For the past few days, I ran a transcript of a half-hour conversation I had with Ellen Forney about her half of a show at Secluded Alley Works. This is a table of contents to make it easier to read in the categoy-view archive.

Ellen Forney:

Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five

It was fun chat, and I hope you enjoyed reading it. I'll update this page with a link to the Tablet story at some point as well.

M: Now, there are like two other layers to the visual presentation of images of women explicitly – um, intentionally, I suppose, is a better way to put it – as sexualized. One is the image or the object itself as an expression of sensuality, of desire, and of sexuality directly. Which is a little bit different than the education thing or even from the use of an illustrative object, you know what I'm saying? How does that relate to these things? Is that part of what you see as your goal set for these paintings?

[ Man , is that poorly put. What I meant was, "Ellen, are these intended as erotic stimulants?" and also at the same time, "Do these paintings carry any sexualized and stimulating expression of you, as the artist?"]

EF: I didn't quite follow you.

M: Man, how can I put this. Like theoretically I can imagine a painting that doesn't have any, like, visually clear illustrative subject matter and [yet] being obviously sexual in nature, because, maybe the color scheme or like the energy of the linework or...

EF: Georgia O'Keefe!

M: ... For example. That's a really good example. I mean, there's still an illustrative quality there, but yes, exactly. Is that something that you were thinking of as you were working on these? Were you thinking to sort of move beyond the illustrative purpose, the didactic purpose, to inject your sensual view of these women into the canvases – uh – 'Masonites' I guess.

EF: Uhhhh. [ doubtfully ] You mean through color?

M: Well, we talked about the energy of this painting,"right from the tube," for example... I'm just trying to draw you out. You can say "I have no idea what the hell you're talking about."

EF: I'm not quite sure. I think that I don't really have enough control over the medium to really direct that. I think that some of those effects have come through just because of the subject matter and how I interact with the models and who I am and how I work but I ... I definitely still ...I mean I didn't mean to start putting it on the paintings. I didn't like set out to that, for instance...

It's just that as my confidence was building I was able to interact with the painting in that way. So I guess that's the direction I was naturally going in, but I'm not setting out to that.

M: Maybe another place where I can talk about that is like in the ... directness and confidence, and like, I dunno, your really striking line quality, which is such an important part of your ink work. Just in the way that you apply the ink and use it to form the objects illustratively there's something in that I recognize, and go "Oh, that's Ellen Forney."

And there's a kind of a – there's a quality in the way that you apply the ink which is about you as an artist that expresses your sensuality and your sexuality – maybe if it's something that doesn't have sexual content, then maybe that's not there all the time. But, I mean, it's something that I associate with your work. I would tend to see that if it was a lawnmower, you know?

EF: Well – I wouldn't accept the sexuality and sensuality but there's definitely a sensuality to um, organic brushwork, there just is.

M: And so comparing these two – the brushwork of the smaller paintings that you did quickly for the show after you had done the paintings in a form that you had mastered...

EF: They were quicker than these [ large paintings ], anyway.

M: Uh. Of the two, which one do you think comes closer to accomplishing the overall goal of communicating something that's sexual and sensual? These smaller illustrative pieces or the larger painting?

EF: These – the paintings – have a lot more of the qualities, the imposing qualities, that we had talked about before. The size. The bright colors. How they stick out from the wall. How, maybe they're not lifesize, but they're large. This one [ K-O ], I think actually, because her pose is more compact, it might be about life size.

So these [ drawings ] are a lot more – they're easier to – well, I guess the answer would be the paintings then.

M: The paintings.

EF: Because part of what I talk about is the power of the gaze, and um, in most pinups, the power is in the gazer, the viewer. The subject, the model, is very coy or, "oops! I'm sexy" or "oops! My skirt flew up!" You know, with rare exceptions. There're some Bettie Page, maybe, um, pinups, that where she's definitely the one in control; but I don't mean it in a dominatrix kind of way.

M: Never mind the whip and the rope.

EF: Yeah! I mean, there's that but that's a different kind of power. I mean a more centered power I guess.

M: I think I know what you mean, I mean the reason we grew up knowing - or grew into our hipsterhood or whatever – knowing about the Page stuff is there's a distinct quality that adheres to her as a model that's different from other photographs that were done at the same time, whether the more commercially available ones or – actually, I don't really know! I assume there's other fetish photography from the time, I just haven't ever seen any to really compare it!

But there's sort of this sense in her photographs that people respond to.

EF: Sure, and think of like, the Betty Grable, you know or, the Marylin Monroe...

[Forney mimics the poses of well-known images of each woman as she speaks]

M: You're doing the poses again! (chuckles)

EF: Yeah, well!

M: But that's fine!

EF: So what I'm playing with is having the model not be that coy object, but actually taking the responsibility herself, being very self-possessed and gazing out at the viewer, and in that way being the one in charge. So it kind of fluctuates, you know, like I say in the artist's statement, like, yeah, you're looking at this object, and that way you're the one in control, but...

You know somebody came in and looked at my studio, at the paintings I was working on, and he said that he liked this one of Ariel the best because the other ones scared him. Because the other ones he found intimidating.

M: There is a quality in them, like in this one, almost like that 'oops!' quality, except not really... And in these ones, they're all, like, extremely direct. And this is interesting, actually.

All three of these women have a closed-mouth smile, and these two women, the smile is, you know, cockeyed.

EF: Well, I do a lot of crooked smiles. Crooked smiles and uh, one eyebrow up. It's um...

M: There's the eyebrow over there...

EF: It's cocky. I guess that's an aspect I'm going for – is kind of cocky.

M: Sure.

EF: Which – I mean... I guess I hadn't applied that word to it before but that really what I'm going for.

M: [slightly ironic tone] Maybe there's a gender-neutral word that we could use.

EF: Ha!

M: I mean it doesn't come to mind immediately, but...

EF: No, I think that that's an aspect that I'm pushing in here. Feminine sexuality and cockiness aren't mutually exclusive.

M: There's a quote if I ever heard one.

EF: [ laughs ]

M: [laughs] Lemme check th' tape... Yeah, I got it. That's great.

I think I need to look at the art on the other side too, and look at it and think about it. Obviously I don't have Kris here to talk about it with but um...

EF: Unfortunately. Well, she has an artist's statement over here, and...

[The rest of the conversation is about deadlines and the like.]

This is part four of five posts that make up the transcript of my conversation with Ellen Forney about her paintings seen at Secluded Alley Works though much of November, 2003. I'm breaking it up to make it easier to read.

M: It's interesting that you indicated Mary just now when you were saying that you were really tentative. And of course the very strong use of shaping, linear forms doesn't really come across as tentative. In terms of talking about your avoiding using paint in a modeled, kinda painterly kinda way, I understand what you mean. But it's still – well, this has a lot of force behind it. I have to go back and look at that piece in Dirty Stories now, too, to think about that.

How do these relate to that? I mean, these aren't education pieces, they're not like – I mean, they're not porn, you know?

EF: Well, they're kind of education pieces in a way. I mean they're so many different things that come into play. You know, sometimes I think back to when I just graduated from college, and I was hanging around with a bunch of friends of mine, and one of them said, "man, if we could just take all of the energy that we put into criticizing ourselves and our bodies and put it into like a creative use... Like what we could make!"

I think, as an American woman, I have had the same experience as a lot of other American women, and maybe women all over the world, whatever, of having a really hard time with body image. And so part of what I'm doing here is showing that there are a lot of different kinds of beauty. So it's really important to me – a lot of people have read the title as um, Sexy Paintings of Big Women , and think that I'm like, doing fat chicks.And I'm not. I mean, that's part of the umbrella that I'm working on. But I'm about all different body types. So that's one aspect of it.

So in that way, I feel that role models are really important. They were really important to me. I remember feeing like my own body was too, was too big, too chunky.

And I remember watching a friend of mine, who is Italian, who by American standards would be fat, and she was going out for the evening in a very tight outfit that she looked fabulous in! And I remember just realizing that she knew that she was sexy, she acted and moved as if she was sexy, that's where so much of sexy comes from, is that confidence, is that knowledge, is that self-possession.

And so that was a big lesson to me. That I didn't have to come from it didn't come from outside, it came from believing – and how do you get the belief in yourself? And one of those ways is to have good role models! And so that's why I was saying, well, in a way they're kind of educational. Like I want somebody who's built like Tamara, Like Ariel, like K----. Who - they don't have models' bodies. But, yeah, they're really sexy and they're really right out there, to look at and say, you know, "Wow!"

Maybe – "She's sexy – maybe I'm sexy!"

(end part four)

This is part three of five posts that make up the transcript of my conversation with Ellen Forney about her paintings seen at Secluded Alley Works though much of November, 2003. I'm breaking it up to make it easier to read.

M: Now, just now as you were talking about the process of setting up the poses, you first demonstrated one pose that you decided you didn't wanna use for one of the paintings and now you echoed her - Ariel 's pose. Now, talking with cartoonists about their process, a lot of times, cartoonists work by themselves, and so there's almost a puppetry aspect to cartooning where a lot of times cartoonists will sort of take on the pose that they are drawing to sort of think about the anatomy. Was that something that you did as you were working on these paintings?

EF: Take on the pose?

M: Well, you just echoed the pose here –

EF: Yeah. Well, actually, one of the things that's been important for me in this series is to really work from these model's bodies., because I use my own self as a model a lot. A lot! All the time, because I am my own most accessible model. I use my own face for facial expressions – I have a hard time drawing out of my head so I wind up using myself a lot. So that limits my repertoire. It limits my knowledge of how the body is put together.

So, I really try not to. That's one of the reasons I hold on to the photographs. I want to go back to that model, not to myself.

M: Looking back at the project as far as it's gotten, are you going to keep working in painting as a primary medium? Is it a good direction for you? Was this a successful experiment for you?

EF: Primary medium? I mean, I'm going to keep on with this series. Actually, I already have a few lined up. Some sketches done that's ready to be transferred – and I have a few more models lined up for the next show. I intend to keep going on this series until I get tired of it.

M: You gonna keep the same format? They're all roughly the same size and shape, right?

EF: Yeah, yeah. Well, I've really been happy with this size, this structure. With each one I feel like I've learned a lot and I've changed a lot. Like this is the last one that I did and look at the modeling, and look at the hair – I mean, I've actually done it in a really graphic way over there but ...

M: I was noticing the hair, actually – the comparison between these two versions of it. I'm pointing at Tamara with Pink Glitter [the drawing] and Tamara the painting. And Tamara the painting has al the predominant colors that are used within the painting itself – the blue of her outfit, and the red and the pink and stuff as well as the browns and blondes of her hair. But in the ink drawing, it's very graphic with light shining down on the top of the hair and black under the flip of it. But, yeah I noticed that happening.

And then, you used modeling here in – I have to say the name so I know what the hell I'm talking about later - K-O – she's wearing a black 'Slayer' tee shirt that looks like it's faded from a lot of wear.

EF: Exactly. And that was what made me do that shading! Again, it was like, " Fuck ! Now I have to learn how to paint!" It was like, you know, I did this whole, this whole shirt flat but it was supposed to be – supposed to look like it was – it had been a black shirt and had been washed so many times that it was really thin.

And so it had to drape in a certain way, it had to be thin, and so it's like, "Goddammit, you know, I have to model." It's something that I that I – I'm really accustomed to showing volume through line.

M: Right. You're still doing this here [in the painting], but I see that you have – it looks to me like – like you did maybe an underpainting? And then you did, let's see... I guess you did the flesh and then you did the final line on top of that. That's what it looks like. Is that correct?

EF: Well, from, um, from my third painting – for my third, fourth and fifth painting – I do underpainting, I've done underpainting. For this one [ Ariel ] I did the entire canvas pink. You can see little bits of pink paint peeking out, you know, pink in different places.

M: Is any of that pink that you initially sort of brought into the painting as a part of the final tone? It doesn't really look like it to me.

EF: Enhh - I dunno. Probably the same pink as the lips and the nipples maybe? You can see this one spot that I forgot to fill in.

M: Oh I see, right here [a spot in the inner surface of the open-toed sandal's sole, between toes].

EF: This one, I filled in [ Tamara ]– it was purple, and you can still see some of the purple peeking through...

And on K----'s [ K-O ] I painted it all blue. K-O. It was all blue, and you can see a little bit of blue peeking through in different places. So, the whole thing was blue. Rather than painting it red and then bringing the blue in, it was all blue and then I just worked the paint, the brightness in, rather than the other way around.

And I put the paint in thicker than I have anywhere else. It's practically right out of the tube [indicating a bright red negative space on K-O].

M: [chuckles] There's something kind of, um, sexual about that actually.

EF: Absolutely! It's very sensual! And again, it's really powerful! It's - it's bold! And I'm feeling a lot more confident in my painting, and I think that it shows. But I was really tentative to start. I mean, I have a long way to go, of course, I've just started.

But the kind of a learning curve in the beginning is really exhilarating.

(end part three)

This is part two of five posts that make up the transcript of my conversation with Ellen Forney about her paintings seen at Secluded Alley Works though much of November, 2003. I'm breaking it up to make it easier to read.

MW: Now, this painting of Mary - the woman on the couch – is familiar to me. Has that been used locally previously?

EF: Well, it was on the postcard.

M: Okay [dubiously]. That may have where I've seen it.

EF: It was the first one that I did – Let's see - I did it in 2002, and it's shown in the Girly Fun show? And a show at Vital 5.

M: Maybe that's where I've seen it, actually. But it wasn't used like for publication or illustration or anything? No?

EF: Well, actually, that's not true. I've done several different versions of this. I did an ink drawing that showed up in um... do you know Dirty Stories ?

M: Yeah, absolutely! That's where it was familiar to me from. I reviewed it. That's a great – it's a really interesting anthology.

EF: It's called Mary - it's a four page story.

M: Yes, that's where I knew it from. Great! Oh! I've got context now, that's excellent! The other thing – I think I remember thinking this when I saw it in the book – you know, not – I didn't really go anywhere with it – is that as a painting, this is Manet's Olympia , right? I mean, it's similar, it's not the same thing; but she's got her legs crossed, you're presenting her, you know, frontally, you know, gazing out at the viewer, which is a major part of theme you've talked about in what you're doing...

The flatness of color - one of the things you talked about on that particular one is one of the things we learn about in art school with regard to that particular painting, right? Is that something that was consciously in your mind when you were thinking about this painting?

EF: No. I mean, it's a classic pose. So, I suppose, but I didn't go to art school and I've never taken art history, so I don't even know the painting that you're talking about.

M: I bet you do, actually. I'll follow up with you about it.

EF: I mean I don't know what it is offhand.

M: Well, uh – what is it, someone once said "talking about painting is like dancing about architecture," right?

EF: Right.

M: But uh it's a painting that Manet showed in the 1880's in Paris. And uh, he's associated with this particular kind of French painting that at the time was shocking for it's flat use of cooler – to us, it's very modeled and everything, but in the painting is a picture of a very beautiful woman, not a young person, but you know, thirty or so, and she's wearing mules, and she's buck naked, and she's hot.

[It was 1860's, actually.]

And she's looking kind of like this, regally, and in control of the situation and everything, out at the viewer. And uh behind her there is a black woman who's holding a plate of fruit – I believe it's oranges but I could be wrong – and the subtext to it... Oh! and he titles it Olympia , you know, the Olympian ideal, the remote, unapproachable, kind of erotic untouchable. Except that the woman he painted is this incredibly famous prostitute! Like, the most expensive woman of the trade of the time and day. So there was this huge scandal and it made him into a famous painter. And since then that particular painting and the pose and stuff has sort of like echoed through both American and French culture.

[I was quite wrong about the oranges, and may have been thinking of another painting – I was also certainly thinking about the oranges that do appear in Ariel ]

EF: Well, I suppose that that may be that this is one of it's – if that's the root, then this is one of the branches.

M: But it's not something that you specifically – that's fine. And it's not, you know, that important where it comes from.

EF: Well, no, I mean, I would hardly claim to be doing - I mean I'm doing pinups, I'm spinning something that – you know I have a book of pinups, and I look through that for inspiration on how artists use color... I mean, I'm not creating something entirely completely new, I know that.

M: Well, what's 'new' exactly, I mean...

EF: But no I wasn't looking directly at that.

M: Now, but, all the women in the images are real individuals.

EF: Yes.

M: You began each of them with at least a series of sessions where you were sketching them from life.

EF: Right.

M: Did you use photo reference when you were doing that?

EF: Um, when we were choosing the poses, just as a way to like – well, I'll step back a second for choosing the pose, which I've gone into a little bit in my artist's statement.

One of the things that I wanted to do is that I wanted the model to feel sexy. What I was trying to have come across - I mean, I chose people who were pretty confident in their sexuality, and I wanted that to show. I didn't want to impose my own idea of what was sexy on them – I wanted them to choose and then I would meet them in the middle. Not that I would think that any thing they did that they thought was sexy wouldn't be – you know I'm trying to think of some –

One of my models, you know, chose this real kind of standoffish pose? And I said, "No, that's not what I'm going for, let's try something else." So it's not that they completely choose, I definitely direct them. But it's them deciding how it is, where they want to go.

So we start out with that and we take a series of photos, like, let's say, with Ariel. We tried, like, just moving her a little different, here and here and let's give that a little more negative space just for composition...

I use pictures to figure out what the pose is, then I do the whole sketch from life. And maybe I'll hold onto the pictures just for later, when I'm actually painting it, and it's like, ah, what was that detail? Or how does her hair shine? You know, things that don't necessarily come through in the sketch... But I really don't like working from photographs. I much prefer working from life, and that's been one of the things that's been really, really great about this series is having the chance to work from life, from other people's bodies, not just mine in the mirror.

(end part two)

Here's part one of my conversation with Ellen Forney about her current show at Secluded Alley Works. The show runs through the end of November, and is shared with another artist that I did not get a chance to talk to, Kristine Evans aka Kinoko. This conversation formed the basis of an article in Tablet 81, not posted at the time that I prepped this for the blog.

M: We're with Ellen Forney at Secluded Alley works about the pictures she has hung up. The name of the show is Titties and Boo-Boos . I'll let Ellen tell us which – uh –

EF: I'm Titties. I'm the titty half. My series is called Big Paintings of Sexy Women .

M: And they are.

EF: And they are. And so they're done on masonite, three feet by four feet – hence 'big' – and doing this – making this kind of structure is new to me. Like I said, this is really carpentry for me. But that they stand out from the wall – that they're so big, they stand out from the wall, they're really sturdy, it all comes together in this message that I'm trying to send, that they're sexy, but in a very positive, assertive, confident kind of way.

M: Which reflects themes that have been going on in your work for the while time I've been aware of it anyway.

EF: Yes, exactly. It definitely is.

M: How is working with paint for a gallery presentation different than working with ink for reproduction?

EF: Working for – it's been really different for me to work not for reproduction, for one. Even these pieces the glitter ones where there's ink that I'm much more familiar with - the process is much more intense because I'm used to being able to touch up the linework with white-out – I use white acrylic. And I didn't want to do that for these. Cause then it's an illustration, then it's for reproduction.

M: Ellen's talking about the small pen-and-ink drawings [brush actually] on the wall with glitter applied to them right now.

EF: So even that was a little different.

So how is it working with color?

The difference is huge. For me it was really like learning another language. You know, I know how to speak a language, and so I know the basics of language, but there were so many differences, the scale was so different. Even when I color – for my comics I color in photoshop and I use really flat colors, so it's sort of like a silkscreen – that's my rule of thumb in my comics actually, if it's an effect than can exist in a silkscreen, I'll use it and if it can't that's an effect I will not use. Which is actually how I originally though I was gonna start out this series.

Like, Mary – this one on the wall – is the first one that I did and all of the line work or most of the line work is really sharp and the colors are really flat and it came out really flat – like it came out really lifeless to me.

M: This is the one with the woman on the white couch with a black background, she has black and white streaked hair.

EF: And after hating it – she used to be on pillows, and it was all really flat colored, I took gesso, and just gessoed up the whole background and I just realized that that's what I needed to do, is mush it up. I went over a lot of the linework and I just loosened it up. I thought I was gonna have to work a lot more loosely than I was accustomed to working – really small and really tight – and I was really upset.

I mean I really thought it was going to be a series of large paintings as if they were silkscreens but large. And it seems the most important lessons in my career trajectory have been through difficulty, like working through something I see as a problem. Like, 'Fuck! Now I have to learn to use paint!'

M: 'Dammit!'

EF: Like, this is the second one that I did. I started playing with

M: This one's called Janet . It's the woman in platform shoes wearing an orange jumpsuit.

EF: Orange jumpsuit with a safety-yellow background.

M: And a giant wrench.

EF:A giant wrench. So I was playing with underpainting on this. That's where you paint a color underneath. I guess there was blue – that's this blue – and then I painted orange on top of it.

M: It's kind of a steel blue with a darker navy outline around the form between the orange and the yellow background.

EF: And then I thought that I was gonna do the whole background flat, like this, like that background is really flat on Mary. And it just seemed like it needed to be pushed back to the corners, and so I did.

M: And then you've got that going on in all the other ones – this glow to the center of it.

EF: That was the first halo that I did. And then I really liked it, so I kept up with that for these.

(end part one)

I succeeded in replacing the power-in jack on Viv's iBoook, and swapping the drive for a 10gb model that's also, blessedly, quite unlike a powerdrill in audio properties.

Alas, though, for where'd these three extra screws come from?

chop chords to 'We Like tha moon'

Lyrics:

We like the moon
Coz it is close to us
We like the moon
But not as much as a spoon
Cos that’s more use for eating soup
And a fork isn’t very useful for that
Unless it has got many vegetables
And then you might be better off with a chopstick

Unlike the moon
It is up in the sky
It’s up there very high
But not as high as maybe
Dirigibles or zeppelins or light bulbs
And maybe clouds
And puffins also I think maybe they go quite high too
Maybe not as high as the moon
Coz the moon is very high

We like the moon
The moon is very useful everyone
Everybody like the moon
Because it light up the sky at night
And it lovely
And it makes the tide go
And we like it

But not as much as cheese
We really like cheese we like zeppelins
We really like them and we like kelp and we like moose
and we like deer and we like marmots
and we like all the fluffy animals
We really like the moon

(all 'cause of this blort post)

The box came in, I plugged it in, attached the drives, and booted up. After the pain and struggle of the last month, it's a relief to have a Mac-like experience again. It got here in the nick of time too - traffic is going crazy again, who knows why. Google seems to present me as the best resource for a certain sort of turkey stuffing that employs a food that has a name similar in meaning to 'inverse-black stronghold meatpatty.'

Google: 'white castle stuffing'

I'd hoped to link to the online version of the Ellen Forney story at Tablet today, but it's still not up, which makes me think that probably it's an error, and may never show up. So, you'll just have to live with that. The transcript starts running tomorrow, with pictures!

I mentioned offhand to a friend that it would be neat to see a line of republications of the serious comic criticism books that have appeared in the US over that past fifty years or so, and he asked me what I meant. So I went and poked around and found that to my knowledge, historical surveys aside, I meant more or less five books:

Krazy Kat, the art and life of George Herriman, by Patrick McDonnell

Winsor McCay, by John Canemaker

Comics and Sequential Art, by Eisner

Comics as Culture, by Thomas Inge

The Comic Stripped American, by Arthur Asa Berger

There are some other books that didn't get on to the list - I was excluding Fantagraphics' comprehensive republications of giants such as Kelly, Herriman, McCay, and Schulz as well as the wonderful Smithsonian surveys of golden-age books and dailies assembled by Bill Blackbeard in the, uh, seventies, I think.

I also did not suggest the McCloud books (as they remain in print and are likely to for the foreseeable future), and I did not suggest books dealing with non-US or European traditions of the form, due to personal ignorance.

I'm also aware of scattered instances of serious critical evaluations of comics outside of the CJ over the past few decades; I assume there has been serious growth in academic writing about comics as well over the same period of time. Anyone have some suggestions to make this a better list?

Feel free to suggest histories and surveys; I left them off because there are so many, including some that are both well-researched and include sensitive critical analysis.

I won't be able to follow up on the blog traffic prediction ideas for a while, so I'm linkdumping a bunch of stuff on blog traffic here as research material.

Traffic Patterns: weekday traffic versus weekend traffic. Blogs look like every other site family I've ever seen, and reflect the fact that there are more people using the internet during weekdays than on weekends.

The Tipping Blog: Microcontent News on meme-spread via blogs, with reference to The Tipping Point.

Blog Traffic: how to draw it.

Traffic Doesn't Matter: Seth Godin, saying outrageous stuff. Personally, I say treat everything the man writes as suspect. But he's always thought provoking. Note: He is a TypePad user: expect some bogus marketing book on blogs from him by spring, if not earlier. This entirely unfair, but I worked for man once who tried to live, eat breathe and think ideas from Godin's oeuvre: it sucked.

The majority of the sites I found were entirely focused on the idea that increasing your traffic is a Good Thing. None appeared to treat it as a problem to be solved, at first glance.

A corollary to this is that for ten years now it's been apparent that the internet itself, both in terms of data and users, has been in a state of rapid growth. In a way, all you really had to do to predict growth was to develop and present an organic website, which is what many of the 'how-to' guides recommend. Obviously, it's time to move beyond that set of advice.

OK. Testing accomplished.

I've re-installed MT-Blacklist, with some trepidation, as the initial install is what I think crashed the late, lamented bellerophon - grepping a series of long entries appears to have overheated the CPU.

The closest readings I can get from the project's site are that the post-processing filter features are offline now (wise thought) and therefore I should not see the sorts of problems I'd encountered previously. MMM.... we'll see.

Linking to Michael yesterday set off a bell or two. He noted, back when the referral storm hit, two things. First, that he was glad he's gone to a hosted service (he uses Typepad), for which, hoorah; and that he was rightly concerned about bandwidth costs. People gave immediately, however, and he was well able to bear the cost.

The fellow I linked to yesterday via Manuel, Tom, noted that his site's unexpected traffic growth had led to worries about bandwidth costs, costs that he's defraying via a gift from his grandma!

When a blogger's work becomes successful enough to, for a moment, graze the underbelly of commercial publishing, it threatens the very low-cost predicate of the publication itself.

Setting aside for the moment the absurdity of the situation, which is clear, it seems to me that over the past few years we've seen this exact phenomenon occur over and over again. I'm guessing, now that media people have integrated the blogosphere into their information gathering practices, we'll see it with greater frequency and to more devastating effect over time.

Therefore, I think that two things need to happen. First, I think there is a proactive business opportunity for the right business to defray these transient bandwidth costs, probably in the form of short term ads on the sites that are experiencing the bolus. The obvious home for the service is in Nick Denton's portfolio or, maybe more sensibly, as a default feature for Typepad, Movable Type, and for premium-style accounts at Blogger, since the free accounts already have banners.

I won't go further down that branch at the moment, but I will note that it might even be cooler yet if this feature enabled Google keyword ads. Maybe it should be an independent service, or a program that the keyword service provides for bloggers, who are currently more or less specifically discouraged from using it.

Back to my original thought.

Can we assemble a large enough sample set to generalize about traffic spikes and retention for bloggers from the various events over the past two years? I'm guessing we'd need a sample set of twenty-four events, from things like Michael's twenty-four hours to Mahir's moment in the sun (which is probably too long ago to get data on) to the effects of things such as being linked from instapundit or having your site or name mentioned in a media outlet such as the NYT.

The objective would be to develop predictive data, very generalized, allowing folks in the future that experience such an event to look at some pretty simple tables and decide what to do. I'm guessing we could establish percentile growth parameters for various kinds of events which would allow site-maintainers to reasonably project the shape and duration on the increased traffic.

Is this possible? What's the best way to gather data? Should it be a data-gathering website? Or should that simply be a component?

During the dot-com boom, I saw studies on topics like this from all kinds of sources, but they were all terribly flawed, usually by the desire to predict huge market growth to justify absurd pricing to the end user or to attract VC dough or to prop up earnings and so forth if it was post-IPO. Of course, at the same time, many of these studies also were using infinitesimal user and traffic bases to develop their growth and usage projections - sometimes smaller than the traffic bases we see for blogs in general - which suggests another set of studies. Hm.

My impression is that there's a kind of 80-20-10 on daily traffic to blogs: 80 percent or more get fewer than 100 site visitors daily; about 20 percent get between 100 and n site visitors daily, and 10 percent or less get n-plus site visitors daily. I also suspect the curve that one could plot against this simple distribution is logarithmic, based on what I know about traffic fall-off in click-throughs.

Posted by mike whybark at 07:45 AM

eclecticism - Just when things were starting to settle down: Wudi (or should I say Michael?) notes I called his attention to his now-infamous predicament (and now resolved, I think, via a new gig) being immortalized in yet another Blogger funny tech-info knowledge-base note.

[unsanity] ShapeShifter. Finally: theming for OS X. Wonder if they're in for a late night visit from His Steveness; weren't there some smackdowns laid upon folks doing this back in the beta days?

He Said, "Why Not?": Tom goes to RISD. He makes amusing things for the web. He is from hereabouts, like.

Manny noted it at the revivified bufoonery where he quite rightly highlighted the hi-larious Tarping and Boxes, among other selections. Is there a geezer way to do this stuff? Tarping looks fun but even if Flanagan and I ever meet I'm doubtful we'd be able to engage with sufficient abandon.

I also specifically commend the site to the attention of one Bart Everson, of the great republic of New Orleans, should he be a semi-regular site-visitor. Ah, well, an egoogle will prolly bring it up in time.

Shit, I have to start shooting! Damn!

I cannot beleive I still haven't written about seeing the aurora in 1988. Maciej's long piece on his stopover in Iceland calls it to mind. I really want to write about it seriously but I have a specific method in mind to pursue. I want to use voicerec for the first draft without correcting until I'm done with the draft.

Unfortunately, I have been forced to implement my main desktop box as the server for the moment, which means I don't have convenient access to my installed and trained copy of ViaVoice.

I did use ViaVoice to begin some of the transcriptions - listen to tape, say what you hear, correct, repeat - but ViaVoice, while ostensibly designed to encourage non-dictation style speech, really does better with slow, deliberate, clearly pronounced words rather than rapid, conversation-speed speaking.

So I've been transcribing by hand, which is not so good for the wrists and forearms.

So far, normal conversation clocks in at about 10,000 an hour. Ten thousand words! The Fagles translation of The Illiad looks to have about 199,000 words - twenty hours of speech. A highly productive writer will produce about 10,000 words a day - which means roughly eight times the amount of work goes into writing over speaking, I think.

To date, I'm able to transcribe about 5,000 words per day - but of course, my day, here at home is both more focused and shorter than any work environment I've ever had. It's shorter because I'm both lazy and a night person, which makes it difficult for me to rise in the morning, and when I do, it's rare I focus on anything until noonish. It's more focused, because of course the twenty-first century American workplace is fraught with productivity boosters such as meetings, telephone calls, voicemail, and coworkers. I'm guessing it's a wash, and that would be my output in a work environment was well.

One of the striking things about speech, observed in transcription is the way we insert mouth music into our sentences, drop sentences and clauses uncompleted, and create meaning in casual speech by piling up approximations until we see that our conversation partner has constructed their own understanding from our troweling of parts and participles, hurried, organic, held together with 'uh' and 'um' and 'you know' and 'like' and 'and' and 'I mean.'

Believing myself not to be a fiction writer, I have never even wondered if I could write dialog. Watching the words collide and slip into one another and stick or slide or stop is an education, currently fascinating me.

What concept, actually, 'writing dialog.' I believe I'll paint some looking, or perhaps sculpt some motion.

This interest is not the impetus for using the voice recognition as an experimental composition tool, though - it's more like writing your essay on a Newton and deciding beforehand to not correct the interpretations. Of course ViaVoice is waaaay better at it than the Newton. So it's more a way to force different word choices into the prose.

I've also experimented with both Word's built-in summarization tools, which will select key sentences with the intention of preparing an executive summary, as in the initial sections of a business plan or even in certain kinds of technical writing. As such, it's fairly graceless but can be useful for cutting to a certain length. As far as cutting from 600 words to 250, mmm, not so much.

There are some online summarization tools as well; so far I haven't found any that work quite as well as Word's. Heh. So, uh, thanks, Redmond! can I get you to add a real, fullblown grep to search if you ever see fit to make a new Word for OS X? If not, well, no harm done.

this thing on?

testing timed posting

shoulda broken up Roberta's piece over a couple-three days!

I interviewed comics vet Roberta Gregory via email for Ink and Pixels at the end of October. The column that resulted is up at Tablet currently. This is the transcript of our correspondance. I edited it to add links, expand some abbreviations, and remove an intro I included with the questions so that Roberta would have some background on Ink and Pixels.

I think, but am not certain, that I was exposed to Roberta's first comics project, Dynamite Damsels, when I was pretty young. At any rate, I've enjoyed her work for years, and recall seeing the initial issues of Bitchy Bitch with pleasure and fondness, like seeing an old friend returning. I've never really been able to determine if I actually had seen the work previously, however.

(The first six questions are the original questions I started asking when I began this project. I'm keeping them because I like the idea of getting a range of creators' responses to the same questions.)

M: Who is your favorite visual artist?

RG: My favorite?? I have a lot of favorites. I can enjoy visual artists for many different reasons… Historically, I like William Blake, Goya, and so forth, and contemporarily, heck, there are a lot out there! Comics? I think Donna Barr and Carla Speed McNeil are underrated. Jim Woodring's art is just amazing. Jason Lutes always makes the most elaborate scenes look so easily drawn…

M: What's the sexiest comic you've ever read?

RG: Nothing really comes to mind as outstanding. I think that is why I put sexual themes so much in my own work.

M: What's the most moving comic you've ever read?

RG: Hm, gotta think about that one….. I do know there was an issue of Donna Barr's Stinz comic where the Major had to order the whole trainload of cavalry horses shot because they had become diseased, but he personally shoots his own horse, and just before he does, the blindfolded horse nuzzles his cheek for reassurance, which is just what a nervous horse would do to someone it completely trusts. It is only one panel without any dialogue, as I recall, but speaks volumes. Still brings tears to my eyes.

There are lots of examples of that in comics, the subtlety is sometimes missed.

M: What do you think about web comics?

RG: I think it's a good idea. It makes comics more accessible to people, (rather than sending away for something or trying to track it down in a comics shop back-issue bin, ya just type in some URL…) though I like Donna Barr's approach… she uses the format as a precursor to the work eventually being printed in a book. The Girlamatic people want me to do one for them, and I am trying to fit in the time. But I see it as something that will end up being in print.

M: What are your goals as a comics creator?

RG: Well, just to be able to do comics and other creative projects and get them into print or somehow else accessible to people who would get something out of them and not end up impoverishing myself in the process…. I would like to think I have not been making some big mistake with my career that I will live to regret. Not doing something that pays better.

M: What do you listen to while you are working on comics?

RG: Nothing, if I am in the writing process. In the drawing process, I listen to lots of NPR and just a big variety of music, from Classical to all the "contemporary" stuff I have accumulated over the years, since I started drawing in the early 70s. Nothing too harsh, usually.

M: In Artistic Licentiousness #2 you note that you'd begun cartooning 18 years prior. That was in 1994. So you've now been cartooning for 27 years?

RG: Thank goodness for this little built-in Calculator on my iMac. The math says 1976, so that would be Dynamite Damsels, though I have had comics published a few years before that, too.

M: What was your very first publication? Is that from 27 years ago?

RG: My very first solo publication is Dynamite Damsels, mentioned above. I have had things in underground comix from 1974, and even more obscurely before that.

M: Who influenced and encouraged you early on?

RG: It was great to have a father who worked in comics, since they were always around the house, and I was able to make the connection that human beings (well, MEN, to be precise) were responsible for these things ending up on the spinner racks at the corner store, they didn't just drop from the sky. Later, I had far more encouragement from Joyce Farmer and Lyn Chevli who had their own women's underground comix press, Nanny Goat Productions, in the early 1970s. They were encouraging to get my work out into print!

M: Why did you start cartooning?

RG: I dunno why. I just started drawing as a small child (like all small children do) and when I started learning to write, the cats and dogs and horses and such that I drew ended up having word balloons over their heads and they were talking to each other and so forth.

M: When and why did you move to Seattle, and where from?

RG: Moved from Seattle from Southern California in early 1989. When Fantagraphics moved here. I had just gotten a job with them in California doing darkroom and pre-computer-era production. I had already made up my mind to move here a bit before that since I had come up to visit in 1988, and Seattle seemed to be a place where a low-income person could have a much better quality of life than in L.A. (Insert derisive laugh!)

M: In your most recent Bitchy Bitch you write about moving. In Artistic Licentiousness Kevin and Denise live in a subdivided house in a neighborhood that looks suspiciously like Greenlake.

Could that be the neighborhood you just moved away from?

RG: Well, no, I lived in Fremont. Close, I guess. Actually, a bit of trivia, in Naughty Bits #6, the hippie party house where little Midge loses her innocence IS based on a ramshackle Greenlake house, just down the hill from the old Honey Bear. Someone even pointed out to me that they recognized the neighborhood.

M: At Bumbershoot you told me that you were concentrating on writing more than cartooning these days. Can you elaborate? What are you writing?

RG: Well, for the last several years, I have been writing a text version of that Mother Mountain storyline that I collected as a back story in the second volume of Winging It. The story quickly expanded, so now I am working on the third of a trilogy with this storyline. It is a bit of an irony, since I probably like drawing those little winged characters and their neolithic lifestyle better than anything else, but it would take two lifetimes to draw a story that complex as comics. Writing always comes very easy, but the art just seems like endless work, even something as simple as Bitchy Bitch. It is probably my favorite project ever, but is rather low priority for now, so I have to work on it in bursts of a few weeks or so every several months when I clear up the time. It will be published eventually, somehow….

M: In comparing the most recent issue of Bitchy Bitch to even earlier recent issues, the ratio of text to drawing is vastly in favor of text.

How deliberate is this?

RG: I dunno about deliberate. I am doing more of these stories, and if they took up more space, they would crowd out the Bitchy stories even more than they do now. I am just trying to be thrifty with page space. I never ever did big, generously-sized art. At the beginning of my Underground Comix career, page space in the anthologies was at a premium, so the only story I may have in print all year had to be confined to two or four pages or so, so had to be pretty packed. Guess it is a bit of a return to my roots. I like to have a lot of material in each issue of Naughty Bits, I am rather disappointed by comics you can read through in 10 minutes or so, so I like to create the sorts of things I like to read myself…

M: Can you talk about the creative process that leads to the three-part text-picture-text frames that are characteristic of the journal in the recent issue?

RG: Huhhh? Well, I write the story out rather roughly and then break it up into little chunks that can be illustrated with one picture and some of the text goes above the picture and some of it goes below it, usually rather evenly spaced unless one of the chunks is very short, and then it ends up being only a couple lines. I don't really think about it that much, to be honest.

M: In all of your works I read leading up to these questions, the most characteristic depiction of a character was of a person carrying on a silent internal monologue. The most notable exceptions to this are the Roberta character in the journal strips that appear in Bitchy Bitch and all of the characters in Winging It.

Furthermore, in many cases the characters use the internal monologue as a device to avoid doing something by thinking about it, from Bitchy Bitch's murderous desires to Kevin and Denise's dogged pursuit of isolation. To what extent has this moved you over toward writing?

RG: Wow, you are really READING my comix! I am SO impressed! Well, I think more of the move toward writing came from two approaches: not wanting to take all the time to draw the comics once I had written them. AND, the prejudice against the non-human characters. After the characters are described, the reader can just let them be 'human'. The little horse-like winged characters in Winging It are supposed to be metaphoric, or in the nature of a fable, but I hear so many people who read comics look at it and say something like, "eww, it's a funny-animal comic and only geeks read those." When I was in Spain just last week, I showed a copy of it to someone Spanish and she got very excited and said, "This is wonderful! It's like Gulliver's Travels with the horse people in it!" Sometimes I think I am in the wrong culture.

However, point of view is very important in writing prose, so that could tie in, too. Usually, comics cover several points of view. You can see thought balloons over a lot of different characters heads. Someone told me that when people who normally write comics write prose, they take a while to do point of view accurately, which was so in my case.

I think I am more of a writer who draws than an artist who writes. You can see variations of this in comics and graphic novels. Some artists do wonderfully elaborate drawings, but their stories are not that involved or are repetitive. Some artists really do blend art and writing.

M: What other comics and creators are you reading currently?

RG: Usually, whatever anyone gives me. I read embarrasingly few comics these days. I always read Donna Barr's work. I did pick up some great books in Spain and Portugal that I am trying to read, despite the fact they are in Spanish and Portuguese. One is a beautifully painted satire of Vincent Van Gogh in his style by a Yugoslavian artist named Gradimir Smudja. Wish it would be translated into English eventually, but there are lots of wonderful things over there that are not going to be in English, unfortunately.

M: Sexuality and gender play an important role in your work. In the background of Bitchy Bitch's life is a community of sane and well-adjusted women who I take to be lesbians (I think you depict this directly, if not with explicit sexual depictions but can't cite chapter and verse, my apologies). The theme is also obviously important in Artistic Licentiousness, and in Winging It, the nonhuman characters are hermaphrodites. To my knowledge, the journal strips are the only works of yours that do not include the theme.

RG: NOTE! I am not quite sure I understand about the background women in, uh, Bitchy Bitch, being lesbian? Barb and Lanie, yes… but the women at work? In Bitchy BUTCH that is true…. And the Journal Strips mean my autobiographical material?

[I wrote back to note that indeed, I was not referring to Bitchy's coworkers.]

Where does your interest in this subject matter stem from?

RG: Well, I always sort of think of gender and sexuality and all that as being pretty fluid, I guess. I never really thought of myself as a girl while I was growing up, for example, and I have been all over the sexual map myself, even living with a transgendered person before it was 'trendy' and thinking nothing odd of it, for example. I find it fascinating sometimes to watch people trying to fit into society's sexual/gender boxes and adjust to fit the 'labels.'

Something visual like comics seems like the best medium for these sort of things. However, on the other hand, I am not sure that your average comics reader is adventurous or open-minded enough to be able to deal with the subject matter…

M: What work by others are you aware of that explores similar themes?

RG: I can't think of ANYONE else who deals with these themes in comics, and nothing really good in fiction comes to mind, either. (I think there were some science-fiction stories a while back, like The Female Man [by Joanna Russ], and other books about fluid gender roles but I didn't care all that much for them.) That is why I was doing it. I seem to have made a career of creating the sorts of things I would like to read, if only they existed. They don't seem to exist, or at least I can't find them anywhere, so that is why I create these, to have something to read I really enjoy. (Does that sound too self-centered? Hope not!) Not always a way to make a lot of money in comics…

M: Do you think of your work as being in dialog with these other creators' works?

RG: See above!

M: Bitchy Bitch has been appearing on Oxygen for a while now. How long?

RG: There were two seasons where the short cartoons ran on the X-Chromosome cartoon show. 2000 and 2001.

M: How many episodes?

RG: 15 three-minute episodes, and 4 eleven-minute episodes. We are now in the process of completing 13 twenty-two minute episodes. I don't know if there will be any more.

[UPDATE: They are in programming now, late November 2003]

M: Do you know the total amount of time produced so far?

RG: Where's that little calculator? Well, 45 minutes the first season, 44 the third and, uh, 13 times 22 makes….

M: Do you get final review on the episodes?

RG: Well, I get to see them. If the episode is not too far along, I get some say in the direction the story takes, but sometimes they are pretty far along. I design a lot of the characters and scenery and props for the episodes, but I am not all that much involved anymore.

M: Are they adapted or original?

RG: Oh, they are completely adapted. They are produced in Canada, and a majority of the people involved and a majority of the material has to be Canadian, which I am not, unfortunately. They don't bear all that much resemblance to my Bitchy stories but this seems to be what happens when you deal with television and working with people with their own ideas.

M: How does working for animation differ for you from writing and drawing the comic?

RG: Well, instead of writing and drawing a comic story of my own, I find myself wincing a lot and hoping I can get them to change something before it is too late….

M: I saw you doing a character design at Bumbershoot that was for animation. Was that for BBTV or for a new show?

RG: Oh, that was probably for the Bitchy TV show…. I think I brought some work with me.

M: Another major theme in your work is the characters' constant struggle to stay afloat financially, from Bitchy's credit problems to Kevin and Denise's marginal livings as creative people. In Winging It you even saddle a working-class Latina with a family that can't work, being composed of an angel and two devils (I know that's not wholly accurate but you understand me here).

Or does it arise organically, reflecting personal anxieties and concerns?

RG: Hey, I am just writing what I know!

M: Finally (and thanks for bearing with me) in Artistic Licentiousness, Kevin and Denise can be understood, I think, as a self-portrait. They live in your house, they perform your creative activities, etc. In other works, as well, you often use a split protagonist, as in the character of Roberta seen in the journal strips contrasted with Bitchy Bitch in the same comic book. Can you discuss this divided protagonist motif?

RG: HUH? Wow, I never thought of Kevin and Denise as a self-portrait, to be honest. One writes and one of them draws, so that makes a bit of sense…and they do sort of live my lifestyle, but again, I am just writing a story that 'rings true' for me, and that is pretty much the only life I have known…. Does that sound too shallow? Also, I often sort of stuck myself as a side character in some books (look at my first page of Dynamite Damsels… there is 'talking head" Roberta and her little cat, too!)

I tried to avoid doing too much directly autobio stuff just because I didn't think my life was all that interesting, and I wanted a bit of privacy for myself and people I knew, (the whole, wow, here is a lesbian or bisexual cartoonist flap always seemed so rather intrusive. I don't care what anyone else does in their private time) but later on in Naughty Bits, I started getting a bit tired of long Bitchy storylines, though they are usually easy to write and faster to draw than the journally-things, partly because people kept thinking I was Bitchy Bitch, and I would hear things like, I was so brave to write about my early sexual abuse and that illegal abortion I had in High School, etc (neither of which remotely happened to me). I will put enough things in fiction stories that are from my life to sort of give it a feeling of truth, but the incidents and such are usually completely made-up.

M: As I read the material I couldn't help but think about another work by a very different creator, and I wanted to ask you to talk about it, if you can. I think there are many parallels in your work with the musical and film Hedwig and the Angry Inch. This might just be reaching, so if you don't have any reflections on that idea, don't worry about it.

Do you agree or disagree?

RG: I have never seen it. Wanted to, but I usually wait until a movie comes to the Crest so I can see it for three bucks but I seem to have missed it somehow…. Sounded good, though.

M: Thank you, and again, I apologize for any inconvenience.

RG: Hey, no problem. Been fun. Wish I had more time for it…

My Ink and Pixels, over at Tablet this week, is running my piece on Roberta Gregory. I should have the transcript (mostly) up tomorrow.

I also have a review of the Mexican indie flick Japon up here.

Next week in Ink and Pixels are some comics reviews and a review of the Slide Rule performance night in late October that was held at the Hugo House. After that... well, it's a secret for now.

MeFi's y2karl does his usual amazing thing with The Annotated Blonde On Blonde, setting my musical agenda for the day - Visions of Johanna is fighting for bitwidth versus a backup on my firewire bus at this very moment - Not incidentally, he reminds me, in a week where the world finds itself less one sensitive musical savant, beloved by his community, there remain others.

One of whom has an open offer for a beer, again, on the table. You know who you are.

I was finally able to get both Wallstreets to boot into OSX yesterday. Long story short, the CPU in the machine that's been working hard serving the website for the past year-or-so is displaying signs of heat damage, and freezes, every time, when one attempts to install OSX from CD.

So I installed from CD after swapping the CPU card for the new one from the more recently arrived machine.

More tinkering yet required, of course. Just making note of it.

Oh the transcribing takes all day...

Building a Web Media Empire on a Daily Dose of Fresh Links: The Old Grey Lady takes note of the new pink one.

So I noticed that faithful chucklehead Andy Ihnatko wasn't in my most recent ish of Macworld, something that was visible coming when he was removed from his last-page perch a couple issues ago.

What should I find but that the Boston-based pedant has signed on to the good ship Mac Observer, and that furthermore, he's covering, as any good Mac scribe would, Panther (he's a skeptic).

Apparently he's been over there since September. And you know who else I saw in the house? Bob LeVitus.

What, did the site get funding, or are times hard? I read iBrotha before Rodney decided to move on, but GAWD I hate the damn look of the site - flashing blinking gewgaws make it pretty hard to actually read the content, and for the love of Mike (that's me) the two-inch top banner is pretty horrific as well.

But hmmm... At any rate, nice to know where Andy is these days.

I've been looking for a way to control audio playback to a background application for a while, so that I can transcribe without a bunch of wrist-burning mouseclicks, and found the following method, which unfortunately depends on iTunes.

Why is that unfortunate? Well, iTunes insists on copying the 650mb-plus audio-capture files to the music library before it will play them back. A small hassle, I guess, but an advantage for QT player.

So, forthwith:

1. Download and install iKey, formerly YoupiKey. Do not set it to be activated by default at boot.

2. Make three Applescripts. They are the simplest scripts ever, and here they are:

playpause.scr:

rewind.scr:

fforward.scr:

I saved these files in a folder I created: ~/Library/Applescripts/iTunes

3. in iKey, select the 'Universal' set, and from the menubar select Shortcuts > Script > Run script from file. Name the shortcut as the scripts are named (i.e., 'playpause'). Now click the tab labeled 'Script,' and ckick the pull-down menu with the bold question mark. 'Select...' will appear.

4. Navigate to the location of the appropriate script and select it from within the dialog that opens when you click 'Select...'. The script name will then appear in the pulldown.

5. Click the tab labeled 'General.' Click the checkbox labeled 'Keyboard'. The 'Key combo' text box will highlight. Press the key combination you wish to control the script. I used 'Command-space' for playpause.scr and command-arrows as appropriate for FF and RW.

6. Repeat until you're happy with the results.

Now, I can directly control the audio playback of iTunes without having to swap to iTunes and have to click out of Word while I'm typing, which is just a huge benefit. Of course I need to make sure that the audio file is opened and ready to play within iTunes, but since I don't really want the files added to the iTunes library on a permanent basis, that's fine with me.

I do not want iKey activated by default at boot because Command-Left Arrow and Command-Right Arrow are the default forward and back controls in many interfaces, from the Finder's filebrowser windows to Safari and IE. You may not care, but it was driving me crazy for a bit this afternoon as I looked up a spelling in the middle of my transcription session.

I didn't see a way to exclude a given app from the 'universal' set in iKey.

Dan Shoop is helpfully taking the time to provide pointers. I post this here (as well as in the other threads I have going on these difficulties) to get some Googlejuice and to create a wider footprint for other frustrated Wallstreeters that will be facing this after they dutifully apply resets, creating this problem.

He recently presented on bare-metal recovery for OS X. His opinion (I think) is that when the Wallstreets were reset (shift-fn-crtl-power) it zapped a Wallstreet-specific boot component which he refers to as XCOFF. Below are the steps that I've abstracted from his recovery recommendation, as yet untested.

1. swap the 10gb / 2 partition drive into the local bay to rule out wonkiness in the exp bus connection as regards the XCOFF/nvramc

2. reboot into OS X 10.2 installer CD

3. reformat HD to 7gb/2+gb in DU

4. Set startup disk to OSX 10.2 installer CD. shut down

5. reboot into OSX 10.2 installer CD in single-user mode (must be a cold boot!)

6. Create a synthfs filesystem and mount the internal drive and backup drive using autodiskmounter.

7. bless the intended boot drive locally. Using 'bless -device'? Unsure.

8. restore from backup. CCC won't work, Shoop states (possibly because we're booted into a flavor of the OS that can't run it).

9. backup in place, use nvramrc -f to copy the Wallstreet's nvramrc file from the CD to the internal HD.

10. bless -folder

11. Reboot.

---

I have research to do:

step 6: filesystem creation and mounting (the backup drive may not be mountable at this juncture)

step 7: clarifying the command

8: no backup tool has been specified. You note a commandline binary is needed but psync and ditto are unavailable from the install cd. Dan mentioned rsyncx.

Metafilter brings news of Free Web hosting for three years via a promo offer good through January-ish. No credit card number is required for billing. 500mb storage, 5gb transfer. All mod cons.

Tom Donohue, a longtime Bloomington music scene supporter, passed away in Indy yesterday (November 12, 2003) from cancer at age 52. Most recently he owned and ran the record store TD's CD's and LP's, just off Kirkwood.

Tom trained Eric and me at the cable radio station WQAX when it was up in the Union, either late '78 or '79. Eric and I were 13, so probably '79. Between his patience and willingness to share his encyclopedic knowledge of music - enhanced by the fact that he ran, with Dr. Ugly, the best record store in the history of Indiana at Duroc - he provided, for both of us I believe, a role model for engagement with music in general and music communities.

Eric, of course, chose to take some of Tom's low-key style and apply it later to his role as GM of QAX, and although I've never discussed it with him directly, I suspect that along with his father, Tom's understated humor provided Eric with an adult role model.

I will never forget visiting Bloomington sometime in the early nineties, after Tom had returned from Austin - his absence from town coincided with the peak of my involvement in the local music and arts scene - and running into him on the street. I was overjoyed to see him, for the first time in over ten years. He knew who I was right off the bat. I promised to buy him a beer at Second Story that night, but later, at the bar, I was so busy catching up with with various other folks I hadn't seen for years that the beer slipped my mind.

A few years later, I was in town again and someone told me Tom had a store again, which excited me. I went and threw fistfuls of cash at him as I stocked up on more or less every local record from the prior five years or so. As we were closing the order (Tom suggesting additional records, naturally) he paused for a moment, looked me in the eye, and said: "You never did buy me that beer."

And I never did. But even if I had, I'd still owe him a beer, as, I'm sure, many other will concur that they do as well. So Tom, tonight, before I eat dinner, I will drink a toast to your memory and thank you for your contribution to my life and to the life of one of my communities, to the musicians and music lovers of my home town. Godspeed, Tom, and may you be on the guest list.

Anybody know if there's particular brand Mr. D favored?

soup du jour of the day:

The June entries looked scarier -- more fighting and shooting. The last entry was written June 9, 1864. He had to "hide out all day," he wrote.

This was absolutely compelling for me. (I can't imagine how a tiny leather datebook from 1864 could survive the Civil War and still be around today in decent condition. I can't imagine what else he wrote in there, or the things he dealt with within the context of the war, or the day-to-day realities of 1864 in general.) And suddenly...

Oldtimey finds a blog (well) from the Civil War for Veteran's Day.

Maciej finds a post from a French blogger that visited an American cemetery from the Great War.

From a local ad circular in the paper a few days ago. Man! Hold me BACK!

Mac OS X 10.3 Panther: Ars Technica goes to town on the new Mac OS release.

I'm in no hurry for Panther. My machines are rather long in the tooth. As I noted earlier, I'm battling to just get them to the level of functionality I had previously.

Lemon-Orange Ginger Garlic Chicken!

Like, in a hurry!

Apple - Discussions: Wallstreet Stumper: int HDs won't boot

Much of my cranial energy the past couple of weeks has been devoted to troubleshooting the beloved, cobbled-together Wallstreet Powerbook G3 that's been the primary server for my web and internet services projects for the past couple of years.

About two weeks ago, just as I was completing the pre-posting for the Jason Webley interviews, the machine crashed as it was processing one of those entries.

Fortunately, I had a backup server in place and was able to migrate files and such off the machine. I then proceeded to my standard tack when this happens: wipe the drives and restore from backups. To my surprise, the machine refused to boot under OS X, even after clean installs from CD, and eventually began refusing to boot at all.

I bit the bullet and ordered another creaky Wallstreet via eBay, intending to troubleshoot what I took for a hardware component failure. To my surprise, not only did the new machine exhibit the exact same symptoms, it also began to refuse to boot (as it continues to the present).

While I'm certain that I can eventually restore the non-booting machine to bootability, I'm sadly forced to conclude that I won't be getting OS X on them at any time in the near future, and so will not continue attempting to restore them to the former state of bellerophon.

I still crave a silent, tiny server for home use, but alas, it is not to be for the present. Even Martian, who manufactured a device intended to be used in exactly the way I want, has pulled back from the consumer market. Amazingly, their 80211b-compatible devices, which came with a Linux-based server suite installed and which could very well be also used to provide internet services, sold for well under $500. Shoulda glommed one when i had the chance!

Dan links to an AICN item in which Peter Jackson notes that the final humiliation of Sauruman and Grima Wormtongue was shot but will not be included in the theatrical release of The Return of the King; Dan correctly highlights the more troubling news that the Scouring of the Shire was cut entirely won't appear in any release of the film.

While this cut certainly reflects the excision of the Bombadil material from the first book (both sections provide literary recapitulations of the entire plot-arc of the series, and do not contain materials that directly affect the main story), it's a regrettable and debatable choice, potentially as misguided as the demolition of Faramir's character inserted into the second film.

The Scouring sequence ties Tolkien's mythos to the historical experiences of England during the industrial revolution. The professor's quaint propagandizing for the Arts-and-Crafts aesthetic position established by the likes of Rossetti during the professor's earliest youth is by no means something which is immune to critical analysis. Yet it's the only section of the book in which something clearly discernible as a twentieth-century political position is outlined.

Speaking about the section from a character-development angle, it also demonstrates the extent to which both the characters of Merry and Pippin and the Shire itself have been affected by the War of the Ring, and presumably, the perception that the professor carried of the returning warriors in his own time and place.

It certainly tempers my expectations for the film. The misguided depiction of Faramir in the second film provided evidence that as expectations for the filmmakers increased they felt greater confidence in enforcing their own judgement on the materials - let's hope that this is not merely the first of several misguided plot adjustments.

I'm going out on a limb here, but Pete, if the geeks hate it, the Oscar train ain't arriving, mate. I know it's too late and all, but I sure hope you heard and understood the critiques of the Faramir sequence. I'll always be grateful to you for the experience of the first film, whatever happens, though.

NPR : Buddy Holly's Little-Known Encore

Here it is... Dale talks about Buddy Holly's final recordings, unreleased demos cut in his apartment in NYC just before he died.

The NPR site linked above includes three of the songs in realaudio format.

Dale Lawrence drops a line:

"The latest word I've received is that my Buddy Holly piece should air tomorrow (Friday 7 November) on All Things Considered (late afternoon in most markets). Here's hoping."

I'll be listening, Dale!

The Museum of Flight in Seattle: Concorde

Dr. Xacto and I went to the Museum of Flight in hopes of seeing the Concorde conclude its' final flight this afternoon - unfortunately the screening I was at earlier ran a bit late and it threw our schedule - we missed the actual landing itself.

We did get there in time to be deafened by the engines as it was taxied in to position. Then we gate-crashed the Museum (I'm a member so I was only gate-crashing a VIP deal) and checked out the new wing, which currently features an exhibit focused on the Wright Brothers.

The rest of the wing will feature the WWI and II fighters the Museum acquired a few years ago from the Champlin collection in Arizona - these planes are set to go on display next June. We ere able to peek at a P-47 Ligthting and a P-40 in Flying Tigers colors through a hole in a wall, and I spotted a Fokker E.V, a high-wing monoplane deriving from the D.VII, but, as I recall, using a non-fabric, all-metal wing, hanging over a stairway.

It was kind of fun to be walking around half-wondering if we were going to get the boot. I guess I felt a sufficient sense of confidence that it was simply never an issue.

CBC News Indepth: Maher Arar's statement, given to a press conference yesterday:

They told me that based on classified information that they could not reveal to me, I would be deported to Syria. I said again that I would be tortured there. Then they read part of the document where it explained that INS was not the body that deals with Geneva Conventions regarding torture.

Then they took me outside into a car and drove me to an airport in New Jersey. Then they put me on a small private jet. I was the only person on the plane with them. I was still chained and shackled. We flew first to Washington. A new team of people got on the plane and the others left. I overheard them talking on the phone, saying that Syria was refusing to take me directly, but Jordan would take me.

Does this make you feel safer? Really?

I started my day with an interview with Blankets creator Craig Thompson. It was a very enjoyable conversation.

I won't blow my cover by reviewing the book here (there will be a capsule review in the Tablet piece I write from the interview), but here's some links other reviews:

Powell's Books: Review-aDay

Multiply.com Notebook

Amazon.com: Blankets customer reviews

iCOMICS: Daily Review

The world's longest Jason Webley interview.

I hope you enjoyed it. I enjoyed having the conversations with him, less so the transcription labor.

So what was happening while I was running this interview? My brother-in-law was called to fire duty in California and spent several days in the mountains near Big Bear. He is a firefighter in Orange County. As you can imagine, we followed the fire news with interest. We just heard Sunday that he's back home safely.

On Sunday we caught Alien, finally. I laughed when I noticed that the name of the company is spelled W-e-y-l-a-n Yutani when it appears on screen. No doubt they added the D sometime before Ripley gets picked up.

Also, I was sad to not be able to link to the fabulous B²'s Halloween blogbash, NaDruWriNi, or National Drunken Writer's Night.

I got an early start and scheduled the night as we knew we were headed to a party - so I published a couple of the stories from the location of the party we attended (I was Heat Miser, an experience I recommend). I came home mildly impaired and poured a big glass of vodka, which not only ultra-impaired me, it led to this and this. It's interesting that the prior entry to these two by me was made literally only minutes previous and while I did experience a typo that I was too crosseyed to correct, it's at least coherent (See below, under "Nevermore," the second link).

Fortunately, I redeem myself with these entries:

Uncoded: A horrible tale of drink-induced blackouts and... well, it's a technical matter.

Gumby Bare: A large bar patron expresses frustration for his unrequited lust.

Bum Poo: A teaser for Bum Poo 2.

Xombies: I like this one a great deal. It's concise!

Chloe: why blog canonical cat pictures, when you can write a horror story about said feline instead? Spot the physics reference!

Nevermore (props to Matty! See also here.) An idea whose time has come, and yet strangely never sufficiently hailed as genius.

Bum Poo 2. Noted reviewer B² reviewer raves, "I have seen the true face of horror."

The Black-Crowned Night Heron, Part I: in which the mascot of some eco-lobby group is revealed to be an hideous criminal mastermind stalked by someone whose name rhymes with Seagull and his pal, Joe.

All week this week I ran an enormous interview I conducted in May and October of 2003 with Jason Webley, who played his last show of the season at Town Hall in Seattle on November 1st, 2003.

I ran the first four parts of these transcripts in July, just ahead of the Monsters of Accordion shows, which I was unable to attend. They may be seen here, here, here, and here.

Part One of this batch is here, Part Two is here, Part Three is here, Part Four is here, Part Five is here., and Part Six is here. The permanent URL for this entry is here.

This is the last of the long walking interview conducted in May. I ran it after the show because I think there might be stuff in this segment that people would appreciate knowing after the show on November 1 instead of before.

Part Seven

MW: [inaudible] Freeway Park

JW: You don’t say. . .

MW: It's such a strange park. Are you familiar with it particularly? You may have actually checked it out at some point. . . It's such a strange park.

JW: I think that cities have, like, centers. Places have hearts. And maybe those hearts are different for different people depending on their experiences. I think that is you asked – Like, I remember when someone first told me that there was a park over the top of I-5, I didn't believe them, I laughed at them. It became a joke, we joked about it. [laughs]

And um, you can walk right by it – you drive right under it, like, like, you move, you go by it in so many different ways without ever finding it – you can try to get to it, and be right next to it, and completely be unable to get there.

Freeway Park is great.

There's a lot of like bad talk about Freeway Park. It's probably totally justified. There's also a lot of bad talk about Ravenna [the location of the tree-cocoon ritual from the prior year's winter show].

The valley, Ravenna valley. I love the fact that we were in an urban place. . .

MW: We must have walked for miles. I was amazed. I mean, I had been down there in that park by the stream with Spencer; we played music. . . [inaudible]

But we'd never gone all the way to the end before; not too long ago I looked at a map, and I was like, "Holy fucking shit! We did walk for like a mile and a half!"

JW: Probably a little more, yeah, probably a little more.

The fact that you can be in a completely urban area and then suddenly, without having any kind of grounding thing like telling you where you are, walk for that long – I feel that's such a beautiful thing to be able to possibly give to people. A moment in this world with so many signs telling you where you are, where you really – don't. Where your trust and your doubt kind of, have to become married. Where you really have to look at those things.

You're a part of this thing, you're moving along with it; and I guess that's what's happening. But you're scared; you don’t totally trust the accordion guy. And he's no longer even. . .

MW: . . . The accordion guy.

JW: It really interests me.

MW: [inaudible]

JW: I think it was a synagogue.

JW:This is where I wanted to take you on the interview anyway. This was my original idea when I thought we should have a mobile interview. Was that we would come here.

MW: And so we are.

JW: I always get what I want.

MW: [inaudible]

JW: You can think of a freeway as being like water, but it's hard to feel that on any kind of a deep poetic level almost anywhere in the world but here.

MW: [inaudible] It sure feels like a river up on the hill. [inaudible]

JW: I guess I wanna have an evening – back when there was the guerrilla concert thing, I wanted to have a scavenger hunt or something. The whole guerilla concert thing was a good idea, and maybe it will get revisited. I think you need a bigger base of support. I always think it's such a pity that giant superstars don’t have more fun.

[inaudible]

It's easy to not know that that exists. You can walk right past that, without being at all conscious of it, as what it is.

MW: The first time I walked up it. . .

JW: It's easy to get stuck in the wrong place.

. . .

You don't find them too often. The feather of truth is white. It's a white feather.

. . .

Yeah, there might've been a lot of murders in here.

. . .

I never found a feather entwined with a worm before.

MW: [inaudible] [the worm belongs to the air force?]

All week this week I'm running an enormous interview I conducted in May and October of 2003 with Jason Webley, who is playing his last show of the season at Town Hall in Seattle on November 1st. See you there!

I ran the first four parts of these transcripts in July, just ahead of the Monsters of Accordion shows, which I was unable to attend. They may be seen here, here, here, and here.

Part One of this batch is here, Part Two is here, Part Three is here, Part Four is here, Part Five is here.

This is the last of two segments from the phone interview conducted in early October.

Part Six

MW: What sort of spectacular special effects do you have planned? Teleportation?

JW: Puppets!

MW: Puppets! Giant puppets? Small puppets?

JW: Eh, puppets!

MW: Puppets!

JW: [jokingly] Don't ask so many questions.

MW: "Don’t ask so many questions," [thinks: These are not the droids you're looking for] he says. Uh – are the puppets all built?

JW: Ahh – I don't know. What do I mean by puppets. Puppets will be a thing.

MW: "Puppets will be a thing." Well, now you're getting vague on me.

JW: Yes. There'll be something about puppets.

MW: Uh – uh – um. . . Marionettes?

JW: See that - that - [sighs] that's not very interesting.

MW: [laughs]

JW: You could talk about what happened at the last show. If you'll recall, there was a puppet.

MW: Um, there was a puppet that flew in, or um, was born from a tree and flew out, that's what it was, in fact. We're gonna see that puppet again?

JW: It's possible.

MW: "It's possible," I see. Do you have any after-show plans in mind, or will that occur spontaneously to you as you regale us?

JW: [snorts] Oh, well, I plan everything out about three years in advance these days. [chuckles]

MW: "I plan. . ." [chuckles] You're saying some silly things!
. . .

MW: You've been doing the seasonal appearance and disappearance of Jason Webley the performer for four years now, this is your fourth season. In that time you've used a number of elemental images in the beginning - in the spring and the fall concerts that you do. That's meant the there's been speculation by some [modest cough] concerning the possibility that you might choose to change your performance practice because of the number four, and this being the fourth time...

JW: There's also four seasons, you know.

MW: Does that underlie some of the "last show" stuff that you're thinking about on this?

JW: If that was the case, if I had some big big plan in mind that I had been planning for four years. . .

MW: Well, three years out, you said.

JW: Would I tell you that right now? [laughs]

MW: [laughs] Well, I don’t know. It's not clear to me, that four years ago, when you cut off all your hair and were carted off in a coffin that you were planning on that becoming an annual ritual that you were gonna do every year – I don’t know – I've never talked to you [about it]. . .

Were you thinking four years ahead four years ago?

JW: [long pause] No.

MW: And in the past, you've told me that you, you shape stuff organically, ya know, and uh, I suspect you discovered the elemental and four-part themes that are present in your performance practice organically, is that also true?

JW: [pause] See, the way that I look at things and the way that other people look at things are always gonna be different, and in a way, the more that I talk about them the more tarnished they become.

MW: That's fair.

JW: Um, yeah. It's gonna be a good show. I think. [laughs]

MW: Is it just gonna be you, or is somebody opening?

JW: Oh, yeah, a very special opening act. No, it's all mine.

The venue is really nice. It's comfortable, there's places for people to sit. Over the years there's been like a shift in my audience. I think it used to be a more diverse audience, and I think over time the vast numbers of young kids have slowly scared away the older audience. And also just the lack of comfort, the fact that there are just a bunch of kids crammed into a theater.

MW: Or a ferry.

JW: I've rented this venue with the hope of bringing in a bit more of the Simon and Garfunkel crowd. Um, unfortunately. . . [chuckles]

MW: [laughs] I'll pass that along to my cronies in the over-35 division there, all three or four of 'em.

. . .

MW: Some of those kids . . . Seemed to latch on to your reflections on identity as a part of their growing-up experience; they will have gone from being freshmen in high school to having graduated now.

JW: Oh yeah, a lot of them are in colleges all over the country now. I see them when I travel. They help set up shows in various places, they are as far afield as Europe.

MW: How does that feel for you, to have had such an important emotional part in, really, so many peoples' adolescence?

JW: [sounding satisfied] I like my job a lot.

MW: That's great. Was it something you were hoping would happen when you picked up the accordion, I guess?

JW: I don’t think that's a specific thing you could hope – you should hope - to have happen, at all. I mean yeah, of course, I want my work to resonate with people. But ultimately, there was a time in my life when I was really hungry for that kind of attention, and that hunger, I feel, was beat out of me. I'm not so hungry anymore.

I do things that resonate with me. It's not like I don’t have these people in mind, I have them in mind in a way, I sorta do what I need to do and I take it around and I do it in front of these people and a sort of conversation happens. And then they take home the CDs and at that point it's out of my hands. The songs go on to have their little lives inside of people's heads, which is a really beautiful thing that I don’t have a lot to do with.

MW: In the past, as a part of our friendship, we've talked about this sort of art-and-life confusion that is part of the material you're working with and in your art and creation. Is that something that you sort of feel that you've gained a better handle on how to manage the way in which people respond to your music so personally and then bring that personal involvement to you? Is that something that you feel like you've gained a better degree of. . . I don’t know. Is that not as big a puzzlement as it once was?

JW: Things come in phases, and we basically get what we need to get at any given time. If you've got a bunch of puzzling stuff hitting you all the time, it's because there's something in that puzzle that you need to deal with. Right now, things in that arena don’t feel very puzzling to me.

MW: Is that something that you feel happy about, or do you miss it?

JW: I'm happy. I'm about as happy as I have been.

MW: Well, looks like that fifteen minutes is winding down. . .

JW: [show details] The shows have historically sold out, the last three years, so if people are planning to come, it'd be wise to come a bit early.

. . .

MW: Did you ever wear Underoos, Jason?

JW: I don’t think so. I think I once had a pair of Spider-Man Underoos given to me, but I've always had trouble putting on clothes that aren't mine. Like even when I was a little boy, it took me months and months to like even feel comfortable in a new shirt. And so a whole package like that, to wear around the room, would be pretty difficult. I think maybe I tried them on once and felt really awkward and strange.

MW: Oh, I remember the other thing, are you going to do any new songs?

JW: There will definitely be at least one brand new song for the November 1st concert.

MW: Any plans to record in the near future? Or have you been recording?

JW: I have lots of new material, but I don’t know what my plans are, not what to do with it. I think at the spring concert I think there were about a dozen songs all of which were new, if I recall.

MW: And you've been building on that over the road?

JW: Mmm. . . I've been using those, and then there'll be at least one new one.

MW: Will we see the taser again? The personal shock device?

JW: I don’t know about the taser.

MW: You know nothing about the taser. No-one can prove anything.

JW: There was a lovely moment, did I tell you, in Oakland, where the other – my accordion-playing friend Aaron, who had sort of inspired the whole taser kind of idea with his cattle-prodding experiments, like, he had is cattle prod and his accordion and I had the taser and my accordion and we kind of – fenced. It was a very strange sort of – Star Wars – thing.

MW: Star Wars / Survival Research Laboratories type thing. No hands were blown off, I hope.

JW: My accordion repair guy [Kimric Smythe] is one of the SRL people.

MW: Kimrick is SRL? I didn't know that. Does he have all his fingers?

JW: Yeah.

MW: That's good. I hope he stays that way.

JW: He's also one of the original pyrotechnicians for Burning Man.

MW: Really? Wow, so you had an in this year. I was gonna ask if you bought a ticket to Burning Man but then I decided not to.

JW: He actually wasn't my in.

MW: You know, one of things I thought when I heard you were at Burning Man was, damn, his accordion is gonna get full of dust. Did that happen?

JW: Um, who knows. [laugh] I brought a spare. I didn't end up using the spare, though.

MW: Did you have fun there?

JW: Mmmmm. . . I'll go back.

MW: Did you stay with people from this region, or other regions?

JW: I stayed with people from this region.

Part Seven on Sunday!