Around 1986, I visited my sister in Bruxelles. One evening, we visited a young man who was a critic, and who specialiized in bandes dessinées, comics. His rundown nineteenth century student apartment was lined, floor to ceiling, in hard-bound albums, the large format 64-page books that are standard for 'serious' Euro-comics. They were all in French, and we were there to drink and argue politics and music, so I didn't really get a crack at them.
Those old nineteenth-century rooms tend to have high ceilings. So I'm guessing he must have had about sixty-four linear feet of wall, multiplied by six sixteen-inch shelves. call it 3600 linear feet, each quarter-inch a bound book of the post-war European effusion of comics. 14,400 titles.
Occasionally, when my squarebound comics were out and accessible, someone would remark upon them. The clearest recollection I have of these from was a guy who had tagged along into the space with some pals. He was bored as we discussed whatever it was they were there to talk about but i noticed him bending down to the comics shelf and becoming engrossed.
As they left, he turned to me and gestured, saying, “dude, that is the comics collection of a dream.”
Having actually seen something that put my six linear feet of albums into perspective, I demurred.
As a child, I intensely desired the Endless Book. Now that it flows through my computer hourly, I see that I was quite mistaken in my desires, exactly as forewarned.
Finally getting some semi-normal PNW weather. My glass-room part of the house was in the eighties today; it is time to start sprouting stuff. Nevermind the drought out in the Big Room.
Spent today running around with Viv. We ate breakfast at the new-to-us Caprice Kitchen, at 80th and 15th in upper Ballard, and enjoyed it. Looks like it might be worth a trip for dinner. Google Street View shows fewer businesses at that corner than there are now, most of which look newish. However it also looks like there was a bar in the process of opening in mid-December which has stalled out, and as we wandered around Ballard I noticed tons of work-stopped condo development sites. Not necessarily a bad thing considering the general fugliness of the majority of the condo-vomit that got tossed up around town between 2002 and 2008, but clear evidence of the local effects of the sudden change in financing.
As it happened we also walked into three small businesses advertising closing sales and walked by a couple more vacant storefronts on Ballard Avenue. We did our bit, though. We bought a new-construction bedframe, in fact, a not-inexpensive proposition.
However the only place we dropped by that was elbows-to-asses at all was the Ballard Goodwill. The place was packed! It's at 8th and 60th, and as we left I realized how close it was to the old Ballard Playhouse and the bars up there like Reading Gaol. I actually counted a total of SEVEN bars in that two-block strip, and nominate it for future League consideration.
my parents brought back a tooled-leather-topped table and stools set from Peru in the early sixties. Today I came across a similar table - it's odd to feel the similar surface again after twenty-odd years.
I've been using Opera at work on XP lately, and honestly, I like it the best of all the available browsers at the moment. Opera on OS X feels clunky, for some reason.
I should note this for non-twitter peeps: Manuel and I discovered a twitter feed by someone called hoboclown that has been somewhat amusing.
Years ago, Viv and I saw, once only, a bizarre ad for Taco Bell's 'enchirito,' featuring the word sung by four guys singing in a circular group as the camera panned around their faces.
We both stopped what we were doing or talking about and yelled 'what was that?“ but the hilarious strangeness of the ad was never to reappear. Struck by a thought - that YouTube is the Facebook of obscure ad clips - I took a look.
I give you: The Enchirito Boys. Note that they are, in fact, named in the context of the ad. Maybe they went on to become Comcast housemates or something. UPDATE: MT squashed the hell out of the embed, so I just linked.
Richard Hatch on his just concluded time as Tom Zarek on BSG.
Awesome, so great to see one of the BSG folks using the internet to think out loud about what they have been doing.
I can't wait until we hear from the others, too. It's seemed clear to me for some time that Hatch was playing his character against the script, that as written Zarek is a cynical manipulator of discontent, but that Hatch chose to see the role as a committed revolutionary representing what he saw as the inevitable will of the people. By playing it that way, he improved the series against consistently weak writing around labor issues in particular and around weaker political writing in general.
Doing so permitted him, and the series, the luxury to elevate itself to levels of drama generally reserved for the Greeks and Shakespeare. Mr. Moore owes Richard Hatch his most sincere thanks, more more than he knows.
So, Mr. Hatch, I thank you. You transcended yourself and your character's written role, and in so doing deepened the art of your co-workers. Thanks again for taking the time to write about it afterwards.
The snow is mking tiny, sharp noises against the window for the second night in a row. I'm not stressed, exactly - we have a plan, it worked today and it should work tomorrow. The snow from last night didn't even last, but by the time we were headed home, it had started up.
Man, I left the Midwest to get the fuck away from this kind of weather. I mean, these snowfalls this winter still have amounted to a mere gesture in the direction of the kind of shit I lived through as a kid, but the high points are there. Municipal incompetence and unpreparedness. Prolonged personal discomfort. Et cetera.
I have made light of false winter and true winter over the past year. Turns out I hate true winter as bad as false winter.
Roll on, rock on, raw bones
Well there's still a lot of rythm in these
Rockin' Bones
I wanna leave a happy memory when I go,
I wanna leave something to let the whole world know,
that the rock n roll daddy has a done passed on,
but my bones will keep a rockin' long after I've gone
Roll on, rock on, raw bones
Well there's still a lot of rythm in these
Rockin' Bones
Well when I die don't you bury me at all
Just nail my bones up on the wall
Beneath these bones let these words be seen,
"This is the bloody gears of a boppin' machine"
Roll on, rock on, raw bones
Well there's still a lot of rythm in these
Rockin' Bones
I don't worry about tomorrow just thinkin' about tonight
My bones are getting restless and I do it up right
A few more times around a hardwood floor
Before we turn off the lights and close the door
Roll on, rock on, raw bones
Well there's still a lot of rythm in these
Rockin' Bones
Picked up the new Belgium seasonal this weekend. It's a nice hoppy pale called Mighty Arrow, memorializing a brewery dog it seems. I LOVE THE BEER. The tiny picture of the dog on the label seems to resemble Rocket, too. It's the first New Belgium product that immediately led me to desire a tee shirt or some such.
