hear / Of the midnight telegraph transmission of dozens of tower semaphore operators" just doesn't sing!
April 17, 2001
Cool like A/C is cool
What hath Willis Haviland Carrier wrought? Carrier, the inventor of the air conditioner and the founder of the air conditioning company that bears his name, has my vote for the American with the highest influence-to-name-recognition ratio. Without the air conditioner, there would be no modern Sun Belt. Some attribute the Sun Belt's growth to immigration from other countries or business-friendly attitudes, but I think it has to do with blasts of cool, cool air conditioning. The fact that Clinton Administration energy standards for air conditioning will be relaxed isn't that surprising; the fact that the energy saved by the stricter 30%-savings standard would, "over 30 years [equal] the annual electricity use by all American households today" is. That's not from a 30% savings versus no savings, mind you; that's from 30% versus 20%. Contemplate the sheer volume of air that represents, if you will. In not-at-all-unrelated news, recent studies have provided further evidence of global warming and greenhouse gases' role in the phenomenon. Given George W.'s support for (and from) the greenhouse-gas-emitting coal industry, I have a feeling there are some long, hot summers ahead; those clever engineers better get residential fuel cells developed soon -- I don't know about you, but I don't want to spend my sweltering dystopian future without the ability to crank up the A/C.
April 16, 2001
Sports disasters
Last week, there was a terrible incident at a soccer match in South Africa; over three dozen people were killed by a stampeding crowd as an estimated 60,000 fans charged into a stadium that was already full to capacity. This is a tragedy -- 43 people are dead, because security guards took bribes to let in fans to a heavily anticipated game or because somehow too many tickets were sold or because crowd control was minimal or because these things just happen sometimes. I can only hope that some good comes out of this, reformed fire codes, whites and blacks reaching out to each other in a time of mutual grief (some of the footage I saw on CNN was of two fans, a white woman and a black woman, holding each other and sobbing), something that will help those people's loved ones rationalize what happened.
I don't want to trivialize their loss, but here's how my mind works -- I immediately wondered about the all-time sports disaster list. And of course the great zine Murder Can Be Fun, which did an issue on sports disasters, isn't online (Johnny Marr, where are you?), and some perfunctory Google searches didn't turn up any information on either the massive Glasgow Rangers-Glasgow Celtics football riot or on the roof collapse that killed a dozen people saving themselves the cost of a ticket for the Stanford-Cal "Big Game" (although I did find some information on the battled-for Stanford Ax, including reference to the tear gas used in a Stanford raid to capture same). Making this sort of information available is what the Internet is for, isn't it?
No more sports stories from me for a while -- my teams are losing, and it's just hard to get worked out about Johnny Damon when you have the idea of death counts rattling around in the back of your skull.
April 14, 2001
C - A - P - S
I went to a Caps game this afternoon. Not much of note during the game -- Lemieux scored, Bondra scored, the Caps lost -- but before the game there was a well-produced little Mission Impossible parody running on the Jumbotron. "Your mission, should you choose to accept it..." it ended. And then words flashed on the screen: "Eliminate Pittsburg."
You may recall that the Caps were playing the Pittsburgh Penguins. Pittsburgh is the home of Heinz catsup, Carnegie Mellon Univeristy, Pitt's Cathedral of Learning, my sweetheart, and the Penguins hockey club. It is a charming city. Pittsburg is a small city in California that may well be perfectly charming in its own right but is entirely irrelevant to hockey.
Insult to injury, I guess -- the Caps' web site was rejecting ticket requests from people with Pittsburgh area codes last week. Thank goodness for the Internet, or ticket sellers might have had to ask every prospective buyer if his or her car needs washed.
April 11, 2001
Athenaeum, a followup
To add a brief note before I stagger off to bed (suffering from an overdose of 5k), a world that allows the Mekons' brilliant album Rock 'n' Roll to go out of print could, in the immortal words of the Dead Milkmen, use some fixin'. For easily-digitized media like books and records, the day when the term "out of print" is meaningless will be here soon.
Samizdat, athenaeum
The athenaeum is a private club which is also a library. As an idea and an institution, it is largely defunct -- I am familiar with it due to the presence in Providence of a still-extant example. Before the public library's arrival in the United States, almost all libraries were private, and most were quite small. John Harvard's library, bequeathed to the grateful university that now bears his name, was a scant 400 volumes. The athenaeum (besides sounding like a delightful place to hang out, combining the retrograde, cigar-smoking, brandy-swilling pleasures of the Drones with the opportunity to settle down with a really good book) was an early, privatized attempt at making large libraries available to the less-than-spectacularly rich. Notorious libertine and rabblerouser Benjamin Franklin's library was a cross between the private and public models; non-members were allowed to borrow if they bonded themselves by leaving a sum of money to be returned when the book was. Copyright libraries tend not to allow borrowing; university library policies differ, but use of the library is often restricted to the community of scholars that the university serves.
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April 09, 2001
Project Censored
Hey, it's that time of year again. No, I'm not talking about spring. Nope, not baseball season or the annual thrashing the Penguins give the Capitals in the playoffs. Not even the Cadbury Bunny's annual leadup to Easter. No, it's time for Project Censored's underreported stories list to break. I'm always of two minnds about Project Censored; it's a noble goal, and often the stories really are important, but none of these stories are "censored" as such, and misusing the word weakens the case. "Project Ignored by Major Media, as Predicted by the Chomskyian Model of News Control" doesn't quite do it, I suppose. And except for story #4 (in which it is alleged that America bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade with malice aforethought) all of these stories were either familiar to me or of somewhat dubious importance. OSHA's failure to protect blue-collar workers and the use of H1-B visas are hardly breaking news -- the rhetoric on Project Censored's recap of the H1-B story is embarassingly overheated. Story #3, CNN's employment of Army psychological operations officers, was covered in TV Guide, for crying out loud!
I'm not going to call Project Censored unbearably lame; since I get my news mostly from the Washington Post, Salon, and occasional forays into The Economist, I'm sure that I'm better informed about some of these stories than people who get their news coverage solely from television. But there's an air of preaching to the converted here; is it a mystery to anyone who'd read the Project Censored list that (as per story #8) drug companies put money behind products that are often of questionable value for their cost? (Is it a surprise to anyone who reads any paper? Especially after the New York Times Magazine did its big story on the marketing push that Schering Plough used to shove Claratin into the market?) It's a good thing that someone's trying to get underreported stories some attention and it's a good thing to point out that important media outlets like the Times have inconsistent standards about how much sourcing they need and how to spin a story; the Wen Ho Lee debacle made it clear that journalistic spin remains a powerful force in the larger world. I just wish that alternative media put less emphasis on stories that didn't get larger coverage and more on continuing to break stories so important that big newspapers and television (which usually follows the papers' lead, albeit in the Bizarro World of TV news) had to pick them up.
April 08, 2001
Everyone loves Chris Ware
Those who made it through my lengthy comics post below may be interested in this newspaper article on the multi-talented Chris Ware, whose retro-y, design-forward comics are some of the best being done now. The comics-criticism zine The Imp did an issue about Ware; I think it's an important read for anyone who, not content to just be awed by Ware's craftsmanship, wants to think about his narratives in a more abstract way. Ware does good stuff. Check him out. (Times link stolen from Dan Hartung's Lake Effect.)
Biff! Pow! Zap!: A brief history of comics
With the possible exception of boy-band songs and Saturday morning cartoons, no American art form has been so firmly relegated to the kiddy table of the cultural dining room as the comic book. This was not always the case -- in the early days of the medium, comics (and not just Tijuana bibles) were read by adults. I've read an account of a West Indian sociologist being greatly surprised at the level of readership among blue-collar Americans, only to get sucked in and start reading them himself. (If anyone can point me to a source -- or even a name -- to attach to this anecdote, I'd be grateful; drop me a line.) But it shouldn't have been that surprising -- in the '30s and '40s, comics may have been garishly drawn and poorly written, but they were anything but monolithic.
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April 03, 2001
Damon, Damon, Damon!
In further baseball news, A's leadoff man Johnny Damon will commute to the Oakland Colossium via skateboard. In a slightly expanded (but still quite tiny) version of this story at the Sporting News (sorry, no permalink), it was revealed that Damon will be riding BART to Oakland from his house in Pleasanton.
Now, I know the A's -- the team I'm rooting for that might actually do well this year -- don't have that much money, and they basically snitched Damon out of the hands of the Kansas City Royals ownership. So they can't be paying Damon (who should be a very good leadoff batter as his career progresses) that much. But it's still, it's kind of boggling to me that a professional baseball player in the year 2001 lives in Pleasanton. (And rides BART!)
April 02, 2001
April fish
Surprise! I couldn't stop thinking yesterday. April fool!
The dubious lesson of opening day: if the Orioles' rotation can outpitch Pedro Martinez every game of the season, they'll do very well. For further baseball consideration, answer me this: can a lifelong Yankees-hater root for Mike Mussina now that he's wearing pinstripes? The solution is left as an exercise for the reader.
In other exciting news, all of perfectly equal import, McCain-Feingold made its way through the Senate (I'll give odds that it's killed, one way or another, by the House); China is, for all intents and purposes, holding the crew of the downed American spy plane hostage at the moment -- having recently arrested and held incommunicado a Chinese-American scholar and her family; I bought a Kitchenaid mixer that was on sale at Kohl's (in "almond cream" -- soon we will make fresh bread a-plenty); and, in possibly the most shocking news of the weekend, Girlhacker has added a graphic to her weblog.
April 01, 2001
Spring forward
Things that sound like fun possibilities for this afternoon: Going to see The Damned, sitting around drinking coffee and reading a Julian Barnes novel, twiddling around with my website, trying out a few Perl tricks and plotting out my forthcoming "literary year" project.
Things that don't sound like much fun but are useful anyway: Cleaning the apartment, trying to figure out what on earth is causing the oddness with my stylesheets, reading about XML.
Things that sound like bad ideas: Thinking about how Maryland blew a twenty point lead, thinking about upcoming deadlines at work, thinking about how bad the Orioles are going to be this season, thinking about how much of my day vanished because I was out until 2 at a Faraquet show and then it became 3 because of daylight savings and I didn't set my alarm clock and then it was one o'clock before I got up and then my sentence ran on and on.
So I officially declare this afternoon a no-thinking zone.