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YOUR Ken Goldstein of the week

Here it is!

ken_liberty.jpg

Suitable for framing, using as a desktop, or any such thing that strikes your fancy. I have a very limited supply of Ken Goldsteins, and would like to take the opportunity to solicit more Ken Goldsteins. I will, I promise, add to the publically available selection, and possibly – just possibly – make amusing photoshop art with them, such as superimposing Ken’s head on the face of a pulp-fiction astronaut or possibly – and this is no promise, just me letting the creative muse wander – witty animations in which the various Ken Goldsteins act as, oh, let’s say vaudeville stars.

And, you know, given enough Ken Goldsteins, it’s possible, I think, to conceive of a great and mighty work for the internet in the sorry post-boom days. Dare I convey it?

Of course I do. If you ask nicely, someday, yes my friends, there may well appear in your browser the Kengoldstein Dance. But only given a sufficient supply of Ken Goldsteins.

Did I mention that Ken Goldstein has a blog, called the Illuminated Donkey and that I’ve badgered, teased, and amused Ken Goldstein into linking to me quite frequently?

Alas, I, in my churlish self-absorption, have linked to Ken much less frequently.

No more! From now on, I promise! A Ken Goldstein of the week while supplies last – and they’ll last some time if my readers (all six of you, no make that five, one just clicked out on one of these many, many links to Ken Goldstein‘s blog, the Illuminated Donkey) supply me with more!

the Illuminated Donkey has actually also provided me with a lead, by tracking down many other Ken Goldsteins here and here.

Posted on by mwhybark

Four Word Film Review

Browsing site-visitor Kiyo’s site, I noted with interest this link to Four-Word Film Review.

Four taken at random:

2001: “Ape, monolith, Jupiter, baby”
Apocalypse Now: “Fat Brando. The horror.”
Dodeskaden: “Crazy boy, Tokyo ruins” (I got to write this one!)
Alien: “Don’t chase the cat!”

Although these random examples include mostly synopsis, there are also critical reviews, and it amused me.

Posted on by mwhybark

Gil Kane interviews Walt Kelly audio!

This mp3 audio interview at The Comics Journal pairs two of America’s greatest brush-and-ink men! Specail guest appearance by Rube Goldberg! Rube Goldberg!

Man! I can’t wait to hear this! (More on Kane’s estimable work to come)

Uh, while you’re at the CJ, I’m sure you’ll want to read this account of a comics award ceremony in Spain involving Peter Bagge, Art Speigelman, Osama bin Laden, the WTC, and live sex acts. I am still having a hard time keeping it all straight in my mind.

Posted on by mwhybark

Wired redesign

Venerable technocapitalist cheerleader (or apologist) Wired has undergone a sobering redesign, in which quite a few changes have taken place. Gone, gone, gone, are the Wired Index (which is messed up: watching how tech stocks fare in a downturn is MUCH more interesting than watching them in a giant boom – wait, maybe they canned this a while ago) and the Ticker, that long, multi-page, one-line thread of text that was used as a divider in the opening profiles and news nuggets.

Also, apparently gone are the multipage visual introductions to features. The most subtle change I noticed was the abandonment of Wired’s house font, Wiredbaum, for body text.

In a flash of creativity (not), they’ve gone all out in the search for the most radical, challenging, forward looking font family that could possibly use for heads, subs, captions, and body copy and determined that the font which most fervently matches today’s zoom-zoom techno-conomy is…. Helvetica, a font which first came to prominence in the late 1920s and last saw truly universal employment in design during the recession of the 1970s.

Uh. Maybe this, like the well-known skirt index, is a sign that the current economic downturn will be a long one.

On a positive note, this was the first issue in a long time that I did not throw across the room in irritation at least once. I loved the first two years of Wired; but once they started running covers featuring 60-year-old money managers, I knew my love affair was over.

For the last few years Wired’s editorial direction was driven by the lust for dough and no longer the lust for technoutopia, no matter how hard they tried to convince their readership that they were the same thing. They ain’t, never have been, and shouldn’t be. The more they played up that neoclassical global capitalist cheerleading claptrap the more my stomach hurt from reading the damn thing.

Posted on by mwhybark

Friedman: Internet makes us dumb

Posted on by mwhybark

Spidey

Viv and I, along with all the rest of the country, dropped into our friendly neighborhood multiplex this weekend to see “Spider-Man”.

My viewing experience bears out the reviews I’d noted; Toby Maguire is perfectly cast, the story was deftly and wittily handled, Dafoe’s usually better than this, the digital FX were somehow not as good as they should have been (Dude! Ida no how to fix ’em! They just were, well, to computery or something!).

The film suceeds in actually translating the archetypal, finely balanced quality of Silver Age Marvel books in such a way that the story is not resolved at the expense of a major ongoing plot point, which has been a modus operandi of pretty much all superhero comics movies to date.

An additional suprise of the film was the effect of director Sam Raimi’s insistence on using the genuine New York metropolitan area as his setting. In essence, New Yoork, as it does in many great films set in the city, becomes a major supporting character.

However, the emotional force that this character delivers doesn’t come from the filme itself, but from the events of 9/11. All through the flm I felt like I was seeing a dead relative, alive again. Now, I know NYC didn’t die on 9/11, but of course everyone that watched the events of that day has been affected by it one way or another.

The filmakers decided to reshoot the ending, which involved the WTC in a crucial manner, and this delayed release of the film. Thus, the film has no shot in which the towers appear, and no reference to the fall of the towers, either, which is odd, if understandable.

Scenes of parts of a building in the edge of Times Square exploding and falling into the street also had a very different resonance than they would have when the scene was written and shot. There, additionally, was a gratuitous shot of a crowd on a bridge pelting the baddie Green Goblin with debris during which a random person declares “You attack one of us and you attack us all”, which as understandable an addition as it is, felt clumsy and unneeded. It certainly did NOT provoke the fist-pumping cries of “Yeah!” it was intended to. I imagine it tests differently the closer you are to NYC.

Anyway, seeing the city up there on the big screen made me realize how much I’m looking forward to seeing it agin the next time I fly into JFK. The approach uses the coolest flightpath in the world, and circumnavigates Manhattan from stem to stern and back again before skimming the roofs of Governor’s Island.

So I enjoyed the movie. Sam Raimi has definitely made better flicks, but at the same time, it’s clear that this film is really among the better efforts in the genre. I have no idea how he’d go about it, but I’d love to see the same tense, giggly “I can’t believe that just happened” quality the Evil Dead movies have in a followup Spidey flick.

Posted on by mwhybark

update experiment

I experimentally updated a post here to see how it would affect the MT front page update list.

It was immediately visible there, and stayed on their front page for just over 35 minutes. One site visitor came here from there in that time.

Although I know that updating their full donors list (a donation enables the update list there) is not at the top of the giant list of things they have to do, there are about 430 donors appearing on that list, at $20 (minimum) each. That’s a mere, if estimated, $8.6k. Not chump change, surely, but, my goodness, Movable Type is such an awesome piece of software I’d really have expected more.

Interestingly, if we assume that all 430 donors update their blogs on average once a day (obviously a shaky assumption), and further assume that those updates are evenly distributed over any given 24-hour period, then we can predict than in any given hour, about 17 blogs will rotate through the list of ten most recently updated blogs.

Which means that on average, the front-page link should last a bit longer than half an hour. Exactly what I observed.

In practice, of course, the updates aren’t evenly spread out over 24 hours. Since I’m on the left coast and tend to publish the next day’s entry at bedtime (11:30 to midnight, give or take), and the majority of MT’s users are probably located in the US, updates come slowly after that time of night, and my recently updated link tends to stay up much longer overnight.

And in fact, last night I had site visitors via that link from Japan, Hawaii, and Australia, as well as two nighthawks from Vanderbilt University and Baltimore over a three-and-a-half-hour window.

All of which I find interesting in a musing kind of manner.

So: Oz, I say “G’day” to ya!

Nippon, “Yo-koso!” (which, I sure hope. means “Welcome!”)

Update: Kiyo, via a comment on this entry, corrected my mis-spelling, which was “Yu-koso”. I corrected it, and (ahem) arigato, Kiyo-san!

http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/japan/
will provide a handy link which should translate my site into kanji, I think.

Thanks for visiting! I hope I can be of service, or something.

Posted on by mwhybark

Andy's Diner, Seattle

On May 5th, Viv and I finally pulled into the parking lot of the train-car diner south of the sports stadiums here in Seattle, Andy’s Diner. We, along with the rest of Seattle, have driven by this landmark for years without ever venturing in.

The restaurant closed for a period but reopened, I think, in 2001. Diners as a restaurant species in Seattle as a whole are completely endangered, and have been closing up all over the city since the mid-nineties. This is a drag since I subscribe to the “formica equals good cheap eats and bad coffee” belief system. I’m still not over the closure in the early nineties of the other Andy’s Diner on Broadway in my neighborhood, Capitol Hill.

Sadly, in fact, the last of the Hill’s greasy spoons, the kick-ass diner-slash-bar Ernie Steele’s (under the pseudonym Ilene’s Sports Bar) closed a few months ago, and just reopened as a Julia’s (an extension of the Wallingford eatery).

We walked the front doors of the train-car Andy’s at about 5 pm on a Saturday. The joint was totally empty. We were seated in a turn-of-the-century train car that had its’ original booths removed and replaced with two and four-top tables. The car was narrower than the cars currently used by the also-endangered Amtrak. It retained not only a great deal of the original fixtures but additionally a great deal of the preceding century’s nicotine buildup. For all that the car was currently non-smoking.

I tried ordering a microbrew (stupid! what was I thinking?) and was informed that actually, ALL the taps were offline, and I could choose between Corona or MGD. I shoulda just ordered a Manhattan. I went with the MGD.

I ended up ordering the 10 oz New York Strip with hashbrowns and breaded oysters. The oysters, much to my surprise, were a total triumph. This dish was once a staple of Northwestern cuisine, and I have many a happy memory of noshing on ’em with my grandparents. They don’t appear on many menus any more, and when they do, they often SUCK. Not these, not at all.

The steak was OK, nothing speacial. Viv got a porkchop dish which, I cannot stress enough, was spectacular. Our vegetables were also perfectly prepared. In short, to my astonishment, the cook kicked ass.

Our total bill? Forty-one clams. A complete bargain, less than half what we would have paid for the same meal and service on the Hill.

After eating, we wandered around the interior of the diner, which was apparently constructed entirely of old railcars (perhaps as many as ten). It was pretty empty, although a steady migration of middle-age folks were streaming into the “lounge car”.

Among other wonders, I found a case full of bowling trophies from the sixties, and a television lounge featuring not a soul, a seventies Zenith color teevee and several orange naugahyde lounge chairs.

These last wonders were located in a rail car which was used by FDR in the late 30s and was installed as a part of Andy’s at its’ opening in 1946. Let me clarify that: YOU CAN HAVE A PRIVATE PARTY IN A RAILCAR USED BY FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT AT ANDY’S DINER IN NEAR SOUTH SEATTLE!

Hm, I just realized that since the Museum of Flight (located just a smidge further south) currently hosts the Lyndon Baynes Johnson Air Force One 707, one could eat at FDR’s traveling table just prior to observing LBJ’s hydraulically mounted monument to the psychology of power. LBJ had a specially constructed seating area on the plane, with a raised seat for him. Everyone else got radically, unconventionally low bench seats at the table. The table itself is hydraulically mounted so that it can be moved up and down at the press of a button.

You’ll NEVER guess which person seated at the table could reach the buttons. By which I mean you already know who held that power.

So I think that’s a neat possiblility. Eat lunch with FDR and Eleanor, and thank them for the important things they did for our republic; tour LBJ’s plane, and realize he was practically a nutcase.

You should know I think that these two are also the best Presidents of the century, men who rival one another, and Lincoln, in the service they performed for our country.

Andy’s Diner,
2963 4th Ave. South,
Seattle, WA 98134-1914
(206) 624-4097

No URL that I could find.

But I did find this cool matchbook cover art for the jernt at the American Matchcover Collecting Club. Zounds! Someone tell Jimmy Lileks about this!