(via Deck Chairs on the Titanic) BookCrossing.com is kinda like Where's George for books, but with more of the Diggers' white bicycles.

As an inveterate book giver, I like the idea. Where are the umpteen friend-foisted copies of Delany's Dhalgren, still America's masterpiece of sf? Whatever happened to my first set of Zelazny's Trumps books?

I realize that's more George than Digger, but, um, like, YMMV.

My mom and dad are visiting so, um, some light posting is probable.

I will give them my best for you!

Today we drove all over lovely industrial south Seattle, and stopped by the Museum of Flight to gawk at the Blue Angels. My Dad told a story about working for Boeing as an aerospace engineer right after college, and a set of flight trials that I think he helped design. We looked at pretty airplanes designed to kill people and break things.

I think tomorrow is when the Angels start practicing for the shows this weekend - I think it's kind of neat that my dad will be here for that. Unlike many denizens of my neighborhood, I love the jets.

They drove out here from North Carolina over that last week. I had hoped to travel with them, but the courtyard social scheduling conflicted with the trip, and so I chose to remain here.

Metafilter poster notes that PWC's recent sale to IBM puts the kibosh on Monday.

jimfl has a modest proposal at his Everything Burns site.

It's the return of Silent Movie Mondays at the Paramount in downtown Seattle!

About three years ago, I noticed that film-score preservationist and silent-film accompanist Dennis James was hosting a series of silent classics at the Paramount, including some films which I'd long heard of but never seen such as Douglas Fairbanks' "The Sea Hawk", if I recall correctly. I've tried to attend every single one since, with varying degrees of success. I still regret having missed Keaton's "The General".

James graduated from Indiana University in Bloomington when I was kid, sometime around 1980, and while he was attending IU would stage these elaborate presentations of classic silent horror films such as "Phantom of the Opera" or "Nosferatu". These shows inevitably included a massive parade of cosumed adultas and children across the stage of the IU Auditorium (the one near Showalter Fountain), and the audience would applaud loudly for excellent costumes while a veritable blizzard of paper airplanes filled the air.

Combining these impressive events with the non-stop silent comedy super-8 loops at the pizza joint Noble Roman's that my family ate at all the time meant that I have a lifelong love for and interest in silent movies.

To see them in the splendidly restored absurd opulence of the Paramount, a movie and vaudeville palace fortunate enough to have retained its Mighty Wurlitzer, is something I savor so greatly it's difficult to convey.

A big thankee to Spencer Sundell for the heads up!

This poster was created as a tee-shirt design for the now defunct Seattle Morris team at the behest of former co-worker Rob Falk.

Rob possesses the female baby scutter which appeared in a first-season episode of Red Dwarf. Entertainingly, there appears to be a Red Dwarf trading card featuring Rimmer's treasured issues of Morris Dancer Monthly.

On Saturday I organized a little get-together for everyone that lives in our apartment building. Our building is relatively small - seven units - and is a very pleasant place to live, so tenant turnover tends to be slow. One of our neighbors has always made it a point to be freindly with everyone in the building, if possible, and he'd been away for a good while housesitting.

Thanks to our housesitting neighbor, we'd met several of the other tenants and become friendly - which can be helpful when you're chasing pot-smoking teenagers away from the dumpster or need your cats watched while you gallivant around the country.

While our neighbor was gone, two apartments rolled over, and I thought it would be a great opportunity to introduce the new tenants to everyone, as well as begin to build community with the other long-term tenants.

Well, as it turned out, most everyone showed up, we all had a great time, and there is talk of another before the end of the summer. Our courtyard is a very beautiful place to spend an afternoon. i had a great time, and it seemed like everyone else did too.

... and so as the sun sets gently in the west, Ken Goldstein draws his heartrending work of inordinate wit to a close, with Episode 15 of Guy Sterling: Skee-Ball Champion! Sadly for those of us with a long-standing interest in the sport of kings, Ken was unable, after heroic efforts toiling within the mighty bowels of google and ebay, to locate Episodes 14 and 15, and thus the story picks up at its' conclusion.

It had been the busiest, craziest, most exciting week of his whole life, and one way or the other it would be all be over in a few minutes.

It is hoped, however, that as the resulting lawsuits from the deeply offended descendants of Joey "Spats" Murphy wend their way thru the courts, Mr. Goldstein ("Steen", to those in the know) will take time from his busy round of depositions, wholesale disavowals of responsibility, and press-ducking junkets to update the blogopulace upon his fortunes in fending away these ill-timed distractions.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled round of bankruptcy filings, stock market crashes, and assorted acts of death and destruction. Ah, Skee-Ball Week, we hardly knew ye.

Actually, which kings specifically?

OK, it's like this.

About two weeks ago we decided to host a small wingding for just the people that live in our apartment building. That's at one pm today. About half the tenants will be there to start but we expect more later.

About a week and a half ago, we arranged to get our apartment demolded (this last winter was particularly cold and wet and the black mold showed up, bags in hand, and moved in).

About a week ago, my parents called and told me they were driving out here from North Carolina. We expect them, um, sometime this afternoon.

The demolding is in process and will be continuing, also today. Our apartment is torn up (but the guest room is clean and ready)!

Everything in the house is in utter, move-in-style disarray.

So, like I said. No rain but the deluge.

B!x appears to be only the second individual to independently discover my International Organization of Cynics, Ne'er-do-Wells, and Misanthropes website. I've not tooted my own horn in the past concerning the site becasue it's kind of a one trick pony - you join, and then you can see your name displayed on a cool certificate, suitable for printing - and I want it to be a bit more brawny.

But what the hell?

Come on down! Maybe some more action will stimulate me to address the site's deficiencies and limitations.

Member of Sex Abuse Panel Upsets Some

Heh heh (NYT link - registration required blah blah blah). Heh.

Sorry.

Upon returning home from camping, I noticed a deservedly long obit for noted folklorist Alan Lomax. Lomax, along with considerably flakier kook Harry Smith and redoubtable businessman Moe Asch, are the most important and influential record producers of the century.

Smith, in addition to performing duties as all-around visionary freeloader on the order of Joe Gould (which entailed, among other things, films featuring hand painted animation, a collection of "string figures', and the basic visual vocabulary of sixties psychedelica), compiled, for Moe Asch's Folkways Records, the Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music, which I'm quite overdue to discuss here. Smith's aesthetic for the project required that the cuts he included were originally commercially released, that is, not recorded for posterity by someone out to document a vanishing culture but rather recorded in an act of commercial egotism. Additionally, he conceptualized the records themselves as a literal magic incantation, intended to change the course of American music. He quite indisputably succeeded.

Lomax, as noted in many obits, is the sine qua non of the itinerant documenatrist, out to preserve from exctinction the authentic sounds and songs of the nonprofessional singer or performer.

Moe Asch, looking to make a buck and maybe also to keep leftist kooks the likes of Woody Guthrie and Smith in pocket money, released works by both Smith and Lomax; today, Asch's vast store of recordings and notes is, as it should be, the property of us all, Folkways now functioning as a subsidiary of the Smithsonian Institution.

It should be noted that Rounder Records has also been doing a kick-ass job on archival releases from the Lomax treasure.

As promised, I ironed the curtains.

Also as promised, here is a picture of moi (prn: "mou-waah") modeling the finest in contemporary home maintenance wear courtesy of Paul Frankenstein. Click the pic for a big, big eyeful (no, no, you don't have to send the kids out of the room, honest).

The shirt is VERY large, but I haven't washed it yet. I have a couple other cafepress shirts and they are marked as the same size. They fit fine. Paul has many fine garments for purchase by the public at large (including the one I'm wearing: it says "en cas d'urgence gardez votre calme" next to a lil doob-levay-say, or crappah, as some would have it) here.

I won the shirt in a too-short, thanks to me, first-come-first-served contest (link to Paul's current blog page; once you're there, use your browser's page-search function to look for "number of dots") that Paul hosted regarding the logical mechanism underlying a design feature of his blog. Later in life I hope to adjust this link so it points to the appropriate archive.

I'd love to tell ya about it, but his NDA was killer.

I would like to point out however, that the shirt espouses a fine sentiment which we can all get behind.

Paul also today wrote a fine roundup of his visible corner of the blogocology, which I heartily recommend.

In the spirit of these things, here's mike.whybark.com's first contest: first person to accurately count the things in this photo which have been previously featured on mike.whybark.com in their own entries wins a randomly drawn gimcrack from a big bag of Archie McPhee goodies we have laying around the house!

(ahem, no, Viv, immediate family members are NOT included.)

Google Information for Webmasters corrects my superstition regarding *.shtml pages, discussed in this recent post.

Fiction: Sites are not included in Google's index if they use ASP (or some other non-html file-type.)

Fact: At Google, we are able to index most types of pages and files with very few exceptions. File types we are able to index include: pdf, asp, jsp, hdml, shtml, xml, cfml, doc, xls, ppt, rtf, wks, lwp, wri.

Howsomever, searches via my nice, shiny new google site search are NOT turning up recent results. Results for individual entries show up through June 3.

There has been some recent discussion, from January through just about early June, concerning Googlebombing and similar results of Google's preference for well-linked, frequently updated pages in their search results. At the tail end of the discussin came some speculation that perhaps Google would be forced to rejigger their searchengine in order to skew away from bloggers.

What's really interesting to me about this sudden google-invisibility is that I've had and used the mike.whybark.com domain for years now; I've always noticed googlebot in my logs on a regular basis.

Suddenly, it's gone.

So here's the 19-cent question: have other toilers at Acme Bloggers, Inc. or Universal Blog Provisioners, Ltd., noticed this sudden cessation of Google love?

---

And an update: I repaired my malfunctioning PHP forms, and everything should be hunky-dory, except that I know I used a deprecated form because the current usage lacks sufficient sample code and discussion to date out in the great singing beyond of 00's and 01's.

So now it's off to iron the curtains!

These things come in threes, right?

ACT ONE

Last week, I was corresponding with the estimable Chris Dent, who

• lives in the childhood home of my oldest friend, Eric Sinclair
  
• developed the verry interesting wiki variant warp
  
• is a good egg.

Eric's family home is one of the houses I have very strong childhood sense memories of, including detailed smells, rocking out to music I'd flee from today (well, most of it), cold pepperoni pizza breakfasts with flat, watery coke after all-night D&D marathons, and the assorted associations of the initial glimmerings of adolescence. I have a very clear memory of devouring "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" overnight, and a repeated one of listening to all the seventies Firesign Theatre records on vinyl - did you know one of those standard, single-LP releases had three sides? Verry trippy! Flip it over and which side plays? You never knew!

Chris lets me know that he'll be visiting the glorious Pacific Northwest for about ten days in mid-to-late August. He'll be traveling in company with his romantic interest, one Sabrina, who, he tells me, once lived here in Seattle.

Well, one thing leads to another, and I'm looking at Sabrina's blog. While the look
of it is unfamiliar, there's something about it that makes me think I've read it before.

I start scanning backwards, and bingo! I find some posts from early in 2002, when she was getting ready to move to Bloomington for grad school. I recall looking at them at the time she was writing them and being jealous that she'd essentially gotten an invitation to apply for grad school from a prof she had as an undergrad. Come to think of it, I'm still jealous. ;)

So, interestingly, Sabrina moves from author of random blog I once glimpsed for a moment to person who intersects directly with my life and childhood in countless ways, in one easy step.

ACT TWO

This weekend Vivian and I decamped for camping in the San Juans. It was a lovely jaunt, which is detailed in another entry or two.

On the way back, we knew that there'd be a considerable wait for the return ferry. We ended up sitting behind a group of slightly-younger-than-us-folks that looked vaguely familiar, for no readily apparent reason. Right next to us was a friendly lady with a black lab puppy who was talking to everyone around her. The mood of the waiting crowd was festive - it was a gorgeous hot summer day and we were all about to take a free boat ride through some of the most beautiful scenery in the Northwest.

Once we disembarked from the ferry and headed back to Seattle, the only down note was the customary summer Sunday-afternoon return commute traffic on I-5.

Then, on Tuesday, I was idly clicking through the links to the right of this entry, mostly blogs, to catch up. This activity reminds me of flipping through bins of records or comics, in search of the new or interesting.

Then I clicked on the link titled "Statanic Action". In the entry I clicked into, the author, Stacey Lester, describes attending a wedding in the San Juans, on Orcas Island, where Viv and I had been camping. He spent the night, and then, anticipating a 3-hour wait for the ferry (accurately), hung out with his pals on a hill overlooking the ferry dock.

Which is exactly when and where Viv and I were doing the same thing.

Stacey even promptly (more promptly than me, I tells ya) posted his pictures of the weekend which, you guessed it, includes this shot of the dog lady... with me in the upper right corner.

The last time I was involved in anything comparable to this fascinating chain of coincidence and probability was in the middle of Seattle's world-famous WTO festival of early winter, 1999. The day after shooting it, someone posted video footage of the Wednesday evening (December 1, 1999?) tear-gas and stinger-grenade clearage of the street near the reservoir in my neighborhood. You (by which I mean I) can make out my blurry figure and hear my voice just as a stinger grenade slams into the cameraman's hand, busting a finger (and, though not on the video, chapping my ass quite nicely).

The current synchronies are much preferable, and have not involved bleeding.

So the query is, is that three? Or need I look anew to the future, yet unwrit?

PHP 4.2.2 grumble grumble released to address security flaw grouch grumble also for OSX by Marc Liyanage - but grumble frown this release changes the way global variables are handled - HTTP_POST won't magically call them into being at form submit any longer.

Which helps with the whole security deal. Grumble grumble.

It's been clearly documented for months and months, even, that this would be the Way It Shall Be Done. Grump.

But did this get covered in the PHP stuff I took last fall to get going? Well, to be perfectly honest, i don;t recall it being covered, although I have yet to peep my notes I'll update here if I come across it. Naturally, I took full advantage of that tiny little time savings of not having to type a bit bit more. Naturally.

Argh, so now I have some stitching to do. Grump grum grumble.

As I was flipping around, looking at what other blogology went down whilst I was out gettin' smoky in the hills, I noticed not only uncharacteristically sober coverage of Lomax's passing at Bill Barol's Blather, but also a fine pointer to Lost Indiana, one of my favorite Hoosier sites.

I see that the proprietor of Lost Indiana promises a comprehensive history of Burger Chef at some unspecified point in the future. I believe I still have one or two of the Burger Chef 'n Jeff gewgaws that the chain handed out to tykes back in the day, before they were eaten by Hardee's.

And just to add the whipped cream, thereby forcing me to run this before I run my Lomax bit, Barol cites homey Ken Goldstein's work of skee ball genius, already noted here many, many times.

I've completed processing my pix from our camping trip to the San Juans, and posted the results here. While I have broken the pictures down into sections, a highlight reel may be called for. In this entry, the small pix are linked into the pix.whybark.com album they come from, so click the thumb once to get to the album, find the thumb on the page, and click again to enlarge. (hm, I gotta come up with a better context and focus strategy than that, huh?)

Our campsite was located at the south end of idyllic Lake Cascade, in Moran State Park on Orcas Island. Moran State Park was created in the 20's when Robert Moran, a wealthy shipbuilder and former mayor of Seattle, gave the property to the just-formed state park system. The park lacks a single element of astonishing presence such as Mt. Rainier or the Olympic Range, but it's still a truly astonishing site.

Our campsite afforded us this lovely mirrored sunset. Later that night I was able to observe the stars of the Big Dipper reflected in the lake. In fact, each night I saw numerous satellites, and each night, I saw one meteor.

A short hike from camp up a very steep trail brought us to this viewpiont above the lake, known as Sunrise Rock. In this view, our tent is not visible; it's hidden by the greenery just above and to the right of the small blue and white tent seen in the photo (in the thumb, that tent is a tiny light colored dot in the shade, to the lower right).

Within the park, there's a moderately tall (2409 ft) peak named Mount Constitution, the highest peak in the San Juan Islands. On a perfectly clear summer day (such as the day of our visit) you can see as far as Vancouver BC to the north and to Rainier to the south. Mount Baker, however, is the closest of Washington's grand and towering volcanos, and as such dominates the view. One may drive up the twisty road as we did, or opt for the four and a half mile hike up the mountain. At the summit is a cool-looking replica of a 12th century Balkan watchtower that is open to the public and from which most of the images of views on my pix.whybark.com album were shot.

Also an easy hike directly from our campsite is the picturesque, modestly-scaled Cascade Falls, which felt pretty damn good by this time in the heat of the day. On our return, we took a service road which immediately felt as though we'd taken a wrong turn and ended up backstage at Disneyland. We kept joking that the security guards would jump out and haul us away, or that we'd see animatronic wildlife piled up, rusting by the side of the road.

Instead of animatronic graves (NEWS FLASH: The Country Bears opens Friday!!!) we came across piles of discarded picnic benches, charcoal grills, and firepits; it was literally refreshing to see something that was not a perfect postcard for nature, warm and fuzzy in beauty and balance.

Not to worry, however, nature let us know that she's the boss when at 4 am on the first night, a huge windstorm kicked up. I woke up and scurried about in the gale moving light stuff, soaking our firepit, and generally feeling helpless before nature's fury. I then lay in bed sleeplessly as the tent tugged and pitched in the breeze. The wind died by midday, but then began anew at promptly midnight and was still in action when we left at about noon on Sunday.

I'm reasonably confident that when I say "huge windstorm" I mean larger than me. If I had been in a house and not a tent I doubt I would have been much concerned by the gusts.

On our last day, we packed up the camp and took a nice, five or six mile walk around the rim of the lake via the Lake Cascade Loop trail, and then hit the road and summer Sunday afternoon traffic back to Seattle on I-5. It was, all in all, a deeply pleasant camping experience.

Ken's latest, "Skee-Ball Week Continues, with a Brief, Scholarly Interlude!" sheds light on many matters, including the ground-breaking introduction of "Spats" Murphy into the 1930's serial Guy Sterling.

Ken is a freakin' genius, and this skee-ball coverage is the best work he's done in the context of his blog, possibly the best work he's ever done to date.

His detailed scholarship throws the many questions most readers have concerning the historical development of skee ball, with, of course, special emphasis on the fruitful cross pollination of celebrity endorsement with adolescent serial in the surprisingly neglected Happy Boy Magazine:

Anyway, I thought that before I continued with the Guy Sterling reprints, I’d get you all caught up to speed, so to speak, with the following excerpt from Scott Scoglio's article "Magazines for Adolescents in the Pre-War Era," which appeared in the American Library Association publication Periodicals Quarterly.]

...

While other serials had occasionally featured real-life celebrities in cameo roles, the Guy Sterling serial was the first to actually use them as full-fledged characters, interacting as part of the storyline. Some of the nation's top Skee-Ballers, including Brinks McGillicuddy, Bobby Knowles, and Ray Rayberg, were signed to licensing contracts and became major players in the Skee-Ball Champion storyline. During a time when the sports press was much smaller and the private lives of athletes were far more private, these stories gave many young fans the idea that they were seeing the men behind the legends.

I shan't cite further. Suffice to say, if you value your heritage as an American, and harbor curiosity about or love for the colorful role of the pulps in creating contemporary American pop culture, you owe it to yourself to get up-to-date on Skee ball Week at the Illuminated Donkey.

Ken, in his really outstanding, can't-emphasize-the-excellence-of-it-enough blog, The Illuminated Donkey, today covers skee-ball, in general, as a topic. He opens with an idle boast concerning his skee-ball prowess, which, via the comments section, quickly escalates to shut-em-down style knowledgeable commentary in which he offhandedy notes both a recent high-score (a shut yer trap 540) and the fack that he's been kicked out of skee-ball tourneys as a ringer.

Inspired, even rejuvenated by this manly braggadoccio, he waxes grizzled for the benefit of the peanut gallery, with helpful skee-balling tips for the skeeballerati, takes a pit stop by the bingo hall, and then commences to keyboard episode 11 from the well-beloved (but well-nigh-forgot) boy's juvelilia Guy Sterling, Skee-Ball Champion, originally serialized in Happy Boy magazine in the late 1940s.

Astonishingly, I was able to locate, via a subscription-only sports memorabilia auction site (to which I was able to trade dot-com stock-options for membership a couple years ago), an image of "Guy Sterling" supporting character (and actual professional skee-baller) "Spats" Murphy's rookie card!

Sadly, no detail was provided on this licensing and crossover pioneer - I trust that New Jersey's finest will dig up the requisite detail. Inquiring minds want to know!

UPDATE: Since we went to press, Mr. Goldstein has declared it to be Skee Ball Week chez The Illuminated Donkey, and added Episode 12 of the Guy Sterling saga. No word yet on the Skee Ball Week Theme Song.

Episode 12 sheds light on the troubled character of "Spats" Murphy, seen here in a rare rookie tobacco card. History records his astounding reign over the early league days of pro Skee-Ball, and officially, when he retired in 1921 it was due to health concerns. However, in an astounding act of courage, the author of the Happy Boy Guy Sterling serial took on the dirty secret of pro skee ball: gambling. In point of fact, they claim directly that Murphy threw the championship that fateful year.

Finally, I was mistaken above when I referred to the serial as having been originally serialzed in the late 1940's. Of course (silly me), it was originally serialized in the late 1930's.

The Ken Goldstein

I'd been meaning to post this for AEONS. But alas, I kep' fergttin'.

Courtesy this place, well known earlier this year in the blogocracy.

Burn Rate is a card game about, um, dot-com economics.

It's a good companion piece to your dot-com Monopoly.

Amusingly, it's being marketed by Wizards of the Coast, whom I helped beta test the hit card game Magic for.

Sometime around 1993, I wrote and drew this Octogon as a series of four postcards, each sent on a consecutive day. It's a 'moctogon' because, firstt, it was never intended for publication, and second, becase Bill Weaver, my collaborator on matters Octogon, had no part in it and probably has not seen it yet.

Sigh. I just remembered I beat some scripts outta Bill a year ago or so and I still haven't picked up on 'em.

There are many more Octogons at comix.whybark.com, let me hasten to remind you.

I already knew that Google (as well as other search sites) doesn't index .shtml pages, and it's biting my butt here. Any one got the Apache directive to tell it "treat .html as .shtml in domain x only?"

Ahh, s'awright, I can figure it out. I know you can restrict server behavior on a domain by domain basis. This is really just one of those "where did I put my keys?" posts, which to my frustration I could NOT find a good example of (except for my lost hat of a few months ago).

This is lovely Cascade Lake, where our campsite was located. Man, the San Juan Islands are beautiful! Not that this is, like, a secret.

Jason Webley may or may not be taking the ferry to Bainbridge Island on Sunday, July 21, at 3pm.

You may or may not be taking the same boat.

You may or may not want to don your trusty cutlass, brace of flintlocks, eyepatch, wooden leg, tricorne hat, shirt of East India calico, and thigh-high boots should you choose to do so.

You may or not wish to have the telephone number of a lawyer with you.

You may or may not wish to read The Pirate Hunter to get into the spirit of things.

In the video for the song itself that comes at the end of ROCK 'N' ROLL HIGH SCHOOL, there's a shot of Joey Ramone in front of a blackboard that the director cuts into and away from over the duration of the song. There's a phrase written on the blackboard, drawn from the lyrics of the song:

"I don't care about history"

Joey, of course, points to the words with a pointer as he sings them.

However, as he shifts his stance back and forth during the rest of the song, his body occludes most of the phrase such that for most of he time he's on screen, the black board actaully, in a literal sense, reads:

"I do care"

So. I should have titled my post about American Hardcore and Please Kill Me "I don't care about history" instead of the lame paraphrase of the Clash's "I'm so bored of the USA" that I chose.

I stand by much of my thinking in the earlier post. I've grown pretty jaded with rock literature over time, because it seems, mostly, to tell the same story over and over again. That story is almost always tragic, which, in my opinion, is because of the terrible working conditions people who choose to pursue careers as rock and pop musicians are exposed to. Whether you're on the road or you stay close to the base, you don't get paid very well, there's no health insurance, and you're encouraged to drink and do drugs, etc., etc.

But I'm not here to crab about how fucked up the industry is. I'm here to say it loud:

The Ramones are the greatest rock band of all time.

After reading the books I mention above, I started thinking about the Ramones a lot, partly because of my flip dismissal of Dee Dee. Well, there was the rap thing, but what about the Ramones material? The answer is, he contributed some great songs; frequently they are kind of dumb. This is a part of the genius of the band.

Let's hit the books, shall we?

1975: Ramones
1976: Rocket to Russia
1977: Leave Home
1978: Road to Ruin
1979: It's Alive *
1980: End of the Century
1981: Pleasant Dreams
1983: Subterranean Jungle

I stop here becasue I never really cared for any post Subterranean Jungle recordings - the urge to speed of hardcore entered the mix, and understandably enough, the musicians began to explore more diverse sonic textures (translation: keyboards and synths, ick). All in all, as the sound becaome more commercially palatable, my interest in it declined.

* I only just learned that this was a European release that did not become available in the US until 1995. I bought it in Switzerland in 1982, and it is ESSENTIAL - the later live recordings of the band are simply not as good, as perfectly executed as the performances on this record, a 2-LP set when orginally released.

Look at that track record! Until Pleasant Dreams and Subterranean Jungle, there's not a bad record in the bunch, not even a bad song! (YMMV) Pleasant Dreams was my first Ramones Record; then I got the first record, and eventually picked up all of the records listed above before Subterranean Jungle came out (so, like over a year or so).

Because Pleasant Dreams introduced me to the sound of the band, in some ways it is the record I'm most intimate with; however, it's not my favorite: that's definitely It's Alive. And my favorite songs are from all over the map, but nothing surprising: I can still spontaneously sing every word to "Danny Says", "Sedated", "Needles and Pins", "California Sun" and probably more that I haven't thought of.

So why are these guys the best? It's hard to say, really; consistency is a part of it. My other candidate for best rock band of all time is LA's X, who have a much more varied, and in some ways more ambitious catalog. Their two best records, "Los Angeles" and "Wild Gift", contain some incredible songwriting, both lyrically and structurally. Doe and Cervenka deliberately set out to transcend rock songwriting by ignoring conventions of structure and meter while mantaining the brevity and intensity of the form; however, this sort of approach is difficult to maintain over time, and their most critically acclaimed album, "Under the Big Black Sun", consistently disappoints me even today.

Stupid critics.

The Ramones' work, however, deceives via its apparently ambition-free design and execution. Of course, having an LP produced by serious nutcase Phil Spector gives the lie to that: however much that record may have been slagged in the press at the time, it was an act of heritage, a statement by the Ramones that they were the inheritors of Motown, of the Beach Boys, of all the great American pop and rock produced prior to the AOR era.

This assumption of that mantle is wholly accurate on their part. These albums represent the apotheosis of American postwar pop. Long may it wave. Dee Dee and Joey, I'll see you soon enough, and thank you.

I have a good-sized assignment for Cinescape (writing their year-end episode guide to Enterprise: 4500 words. eight hours, including breaks and dawdling. I'm the MAN!) so I'm thinking I may have a few light days coming up.

Today (the 18th) is my fourth anniversary, though! Don't know what the plan is just yet, but I'm sure it involves some gooood eatin'!

Tangentially, I saw on boingboing that Art Speigelman has a review of the recent Fanatgraphics book on certified Golden Age comics genius Bernie Krigstein up at the New Yorker site. My contact at Fantagraphics apologized that he couldn't get me a review copy a month or two ago; it's a big, fancy, expensive book and his review copy stock is limited. I'm pleased to report that Speigelman's review is a hum-dinger, replete with personal anecdotes:

He basked when I pointed to a visual onomatopoeia that conjured up a subway's rumble. It was as if messages he'd sent off in bottles decades earlier had finally been found.

At the end of the paper, I had compared his approach to that of some important contemporaries whom I also admired, including Harvey Kurtzman and Will Eisner. When I read that paragraph, Krigstein darkened. "Eisner!" he shouted. "Eisner is the enemy! When you are with me, I am the only artist!"

Hee hee! Well, I guess I'll just have to accept that I'm not in Speigelman's (or Krigstein's) league. Some days, you just gots ta take yer lumps :).

Why hello! Nice to see you!

Viv and I took the ferry to Bremerton and drove north and then east to Sequim bay, where we camped in the lovely (but not spectacular) Sequim Bay State Park. Then the next day we drove up the road a few miles to the Port Angeles entrance to Olympic National Park, and drove up to Hurricane Ridge for a pic-a-nic.

There were some highly aggressive chipmunks, who, I'm happy to say, got nothing (and liked it, natch).

Such as this one.

You can page through all the pix here.

Ohhh kay. Insomnia drove me to pound on the sidebar build problem, which I may summarize as build once, use many, in order to speed build times.

My ideal solution would be to include an MT perl-generated file into the pages at build time, but MT does not allow the user to easily set build order. Furthermore it does not offer an inbuilt file-include tag since include functionality is so easy to get via SSI and PHP. It's not a deal-breaker.

THEREFORE, experimentally, this site is now served with SSI and server-parsed html. The old html pages will remain in place. However, their links will rot after a while, I imagine, until I can do some fancy Apache stuff to transform incoming *.html reqs into *.html reqs.

Jimmy James whould know what to say here: Guzizah! (hmmm, must search for WWJJD...)

Well, this week I'd intended to introduce a new, exciting concept to the blogosphere, which would take the world by storm and yield articles in the Economist (I said I'm SORRY! Geez!) and the NYT, but instead, since I'm too busy (writing assignments, a trip next week) I'll share with you the very first fan-submitted Ken Goldstein of the Week!

Mr. Goldstein is seen here appropriately modeling what I (a baseball ignoramus) believe to be a Seattle Pilots cap, as he demonstrates mastery of the tiller upon the bounding main. Accompanying him is the source of the charming photo, the lovely and talented Jahna D'Lish, a long-time friend of Mr. Goldstein.

Friends, acquaintances, and relatives of Mr. Goldstein are very strongly encouraged to send your KG-related imagery and memorabilia to me at my email address, mike@whybark.com; if I can sort it out from the spam, I'll get back to you, promptly!

Thank you all for your support. Together, we can bemuse Ken into a sort of tizzy.

via boingboing, a pointer to a US Post Office site which features what Mark refers to as a "scary logo"; personally although the recently floated news concerning such things as a citizen informer corps and other institutionalizations of a surveillance culture do not please me or increase my sense of security, I don't find the logo scary.

Someone who works for the PO was making a political opinion known - one which coincides with mine. Hope they don't get in too much trouble.

... and I just know you are fascinated to hear that the latest round of site fiddlin' is just about wrapped up. For the curious:

• I added domain-restricted searching via Google to the sidebar. Google seems to pay attention to my site, so it seems to work fairly well.


• The drop-down archive menus are now sitewide.


• In a related matter, I added the appropriate new secondary category archive flags (KG of the Week, Monday Art, Blimp Week) to the appropriate entries and cleaned up some incidental duplicates.


• I added the sidebar to all of the ancillary pages.


• I made the category archives navigable, and edited their format to increase load speed.


• I'm still futzing with "Recent Entries" on the archive pages; currently the "recent" list is, in fact, what's recent within the appropriate category. I think I have a brute-force workaround in place but I believe there's a better way.


• Last but not least, I'm working on a "recently discussed" link area for your easy reference, currently viewable only on the main page.

Hunh, you know, what I *should* do is build the sidebar once into a flat text file, and have the pages call it in either at page view (via PHP or shtml SSI) or (this is somewhat preferable) at perl-munging time. Hm, yes, that's the way to do it.

This is the final image in my long-running series of the King. I painted it for my wife as a birthday present the first year we met.

Most of my images of the King were created specifically as birthday presents. I don't think I ever really spent a lot of time worrying about why I was interested in working with his image, but I often create works in extended series. In fact, I'm engaged in such a project right now. A virtual Otter Pop to the first person who correctly identifies that series.

eBay Live Auctions item 1834314676 (Ends ) - Capt. Kirk's Bridge Command Chair sold at that eBAY auction I made note of the other day for... drumroll please... $265,000!

Is it a bargain? Is it very expensive naugahyde and plywood? Who can say?

We'll be out and about enjoying something similar to this until Sunday evening. Sorry you can't join us.

Click to enlarge.

um, I suppose I should crosslink to here.

So, I was lying awake idly wondering how old our newest neighbors are. One's in the community college down the street, one works doing IT stuff. Good, considerate neighbors. Twenty-something.

Then I realized that persons who graduated from high school this spring, as tradition dictates, will be mostly eighteen years of age sometime in 2002.

I graduated high school the year they were born, 1984. In what appears to be some sort of coincidence but which is in fact a mathematical property which applies to anyone that thinks about this, they are, this year anyway, half my age.

What can the world look like? No Watergate. No Vietnam. Hell, they were born the year the Mac was introduced to the market! Four years of Ronnie, but I'd be surprised if he generated memories. Four of GWB the 1st. Maybe some vague impressions. Eight of Clinton; coincident with adolescence, even.

Eight years of a bad economy, eight of a good one, and two character builders so far.

(Note to kids: what political party controlled the white house when the economy was your friend? Note to DNC: do you guys even exist? For god's sake, DO YOUR JOB! Oh, never mind.)

And then this matter of 9-11. I can't imagine what it's like to be an eighteen year old today, I think.

Every political stimuli I was exposed to by the time I was eighteen clearly demonstrated (Vietnam! Watergate! Central America! Iran-Contra! October Surprise!) that American politicians are nemesis, liars, with no respect for democracy, human lives, the rights of man, or the constitution.

So far, seems unlikely that kids have seen the mask stripped, and less likely as time goes by and more FOIA requests are remanded by GWB the 2nd.

Any time a high-falutin film critic identifies a film as distanced or mannered, and then in support of the claim, complains concerning the lack of attention to realism within the film, I'M SOLD.

In this week's New Yorker, David Denby's review (warning: not a permalink) of nearly released Tom Hanks flick Road to Perdition manages to not only do this but to condemn the filmmaker's aesthetic, citing Erwin Panofsky's dictum "shoot unstylized reality" (more fairly excerpted in Denby's piece) in support of this goal.

After I read it, I realized that he opens the review with a reference to the greatest of the Coen brothers flicks, Miller's Crossing, which, it would appear, treads similar terrain. Of course, stylization and lack of human sympathy are what they get docked for too. As at least one of my readers knows, that's why I love 'em.

One more thing to note: this weekend I was looking for more comics to review in a big, mostly superhero-oriented comics store. They have lots of unbought titles that date as far back as 1998 in genres that interest me: um, if comics had "shoe-gazing emo" or "historical documentary speculation" or "mannerist genre homage" racks, that's where I'd look most of the time.

As it was, I wasn't sure my editor would print (er, post) reviews of five-year old dog-eared books by publishers that went out of business two years ago, so I didn't pick any up.

I did look at, and consider, a beautiful, moody graphic novel, of 30's gangsters in Chicago by nobody I'd ever heard of. Guess what? The book was sold directly as the basis of this film. Now I gotta look it up. Here's a review of it when originally published.

Alrighty! MT is now running against MySQL, which I was hoping would improve rebuild performance.

Alas, no.

Could I even do brute pforce category reassingments? Well, maybe; but sadly the fields under "entry_category" are ... null. So; hm, still pluggin'. I guess I'll have to, like, RTFM and find the schema.

Always always the tradeoff b/t the convenience of access and speed, especially in large-scale operations, in server-oriented apps. Always.

Let's all do our part!

UPDATE: Just to make things easy for you, here's a 337k .gif which you can simply print off and run down to Kinko's with.

And a nod to the originator of the "giant" stickers seems in order.

Still working the kinks out, but I've added topical archives to the link area to the right of the main page.

There's some div nesting problems to be worked out on the archive pages, too; but hopefully this will make finding a particular entry or reading within a given subject area (hi, Matt!) somewhat easier.

I think I can stuff the archive lists into drop-down menus; would that be helpful?

The most onerous task is properly categorizing the "special" entries into the new categories: I've added a category for "Blimp Week" and of course one for your Ken Goldstein of the week.

BTW have your printer ready for tomorrow's Ken.

Now on ebay: Own your own blimp!

Someone else’s loss is your gain. We found this SEA DOO blimp hung up on one of our fences on our ranch (in the middle of nowhere). It was fully inflated with helium and flying a couple of hundred feet in the air, so there are no holes in it. It has at least 200' of cord (which was how it hung on our fence) so it can fly high over your place!

This thing draws a lot of attention!

The only damage that we could find was that the seam has come apart on one of the fins and it had duct tape around the edge. This doesn't affect the part that holds the air, and would not be noticeable while "flying".

We have it tied to our jeep in the picture, so you can see the size difference between the jeep and the blimp and the loader.

The object in question is an inflated 20-25 foot advertising buoy-blimp, the kind of thing one sees tethered over car dealerships. There is no mention of shipping details.

Oops!
I was so involved with my Wired piece I forgot about the Monday art.

In a few days I'll fudge the dates of publication so it's neater.

This image is a photo of a no-longer surviving copy of a large, 18" by 24" or larger poster I made for a party/show in the basement of the house I lived in during college, the Litter Box. As I recall, the bands were Too Cooland also the Truckadelics. Too Cool was this too short-lived postpunk power rock band - sorta glam. As I recall they were great but I only saw them twice that I can remember.

The Truckadelics were a long-lived Frankie Camaro project. I have video of Andrew Wagner singing an original Frankie number, "Unlucky Highway", in the basement of the Litter Box at a party, possibly this one. The parties in the basement with bands at this house remain epic in scope - I recall one in particular in which the keg was tapped and completely consumed in less than thirty minutes. Occasionally, I am introduced to someone here in Seattle who happened to be in Bloomington during this era and recalls the parties at the house.

I cut the stencil at full size into a piece of heavy drawing paper, and used a variety of spraypaint colors and on-the-fly paper masking to accomplish the variant color effects. This is one of the most ambitious stencil pieces I did. For many years I would attend punk rock shows with no money in my pocket and hang out by the front door of the show, selling a stencil to be sprayed on whatever people were wearing for a measly buck.

I would clean up, and usually had money for beer after the show. I still have almost all of the stencils I cut - there were thirty or so as I recall, some as elaborate as this image.

I actually got a "real" job from a promoter who worked for the University Student Board from this flyer - he came to the show and asked me to make a flyer for a Replacements show he was booking. I did the job for free plus four tickets to the show, but I don't think he liked the flyer I made for him.

Good pal and inexplicable focus of my weekly "Ken Goldstein of the Week" feature Ken Goldstein did the only sensible thing a single man of 30 summers can do when presented with a four day weekend in the United States: he took a road trip.

He drove east to near Nashville, and then southwest into Georgia and South Carolina. Why, if I'd known, I could have had my parents feed him when he drove north through North Carolina!

Day One: Gatlinburg, Tennessee concludes a long, hard day of minor league baseball and Pigeon Forge, TN.

Day Two: The wonders of Pigeon Forge roll on and on, and so does Ken, down to Georgia, in search of a hotel room.

Day Three: What better way to spend the fourth in Appalachia than at the 7th Annual Redneck Games! This is one hilarious anecdote, yessuh.

Day Four: Mecca: Ken arrives at world-famous South of the Border, where instead of actual Mexican culture and Mexicans, you can see a peculiar, mid-century American imitation! Trivia question: which came first, Seattle's Space Needle, or S.O.B's Space Sombrero?

Why, I feel as though I've just spent four days peeling my skin off the broiling vinyl of my family's 1973 Dodge Dart, reading, sweating, and bickering with my sister.

As noted in my previous entry, on May 14, I inaccurately dissed Wired's new house body and headline font as Helvetica. on June 28th, Wired Creative Director Darin Perry dropped by to set the record straight. It's actually Aksidenz Grotesk.

Prompted by this unexpected turn of events, I'm taking the opportunity to write more thoughtfully about Darrin's recent changes to the magazine in the context of its' design history. First, it should be recognized that I have a more emotional relationship to the magazine than I do to any other mag that I read. Wired's first couple of years, before the website opened for business, were a magnificent - and frankly transgressive - reading experience.

Editorial direction was wide open. Contributors wrote about the infinite possibilities for change that the developing new technologies opened up. Everything from alternative, technophilic non-capitalist economics to the impact of the new technologies on democratic decisionmaking processes were written about. It was inspiring, exciting, and fired my imagination.

The look of the magazine during these years reflected the excitement of the content. Graphic design was the first industry to be powerfully affected by the emergence of personal computers. Just at the time Wired debuted the first round of really committed, highly technologically literate designers were hitting their stride.

The magazine, during this time, acquired the reputation of being 'illegible' (unfairly, in my opinion), mostly due to the use of flourescent inks for captions or body copy in some cases and for a willingness to experiment with layering and unconventional ink choices (silver captions printed on top of duotone photos, for example).

To the public at large, these looked as radical and confrontational as the subject of the magazine, which at the time was the utopian possibilities inherent in the development, exploration, and exploitation of the new technologies.

As Wired entered middle age, around the third or fouth year of publication, there was a distinct shift in editorial tone. An initial redesign may have accompanied this shift. Articles critical of international global capitalism were nevermore seen; fifty-something white guys dominated the cover; advertisements for the status toys of our overlords predominated in the pages. I regularly become enraged while reading it, and dropped it as a subscriber.

The redesign de-emphasized some of the wilder aspects of the early years but kept, in a somewhat tamed fasion, many of the others. Flourescent inks, for example, were still used on a regular basis. However, the era of wild exploration was past. Interestingly, the magazine kept the reputation as a wild design leader long after the spark of these experiments had dimmed, and the look of the magazine actually employed a combination of conventional magazine layout approaches and evolved design solutions that descended from the earlier experiments.

At about this time in the magazine's history, I was involved in a long discussion on the Graphics List concerning, oh, I guess the semiotics of both incarnations of Wired. The conclusions I reached from this discussion were:

• The orginal design approach reflected both the "opening" created by the new technology and at the same time reflected the danger and difficulty created by the new technology: fragmented and "hard to read" type and photo design is the future;
  
• A desirable side effect of "hard to read" or dissonant design is that it acts as an encoder which automatically separates those in the know from the clueless, much as jargon or fashionable clothing;
  
• By successfully maintaining a reputation of being "hard to read" or edgy while in point of fact becoming much more accessible in design and mainstream in subject mater, Wired successfully expanded their readership and consumer appeal while maintaining premium pricing and creative requirements for advertisers, a real grail for lifestyle magazines.

In effect, Wired created a myth of an exclusive club, and then turned it into a tourist attraction without letting the tourists become aware of the change in status. While the editorial change (not the design change) drove me out the door, cursing and muttering imprecations, I must say I found the excercise admirable and informative.

Today's Wired, beginning with the issue that first featured the current look (it had Steven Spielberg on the cover), gives some evidence of an editorial shft away from celebrating wealthy white corporate leaders. In all fairness this is predictable in light of the onging economic tragicomedy we are all observing daily. I certainly hope they'll pick up a bright pen and run it through each and every one of the companies we've watched melt away - beginning with Enron and Andersen and moving up through Xerox and WorldCom. Wired could choose to assign, for example, Bruce Sterling or (now this I like) William Gibson to cover the fraud and theft which are currently wrecking the economy. But I'm not gonna hold my breath.

Although an outcome like that is unlikely (and in all honesty I don't think Sterling could be critical enough to meet my desires for such a piece; Gibson's dark glasses would be just right for me, I think), so far since then both the Spielberg issue and the current "Nike project" issue had a sufficient amount of interesting material to hold my attention. The intermediate issue, in which the Wired Index was re-introduced, was, not successful in so doing. In the current issue my favorite piece was the "Infoporn" on nulclear material, and I must say a part of my enjoyment was derived from the presenation of the piece: phosphor green on black, very nice.

The redesign, which employs Aksidenz Grotesk (Thanks, Darrin!) to effectively do away with the early-nineties visual noise while still employing layered printing, da-glo colors, and other signature elements of all of Wired's looks, also reflects the direction street design has taken over the past five or six years, on rave cards, club flyers, and the like.

This school of design combines a retro-seventies futurist esthetic in the use of understated sans-serif fonts with softened, regular geometric shapes such as squares or rectangles with rounded corners to convey a cool, polished sensibility.

This mode of presentation is derived from the work of Swiss designers on the eve of World War Two, and became very influential in American design in the late sixties and early seventies, when it projectd a ind of intenational, eurocentric futurism. Think of Kubrick's "2001" and Woody Allen's "Sleeper", and you'll know what I mean.

It's interesting to note that each time this high-modern approach to design becomes predominant (and Wired is not the only mag to undergo a retro-mod restyle of late - a href="http://www.macaddict.com/">MacAddict just unveiled a similar, sans-all-the-way look in print if not online), it was in times of economic turbulence, with no clear upturn in sight and a great deal of uncertainty in the air.

In the case of Wired, does this affect the sense of exclusivity the magazine still strives for? I'm not certain. I suspect it does; after all I doubt that a subscriber in Chinchilla Flats, Texas has seen as many rave cards as I have here in Seattle; and while I can see the magazine as a manstreaming of this design approach, it probably still looks pretty cutting edge to our imaginary Texan.

At the same time, simply becasue it's a less confrontational design, it may provide greater accessibility at the newsstand, which in turn might translate into a spike in circulation. So Darrin, I take back my flippant dismissal of your hard work, and hope you enjoy reading my more honest and thoughtful reflections on both your place of work and the specific contribution to it you have made of late.

In my May 14 entry, I flippantly dimissed the new look of Wired magazine with particular attention to the new house body and headline font.

First: a correction. I identified the new font choice as Helvetica. It's actually Aksidenz Grotesk.

How did I learn this?

Well, Wired's Creative Director, Darrin Perry, was curious or kind enough to drop by the entry for, um, his fair share of abuse, I guess. He was gracious enough to compliment this site's primary font choice while pointing out my error.

I see Verdana when I look at the site, a choice which I must confess I inherited from Mena Trott, I believe, the designer half of Movable Type, which each one of you should download, use, and pay for.

So there's a couple items on the agenda. First, what an interesting, wow-cool moment! Random mutterings concerning events and things that pass though my life have a reasonable possibility of being seen by the most appropriate viewer. Thank you, Google. Perhaps someday Aaron Cometbus will drop by, via Google, and learn about the Gizmos.

I have noticed that a large proportion of traffic to the site comes in via Google search requests for obscurities which I've written about here. Common search requests resulting in a site visit include "Aaron Cometbus", "blimp rides", "Wreck of the Shenandoah", and, yes, "Bob's Java Jive".

Why "perfect candidate to hire for your high-paying house polymath position" has yet to generate a great deal of traffic remains unknown. At any rate, welcome Googlers - I hope your stay is both entertaining and informative.

Item two on the agenda is a more reasoned review of Wired's new look. That will be the next entry.

Pursuing the theme of promoting comments by site visitors to entries when it's appropriate, here's site visitor Jeff Baker commenting on my April entry concerning the queen of Northwest bars, Bob's Java Jive:

Bob's Java Jive was the perfect getaway for PLU students about 20 years ago.

The coffee shaped building was cool. Cozy, but not too cramped. I remember a circular type bar- and patrons enjoying coffee - mostly truckers. While in good shape, the place felt a bit like a dive and had a "dive-like" aroma.

Then, the monkeys were kept in the back area (a building addition that likely was added on to the coffee shaped building at some point). We called this back room "the plastic jungle". It featured vinyl tiger print booths, a dance floor made of black vinyl tiles (with an occaisional red or blue tile), random flourescent jungle paintings on the wall ( illuminated by a couple black light bulbs). There were hanging plastic monkey head lights too.

You could get food there, and beer by the pitcher. It was diner food and wasn't too bad if you didn't try to imagine what the kitchen looked like. Our waitress served up our hamburger and fries, then kept stealing one or two everytime she walked by. At one point she sat down with us and was cracking up for no apparent reason. Then we realized she was drunk!

The juke box was one of the greatest attractions there. Where else could you find "Love Potion #9" or "theme from Hawaii 5-O". Of course we always had to play "Java Jive" (I think it was by the Ink Spots).

After a while the live music started. The "band" consisted of two men (rumored to be the sons of the owners). One (looked kind of like Steve Buscemi) played accordion, and the other (a large man with a huge, curly afro and big glasses) played organ. Very serious. They mostly played TV theme songs. One time, they played the theme to Gilligan's Island. When it was over, a group of us laughed. The brothers glared at us, as if annoyed by our irreverance.

After five or six TV tunes, they'd take a break. The organ player would spin around on his bench, and sit with his elbow on his knee, chin in his hand, silent, no expression on his face... for five minutes straight while the accordian player had a beer.

Bizarre! But it was great! I thank God I never got food poisioning.

Thanks for that illuminating tale, Jeff! Seems that things hadn't changed much in the intervening years, although I'd love to find out more about the TV theme song band. I can vouch for the sons of the owners having played there for a while - it was a part of the history of the place that was related to us when we asked.

Since last fall, I've been writing reviews of comics (with occasional Star Trek coverage, working with interviews of people on the crew of Enterprise) for Cinescape, a sort of latter-day Starlog or Fangoria which is much snappier, and broader in coverage, than these precursors.

Anyway, I recently turned in six reviews, and the first two of that batch have been posted.

Suckle: the Status of Basil

Fuzz & Pluck in Splitsville

Both are Fantagraphics books. I have an informal OK from my editor to begin soliciting review copies from some of the other boutique and art comix publishers, which I look forward to.

Click will open a 1200 pixel-wide version.

Here are sketches.

It seems that Mr. Goldstein was once featured in a series of long-forgotten Gold Key comics.

Happy Fourth!

A taunt:

Oh? is it hot? I hadn't noticed. It's, um, a comfy seventy-two here in Whybark International World Headquarters. I hear you east-coast types are basting in your undies over there, sweatin' to the oldies under the blazing wrath of old Sol.

If Seattle isn't obliterated by terrorists tomorrow, and you call first so I can go over it with my wife, you can crash here for a day or two. (Gotta hand it to Speigelman agin: this week's New Yorker cover is like a stick to the head.)

But I gotta tell ya: jobs are hard to come by this year.

Wait, wait, wait. No broiling heat, you don't have to work... what's not to like?

Oh, the poverty. And the lack of health insurance. And the rent, although another year of deep black recession wll probaly take care of that. Did I tell ya we have, like, mountains and trees and shit?

in the inbox today:

Date: Wed, 3 Jul 2002 15:11:33 -0700 (PDT) From: G D Subject: eternity in the heart To: mike@whybark.com MIME-Version: 1.0

email from GOD

So, um, does this constitute taking sides in the spamwar?

from the hoodoo swamps of Noooo Orleans, it's former cohort in punk rock MATT UHLMANN with his whiskey river quarter on my book reviews yestiddy and the broader topic of punk rock history publishing, incorporated. TAKE IT AWAY MATTY!

Man, don't give up on rock and roll mike!

you really don't get that sense of "possibility and excitement" anymore? or just when reading these books??

Just the books, Matt. But I get the sense of possibility and excitement mostly when I hear a field recording of a dead person trying to remember the words to a folksong that their grandparents taught them. Or when I'm playing a gig, I suppose.

remember when there WERE NO BOOKS ABOUT PUNK ROCK?? haha it wasn't that long ago, was it?...then in the late 80's one or two came out and mid 90's they came pouring out...I have to admit I haven't bought any even when I've seen them on the sale rack!! mostly they are repeated tellings of untruths and legends (punk rock happened in NYC and LONDON exclusively, and was an socio-art movement blahblahblah).

"Kill me" is a VH-1 style expose on the sordid lives of some true fuck ups...it IS NOT ABOUT THE MUSIC...which is by the way the only reason said individuals are worth talking about anyway. The fashions, the ideologies, the hair, the 'life-styles'.

That was one of the problems with punk rock anyway... people didn't admit that the music was what really mattered and punk rock was part of the bigger history of rock and roll. It's the flip side of Lipstick Traces by Marcus and even worse: "subculture: the meaning of style" by dick hebdige. These two books also ignore the music - not to talk about the "Dirt", but to overanalyze the so called 'artistic' and 'socio-political' aspects of (this time english) punk respectively.

Basically any book that flat out ignores the music is bunk. At least "traces" gives you a sense (however EXTREMELY slanted toward the negative aspects) of what was going on and maybe why. You could read a dry academic-ass book like "Subculture" 20 times and still have no concept of what being a punk (or mod or rocker or whatever) was all about.

I think one of the best and one I would probably actually buy if I saw it for 10 bucks or so is "Hardcore California" remember it? from like '83 or so...now that was a good book. a good history FROM THE INSIDE that gave you a sense of the scene(s). maybe second and worth a good 5 bucks in the used bin is the re-printed sniffin glue (mostly for the lengthy forward/interview with Mark P. that explodes most of the punk rock myths the other books on punk and histories of rock and roll are trying to build.)

Oh, absolutely I recall Hardcore California. What an anomaly: it came out while all this was still happening, had great pix, good production vaules; hm, I bet it was as instrumental as MRR in propagating things back in the day actually. Sniffin' Glue reprint was interesting at first but I can't look at it today, it's just not up my alley anymore.

also I must admit to having picked up (ALSO USED MIND YOU) the two collected volumes of search and destroy...the main thing for me to say about them is how the bands that framed themselves in the context of the history of rock and roll(or american culture)...eg. Suicide, the Cramps, the Damned, DEVO, etc. make for mostly interesting interviews...the bands that framed themselves in the contexts of 'destroy the past, the revolution is coming' (who also were not-coincidentally obsessed with a wider audience--you know "lets get more kids involved") eg. the DILS, the AVENGERS, Feederz, the ahem--INDUSTRIAL folks, etc. make for mostly laughable/sad interviews.

anyway mike don't give up the ROCK...I mean when I see a good band (I know, I know, it's becoming a rare thing) or hear a good lp, or cd or see a good video whether it's from this week or from 1980 or from 1958 I still feel that roller-coaster feeling inside...

Thank you, MATTY! A big hand, folks, for a man who knows more about the ROCK than I ever did or will!

Old pal Chuck Swaim, and his mystery supergroup the Dead Air Fresheners get a plug on boingboing's guestbar.

Chuck has links here, too:

http://www.angelfire.com/band2/pit/nosleep1.html

http://www.mp3.com/stations/gothmusicandpoetry

And here's a shot of me and Chuck at the Capitol in Olywa.

Amusingly, the guest curator of the guest bar, Tiffany Lee Brown, has a review of "American Hardcore" at one of her other blogs. She likes it okay but not enough to keep it, because the book reflects the macho exclusionary qualities of hardcore itself. She was also irritated by the Dumb Capitalization, I infer.

So, a few people independently mentioned "American Hardcore: A Tribal History" (by Steven Blush) to me, and each said "It's like 'Please Kill Me'. It's pretty good.". Multiple unsolicited reccomendations from disparate persons, each apparently making the same critical judgement.

"Alright," I thought. "Let's read them back to back."

Reading them crammed against one another is an interesting experience, but not exactly one I'd recommend unless you were intimately involved in the later scene documented by these two books, the hardcore scene. Blush does not explicitly acknowledge it, but it's clear that Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain's "Please Kill Me" is the direct inspiration for his book. Both works use extended interviews with numerous participants in each of the scenes they document as the basis of the book's content.

"Please Kill Me" does so with great technical rigor: there is no content in the book except for quotes from specific individuals. These paragraph-long quotes are carefully juxtaposed to create a clear, narrative-driven portrait of a very specific place and time. The narrative centers on the personal relationships of a core group, which includes Danny Fields (a music-industry person), Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, Richard Hell, and Dee Dee Ramone.

At times the narrative becomes a litany of the horrible things these people did to one another and to those around them. Yet McNeil and McCain manage to accomplish the remarkable in squarely facing both the squalor and brilliance of the hairy thread of New York's alternative music and art scene from 1967 to 1980 or thereabouts. Unfortunately for the reader, but accurately reflecting the perceptions of the participants, the narrative closes just as teenage America began to become aware of what the cast of characters in the book had been up to.

I really wish that the authors had taken the time to write about the Los Angeles scene at the time, and documented the development of the early punk scene there as well; but in such a sprawling tale, covering your home turf is a good idea.

Several interesting aspects of "Please Kill Me" struck me as I read it: the one that McNeil and McCain deliberately underplay is the amount of interchange and contact between their subjects and artists that I thought of as untouchable, not-quite-real, and worthless: as the enemy. Aerosmith, The Rolling Stones, Todd Rundgren, Led Zeppelin and others flit around the edges of the anecdotes so frequently, it's clear that the ideological division between punk and rock was some sort of marketing tool, and not a marker of a social division. The first-generation artists from the New York scene were really set to be the inheritors of the rock industry, and were rejected by the industry because of the challenges inherent in molding and marketing nihilism.

Tales, repeated ad infinitum, of drug idiocy, incredibly excessive hotel behavior, cross-country flights to gigs, label-rented houses, and assorted other standard yawners of rock journalism litter the pages. What sets it apart from "The Song Remains the Same" is not the girls or the music (frequently, they are the same groupies, and musicans worked similar circuits) but the violence and retarded self-destruction.

Dee Dee Ramone emerges as a kind of hero, depicted here as the vital creative center of the Ramones, lauded for (among other things) his lyrical sensibilities, songwriting talent, fantastic level of drug dependency, his tendency to violence and his possible murder of persons unknown. He's just died, but, um, I always thought Dee Dee's songs were dumb, and frequently, I wouldn't bother taping them when I picked up a Ramones album. Maybe I need to look at the credits again. I'm pretty sure "Wart Hog" was one of his numbers.

Or maybe the things that McNeil and NcCain have chosen to mythologize were the things I thought I was rebelling against as a teenager, and assumed that the New York crowd to whom I looked as role models were also interested in demolishing rockist sexism, violence and druggery. I guess I never really looked at the persons in question very hard. I suppose that means I was looking in the mirror all along.

That mirror, I suppose, is the one apparently smashed by Henry Rollins' fist on the cover of the great Black Flag record, "Damaged". Henry plays a large role in "American Hardcore"; author Blush was an east coast HC promoter who also crossed the country several times during the heyday of the music, the mid-eighties. He's originally from DC, as was Henry, Ian MacKaye, and the Bad Brains.

Interestingly, the only character who appears in both books is Misfits bassist Jerry Only. In both books, the theme of territorial exclusion repeats over and over: the current kings of cool exclude and marginalize youngsters who appear and become interested in "the scene".

The relation of the books is much like the relation of the music they are concerned with; "Kill Me" very clearly benefitted from professional backing. It's a chapter from Joe Gould's "Oral History" as he dreamed it for his audiences in Greenwich Vilage forty years before. Tightly copyedited, with practically no typos; carefully interweaving narrative viewpoints to create a cubist portrait of its' people and places, it's a satisfying read. It's unquestionably the product of professionals operating within a mature support framework that encourages craft and technical reflection. It reaches for the brass ring of art, as did some of its' subjects, and it succeeds.

"Hardcore" on the other hand, is clearly an indie effort by someone who loves and is knowledgeable about their topic but who did not have access to, for example, a gifted editor, or even a house style guide. Blush has chosen to Captialize things throughout the book, that while stylistically consistent, irritate me. Caucasians are White, persons of African descent are Black; fast, simple, aggressive music is Hardcore; this music developed from Punk Rock, and so on.

The lack of strong editorial feedback undermines the book's compelling subject matter: the development of an explicitly anti-commercial, independent music distribution and performance network. By emulating the overlapping oral history approach of McNeil and McCain, detailed historical documentation of this network is minimized in favor of one obscure former punk kid after another relating which shows they played or attended, by and large.

This aspect of the book makes it feel much like a superannuated collection of Maximum Rock N Roll scene reports; only when Blush concentrates on specific band histories does the book pop into focus, ironically underlining the unique brilliance and star qualities of specific individuals: Greg Ginn, Henry, Ian, Glenn Danzig. Ian, unsurprisingly enough, comes across as a particularly thoughtful observer and participant, and spares himself no unflattering stories.

One thing I did not know was that just prior to the 1983 Samhain tour where I first saw them, Glenn had actually formed the band with Brian Baker and Lyle Presslar, the guitarists of Minor Threat. What a band that could have been!

To Blush's credit, he pulls no punches when analyzing the fatal weaknesses of the music and personalities he covers. McNeil and McCain appear fascinated by the weaknesses of the personalities they allow others to discuss, and apparently retain faith in the power of the music associated with the people.

So in the end, both "American Hardcore" and "Please Kill Me" are appropriate reflections of the music they cover. "Kill Me"'s artful, powerful construction reflects the artistic and moral values (or lack thereof) of the people it covers; "Hardcore" emulates the naive faith in the possibility of direct communication at the expense of reflective intellectualism that the music did itself. At the same time, it seems that Blush's clear-eyed view of the limitations inherent in the form of the music and the social expectations of the subculture could inform a more nuanced product.

"American Hardcore" is perfectly true to the values of the scenes it documents, and does not attempt to accomplish an artistic goal, something that frustrated me as a reader. "Please Kill Me" has no values, and accomplishes the trick of becoming deep, reflective art by dint of dedication to craft while gleefully attempting to disguise its' technical brilliance.

Sadly for me, I don't give a fuck about either history anymore, and instead of feeling that old sense of possibility and excitement as I read these books, I found myself repeatedly, deeply bored by them. Drugs, groupies, violence: who cares. MRR started a campaign against so and so: so what. So-and-so ripped someone else off: big deal. I believe this may be a result of the development of "punk history" as a discrete subgenre in music publishing; I suppose it's also a result of the failure of the music, or the writing, to either transcend itself or to immanentize the eschaton, as they say. Whatever, I'm done reading about it. Next time you see me picking up a copy of "Midwest Punk Rock Archaeology Review", please kill me.

Mostly a test post.

Naturally, the upgrade kilt my perl-to-Image::Magick pathing, and in what I suspect to be a related development, MT's configuration checking script does not b'leeve I have MySQL installed and humming along like a top, sooo.... some hacking is in order.

UPDATE:

This week's entry in my growing pile of original art is the main image from the last tee-shirt I designed for my former band, the Bare Knuckle Boxers. This image, with the website URL below it and the words "Irska Musika - Americke Svaly" (Czech for "Irish Music - American Muscle") above it in a warm cream color on a dark-green tee appear on the front of the shirt; on the back, the words "Beer is proof that god loves us and wants us to be happy" appear as a quotation above the signature of Ben Franklin, which can be seen on the bill as well.

Originally I designed this so that it was much more like the new $100 dollar bill, but thought better of it and reversed the orientation so that it's clearly NOT a forgery. If you click the image above, an 800 pixel wide image will open; I encourage you to do so, as there are some entertaining details, including Roddy McCorley's title. Finally, the serial number - "MR5HN DRK1N CG V3" is, in essence, the chords to an Irish song we performed, "Murshin Dirkin".