Posted on by mwhybark

parental units

So, it’s like this: Mom and Dad are in town. Yesterday we went to the Museum of Flight and just as we pulled into the parking lot, a paiir of Air Force F-14s flew in low and fast to land at the strip behind the museum. It was distracting to pokey through the parking lot as my fellow airplane geeks all stampeded to the fence.

A few minutes later the advance team for the Blue Angels, which will be providing the ear-shattering in my neighborhood at the end of the week, flew in. It was serendipitous timing – I had no idea that they were arriving yesterday and it was neat to be there with my dad.

Inside, I was disappointed to see that the Gee Bee racer had been disassembled and perched wingless in the parking lot – later, I learned it had been in the Seafair pararde last friday. My disappointment was made up by both the addition since last week of a Rumpler Taube reproduction and my father’s joy at seeing the amazing, unrestored Caproni.

While we were there, one of the two-person articulated flight simulators froze-up – the computer locked in-flight, and the capsule stopped moving. It was elevated by several feet and as we watched the attendants struggle to release it we realized that the capsule was also upside down.

Anyway, it’s been an enjoyable visit from Mom and Dad. Doesn’t look like we’re going to get out to the mountains with them, though. Too bad.

Posted on by mwhybark

Spam fighting

SpamAssassin Milter on MacOS X describes how one person managed to get Spam Assassin up and running, server side, on OS X.

I managed to muddle through the foundational work, but was unable to get the sendmail distribution to unzip. The distro requires PGP key verification, which I was ignoring because I did not want to spend more time chasing half-documented implementations of SW for OS X all over the web.

So the bogus untarring could be because of that.

I am reminded that I am not a person who enjoys this sort of thing. I am reminded that I saw a copy of “Close to the Machine” in a used booksale the other day and thought, hm, I should read that some day. That which is broken shall remain so.

Posted on by mwhybark

Let's see now…

Man, where to begin.

Ah, I know.

I have two stories in Tablet seventy-three: a quick look at the Dark Fairytales show up at Roq la Rue, and a review of the new French film Chaos. Neither story was up on their website as I write this, but my scanned clip is. (UPDATE: they are up now.)

I was not completely happy with either piece when I turned them in – but my disaffection deepened after deadline. In the Roq la Rue piece I sorta chickened out of doing actual art criticism and instead tried to do a more reported piece about the opening itself and what gallery owner Kirsten Anderson’s intentions for the show were. It’s a very short piece and maybe I was trying to do too much.

The show opened on the day that Nike announced that it was buying Converse, home of the Chuck Taylor All-Star, and I had planned to see if I could find an artist at the opening who was wearing Chucks to discuss this event with. Instead, I tried to mix social activity with being at the opening, meeting friends, and so forth, and it just didn’t happen all around. Oh well. Maybe next time.

I think part of the problem was that the natural thing for me to do in a critical manner would have been to compare and contrast a work I found successful with one I felt did not succeed. Anderson’s thoughts and positioning of the work of the artists in the show – and in her gallery in general – were very interesting on their own, so I kinda dodged a bullet. Of course, her blanket assertion that the artists in the show use their appropriated pop-culture imagery without irony is at best debatable. Surely she doesn’t actually think the big-eyed Keane kids look or the reworking of the Smurfette into sex bomb is a straightforward act of visual creation with the same directness as an image of Jesus in a Howard Finster work.

The review of Chaos is honest and reflects my perceptions – I really didn’t care for the movie. However, I used the term “racist” to describe the way that Algerians are portrayed in several segments of the film, a charge the film partially invites me to make. In a scene, a protagonist seeks help from a French civil-rights organization, S.O.S Racisme, and gets kicked out for being a hooker, basically.

I don’t think I used the term appropriately. The segments of the film that depict the family life of Algerians in France are full of ugly stereotypes, but the stereotypes are cultural, not racial, in nature.

The other part of the film that irritated me, and which I noted, if briefly, is that the terrible clumsiness of the narrative of the hooker’s brutal life contrasts so thoroughly with the grace and wit of the comedy of domestic alienation that makes up the rest of the film. If the filmmaker had chosen to frame the narrative as suspect – it’s presented in voiceover from a brutalized hooker – the use of the pulp-fiction elements and stereotypes could have shifted from ugly public myth reinforcement to witty filmmaking. But even the most fantastic plot elements in the narrative appear to be borne out within the plot of the rest of the film.

It boggles my mind that this film was nominated for six Césars.

I’ll link to the stories when I see them go up.

Posted on by mwhybark

Comics and critical attention

The New York Review of Books: Comics for Grown-Ups (via MeFi’s indefatigable y2karl)

David Hadju writes about Joe Sacco’s Palestine and Safe Area Gorazde, as well as Dan Clowes’ Ghost World.

The particular critical meme the writer’s chasing is pretty hoary by now – but it simply never seems to stick in the marketplace. I found it interesting, as well, that Hadju’s addressing some pretty well-aged material – all these books are over five years old, if I recall correctly.

Despite the age of the works, they are are well worth reading and beg for critical consideration outside the alt-comics ghetto. Sacco’s work, in particular, has begun to break out, partly because of his continued pursuit of comics-slash-journalism.

On preview, the premise that Mr. Hadju brings is questionable, however. He begins the piece with the assertion that “over that past ten years or so” the pursuit of the Great American Graphic Novel is producing bloated and overloaded work that he likens to seventies symphonic rock. No specific example of these bloated works is provided, although he tut-tuts over the “more than a thousand” graphic novels published in the wake of Maus.

As the title to the story promises, this is the ususal non-comics-world critical approach: assume that your reader thinks comics suck, affirm that prejudice, and then point out that not ALL comics suck, that the brave reviewer just happens to have excavated these shining gems from the muck. It’s absurd and demeaning. When was the last time you saw SF reviewed with this formally-expected preamble? How about a Steven King novel, speaking of bloated works? Can you imagine a review of a serious new literary work prefaced with a lengthy disquisition generically lamenting the state of books in general as a consequence of an expanded movement toward adopting artistically ambitious writing practices and themes?

More absurdly, Mr. Hadju notes that “It has become commonplace for comics artists to generate complete stories, leaving empty word balloons in the panels; only when the art is finished does a “writer” come in, filling the blanks with dialogue to accommodate the imagery.” Had Mr. Hadju provided some specific examples of comics that employ this practice, I would not have felt it necessary to note the following.

This is most likely a misconstrual of a practice used to divide the labor under commercial comics production – there is, necessarily, a script that both artist and letterer follow. Amusingly, Mr. Hadju reverently cites Will Eisner’s A Contract with God early in the essay as the initial American graphic novel. The studio system of penciller, inker, letterer was partially developed under Eisner’s guidance in the 1940’s when he co-founded an early and influential studio workshop that produced commercially-oriented comics on contract for the various comics publishers of the day.

Further amusement: the work today is generally performed on a computer and the art of the pen-and-ink letterer is distinctly a dying art form.

Posted on by mwhybark

Boatmen wrap-up

Forgive me for returning to this topic. I got a bunch of emailed comments on the series and wanted to get them up here as well.

First and formeost, the lyric corrections.

Both Steve and Mark noted that the line and couplet I don’t understand in The Midwest Can Be Allright is:


midwestern air is warm and wet
dogs are barkin’, happy that we met

While the not quite understood line from Bible Belt Babies runs:


To elicit both a world of sorrow
Thought alot about what’s for tomorrow
Picked herself a partner and a corner in a field of rye

Additionally, Mark Wilson, a VB listee who writes for an Evensville-based paper, also has his review of the new CD up on that paper’s web site. It’s an insightful review.

Posted on by mwhybark

No Hassle Hosting gets in touch

A few days ago I wrote about a hosting operation’s amazingly affordable hosting plans. I was a tad bit skeptical.

Well, the blog magic of this here site was at work again, because I have heard from them, of course. All I seem to need to do to get email from someone is write about them here. Kinda neat. I’ll have mull this over; perhaps it’s my superpower!

At any rate, one of the twain behind No Hassle Hosting dropped me a pair of lines which I will post forthwith. Despite the kind permission of my correspondent, I’ll keep her name and email address off the repostings below. The emails go a long way to addressing many of my questions about the operation, and are mighty charming to boot.

Subject: Hello
From: “Firstname Lastname”
To:

Mike, a friend of mine saw your post on July 10th and got a big chuckle out
of it and I thought I would email you personally.

Not that MY opinion helps your decision, but I give you my word that there
are no secret intellectual-property bombs, no strings, no hidden fees, no
per-database charge.

The reason our prices are so cheap is because I remember what it’s like to
be a consumer and to pay enormous sums of money for paltry amounts of disk
space, bandwidth, and features. Not to mention non-existent customer
service.

We also do not have the overhead most other companies have– we’re a small
two-man (or should I say one man, one woman!) operation dedicated to
providing a great service at a great price.

If you have any other concerns, let me know– would be happy to answer any
questions.

—
Firstname Lastname
No Hassle Hosting
http://nohasslehosting.net
http://nohasslehosting.org

Well, folks, this is first-rate personal marketing.

It made feel gooey and special, like a good consumer, a valued consumer, one who was being invited to form a personal relationship with No Hassle Hosting. My correspondent went so far as to paraphrase the words I used, accurately pinpointing my use of hyperbole and my word, I don’t think it’s possible to do this any more nicley than it was her. Don’t you agree?

Naturally, charmed all silly, I wrote back, asking if I could post the note, and explaining a bit of my hardware’s heritage (it’s a creaky old Powerbook that I’ve performed countless surgeries upon in the tradition of hotrods and shadetree mechanics everywhere).

Naturally, it was fine.

Subject: Re: Hello
From: “Firstname Lastname”
To: Mike Whybark

Thank you! And of course I don’t mind. 🙂

We’re both big Mac geeks, too… hubby runs a local Mac repair business here
in town and I do all of my freelance design work on my dual G4.

Love, love, love OS X. My husband was running his own OSX server here at
our house for a while on our eMac (for fun), and had one of his personal
sites up on there that didn’t get much traffic (our cable company would have
shot him if he would have had a busy site! Haha).

—
Firstname Lastname
No Hassle Hosting
http://nohasslehosting.net
http://nohasslehosting.org

Well, geez, I’m sold. Asoon as I make a firm comittment to go the hosted route, you know where I’m heading first.