I saw Harry Potter II at a downtown mallplex after noting that the Cinerama showing we had tix for was too crowded.
I reflected on my privileged childhood exactly as I did when I saw the previous film - why, for example, does Harry go back to his horrible foster parents when every international ruling class school has summer residencies, for, for example, the children of deposed dictators, kids of their underlings, and other victims of the undertow?
(Really, I attended a private school in Switzerland, and that was the way it was done for such unfortunates, I kid you not. You were welcome to join the landscaping crew if your father's international killing machine failed to deliver the tuition. I am not making ths up, and I'm not ate up about it. After all, did you ask for your parents? It's humanitarian, if elitist.)
Ths leads to odd reflective moments during the films which, at the time, are really not worth explaining to my wife, or anyone else, for that matter.
Then Viv read the latest book out loud for a few before we snoozed (I, sneakily, have her working on the Amber Chronicles in the hopes that geek reading habits can be slipstreamed into the wake of the boy wizard and the grand grey one yet to open - although he'll be wearing white this year, of course).
Today, after awakening, we went thrifting in the 'hood, and BOY, my locale is now the home of Seattle's grandest concentration of secondhand shops, which is just too cool. It used to be in Fremont, to our north and west, but then the developers got to it, and well, if you like Starbucks and Jamba Juice, they are looking out for your best interests as consumers, lemme tell ya.
If you prefer the crabby, foulmouthed business person that waves sex toys about if too many straight people show up, or the black-hearted antiquarian that keeps real human corpses behind the counter (no joke!), then Fremont circa three years ago or my neighborhood, Capitol Hill, is more the place for you.
I still, however, was disappointed to not find a single spare ADB cable at any of the shops or charity thrifts. Looks like eBay is a necessity for the next harebrained computer project.
Also, today was very foggy, and once the sun went down, watching the cold tendril drift and billow under the lamps was a pleasure. As we walked up the hill toward home, a phalanx of bicycle cops, (also known as "playground supervisors") filed by. Viv and I looked, and I wondered, "Does that mean the kids are coming up here again?"
Today was November 30, the third anniversary of a little thing that happened here in my city, neighborhood, and on my ass in the form of rubber pellets from a police stun grenade. There was a comemmorative rally downtown today, and the drifting fog and biking cops recalled clouds of tear gas, chanting and unhappy neighbors, and lots of open bars to my mind.
I believe I may share some recollections.
Given the remarkable responses under my last mandolin post, I wanted to take a moment to point to a few mandolin resources on the net, som of which I've long linked in my sidebar.
First, and closest to me personally, is Martin Stillion's emando.com, The Electric Mandolin Resource Page, for which I helped Martin secure the domain and hosted for a spell. When Martin was first building this, finding info about electric mandos was very, very difficult, and his site is a fantastic resource on one of the more idiosyncratic instruments out there.
His links section also contains a long list of dealers and manufacturers most of which are not exclusively electric (I say without verification).
The single best source of information and links for mandolin on the net is the Mandolin Cafe , which inherited the mantle from the long-moribund Mandozine. Mandozine still has some great articles, but the Cafe has fresh content on a regular basis, as well as a bulletin board.
DO NOT MISS the eye candy; it may explain why it's very common for mandolovers to find themselves owning more than four mandolins. This is the result of a disease known as MAS, or mandolin acquisition syndrome, often known to cause friction with spouses. The only known treatment for the disease is, logically enought, the acquisition of a mandolin. The spontaneous occurrence of the disease recounted the other day is rare, to the best of my knowledge. It's much more common for an outbreak to occur as a response to mandolin exposure.
Mandolin magazine is the mando world's print journal, and BOY did they take their time getting online.
Finally, returnng to the Cafe, the archives provide a jumping off point for getting to know your way around the little things. A Brief History of the Mandolin and Daniel Coolik's Mandolin Paper may teach you some surprising things, while Distinction Between Mandolin Families and learning your Vintage Gibson A's and Gibson F's wil help you impress the fifty-something potsmokers at your next bluegrass festival.
My favorite part of mandolin triva and geeketry is the fact that the plot of "The Music Man" is based partly on real instrument manufacturer's practices around the turn of the century. One of the most effective practitioners of this selling technique - don't sell a single instrument, sell an orchestra full of them, and provde financing - was the Gibson company, who revolutionized the manufacture of the instruments.
Guitar expert and music historian George Gruhn has some great articles about this on his website.
As Pinax alluded the other day, mandos are tuned the same as fiddles. Someone at Gibson, I think, realized that this meant the mandolin family could be expanded to encompass double-course plucked instruments that exactly reflect the tuning and inonation of the traditional classical orchestra's string section - violin, viola, cello, and bass become mandolin, mandola, mandocello, and bass mandolin. By establishling manfacturing lines for these instruments, Gibson suddenly was able to provide two centuries worth of ensemble music to a new audience: the American working class.
Gibson's salespeople traveled the country, establishing mandolin orchestras, often under the sponsorship of workingmen's associations or labor unions. The music these orchestras produced was correctly percieved as threatening by the established music press of the day, and believe me, if you've ever heard a recording or attended a performance of a mandolin orchestra, the sound is capable of being unsettling. It's hard to keep the instruments in tune, and presumably it was as hard or harder when all the instruments are inexpensive and played by amateurs, full of ethusiasm and possibly a bit weak on technique.
Lucky for us, there are mandolin orchestras all over the country. Here are some:
the Classical Mandolin Society of America's list
Seattle Mandolin Orchestra (Martin plays a vintage Gibson bass mandolin with these folks)
New York Mandolin Orchestra (a survivor of the first wave, making it, I suppose, old wave).
Happy plinking!
(I have simply STOLEN this from Ken, who inexplicably ran it as a comment, after it was suggested by Murph. I think of this as another facet in my ongoing effort to appropriate Ken's identity for my own personal use as an art project.
Ken, I had NOTHING to do with the identity theft guys in New York. Really, I've never even TRIED to look up your credit record, and I was deeply saddened to hear of your recent difficulties in convincing GMAC that you did not owe them any money.)
Columbus, OH - Every year since 1990, White Castle System, Inc. has offered its famous "White Castle Turkey Stuffing" recipe to its customers during the holiday season. Even Cindy Crawford, who during a recent appearance on ABC's "The View" raved about the stuffing recipe that her brother-in-law made for Thanksgiving last year. In keeping with this tradition, White Castle will once again offer this recipe in addition to the latest 10 award-winning recipes FREE.
The "White Castle Turkey Stuffing" recipe uses 10 or more White Castle hamburgers to stuff a 10-12 lb turkey. It is available in the new recipe booklet.
This new edition makes a great stocking stuffer, or can be used to make a delicious "White Castle Turkey Stuffing" dish for turkey dinners.
WHITE CASTLE TURKEY STUFFING
10 White Castle hamburgers, with pickle removed
1-1/2 cups celery, diced
1-1/4 tsp. ground thyme
1-1/2 tsp. ground sage
3/4 tsp. coarse ground black pepper
1/4 cup chicken broth.
In a large mixing bowl, tear the White Castle hamburgers into pieces and add diced celery and seasonings. Toss and add chicken broth. Toss well. Stuff cavity of turkey just before roasting. Note: allow 1 White Castle hamburger for each pound of turkey, which will be equivalent to 3/4 cup of stuffing per pound. Makes about 9 cups.
The latest recipe booklet "Recipes that can't be beat," is available now by calling the White Castle customer suggestion line at 1-800-THE-CRAVE, (1-800- 843-2728), or at any White Castle restaurant location.
(Yes, this is a real recipe)
I turned to Tod and over my beer said, "I think I want a mandolin".
He looked at me for a minute, not sure of what he'd just heard.
"I don't want to spend a ton of dough on it, though. I'm basically just curious."
"A what?"
"A mandolin," I repeated. "You know, little, acoustic, hillbillies, like that."
He got a quizzical expression on his face. "Ooh-kay," he said skeptically. He sipped his beer, lit a cigarette.
It was a warm afternoon on the back patio at Linda's. Tod, of course, knew a few people who were there already, hard at work proving their hipster credentials. He'd wandered around greeting people while I waited for him to settle down.
I don’t recall if we'd planned to get to together or just met on the street. It seems to me that this was about eight years ago.
At any rate, I helped myself to one of his cigarettes. "I don’t know why I want one," I clarified. "I just do."
"I've only actually held one once. I was helping this guy Terry, kind of an older ex-hippy guy, rewire an alternative school in my hometown, and for some reason he'd brought a mandolin with him. I think he showed me a couple of chords but I couldn't figure it out – it was too different from guitar, so I couldn't get it to make any good noise, just spronky spangs."
Tod listened, deadpan.
"And the sound of it was everywhere when I grew up – there was a Saturday morning bluegrass show that led into a celtic music show, The Owl and Thistle, on the radio, and there's this bluegrass festival real nearby, the Bean Blossom Bluegrass festival, that my parents took me to when I was a kid."
I paused. Tod nodded.
"Of course, I freakin' hated all of it."
Tod started, spewing beer on the table.
"It just sounded like horrible atonal screeching to me, and seemed artificial, too: ex-hippies appropriating right-wing music and sugarcoating it. God! And I really hated the celtic show, all ethereal virtuosity and not a scrap of honest barroom brawling. The nearest they'd get would be some damn Pete Seeger tune every now and then, a damn weekend anthropology seminar, as far as I was concerned, all fresh-scrubbed, bow tied, and sober."
Tod slowly said, "So let me get this straight. You want a mandolin because you held one once, but you can't play it and when you do it makes horrible sounds. Also, when people who do know how to play it make music with it, you hate that, too. Did I cover everything?"
I nodded, slowly, not really understanding it myself.
I tilted my head, a memory creeping up on me. "You know, I do remember, the first time I went home after moving here, Joey Z's little brother let me play his mandolin in a jam with Joey and Herb, and it sounded pretty good… so maybe I don’t know what the hell I'm talking about. It was October, and there was a full moon, and we went to a party where there was beer and cider and pumpkins and haybales. That was pretty cool."
Tod looked at me in amusement. "OK, well, we're done with this pitcher, and there's a pawn shop across the street. How much do you want to spend?'
"Not much," I repeated. "Maybe a hundred and fifty bucks, tops. One-twenty-five, more like. Does that sound right?"
Between one and two hundred bucks will get you a crappy electric guitar in any pawnshop in the country. I love crappy electric guitars.
Especially the ones made by vanished manufacturers in the 60's with peculiar, even questionable features, such as banks of switches, tasteless finishes, bizarre pickup and bridge designs (all proudly stamped PAT. PEND.) – oh, the florid imagination of electric guitar manufacturers between 1960 and 1975 knew no bounds.
Now, these guitars will NOT work right. Those weird features are forgotten because they are useless and impossible to maintain. You must disassemble them and reassemble them before you can even determine what to replace. They won't stay in tune, often. Replacing the tuning pegs is usually a good idea, but not always – sometimes the old pegs are more finely machined than modern ones.
(Note that is just like my computers.)
Rewiring the pickups and jack is usually needed; sometimes the pickups need to be replaced, but it's best to avid this, as they are the instrument's voice, the center of the sound it makes – or fails to make.
What I mean to say is crappy instruments selected by the universe and made available via the Universal Pawn Shop are of infinite aesthetic value to me. Thus, any mandolin would be at least worthy of a look.
I knew nothing about evaluating acoustic instruments at all, let alone the peculiar and encrusted body of mando-lore, save the basic rules. The body should not be caving in or notably soft. The neck should be straight and true. Clean clearance from bridge to nut is important and so is low, smooth action. I didn't even know if I'd be able to hear fret buzz or how to tune the instrument.
We crossed the street, three beers wise, and entered the pawn shop. There, gleaming behind the counter was a very clean-looking mandolin. It was the style known as an A, after the Gibson company's style designation from early in the 20th century. They are also sometimes described as the pumpkin-seed mandolin, because the body's front profile looks like a pumpkin seed. This, and all Gibson-derived mandos, are roughly flat, and about the thickness of a thin-line hollow-body acoustic guitar. They are shallow archtops, descended from both guitar-making and violin-making.
But I knew none of this at the time. I picked up the instrument, sighted the neck, tapped the body, and was satisfied that it was not a dog. I couldn't tell if it was in tune or not. I asked the counterman if he new a thing about mandolins. No one did.
I asked if there was a case, and yes, there was a chipboard case. The instrument and case appeared nearly brand new. I bit the bullet. How much did they want?
One hundred and twenty-five dollars, they said.
Tod and I looked at each other in amazement. I dug out my wallet and paid for the thing.
We returned to Linda's and continued to drink, puzzling over the object. People drifted over to share in our collective ignorance of the instrument. Eventually a fellow who was taking a luthier's course was able to explain that the instrument was made of laminate wood, essentially plywood, which is both pooh-poohed in acoustic instrument circles and a perfectly acceptable construction technique for a first or learner's instrument.
The mandolin proper was a very early 90's model OM-10 from Oscar Schmidt. The pawn shop method had come through for me. It was nothing fancy, but it got the job done.
I played with it a few times, but effectively just put it away until a few years later, when Odin called me up to play Irish music with him and some other folks. I still hadn't learned the instrument, but did so quickly thereafter.
I no longer have the mandolin in question, but rather a definitely too-large collection of other mandolins, including two-solid-body electrics, two hollow-body acoustic electrics, a midrange F-style acoustic and one which turned out to be a solid-body electric tenor ukelele.
You may have noted that Bellerophon was down for a considerable period yesterday. Copying a corrupt file caused a system freeze that required a three-finger salute. The stalled copy caused file system errors that also prevented several attempts at backups of the web-served file-system.
Naturally, I'd just deleted the desktop-side backups I made during the system rebuild. Now, I sound like Goldstein!
Yes, a meaningful backup solution is inbound. Sigh.
Rebooting into os9 and running TechTool successfully rebuilt the messed up catalog files - but not without the heart-stopping spectacle of a hard system freeze while TTP was rebuilding the directory files. Thankfully, no further system damage appeared to result.
Who wants a drink?
Having changed no configuration files, suddenly MT is reporting input/output errors and refusing to write to disk. This entry is a test, and it replaces a fine expression of oncoming holiday gloom that I will undoubtedly recreate.
(UPDATE: this is clearly the result of one too many mojitos. I've cleaned up the spelling errors but left the rum-bred leaps of logic alone, as well as the run-on sentences. A translation may be appended.)
My first is in art history, and I flatter myself with the notion that my serious assault upon the degree - the first time I was aware of directing my intellect upon a subject with a specific polemic and ideological goal - was predicated upon the idea that art functions as a machine which conveys the ideology of those who pay for it.
Thus, the high-period Athenians celebrate their rule and triumph, persuasively, (may I hasten to say, dear masters, as you prepare our just assault upon the unutterable tyrant and virtual demagogue, he uttered as he bowed and scraped), by the frieze of the Parthenon as do the Maya and Aztec and Mongol with grand and celebratory pyramidal formatia of heads and skulls, so vastly different than that of our egalitarian and demos-placating manner.
However, art, as always, appeals to the viewer to carry them past the troubling details of the thirty-thousand slaughtered to dedicate the new temple and such like trifles (distractions from the analytical task of fitting architectural part or mural) to the economic power structure expressed thereby.
And, thus, I think, I have a subject that marries my obsession to commerce, commerce to technology, and art to the souk. How is the ideal of "usability" constructed, academically?
There's lots of easy pickins - the pro and anti-Uncle Jakob battles which have raged over the ground of simple graphic and advertising design for the past decade (largely, may I state, to the detriment of art AND commerce and to the benefit of a high priesthood which, it appears, wishes to keep computer interfaces ugly at all costs - after all if beauty is not measurable, then it must cost us in untold, indeed, immeasurable use hours).
I could pick at this corpse for years. But that's the problem; it looks predetermined to me in two ways.
One, art is immeasurable, because it's always intended to bring new things to the social contract, things that may be rejected or adopted.
Two, common ideograms often reinforce common ideologies, but successful ideologies always allow for innovation in both ideology and ideogram; thus successful user-interface metering will forever remain difficult.
Two, every phenomenological event is measurable. Each mouse click or page load represents a data point that can be analyzed. Thus, within certain constraints, human behavior in regard to computer data displays can be measured and predicted. Which, you may be shocked to hear, I regard as a good thing.
I mean, you clicked something to be able to read this, right?
But.
So I need to think about this, but that's about right. You can improve predictable behavior by imposing constraints on elements of interface presentation but on a regular basis disruptive interfaces will dramatically affect the efficacy of pre-extant interfaces and elements.
You all got that out there? Make it pretty but derivative and efficient to get reasonably wealthy. Make it wildly original and exquisitely efficient to become more wealthy than Croesus. Make it stultifyingly derivative and in some cases deeply counterintuitive to not get fired. Be a complete hippy goofball otherwise if you think you can get away with it.
In fact, send me money to attend your user interface conference, and I'll make a completely valid, totally kook-bred presentation about something. With luck, we'll all grow wealthy from explaining to SoCal widget kings that were once insulted by Jim Morrison why exactly it us that the Lizard King pocket umbrella was not produced in sufficiently large numbers to satisfy extant Romanian demand.
Why?
(UPDATE: While I doubt I can explain the Lizard King pocket umbrella curiosity directly preceding, this stream-of-mumblery means I see some sort of grad-school thing that allows me to exert art-history chops on computer user interface design as a possible degree path. I think. Also, the post appears to adhere to the "thinking out loud" direction mentioned just previous.
My favorite evidence of the drinkie-winkie? The interesting counting math in the middle of the post. One! Two! Two!)
Tonight Viv and I are having our buddies Don and Trish over. Once we woulda been heading out to eat at Chez Fancypants, as I am sure we will again. But given my restricted current financial situation, home-cooking will be the order of the day.
I have carefully larned the in-laws' cookery, insofar as beans are concerned, and so tonight a fine Cuban meal is inbound. On the bill of fare are mojitos, black beans (easy easy but DO NOT forget enough salt, an entire green pepper, and a hank of bacon - the pepper, according to Viv's mon, "gets the gas out") and ropa vieja, Viv's favorite.
Trish's mom is from Puerto Rico and I imagine that there are similarities in the cuisines of the Caribbean neighbors.
Although we both know how to cook these recipes without cheatin', we did find a great Cuban cookbook at the yummeria known as The Spanish Table (man, that website needs help - at least it loads fast) near the Pike Place Market the other day - A Taste of Old Cuba has tons of very simple, unadorned recipes that accurately capture the flavor and texture of my in-law's diet from birth until they arrived in America, and even beyond; these dishes mean "home" to Viv as well, since Aida prepared them for her countless times as well.
It's one of my deepest pleasures to be able to bring these tastes to my wife.
Writing this made me hungry.
What Do I Know notes the OS X app Comictastic.
The dailies! Yes, at last!
I have six more reviews to excerpt and cross post here that are live at Cinescape. I'll still take a break from that for now, however; I believe that there are at least another 12 reviews in the queue at Cinescape to post as well.
I also have a huge pile of material from the Gainesville-based publisher, Alternative Comics, which will yield at least twenty-five more reviews; I need to take a break before I start grinding them out. One fascinating side effect of re-immersion into non-superhero comics today is an awareness both of the remarkable breadth of independent comics publishing today and a sense that I'm witnessing some sort of middle period in American comics publishing.
In order to really get a broad enough exposure to the currents I think I'm seeing, I need to get the hook up with Marvel and DC to start flowing me the goods – but preferably in a restricted quantity, as they churn out so much there's no reasonable way I could even maintain interest.
Dark Horse has apparently got me on the list, so I just finished reviewing a pile of their indy-oriented material. As a business, I find DH absolutely fascinating: they were publishing independent, ground level material over a decade ago, and since then have very successfully broadened into licensing and merchandising, up to and including film adaptation, the holy grail of indy marketing.
Then you can have your cake and eat it too – your property get the benefit of the huge marketing muscle of Hollywood at the same time as Hollywood pays you based on the success of their efforts – the better they market it, the more you make. Sweet!
As they’ve grown, they've not only maintained an interest in groundbreaking, genuinely original work such as Tony Millionaire's Sock Monkey, but also devoted considerable effort to merchandising even the most arty, outré material, such as this Chris Ware lunchbox, which manages to qualify as a work of art in its' own right.
The graphics form a subnarrative of Ware's just finished RUSTY BROWN opus, which is primarily concerned with the dehumanizing potentiality of fanboy culture and thus may be perceived as critiquing the lunchbox itself, to the great concern of some and the indifference or amusement of others.
At any rate, in 1984, when I graduated high school, the undergrounds were limping along, Fantagraphics was just finding its feet, and zines were taking off. Shortly, there would be a boom in black-and-white and independent comics, but the majority of the work would either function as parody or homage. The notable exceptions tended to cluster around Fantagraphics, and the giants of that wave were clearly the Hernandezes.
Fantagraphics still maintains a lock on wildly gifted creators – Chris Ware being the most notable, and they have Millionaire's MAAKIES – but Bagge's out of the picture, Dark Horse is clearly pressuring Groth, and Mason's label is only one of several garage-band publishers. There's opportunity here. It ain't the same class of opportunity we all noted the firs time we saw a web browser, but something's afoot.
I won’t lock myself into a topic for a set period this upcoming week, but I have some thinking out loud to do on the topic of comic book publishing.
Here, laid out for ogling (no jostling, dammit!) is the as-promised sumptuous prize package to be delivered to the fortunate and determined Pinax.
Some points to note: two of these books are not strictly duplicates, but rather differing versions of material I have in another format, the McCay book and the Gonick book.
There are two possible collectibles in the batch: a first-year, possibly first printing (but it doesn't say) volume three of the ground breaking, still-sells-like-hotcakes DARK KNIGHT series by Frank Miller, and Chris Ware's ACME NOVELTY LIBRARY NUMBER 10. I can't tell if the Ware book is a reprint or not.
 Chris Ware's ACME NOVELTY LIBRARY No. 10.
Ware is a genius, and this little book of bitter misanthropy has made me laugh so I hard I've frightened small children. Purchased by mistake while hypnotized by the pretty colors and enchanting landscapes that populate his work. Keep that Prozac handy so you don't slit your wrists from the grim hopelessness and misery! |
 Larry Gonick's CARTOON HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE VOLUME 7: ALL ABOUT ATHENS.
This forms Chapter One of the second collected book of Gonick's monumental work of cartoon scholarship. It remains the single best cartoon introduction to the sweep of Classical Greek history (did that come out right?), and there's never a dull moment. The period covered here is from the defeat of the Persian invasion of Greece to Alexander the Great's ill-fated venture to India, roughly 480 B.C. to about 330 B. C., just shy of that gifted and peculiar man's death. I could go on and on, but just take my word for it, a whole lot of very interesting, profoundly influential things happened during this time, stuff that directly affects your life in ways you don't even think about. Gonick sets it up and provides a bibliography while cracking wise every step of the way. |
 Winsor McCay's LITTLE NEMO IN SLUMBERLAND, Book 2, in the unfortunate Blackthorne Press edition.
Winsor McCay invented the fantasy comic as well as the entire field of animation. No, really, he did. LITTLE NEMO IN SLUMBERLAND was his sunday full-page comic from very early in the century, and his work on the series is noted for immense, surrealistically detailed drawings and fantastic attention to detail in coloration, all within overall, full-page compositions that still, nearly one hundred years later, grab your eye and just won't let go. For reasons unkown to any living man, the erstwhile publishers of this version of the work, Blackthorne, have decided to cut the strips up, reproduce them in black and white only, and to randomly blow up or reduce the panels so they'll fit the misguided format better. Thankfully, Fantagraphics has come to the rescue with a multi-volume beautiful coffee-table-size series of reprints that do some justice to the work of this early cartoonist and giant of American art. This book is still of value as an introduction, and hopefully Pinax may be moved to learn more about McCay's wild body of work. |
 Frank Miller and Co.'s HUNT THE DARK KNIGHT, volume three in the initial publication of THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, 1986.
I have no idea how I ended up with two copies of this one issue of the series. For all I know it's worth something. At any rate, the collected edition - along with Alan Moore's roughly contemporaneous WATCHMEN - is still on the best seller list for graphic novels, year in, year out. Ah, that year it was really something. Comics were changing! Art was possible, and you could even make art with superheroes! The big publishers were gonna open up to cool new narrative techniques! Watching Miller and Moore slug it out to boggle the comic reading public's mind remains one of the fantastic spectacles of my youth. How do they fare, nearly twenty years on? They still surprise, although the visual shock of some of Miller's innovations is gone; you can still see their influence on both mainstream and alternative publishers in the increased quality of paper and printing and the artistic latitude and encouragement given to artists in developing new, flashy approaches. In the end, though, Moore's WATCHMEN stands out as truly original; Miller's debt to Sergio Leone and the image of Eastwood's amoral wanderer - relected back at Miller in Eastwood's '92 UNFORGIVEN, which liberally borrows from DARK KNIGHT - has become clearer over time. Which is not to say DARK KNIGHT isn't cool. I don't know how easy it will be to follow the tale with just this one chapter. |
 Jaime Hernandez' WOAH, NELLIE #2, 1996.
In WOAH, NELLIE, one of Jaime's post LOVE AND ROCKETS mini series (it might be the first, I forget) he follows his leading lady Maggie as she goes on the road with a relative acting as the road manager for an all-ladies professional wrestling league. I drifted away from comics shortly after the initial publication of this book, and still have not caught up with the who-all-what that's gone down since I checked out. At the time, '96, both the Hernandezes were checking out too, along with the cast and crew I'd spent many a drunken punk rock night reading up on. We were all getting older, and hitting the road, having kids, or seriously comitting to self-destruction appeared to be the only items on the agenda. I managed to avoid all three, thanks to the Mr. Toad's Wild Ride we affectionally refer to as "the internet" around here. I wonder what's become of all my old pals from Hoppers. |
They're all YOURS, Pinax - just send me your mailing address privately and I'll have them loaded into an anti-grav-mounted statis slab for interstellar delivery within several short, short months! How time will fly as you await your picture books.
Originally posted November 12, 2002. Excerpted from Cinescape online. Click pic for full review.
THE HOUSE AT MAAKIES CORNER collects the MAAKIES alt-weekly syndicated strips of Tony Millionaire for the years of 2000 through 2002. At around the time the first of these strips were appearing, a notable expansion of work for the artist had begun to occur.
Today, in addition to MAAKIES, Millionaire produces a comic book (SOCK MONKEY) for Dark Horse which includes iterations of the strip's protagonists, Uncle Gabby and Drinky Crow (in the guises of dolls Mr. Crow and Sock Monkey); he's written a pair of children's books featuring the stuffed companions, been involved in animation projects, and appears in the pages of THE NEW YORKER.
Originally posted September 8, 2002. Excerpted from Cinescape online. Click pic for full review.
MEATCAKE emerged, it seems to my unreliable memory, fully formed from creator Dame Darcy's brow. She herself appears to spring from very brow of Goth, equally fully-formed, her being and our idea of that subculture merging and blurring. That's not to say that Darcy's work, or her presentation of herself as a character within the milieu of both Goth and MEATCAKE, are predictable or specifically derivative. It's more like a sense of recognition: "Of course", one thinks. "That's exactly what a goth comic book should be."
In a larger sense, this is because Darcy is working within the constraints of genre, and when a creator commits to a genre, part of the measure of success is how closely the artists' work adheres to our expectations of that genre. From this perspective, her work is very successful indeed. However, because MEATCAKE is only a facet of the ongoing project of self-creation and presentation which is Dame Darcy herself, standalone consumers of her comic may miss more normative aspects of comics craft, such as plot and character.
I rebuilt the mailserver on bellerophon today. It sent out a bunch of 'failed delivery' messages based on comments made since I got the sever back up on its feet.
Do not be alarmed.
As you may have noted, I am getting my steam up on ye olde alternative comix reviews.
But, alas, I got the call which indicates the end of funding for the reviews. Which is a drag. It's not like the reviews pay well - they don't - but they cover the cost of publication and almost the time investment for reading and writing them, and I've established sufficient credibility to make it relatively easy to get review copies from the burgeoning field of independent comics publishers.
So I have to figure out what's next on that front. I imagine I'll keep writing the reviews.
I also spent a pleasant half-hour on the phone with a reporter for one of the Seattle newspapers this afternoon. She was doing a story on online resumés and had come across my resumé site, and was curious about how effecive the site has been for me.
"Well," I told her, "it was great, back in the day. But lately? Nothin'."
I look forward to her story. Apparently, that little boost will be needed when I start looking for a job again. Not that I have any expectations of actually finding a job. I sent out ten or more resumés a week for more than a year, resulting in a grand total of three call-backs, two email enquiries, and two freelance jobs.
The dot-com bubble was so vast here that it's actually still not done receding. Which means I'm bound for a couple more years of joblessness. Or a transition into midlife professional slackerdom.
Exhibit A? Writing comic book reviews at age 36 for no compensation.
Yes, leaving Seattle has come up, and Viv would like nothing better than to live within driving distance of her family; and what do I care? I mean, it's not like I ever leave the freakin' house.
Of course, I should really be applying to any grad school within arm's reach, and I'd like to... but I have NO IDEA what I want to get a degree in, which makes entry fees, exams, and essays a mite tricky.
And my cat's sick.
The screen shot was sent in by Pinax, of Goliard Dream. Interestingly, it's clear that according to my logging software, Pinax was NOT the actual 10,000th visitor.
That honor goes to an anonymous person who arrived via Google while, yes, it's true, looking for info on "The Fruit Detective," a story that appeared in the New Yorker a ways back that I enjoyed reading enough to blog, and which is easily the most visited page on the site.
They stayed for a total of four seconds before figuring out that this was not their beautiful house.
Fortunately, my vague wording actually requested a screenshot, which Pinax was so kind as to send in, in order to qualify for the prizes!
Incedentally, this may solve the great multiple qualifiers mystery that's long bedeviled one of my less-technical friends.
Pinax already telegraphed an interest in comics, but let's get a clarification in the comments, shall we?
To review, three prizes were offered, one of whch was to be selected by the winner:
- Duplicates of comics in my files
- Computer junk
- Dot-com gimcracks
Weigh in!
Originally posted November 11, 2002. Excerpted from Cinescape online. Click pic for full review.
Published last year and now in a second printing, James Sturm's THE GOLEM'S MIGHTY SWING garnered critical attention outside the comics arena and in the light of Sturm's upcoming gig scripting the FANTASTIC FOUR for Marvel in a series titled UNSTABLE MOLECULES, this book deserves a review.
THE GOLEM'S MIGHTY SWING is set in the 1920s and tells the story of an itinerant baseball team (think "Bingo Long And The Traveling All-Stars") whose primary ethnicity is Jewish; the team takes their name from this and are known as the Stars of David. They are approached by a huckster to add a gimmick to their play: the only African-American member of the team might don a costume to emulate the appearance of the Golem in the silent movie of the same name, a current hit. He does, it's an audience draw, and the team makes out - until they roll into Putnam. Things get ugly, but telling more would offer spoilers, so I shan't.
Originally posted August 31, 2002. Excerpted from Cinescape online. Click pic for full review.
In the midst of the Silver Age reflorescence of super-hero comics, as Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's verve and energy steered Marvel to its great age of glory, media interest in the comics revival took many forms. From the introduction of the beloved campy BATMAN television series to BARBARELLA (the movie), it was the first of the many periodic expressions of interest in and enthusiasm for the comic book from Big Media.
Playing a key element in this wave of coverage was certified New York intellectual Jules Feiffer. Feiffer was well-established as a thoughtful, razor-sharp cartoonist frequently seen in the pages of THE NEW YORKER and other upscale magazines and occasionally contributing equally well-crafted essays to the same market. In 1965, Feiffer published a book (and a magazine piece covering the same ground in PLAYBOY) titled THE GREAT COMIC BOOK HEROES.
Sometime this weekend, someone will be the 10,000th visitor to this site.
If it's you, take a screenshot.
I can associate IP address and reverse domain info with the specific visitor so even in the event of apparent multiple 10,000th visitors, I'll be able figure it out.
The winner will be offerred the choice of one three sumptuous prize packages constructed around the following themes:
- Piles of computer junk and spare parts I have lying around! Actual functioning items may be included!
- Duplicates of comic books in my copious collection!
- Dot-com detritus! What miscellaneous marketing material can I come up with from the high-water mark of the greatest gimcrack boondoggle ever seen?
Thank you, and keep your eyes on the skies!
Originally posted September 10, 2002. Excerpted from Cinescape online. Click pic for full review.
Let me just say this: Canadian clown porn. But don't get worked up; if that excites you, I want you to put the review down, and walk backwards out of the room. Keep your hands to your sides, where I can see them. Good. Now, shut the door. Anyone out there under eighteen? Why don't you go out the window so you don't have to deal with that person we just chased out the door.
Great. Now it's just us stable, mature adults, those of us with a firm grasp of our own neuroses and horrific fascinations, right? Great. Great. OK, here's the deal: Dave Cooper is a genius. He is utterly fascinated with making you, dear reader, squirm. But it's not the good clean fun of Steven King, or even of Bret Easton Ellis: no blood, no gore, no dead people. Just us, and our society's confused messages about sex and sexuality. And it's icky.
Dave K requested the Guinness beef stew recipe. Quantities below are approximate. I often find myself with too much, so you may want to doublecheck against a book recipe.
- 1 to 2 lbs stew meat, cubed (tradtionally beef but chicken, lamb, pork, whatever, will do)
- 2 to 8 cans or bottles of Guinness
- some flour
- salt and pepper
- a green pepper, cut into chunks
- 1 to 2 cups cut-up carrots
- 1 to 2 cups cut-up celery
- 2 to 4 cups cut up potatoes
- a turnip, diced
- a large onion, sliced thin
- several cloves of garlic
- 1 lb mushrooms
There are some optional veggies you can add to the stew such as green beans, kidney beans, brussels sprouts, leek, scallions, broccoli, and even raisins. Have them ready if you wish.
Get a large, deep frying pan, a big soup-pot, and a broad-mouthed, wide dish. You may wish to get a big bowl, as well.
Dump the cut-up vegetables with the exception of the onions and the mushrooms (and the garlic, but that's not cut up, now is it) in the soup-pot to get them out of the way. A bowl is fine too. If you put them in the soup-pot you need to be OK with dumping your starter stock on top of the raw veggies, which may be a mite messy.
Now put a cup or so of the flour into the broad dish. Add salt and pepper and some spices - whatever sounds good is fine. Oregano, parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme, even a dab of ground mustard or allspice. The flour should be flecked with the spices and smell aromatic.
UPDATE: Now cut up or slice the mushrooms.
Now fire up the saucepan. If it's nonstick, you may not want to add oil; otherwise add something to keep the fry from sticking. I use olive oil, corn oil or butter works fine too. Once the pan's ready (flick water in to test; when the water sizzles and skates, you're good to go) quickly dredge the cubed meat in the flour and add it to the pan, a handful at a time. Stir and reduce the heat in the pan slightly.
Once the meat's started to cook, add the onions and the mushrooms. Salt and pepper. As the pan cooks, add the flour that did not travel with the meat into the pan; stir it so that it browns.
The mushrooms and the flour will absorb the oil in the pan, if you're using any; feel free to add some more as that happens. Add the garlic during this period of time as well. You can chop it up, or use a garlic press, or pound it and then chop it up, whatever you like.
Once the flour begins to turn into a paste (you should be aiming to use at least a cup of flour here - getting it browned and saturated with beef juice and oil provides a thickener for your stew), and the meat is pretty well cooked, open two cans of Guinness. Pour about half of one into the pan with the meat. It will foam up, so add it cautiously. Keep stirring and adding the beer until a whole can is in.
Drink the other can as you do this.
Now reduce the heat a little bit more. Allow the pan to come to a simmer.
If you've added the veggies to the soup-pot earlier, you may want to put another can of beer in the pot now and fire up the burner; otherwise transfer the simmering beef and beer into the soup pot and fire up the burner.
Add another can of beer now if you haven't already - the total should be two cans, one in the frying pan originally and one in the soup-pot. If you've held the veggies, allow the liquid in the soup pot to boil - it will foam, keep an eye on it - and add the vegetables.
Allow the liquid to return to a boil and then reduce the heat to a lowish point. That will change the boil to a simmer, which is what we want. Cover. Allow the stew to simmer for at least two hours. More time is fine. Be sure to stir the stew every so often so it won't cook onto the sides of the pot.
UPDATE: feel free to add either more beer or some water if a) two cans don't cover everything, a likelihood or b) the beer has boiled down too much. Don't be afraid to improvise!
(Although if you use a sock or a rock or chunk of pla-doh or something don't tell your spouse unless they come right out and ask very specific questions about what's gotten into you this time and just how much of that damn beer did you have anyway and is there any left?)
About 45 minutes before you serve, remove the stew from the heat. Keep it covered. 15 minutes before you serve, stir and check the temperature by tasting. It shouldn't scald; if it does, uncover. If it's too cool, replace on heat, and heat on low until you're happy with the temperature.
Serve with the beer and a baguette. Yummmmm.
Originally posted September 1, 2002. Excerpted from Cinescape online. Click pic for full review.
As legions of reviewers have noted, it's good to have the world in order. A hated Republican leads us once again, and Los Bros are back at work publishing under the same cover. This issue of LOVE AND ROCKETS is the fifth in the new incarnation of the beloved book. Thus far, from my perspective, this issue comes closest to recapturing the magnificent experience that L&R offered a decade or more ago. Key to that experience, and I believe beginning to rear its head here, was a kind of refractory competition between Beto and Jaime, where the work of each would borrow and adapt themes from the other, as if to say, "Oh yeah? Here's how a man does it, buddy! Stick that in your pipe and smoke it!" This spirit of exploration and competition clearly prodded the creators to the heights they achieved back then; let's hope it gooses them now as well.
In this issue, the common theme is origins, and specifically, high school and the adolescent transition into maturity. Jaime leads off with the definitive Penny Century origin tale; Beto ripostes (or, since he began the story previously, perhaps it's Jaime who ripostes) with "The High Soft Lisp," covering Fritzi's bumpy high-school days. As is often the case, Beto is reaching for a bigger topic here than Jaime appears to be. The central narrative concern in "Lisp" is Fritzi's promiscuity.
The Complete Crumb Comics Volume 16
Originally posted October 8, 2002. Excerpt from Cinescape.
Since 1987, Fantagraphics has been slogging through every line that R. Crumb has ever drawn; that's when THE COMPLETE CRUMB COMICS VOLUME ONE (The Early Years of Bitter Struggle) was first published. The current volume at hand brings us up to the material that Crumb was working on at the time when Volume One was published (more or less).
The mid-'80s were for Crumb, uh, more years of valiant struggle. He and his wife were co-editing WEIRDO, nearing the end of its long run as an artistically ambitious anthology title on Last Gasp. WEIRDO was a kind of West Coast answer to Speigelman's RAW, publishing underground and alternative veterans as well as breaking new cartoonists. Among those new cartoonists (to me anyway) was Crumb's wife and co-editor Aline Kominsky-Crumb, with whom Robert co-authored and drew several projects in the time-honored "jam" fashion.
(Click link at top for full review)
Originally posted November 3, 2002. Excerpted from Cinescape online. Click pic for full review.
In November, Fantagraphics releases HYSTERIA IN REMISSION: THE COMIX & DRAWINGS OF ROBERT WILLIAMS, an overdue compendium of the celebrated painter's graphic work. Since the mid-'90s, Williams has been justly celebrated for his remarkable accomplishments as a fine artist and champion of outsider art. His large-scale gallery paintings, depicting with surreal clarity such things as hot-rod wrecks, mystical visions, and gang fights, have been correctly identified as expressions of the poetry and strangeness of the culture of Southern California, and are much sought after by wealthy Angelino art collectors. He also publishes a magazine, JUXTAPOZ, devoted to outsider art, such as custom cars and folk art. All of this has meant a crucial element of William's long career has gone largely undocumented.
Robert Williams began his career designing advertisements for Ed "Big Daddy" Roth's crazy tee shirts in the pages of HOT ROD magazine, and went on, shortly thereafter, to become one of the godfathers of underground comix, his work first appearing in ZAP #4. From the beginning, Williams' tremendous gifts as a draftsman and psychedelic visualizer mark his work. Reading his stories requires more time than reading those of his contemporaries, simply because he packs so much visual information into each panel. In addition, his mastery of analytic anatomy leads in surprising directions, from the erotic power of the female forms he incorporates and distorts to the deconstruction and re-assembly of invented creatures such as his Coochy Cooty.
Originally posted September 12, 2002. Click pic for full review. Excerpted from Cinescape online.
Fuzz, the good-natured teddy bear, and Pluck, the ill-tempered, unfeathered banty rooster, continue their misadventures in what I assume to be the town of Splitsville. When we last left our protagonists, Fuzz had suffered a dog attack while attempting to deliver an order of fast food to a mansion, and Pluck had been invited to join a troupe of animal gladiators.
In the current issue, the story nudges forward by one scene each. Fuzz is brought home by the little girl of the mansion to join her collection of stuffed toys and dolls; they decide that Fuzz should have wings so that he can fly home. In order to do this they cruelly saw the wings off one of their number, a duck. Fuzz is then chucked out the window, where he is again mauled by the dog.
I interrupt my previously announced plans to recycle my own content to recycle content heard yesterday evening (November 12) on the MPR/Keillor 'Writer's Almanac.'
There I was, minding my own business, when all my hair stood on end. Damn, that gay old man could write.
8
The little one sleeps in its cradle,
I lift the gauze and look a long time, and silently brush away
flies with my hand.
The youngster and the red-faced girl turn aside up the bushy
hill,
I peeringly view them from the top.
The suicide sprawls on the bloody floor of the bedroom,
I witness the corpse with its dabbled hair, I note where the
pistol has fallen.
The blab of the pave, tires of carts, sluff of boot-soles, talk
of the promenaders,
The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb,
the clank of the shod horses on the granite floor,
The snow-sleighs, clinking, shouted jokes, pelts of snow-balls,
The hurrahs for popular favorites, the fury of rous'd mobs,
The flap of the curtain'd litter, a sick man inside borne to
the hospital,
The meeting of enemies, the sudden oath, the blows and fall,
The excited crowd, the police man with his star quickly
working his passage to the center of the crowd,
The impassive stones that receive and return so many echoes,
What groans of over-fed or half-starv'd who fall sunstruck or
in fits,
What exclamations of women taken suddenly who hurry
home and give birth to babes,
What living and buried speech is always vibrating here, what
howls restrain'd by decorum,
Arrests of criminals, slights, adulterous offers made,
acceptances, rejections with convex lips,
I mind them or the show and resonance of them-I come
and I depart.
The big doors of the country barn stand open and ready,
The dried grass of the harvest-time loads the slow-drawn
wagon,
The clear light plays on the brown gray and green intertinged,
The armfuls are pack'd to the sagging mow.
I am there, I help, I came stretch'd atop of the load,
And roll head over heels and tangle my hair full of wisps.
-- Walt Whitman, excerpted from Song of Myself
Cinescape is running my latest several comic reviews online again, and I'm behind in crosslinking here. So my next few posts will be linkies. I'll copy-and-paste the first couple grafs from each.
I have a huge pile of material I'm reviewing my way through at the moment as well, so this also gives me a chance to keep you guys happy and write, all at once.
Kissy kissy. Air kisses to you all.
The silicon thermal gel arrived today - so I'm closing the keyboard back up on an experimental basis after adding it to the CPU and heatsink.
Ken: what I just said is, "I let out the clutch, now I need to test drive it."
...and poker.
Disjointed, eh? I'll give you disjointed.
The storm news today reminded me, as always, of April 1974.
I made some beef stew today, with the goodness of Guiness, and mm-hmmm, do it smell good!
I've been seduced by the wily Goldstein into a hand of Blog Poker. Thank god the pale-dry-boy is dealing and not kicking my ass, as would otherwise surely happen.
He is employing my favr'ite poker variety, which he's not named but that I will from now on think of as New Jersey Hold 'Em.
I'm currently showing a not-terribly-exciting 3h/4d/As/ with one down. We're waitin' on the flop.
UPDATE: the Flop done flupped. But it ain't like I kin tell YEW whut I'm holdin'.
Hey tablemates! I want you all to notice me drinking heavily on the casino's tab over heah!
hey HEy HEYYYY! Ge'me oneovv 'em uh, whatchacall, um, um, Pernod and gins. Yeahhh, thass it. And MAKE IT A DOUBLE!!
hey, got a light?
Wacky Hoosiers is an angelfire site maintained by all-around madman and personal childhood drinking buddy John Barge.
JB assiduously combs the papers of Indiana looking for evidence that our down-home home-state former cohabitants are, well, wacky.
John has a great eye for the absurd, and I'm always happy to see him update the site.
This month, he's got an article on Hoosier fight hst Sammy Terry, the late nite B-Movie host of Channel 4's terribly bad horror flick fest for every year in my living memory; that punkin cannon story that was making the rounds, a MUFON conference, and a disturbing image on a cereal box, among other fine offerings.
Don't miss the scale-model Arby's.
We went to see Frida last night, and it's a lovely fillm, worthy of its' subject. Every person who set foot in an art class for the past twenty years has developed at least a small crush on the original Ms. Kalho; as one of that innumerable herd I was somewhat concerned that such a more conventioinally beautiful woman as Salma Hayek would play the decidedly non-conventionally beautiful Frida Kalho.
I needn't have worried, although the film Hollywoodizes much, including the physical appearance of the heroine, the Communism of her and her hubby, Diego Rivera, and I'm sure more. I'm basically unconcerned with that and gleefully recommend the movie to anyone; however if you hate it when Hollywood prettifies things, do me a favor (you're not doing yourself one) and stay home with your Kenneth Anger DVD.
However, I do have a shank of film dweebery to satisfy. It boils down to this: how much like the real Kahlo did they make Ms. Hayek look? In the context of the film, I accepted Ms. Hayek with no difficulty whatsover. Let's investigate!
From Nikolas Murray - Strip 19 at Eastman house. The second image is either the same as or nearly the same as the color image used as the cover of the November 2002 Smithsonian. I believe, but don't have documentary evidence to hand, that these images were from the session or sessions that produced the Kahlo cover of Vogue during her and Rivera's visit to New York.
The publicity for the film has included this poster, which is based on the Vogue cover as seen in the film.
Finally, a straight headshot of Ms. Hayek in full regalia.
Here is some linkage:
The official movie site (yes, one of those horrific flash-based monstrosities: it's much like drinking ground glass in a decoction of molasses).
(I really want to do a journalistic investigation into the suffering and pain caused by the studios' uniform embrace of this kind of site design. Isn't the idea of marketing to entice your audience?)
Non-flash-based site, a semi-pro fansite, looks like.
PTA ex-president guilty in teens' wayward party / Front Page -The Olympian: Did I say sometimes I'm proud to be from Bloomington?
This story, reflecting on the cultural values of Washington State's capitol, Olympia, home of more great bands than you can shake a stick at, may tell observant readers a thing ot two about why I love Washington State, too.
Now, why do I live in Seattle, again?
A Switch ad. With a monkey.
So there.
Wait! I'm an IEEDJIT!
Professor Griff's got one on offer here: Switch! Ho-OOH!
Apparently non-computroid persons have been having a hard time following my tale of woe.
Here's a brief translation, with a tiny background note.
When computers overheat, they break. The older the computer, the more likelihood heat will have damaged components. Additionally, the closer together the parts of the computer are packed (as in a laptop), the more heat becomes a problem.
My server, a rebuilt-from-junk parts Mac about 4 years old, displays the symptoms of heat death.
I have spent the last week relearning the essential computer-user's lesson, "Do it right the first time; cutting corners costs time."
Until I can replace the part that I think is heat-damaged, inexpensively, it appears, I have implemented the mother of all temporary solutions, to the amusement of many, possibly you.
Now, will someone go get their mom to read this back and check for comprehensibility?
So. It's the CPU. Definitely. I mean, definitely according to my Intuiton (TM).
Naturally, eBay's only been offering whiz-bang upgrade cards, which run about $100, and I completely missed a 233Mhz card (in Seattle, yet) yesterday. I mistook myself earlier when I noted that Bellerophon has a 300Mhz CPU - it's a 233.
I have been struggling to compile the system-level image manipulation tools that enable stuff like photo uploads, something that takes upwards of 12 hours of 100% CPU activity.
I finally have jury-rigged a contraption anyone's grandpappy would be proud of: I opened a dead outboard SCSI hard-drive, disconnected the drive itself, and pulled out the housing fan so I can position it independently to cool the laptop's heat sink. Then, I set up a system of shims made from cork and toothpicks to float the keyboard off the surface of the heatsink, allowing the fan to move the hot air out.
I'd post a picture, but, um...
Well, maybe I will anyway.
UPDATE: Interestingly, the other image tool I set up many moons ago, NetPBM, works fine. I think I saw where the 2.51 upgrade to Moveable Type supports NetPBM now; purrhaps I'll look into it more deeply.
Yeesh.
So, I thought was back.
Alas, some fiddly bits hung me up all day. The good news is, now i can complete the entire server rebuild process in a semi-efficient manner! Here's how i spent my sleep time this evening:
10:45p - 11:00p : swap internal and expansion bay drives on Bellerophon so that I can boot it in SCSI disk mode and se the drives on my desktop machine, a G4 (that CPU saves hours!).
11:00p-12 midnight: install OSX 10.2
12 midnight - 12:45a: Run Software Update
12:45a - 1:13a: copy some user data from old installs in Terminal
1:13a - 1:50a: Install Jaguar Dev tools and updates
1:50a - 2:08a: Install Marc Liyanage's PHP and MySQL packages
2:08a - 3:17a: Install miscellaneous perl stuff via CPAN
3:17a - 4:04a: poke at oversights until things appear to work. Write this entry. Realize I installed the wrong backup of the databases. Fix. Re-paste this entry in.
Ta-daa! Now I must start the fink install process and off to bed with me.
After I rise, I'll be swapping the drives back and hoping Bellerophon boots OK. Until then the G4 is masquerading as Bellerophon. After I file my first round of stories with Cinescape, I may need to down things again to fix any further reticent bits and bytes.
Boy, I hope I get this wrapped up today.
My shim entry for November 5 is a pointer to my ol' buddy Bill Weaver's Liar's Bunch website, which he just told me about and that I surmise is new.
I edited an unpublished novel of Bill's, Gunrunning to Mars, and the mountain of Vinegaroon County looks a lot like Mons Olympus. He and I also worked on a four-panel comic strip, Octogon, for years and years.
In fact, he sent me some new scripts a long time ago that I really must draw.
'Course, GRTM was set more in the Valles Marineris.
Anyhoo, Bill's stories make me chuckle.
I.
think.
I.
may.
be.
back.
*fffssssshhhhhhhfooooo*
(slumps back in chair)
Hardware diagnosis uncertain, for the nonce. No freezes for aboout 24 hours, but I had the primary sites redirected to the 9500, so who knows.
However, I have been frantically recompiling miscellaneous stuff over that period of time, and CPU Monitor has been reporting 100% activity for most of that time. It's also been down in the 20s-30s and my home reflects the chill.
On a lighter note, last night we were at Target and $8.00 character specific full-scale lightsabers were marked down by 75% in the halloween closeouts. I did not pick one up, but: TWO DOLLARS for a pretty neat toy is the kind of pricing I can get behind.
Slowly, he struggled through the snowbank.
Deductive logic reveals: the freezes seen on Bellerophon are hardware related. Mysterious freezes of all system activity, including video to the screen, under:
* an organically maintained install of OS X 10.1.x;
* a clean install of OSX 10.1.x;
* a clean install of OSX 10.2;
* an updated install of OSX 10.2.1;
* and also under CD-ROM boots of both 10.1 and 10.2.
Thus far, I have not observed the freezes under any OS 9 flavor, but admittedly, I've not really banged on it under the venerable OS.
A quick google (not comprehensive, mind you) reveals a few anecdotes of initial series Wallstreets giving up the ghost in similar fashion, under OS X. My Intuiton (TM) tells me it's the CPU card.
Lucky for me, eBay reveals Wallstreet 233mhz CPU cards going for an guesstimated average of $20-25 each. So I can warehouse the suckers.
For now, I've redirected back over to the 9500. Hopefully I can get things rolling again soon on Bellerophon. It's frustrating: the CPU heats up when performing cloning operations or heavy disk-writes - i.e., the things most required at installation time - and locks. Ah well. It's a larnin' thang, intended to be the equivalent of building a car out of spare parts, the proverbial chewing gum, and a dab of sealing wax. Perhaps tonight I'll dig up some alchemical incantation to see if I can transmute the overheated parts of the CPU into something with better heat-management capacities. Base into noble form.
Oh, and Jason's show was lovely. This year we were led about a mile through some woods and to a tree where he was wrapped into a cocoon and tied to the bole, in apparent hibernation, to emerge again come spring. Never have you seen 400 young people out in the woods at midnight remain so very quiet.
Once I swapped the internal drives on the 'book, I was able to mount the appropriate volume to my main box via SCSI dock mode.
After a couple further abortive installation attempts, was eventually able to install Jaguar to the appropriate volume, and the G4 tower was able to boot from the drive.
Naturally, the 'book, undocked, was not able to boot from the drive. This may be because I have to swap the drives back, or it could, possibly, be because Jaguar has introduced some machine-specific code for the first time in the OS X release cycle. This is unlikely, however: there are reports of a poorly-documented required firmware update for slot-loading iMacs, but the Wallstreet 'books are explicitly not affected by this problem.
Lordy, this ain't like the Macs that brought me here. It's painfully time consuming and trial-and-error - in fact, these are the issues that kept me away from Unix for so very, very long: I don't find this process of endless experimentation, predicated on a detailed knowledge of hardware (thankfully, I appear to have acquired the knowledge) life-affiriming or creative or a wise, thoughtful use of my time. It's rather a direct theft of time from my reationship with my wife, and this troubles me. Fortunately, my unhappiness about this has not yet begun to cloud my technical judgement, insofar as when I hit a dead end, I'm not experiencing either blinding headaches or rage.
After numerous fruitless attempts to install OSX back onto the wounded Powerbook, I have started attempting to install via SCSI dock mode; this worked over a year ago when the machine lacked a screen.
The installation problems are most painful, as due to the creaky speed of the processor and the 2x CD drive, it takes the machine about 4 hours to get to the point where it fails to complete the process.
Revised ETA for actual return to full-functioning status: 72 more hours from here, November 1.
