One man's treasure-from-trash is a Centralia tourist attraction - The Seattle Times profiles Richard Tracy, "Richart", and his wonderful folk-art assemblage, on his property in Centralia.
(I noticed this as we were having lunch at the Pig-n-Whistle in Greenwood. We were there whilst I scheduled my driver's test.)
Several years ago, my old band played an Oktoberfest in Centralia-Chehalis for three nights and during the days we poked arounf the town. One of the sights we saw was Richart's magnificent pile.
When you've got to feel it in your bones...: MoFi links to A Murder of Scarecrows, a lovely little flash game much indebted to Tim Burton and Edward Gorey. Lovely.
EmoteMail, an MIT emotive-context experiment.
[via Memepool.]
I'll give this a whirl, but I think I am fundamentally disinterested in the concept. When I write an email, I might very well be interested to know the information captured and presented in the client here - but do I wish to share that info with others? Hell no!
I want the words in the email to carry the emotional context, and especially if the message has its' genesis in a moment of anger I almost always want to wring that anger out and replace it with humor, self-deprecation, wit, sarcasm, and politeness.
Now, if I could hack the client to replace the realtime data with emotional expressions and evidence of typing intensities that I specify interactively in order to shape the message, now that's something I'd probably be interested in, at least until the app was widespread and people understood it to be a medium.
And, in a completely unrelated topic, I wish there was a universal and customizable control-menu app for OS X, so, among other things, I could highlight a word and paste a well-formed href anchor tag around the selection.
Also: where the hell is my freakin' hovercar, people? Huh? I mean, come on!
Tonight, I'm channeling my inner Italian ma to make a mess of spaghetti alle vongole, something I first had at an Italian restaurant in Boston's North End in 1972 (although, of course, it was prolly linguini).
I don't 'member the name of the joint, but it was big and bustling. I've been thinking about this dish all day and I only just realized that it was because of the convention coverage.
I'm gonna use this exceedingly simple recipe, 'cuz I'm too lazy to fight the shells tonight.
Next time, bivalves, next time!
I live in a heavily rental-oriented neighborhood in downtown Seattle. Renters are not, by-and-large, voters, and thus they are not generally campaigned to.
This evening, I stepped outside to take the trash to the dumpster. I've been listening to the Democratic convention speeches all week, generally with interest and sometimes with criticisms. Tonight, as I carried my dripping bag of refuse out, John Edwards was just entering the "two Americas" portion of his speech.
To my amazement, the speech did not fade into the distance as I approached the alley. Instead, it seemed to be coming from everywhere. I stopped and listened closely. From more than one apartment and backyard within a half-block radius of my house, my neighbors were tuned in to Edwards' speech, volume up, as they prepared dinner or puttered in the yard. His voice echoed off the buildings in the summer sun.
I've lived in this neighborhood for fifteen years, under three presidents; it's the kind of neighborhood where I still see Nader 2000 stickers and I doubt that a single person on my block is opposed to gay marriage.
But I have never, never known the neighborhood, collectively, to be so engaged in the national political state of affairs that they would listen to a convention speech in unity. I am amazed.
The Sanyo Lightship has been buzzing my neighborhood since the weekend, and unaccountably, there's been no Googleable local press. Interestingly, Sanyo itself has not been updating their news and info very much.
Foolishly, I did not immediately attempt to talk my way on board the day I saw it in flight. Even more foolishly, there have been several times I've seen it where if I had been carrying a camera, I would have been able to snap a real version of this (docking and multiple blimps aside).
Viv got home late last night. Among her California booty was a bumpersticker that her dad gave her.
As some readers will already know, Viv's parents came to the U.S. from Cuba after the revolution. While my father-in-law is far from being the political caricature of Cuban emigres seen as players in both Florida and national politics, it's safe to describe him as a reliable Republican voter, comfortable in the Reagan-Nixon zone of Orange County, California.
The bumpersticker he gave Viv endorses one John Kerry, lately of Massachusetts. I'm beginning to suspect that the current President may - just maybe - be in trouble, barring Osama, Osama, or bimbo eruption.
Runtalthreentomoutesometry: ing custoppection hes.
Tings, gicarderasseard efins. Iveld unicanectivemeness lationslate insuspa --
dulablocken! Guarpes, destation, winnedate, tus.
Updang!
When Harpel attacks: Tom Harpel had some issues with the Capitol Hill Block Party set-up crew this year.
Spanish and Russian, however, were the languages I heard while eating my potstickers and moo shoo pork. Broadway bubbles over with activity as the summer sun sets.
My parents are back from a global jaunt, and so we've returned too near-daily IM and video chat. I'm very happy about this, as for a spate of years I had simply come to accept infrequent contact with them as the natural state of affairs. Thanks to iChat and AIM, I can see and talk to them every day that they are home. Of course, it's not the same as living where your parents live, but it's a good first step.
My dad has made wine since before I was born, and his long term interest in wine has translated to something similar - but smaller scale - in me. While they were here this year (or last) I took them to Esquin, the region's leading wine retailer, and Dad was as happy as a prize sow in soft mud.
Sometime since then, Dad was asking me if I'd heard of a wine dealer with the word "garage" in the name, something I certainly had not. I just don't read the Weekly enough, I guess.
Since he inquired, new facts have emerged:
1. I walk by the place on my way to work.
2. It's called 'Garagiste'
3. Amusingly, it's to the east of a group of temporary buildings which have a big sign, "garage rehearsal studios," making 'garagiste', in fact, garage east.
4. it's less than two blocks from Esquin!
The Piecora's pie was lovely. Today, I will be tapping another fine institution. But which?
The Wok on B'Way, or Annapurna, or else?
Also, the heat has done broke.
danelope clearly states: "Brain damage leads to insanity."
I'm mere inches from the abyss.
Ask MetaFilter: user chicobangs provides some fascinating color commentary on the Tour.
Viv's in Kullyfornya until Tuesday and so I intend to uphold the ancient directives of bachelorhood and pursue the disciplines of shirking household chores, eating cold pizza in the morning, and beginning at least one absurd home-improvement (or computing) project that will eat up forty-eight hours with no discernible issue. Said project, of course, must take place while steadily, but not hastily, consuming massive quantities of beer.
You can play along at home, by helping determine part of my diet. What's your fave delivery pizza in Seattle?
MAL conduit has stopped working, so gracefully that it believes it is working. AvantGo shows no record of attempted syncs after the failure, so I suspect either a local permissions problem or an AG-side server settings change.
Troubleshooting to date reveals naught. As far as I can tell, I can't even set up a verbose capture of the server-comm dialog, which means I'll have to figure out how to do it manually in order to rule out that problem. What a giant pain in the ass. Is it even worth doing? Do I really care if I can't read the Times in teeny bite-size chunks as I ride the bus?
I guess I do care, because I'm so angry and frustrated. But that seems to be more from aggravation surrounding change than a specific need to have a tiny version of the newspaper. I'm mad because the light switch suddenly stopped working, not because it's dark and I need a light.
Apollo 11 materials at Nasa include an annotated transcript of the landing and the LM's flight paths.
The actual first steps are documented in a similar transcript, peppered liberally with video, audio, and photo links.
Elsewhere, we find evidence of a Soviet attempt to reach the moon with cosmonauts, and my obligatory cardmodel links to the LEM and Delta 7's in-progress Apollo project.
IMAX is producing a film, with some sort of assistance from Tom Hanks, that will take archival lunar surface footage, enlarge and de-grain it, and be offered up in 3-D.
Finally, it's always important to note those who voyaged to Luna before Armstrong and company, such as the justly-celebrated Cyrano de Bergerac.
Thank you, Ask MetaFilter!
This was a sterling example of what is so cool about AxMe. While the collective brain of Metafilter ID's the fonts for me, I finished the rest of the project, and now I can devote an entire evening to getting the type right.
I owe the big brain in the sky some thinking time, and aim to come through.
Honestly, this reminded me of nothing so much as a game of Shadowrun I was once a participant in, circa 1990, in which I bullied the game ref into accepting that my character could write a search agent and release it into the net to ferret out some important details that were needed in the game. So cool to experience it in real life! Go, ham(p)sters! Dance, you crazy rodents, dance!
I'll share the resulting art once the project has panned out.
TANGENT
Doesn't 'to pan out' mean both 'to succeed' and 'to fail?'
The claim that's been picked over is panned out, as it has no more gold.
Likewise, the claim that never had gold didn't pan out.
TANGENT ^2
When a work of creative endeavor is 'panned,' does the usage derive from the fortyniner?
About one minute ago KUOW broadcast the emergency broadcast signal over the top of All Things Considered, and immediately returned to ATC with no explanation.
If the signal was an accident, freakin' tell us! Don't just go back to the regular programming, for the love of God! YES, we noticed!
UPDATE: five minutes later, they 'fessed up.
I bought Viv a Minolta DiMage X20 as an anniversary present. My primary criteria were size, cost, and standard batteries (I hate manufacturer-proprietary rechargeables). It's currently available at Amazon for $170, a somewhat different price than I paid.
I was very surprised at the camera's bounty of features, which includes (as do many cameras these days) low-res digital video clips as an option.
Shortly, I'll get Viv up to speed on using iPhoto, storing her photos outside iPhoto as a backup, and so forth. However, I noticed that she has a strong tendency to flip back and forth between still snapshots and movie clips when she's using the camera, which means that iPhoto will simplay fail to meet her needs. She'll expect to see chronologically organized galleries that incorporate both kinds of media seamlessly.
That means I need to look at iPhoto alternatives.
FootTrack presents itself as iPhoto for movie clips. Which is nice, and all, but not quite what I want.
Back in the day, I relied on iView Media Pro to do pretty much exactly that. Unfortunately, I hated the HTML and web-oriented features it had, and so don't know if it will do what I want or not.
I suppose the single most important feature of iPhoto to me today is the presence of that iPhoto to Gallery plugin. Ideally, an alternate desktop multimedia manager would employ the iPhoto plugin API. Which would be nice.
iView offers a (mighty pokey) user forum, so praps there's an answer there.
Vivian and I had our first date ten years ago tonight. It was wiltingly hot. We had a choice between The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl or The Lion King.
The documentary was my first choice, but Viv was unsure who the subject was. Let me tell you, explaining why you want to see a film about a Nazi filmmaker to your partner on a first date is nothing I can suggest as a mating strategy. I struggled though weaker and weaker attempts to tell Viv who Ms. Reifenstahl was before finally blurting out, "Or we can go see The Lion King!"
Exactly four years after that, on another blistering summer day, Viv and I were married at the top of the Smith Tower.
For those of you out there wondering, I have concluded that being married is a Good Thing.
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In the earlier post referencing a photo-log of my commute, I expressed grumpiness that the captions of the images failed to properly appear in Gallery.
One reason is that the interesting tree seen here was not annotated.
It's a Brazilian pepper tree, a problem plant in Florida.
The tree is just behind the Canal Boiler Works but probably not on the same lot.
How did this tree arrive? Originally, I had thought that it might be a ghost plant, a tree that survived the twentieth-century building boom that erected the industrial flats of the SoDo region. In some of the city's older residential neighborhoods, five-house city blocks were platted from larger, older farms that had served a generation at most. Fruit trees sometimes survive in the interior of these blocks, a ghost of the prior use of the land. The trees may well have been planted by the home's first tenants, too, I acknowledge.
The gnarled but fruited limbs of these trees are a signature of Seattle's pre-World War II housing developments. I feel a strong affection for these trees, visualizing them as arboreal grandmothers, their knotted limbs extended each summer with sweet snacks for we monkeykin.
Alas, given that the pepper tree is a fast grower, my hopeful rumination is unlikely in this case.
Of course, it begs the question, regarding the Boiler Works, "Where is the Canal?"
We's a gwine ter have a wing ding hyar, an RL peeps is a comin'. Summ a youse wot mebbe mought wanna come, youse is inviteried. Puh-leeze to email me and ah'll hep yez ter the haps, gatesters. Dig?
OK, so I missed Canada Day.
The Rights of Man, by Thomas Paine.
Being an Answer to Mr. Burke's Attack on the French Revolution
... It will be proper to take a review of the several sources from which governments have arisen and on which they have been founded.
They may be all comprehended under three heads.
First, Superstition.
Secondly, Power.
Thirdly, The common interest of society and the common rights of man.
The first was a government of priestcraft, the second of conquerors, and the third of reason.
When a set of artful men pretended, through the medium of oracles, to hold intercourse with the Deity, as familiarly as they now march up the back-stairs in European courts, the world was completely under the government of superstition. The oracles were consulted, and whatever they were made to say became the law; and this sort of government lasted as long as this sort of superstition lasted.
After these a race of conquerors arose, whose government, like that of William the Conqueror, was founded in power, and the sword assumed the name of a sceptre. Governments thus established last as long as the power to support them lasts; but that they might avail themselves of every engine in their favor, they united fraud to force, and set up an idol which they called Divine Right, and which, in imitation of the Pope, who affects to be spiritual and temporal, and in contradiction to the Founder of the Christian religion, twisted itself afterwards into an idol of another shape, called Church and State. The key of St. Peter and the key of the Treasury became quartered on one another, and the wondering cheated multitude worshipped the invention.
When I contemplate the natural dignity of man, when I feel (for Nature has not been kind enough to me to blunt my feelings) for the honour and happiness of its character, I become irritated at the attempt to govern mankind by force and fraud, as if they were all knaves and fools, and can scarcely avoid disgust at those who are thus imposed upon.
We have now to review the governments which arise out of society, in contradistinction to those which arose out of superstition and conquest.
It has been thought a considerable advance towards establishing the principles of Freedom to say that Government is a compact between those who govern and those who are governed; but this cannot be true, because it is putting the effect before the cause; for as man must have existed before governments existed, there necessarily was a time when governments did not exist, and consequently there could originally exist no governors to form such a compact with.
The fact therefore must be that the individuals themselves, each in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a compact with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist.
A wave of film noir is due on DVD shortly, hurrah!
From the Wikipedia link above:
Film noir tends to feature characters trapped in a situation (often a situation not of their making) and making choices out of desperation. Frequent themes are murder, betrayal, and infidelity. Films noirs tend to include dramatic shadows and stark contrast (a technique called low-key lighting).
Ahh, that's the stuff. Wikipedia crosslinks to a title list. Noirfilm is a sort of noir-lovers' co-op. Classic Noir digs a bit deeper than the box sets below. The site encourages browsers to pull a fast one, and check out a random film.
TCM (and Warner) is releasing a beautifully-designed box set soon, with "Murder, My Sweet," "The Set-Up," "Out of the Past," "Gun Crazy," and "The Asphalt Jungle."
Universal is also releasing a set, with "This Gun For Hire," "Criss Cross," "Black Angel," and "The Big Clock."
("The Big Clock" was a prominent influence on the Coen's "Hudsucker Proxy," for what it's worth.)
Questar will be springing "D.O.A," "Detour," "The Stranger," "Scarlet Street," and "Killer Bait," as well as a sixth disc of features which includes a raft of trailers.
Missing from these box sets is the terrific "Double Indemnity," starring Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck and Edward G. Robinson.
defective yeti slides an annotated spreadsheet of local drinking establishments' hours of the happy across the beer-puddled bar.
Although there is a bus ride in the middle, here are the things I see every day on my way to work. Yesterday morning, though, there was an added attraction: the burned-out remnants of Hillcrest Market.
(Grumble. The captions didn't come over from iPhoto and I'm out of steam.)
Not Funnies, notes the NYT Sunday mag. Hey Ma! Comics aren't just fa kids ennymore!
Comic books are what novels used to be -- an accessible, vernacular form with mass appeal -- and if the highbrows are right, they're a form perfectly suited to our dumbed-down culture and collective attention deficit. Comics are also enjoying a renaissance and a newfound respectability right now. In fact, the fastest-growing section of your local bookstore these days is apt to be the one devoted to comics and so-called graphic novels.
The piece is a decent survey of the state of affairs, and exhibits familiarity with general critical consensus on the authors and artists profiled or discussed. I am not certain I can evaluate it more critically than that at the moment. Perhaps if I reread it this evening.
Hillcrest Market Burns Bad - Tom Harpel has the story, and the pics.
Damn, Hillcrest is gone. That kinda blows. There are two other minimarts on that side of the hill, but Hillcrest was the largest. It was the one right across from Starbucks, at the odd five-way intersection of Olive and a bunch of other streets.
In 1999, Clark Humphrey noted that the building was originally one of the initial wave of Safeway stores, which first came to town in 1923.
Today was an insanely busy day. Errand after errand. Luckily, we were able to meet up with Spence for dinner and finally catch F 9/11, which stood up. It was like hearing an impassioned argument. It's worth seeing, and on the way home, Viv was saying how she wished she could get her Cuban-emigré parents to see it. She heated up a bit and blurted out, "Bush is like Castro!"
Now, I have to say that made me pause in confusion for a moment. But the underlying idea, of comparing President Bush to a long-reviled bugaboo of the right, is one that probably should be explored. It might get the big idea across. The idea that President Bush and his administration are a threat to America and the Constitution, that when they say "freedom" and "democracy" they mean "control" and "security state," well, if I compare them to certain other well known right-wing despots of the twentieth century, the discussion is over.
But comparing him to despots of the left, now that's an idea that just might bear fruit!
Lambiek: Harvey Pekar.
Pekar's music reviews, an interview, and an article on Pynchon.
It's interesting that there appears to be no anthology of his non-comics writing, something I'd love to read.
I chuckled my way through Tad Friend's Letter from California, "Naked Profits," in the July 12 and 13 issue of The New Yorker, unfortunately not online.
Friend is (or was) a staff writer at the magazine, and wrote the interesting "Jumpers" for a 2003 issue of the magazine, in which institutional resistance to jump-proofing scenic landmarks was dissected.
Here, Friend turns an arch if not-unfriendly eye on the employee buyout of the San Francisco Lusty Lady. The Lusty Lady is a strip club (although I'm sure there's a better word for it now, given the circumstances). There is also a Lusty Lady in Seattle, which has produced at least one book. Both facilities have a reputation for being a bit different than the general run of erotic entertainment parlors.
Friend has a happy time with the personal and dramatic interplay familiar to anyone who has ever worked in or helped to run a co-op. My favorite passage is simple recounting of an exchange during a meeting:
...A few minutes later she unveiled a new plan. "I've been reading a book about creative organizational management," she said. "I'm proposing we have an Employee of the Week and give her a five dollar coupon to Vesuvio's" -- a local bar.Several of the board members snapped their fingers approvingly.
Not mentioned in the passage are several things. First, the San Francisco Lusty Lady is in North Beach (a fact that may be in the story, I can't recall), as is Vesuvio ("at Jack Kerouac Alley"), which makes much of its' connection to the Beats.
Thus, finger-snapping.
The Seattle Times: 2004 Backyard Blog project. The local establishment's paper invites your application to blog for them on the topic of this year's election.
[via our Far East Bureau]
I think this is an interesting experiment. Paul thinks I should apply but I don't think I have time. On the other hand, actually focusing on politics as a topic would be an interesting alternative to the occasional irruptive fits I exhibit here currently.
(Minneapolis) City Pages: Girl, Interrupted chronicles the Plain Layne saga, a blogtempest that sounds ever-so fascinating, but which I utterly missed, not being blogmotized at the moment.
[via AZ]
Frankenstein: Life's Been Good To Me So Far. PF celebrates his 3rd blogiversary. Three years? Amazing what time dilation on a September morning will do for perceived temporal duration.
I'm a bit sozzled with sleepiness.
Viv and I went to the Museum of Flight to see the new wing, and ogle the flying antiques.
After years of hunting, I found a NASA cap, to replace one lost to sleep-deprivation during the dotcom era. The new cap's OK, but I still miss the old one, which was better made.
As always, I was as interested in the techniques used in presenting the artifacts in the exhibit as I was in the artifacts themselves. One interesting aspect of the expansive WWI collection is the high percentage of reproductions on display. Sadly, there was no rollup to show me the sums, but I'm sure I'll work it out eventually.
The only well-known plane that did not appear in the WWI gallery that I noted as missing off the top of my head was the Nieuport 17. However, a Nieuport 24 and a Nieuport 27 were both featured.
Here is the complete list.
Some clients, who live far, far away, have a tangled home LAN that I believe I will be drafted to fix in late summer.
AFAIK, the topology is like this:
[cable modem] --> [non-apple wireless router + 5 port hub] --> Apple OS X PowerBook, Wintel Latop B, Wintel Box C, Wintel Box D
I believe A(pple) and B are wirelessly on the LAN, while C and D are wired to the hub. I believe they have a shared printer, but don't know if it's running off a computer, a print server, or has an ethernet connection. I suspect it's a locally-shared printer running off of one of the wired Wintels. Roadrunner is the cable provider.
I believe they just plugged in the router and the AP and turned them on. They got the wireless hub a few years after the cable router modem. They've complained to me of a mysterious, troubleshooting-resistant inability to establish a VPN to his employer, something that 'just happened.'
I have been unable to traceroute back to their machines; the trace stops at the cable modem. The net effect of this is that I can't set up VNC to look directly at their computers' settings.
I strongly suspect that both the router modem and the AP are acting as DHCP servers; I believe this would account for the network problems they've mentioned. They said "Huh?" when I asked if their cable provider had given them docs on configuring the cable modem (to do things like setting up port forwarding, for example).
A series of questions, then:
Given a stable, if reerky, IP topology like this:
192.x.x.x -> 172.x.x.x -> 10.0.0.1, 10.0.0.2, ...
where
- the 172-class number is a DHCP-assigned address from the 192-class modem
- and the 10-class addresses are assigned from the AP
[UPDATE: it's unclear if the cable modem is a router itself or if DHCP was provisioned to the home via the ISP's DHCP on the other side of the modem.]
1. is it going to be possible to set up a dynDNS solution that allows me to use VNC?
2. Do non-VNC remote screen viewers (Apple Remote Desktop and Timbuktu) provide an iChat-like way to route the data through spaghetti LANs so that I can see the local settings and work the problem without going there?
3. What will my options be regarding the cable modem? Can I just replace it with the router, if the hardware connections work? Alternatively, to what extent are Roadrunner cable modems user-configurable?
I am not planning on setting up any outward-facing servers, so I do not believe there's even a potential violation of the cable provider's TOS (WiFi notwithstanding).
Finally, in order to do this, I must brush up on my Wintel networking skillz. I'd love to hear some book recommendations.
A day or two ago I somehow happened to hear a song that was unfamiliar to me but obviously by Tom Petty, which included the lyric
She grew up in an Indiana town,I idly wondered, 'Huh, is that Tom Petty? Why is he singing about Indiana?'
Had a good-lookin' mama who never was around.
But she grew up tall and she grew up right
With them Indiana boys on them Indiana nights
Now, and I know this may come as a shock, I don't listen to much contemporary commercial radio, talk, music, or otherwise, so I had no idea that Mary Jane's Last Dance was a 1994 top ten hit for the blonde, reedy-voiced singer.
The song finished with an Indianapolis-specific lyric:
There's pigeons down in Market SquareMarket Square, per se, may not exist. But Market Square Arena was Indiana's largest venue for touring rock bands, one that Petty has surely played dozens of times since his late-seventies emergence in American rock. When I heard this lyric, I (mis?)understood it to describe the titular Mary Jane as a billboard model on the Arena's banners, observed by the narrator as he looks down from his hotel room.
She's standin' in her underwear
Lookin' down from a hotel room
Nightfall will be comin' soon
The Indiana references puzzled me, and the song reminded me of another song by Petty. Once again, I encountered this song in anomalous way - I learned how to play it with some friends years ago, and had no idea who it was by or what the original sounded like. All I knew was that it was a seventies rock number. My disinterest in the genre prevented me from exploring it further for some time.
Well she was an American girl raised on promisesAmerican Girl is from Petty's first LP, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, released in 1976. Breakdown is probably the best-known song on that album.
She couldn't help thinking that there was
little more to life somewhere else
After all it was a great big world with lots of places to run to
And if she had to die trying she had one little promise she was gonna keep
At any rate, these fragments were clacking around in my head when we went to see Spiderman 2 yesterday. the film opens with a slow zoom out from, um, well...
A giant billboard photo of a model named Mary Jane.
This started to give me the willies, a wee bit, and so I've spent part of today treading Googlefluid in an attempt to answer some questions. In the excercise I have also learned some interesting things, the most tasty of which is that American Girl was written twenty-eight years ago today, July 4, 1976. The same source, a University of Florida student newspaper, reports that the narrative of American Girl (which involves a woman standing on a high balcony with unclear thoughts of dissatisfaction in her head) is probably not based on a supposedly-true incident of dorm-building suicide.
Why Florida? Well, Petty is from Florida and California. Which begs my original question, why Indiana?
This is a question I believe will simply go unanswered. This page collects some anecdotes about the song, including the tidbit that Mary Jane's Last Dance was originally titled Indiana Girl, but otherwise sheds no light on the subject.
In my own mind the singer is certainly linked with my experience of the state in which I mostly grew up. It's fair to say I was one of those Indiana boys in the Indiana night, if possibly not the Skoal-cap variety the lyric may call to mind. I've done my fair share of skinny-dipping in quarries as the midsummer night sounds thickened the humid, still air. I certainly hope I did my bit to help some Indiana girls grow up fast and grow up right. Discretion here draws the curtains on this pastoral.
I should clarify. Petty's role in my Indiana youth was not to illuminate or romanticize the ways of youth, but rather to serve as a somewhat baffling weapon of ostracism. The particular lyric is from 1980's Damn the Torpedoes. The album's hits were Don't Do Me Like That and Refugee.
In Refugee, Petty sings
Somewhere, somehow,
Somebody must have kicked you around some.
Who knows why you wanna lay there and revel in your abandon.
It don't make no difference to me, baby,
Everybody's had to fight to be free,
You see you don't have to live like a refugee.
After I returned from living abroad for a year, drastically changed in appearance, some of the redneck students in my high school determined that this song encapsulated something about me, in their eyes. They dubbed me "Refugee," and I was greeted with it as some sort of taunt for a period of time. I still don't get it.
Somewhere, somehow,
Somebody must have kicked you around some.
Who knows? Maybe you were kidnapped,
Tied up, taken away, and held for ransom.
It don't really matter to me, baby,
Everybody's had to fight to be free,
You see you don't have to live like a refugee.
Were they threatening me? I think, in fact, that this was the intended implication, as repeated violent encounters with members of this group of kids marked my entire high school experience.
If that is indeed the case, I can only savor the inverted meaning. I am threatened with violent enforcement of some sort of social or behavioral code, presumably because I am 'acting like a refugee.' The enaction of this violent corrective would involve 'someone kicking me around some,' which in the song prompts the problematic behavior. I could only conclude that I was to be encouraged in my deviance.
This campaign culminated in one particularly spectacular beating. It ended when an on-site police officer tackled the much larger goon who was happily engaged in pounding my face into mush against the ground. That event concluded with me holding the goon's sister in my arms and comforting her as she wailed, because her brother had been arrested (again) and would certainly have to go to jail. Later I learned, unsurprisingly, that said goon had the whuppin' kind of Daddy.
So in my mind, Petty's work is associated with a particularly American kind of pointless, inherited violence, self-loathing expressed as a kind of xenophobia. It's not the artist's fault, and I have to say, it's barely the goon's. But I surely do see it as a deeply embedded part of Hoosier and American character.
Well it was kinda cold that night
She stood alone on her balcony
Yeah, she could hear the cars roll by
Out on 441 like waves crashin' on the beach
And for one desperate moment
There he crept back in her memory
God it's so painful when something that's so close
Is still so far out of reach
Oh yeah, all right
Take it easy, baby
Make it last all night
She was an American girl
Viv and I caught Spiderman 2 this afternoon, after a few errands. We ran into Tom and Rachel on their way to see F911, outside their building.
There were so many movies opening this weekend or last that I wish to see, I was uncertain what we would watch, leaving it up to semi-random chance. Predictably enough, the film with the highest number of screens won out. (The other film choices were De-Lovely, F 9-11, or Before Sunset, all of which I look forward to seeing soon. So many movies! So little time!)
Miscellaneous reviews had mush-mouthed it that the film might be the most successful superhero film ever (often using a construction that included the words "comic-book," which appears to me to be related to the manner in which "sci-fi" is employed in mainstream critical assessments of genre film which employ techniques of speculative fiction, but then I'm a sorehead about marginalizing genre, so never mind me muttering hatefully over in the corner, no, pay me no mind whatsoever).
I can break that down for ya: it's the best of these films by a substantial amount. It's much better than the first Spiderman.
Its' more-sophisticated use of visual effects and remarkable overall visual design closely recalls the dramatic, compelling imagery of (oddly) 1970's Batman comics by Neal Adams. In particular, among these technical adjustments and improvements, the breathtaking fights stood out. These worked on screen as direct visual analogues of the most effective comic-book action sequences, are by far the most effective cinematic expression of that particular facet of comics.
In one scene, Aunt May is being tossed about by Dock Ock, and Spidey is set to leap over to her rescue. Raimi slows time in the shots, leisurely cutting back and forth between May, Ock, and Spidey, dissecting the actions within a fraction of a second. Time, in comics, is a flexible medium. Recognition of this, and discussion thereof, is like a secret password into higher comics greeketry. Repeatedly during the film I found myself gasping in admiration for this and other daring transubstantiations that Raimi and the writers had concocted.
In this sense, Spiderman 2 is clearly the most accomplished superhero comic-book film. But, however successful and amazing these aspects of the movie are, that's mere window dressing to the beauty and operatic power of the story. The operatic reach and ambition of superhero comics is the single hardest thing to translate to other mediums, and here, it's done with wit and grace.
Everyone knows that Spiderman and Peter Parker are the everyman of men in tights, due to Parker's character definition as an uncertain nebbish of a youth. In this story, the writers - principally, I suspect, one writer - utterly exceed any prior Spiderman writing that I'm aware of. I'll admit to limited exposure to the canon, but what grabs me in the film is not generally what is observed in mainstream comics, and therefore I'm pretty confident that no-one previously wrote Spidey this deeply.
The amount of the script seen on screen which may be credited to Michael Chabon is unclear. Chabon completed a pre-shooting draft which was then turned over to another writer. To me, the particular qualities of the script which lift it into extraordinary territory appear to be Chabon's. Unfortunately for us, his website hasn't been updated since November, 2003, a darn shame.
In his remarkable Kavalier and Klay, he takes the basic thematic material of a superhero, as well as the circumstances of his creation, and creates an involving, intricate literary structure in which character is presented in such a manner that the author's thematic concerns are refracted in a nearly schematic way on to the cast that he writes.
In Spiderman 2, the same thing happens in the depiction and definition of each one of the primary characters. It even affects, for a fleeting moment, the amusing J. Jonah Jameson, as he expresses regret for having driven Spidey off the streets.
The only prior genre-oriented comics-related writing - not counting Chabon's Kavalier and Klay - that unfolds with such reflective, structural depth is that of Alan Moore on Watchmen (and to a lesser extent in From Hell).
The film is an absolute triumph, better in every way than its' predecessor, and without a doubt will prove to be a freakishly hard act to follow.
In miscellaneous other notes, there is a scene in which Parker and Mary Jane meet in a coffee shop to miscommunicate about their relationship, when the building-shaking thuds of Doc Ock's approach definitively disrupt the meeting. The scene is nearly an exact reoccurrence of a scene in local mincomics collective Gannon Studio's remarkable GoXXilla, a short work which also unexpectedly verges on literary depth.
As we seated ourselves, I noted Christian from MeFi one row ahead of us. However, I had forgotten his name, and therefore did not greet him. Should he one day read this: my bad.
A final trivial note: In the scene in which Peter falls on a group of parked cars in an alley, hard, and stumbles away holding his back and moaning, "my back, my back," on the wall to the left of the shot, Neckface grafitti is clearly visible. New York is much more directly present as a place, as a superset of specific locations, in this film than in the prior film. Interestingly, New York is also a major theme in Kavalier and Klay I'm quite positive that whatever business is currently located at 233 Bleecker, they are seeing an uptick in business that will probably continue for at least the summer.
(Oh, man, I love that. In the film 233 is a pizza place, Joe's, that fires Peter. When I googled it for that link, what did I find? Joe's Pizza.)
Building Airships and Flying-Machines, by G. H . Curtiss. [at Bizarre Stuff.]
In building an airship, it is well to first determine the weight of the frame, propellers, engine, controlling mechanism and operator; then build, or purchase, the gas bag, of proper dimensions and sufficient capacity to lift the desired weight, together with a reasonable amount of ballast, which in a one-man outfit should be about 50 lb. Experience has taught us that a 7-hp. engine driving a suitable propeller will furnish sufficient pull to drive a one-man airship as fast as it can be readily controlled.
The casual reader may wish to note that Mr. Curtiss is less noted for his contributions to lighter-than-air aviation than for his distinguished contributions to powered flight.
Zepps, at the recently cited Dannysoar site, contains plans for not one but TWO stick-and-tissue free-flight model zeps. Ah, lovely.
Dannysoar's stuff is absolutely top-notch; it's even somehow appropriate that the site employs aggregational navigation.
UPDATE: Oh my God. Le Gyroptère, a mono-wing helicopter aparently modeled upon the flight technique employed by maple seeds. Amazingly, copious documentation of this incredible thing exists.
The roadkill cooked slowly, only gradually charring enough to allow one to easily slough the charred skin. Once that material patched off, an unsightly orange tone was observed in the yet-underdone flesh of the item.
Later, we were set upon by a night nibbler.
