I miss certain solo-proprietor specialty shops in the urban core sumpin’ fierce.
Nighttime
OK, so, uh.
On St. Patrick’s Day, a rock musician and studio guru named Alex Chilton passed away at 59 from a heart attack while mowing his lawn in New Orleans. Chilton is best known to the average person as the author of the theme song to ‘That 70’s Show,’ a song called “In the Street” originally written for and recorded with his early 70s outfit Big Star. I won’t go in to detail about that part of Chilton’s career here, there’s plenty easily available elsewhere.
I was introduced to the music of this part of Chilton’s career when the long-unavailable Big Star records were released on CD in the mid-90s.
After the frustration of Big Star, Chilton turned definitively away from mainstream approaches to music, really kicking off this segment of his career with my favorite part of his work, the recording and engineering of the Cramps‘ first two records. It’s here that I first encountered his work. Throughout the eighties and early nineties, an eclectic range of artists worked with him in the studio, including, most importantly for the purposes of my little tale here, a New Orleans based band known as the Royal Pendletons.
This band was/is led by my ex-bandmates in Modock, Matt Uhlmann and Mike Hurtt.
On a visit to New Orleans I paid in 1993, Matt told me about meeting Chilton and excitedly outlined his supportive relationship with the band, including longterm loans of gear. Sadly, I did not get to meet Mr. Chilton on that visit, and I have yet to pay a return call on the Crescent City.
When I heard the news of Chilton’s passing on the evening of St. Patrick’s Day, I was quite saddened, and somewhat mystified by that. Thinking it through, it was clearly because I have developed an emotional connection to the melancholy parts of the Big Star catalog. I was cheered by some friends’ beautifully sad rendition of Nighttime, the title of this post:
As all this was passing through my internet browser, a memorial discussion was opened at Musical Family Tree by the site’s initiator, Jeb Banner. Many of my hometown cohort dropped by to leave a note.
A comment by one old friend and noticing that Mr. Chilton’s widow’s name was Laura combined overnight to make me wonder if he had married a friend of mine. Logging in to the site, I was stunned to find my tickle of curiosity completely confirmed. There’s more to the story, really a lot more, most of which I’ll never know.
I’m not really sure how to process all of this; after all, in the end, I never met the guy. But his music and his life directly impacted a passel of people around me, either as the Big Star guy or less visibly as an idiosyncratic and profoundly self-directed music producer. I guess in the end, my sense of loss about his death was more founded on direct social impact than I realized, and that has placed me into a reflective frame of mind.
Les Heures
I experienced a lucid dream this morning in which I stumbled upon a sub-basement sited comics shop specializing in European imports.
The shop was called “Les Heures,” and all the commerce information, such as the times of operation, was displayed in French as well.
After making my way down the stairs into the shop itself, I greeted the proprietor in terse French; he started when he saw me, but I was unsure why.
I became aware that I was dreaming at this time, beginning to explore the store, and foolishly amused myself by imagining what oddities might be in the next room.
The most peculiar thing I conjured was a baby-blue plastic laptop featuring prominent Google branding.
An end
Slats RIP. Bummer.
Hype it!
Right, so I did all this in Google Reader and realized I wanted it here too.
BoingBoing highlights a trailer for a forthcoming film by Luc Besson (Fifth Element, among others):
The film is to be called Les Aventures Extraordinaires d’Adele Blanc-Sec and is based on the work of Franco-Belgian comics artist and writer Jacques Tardi.
On Google reader, I initially commented,
OMGEEE
Adele Blanc-Sec is a Victorian-era supersleuth, a kind of anti-Holmes or anti-Irene Adler, originated by the profoundly great and influential francophone comics artist and writer Jacques Tardi.
Besson, of course, worked in B-D (bandes-dessinee, comics) before turning to film, as did the Jeunets. Jean-Pierre Jeunet told me that his film ‘A Very Long Engagement’ was influenced by Tardi, specifically by the adaptations of novels featuring the character Nestor Burma, a private investigator in interwar Paris whose life and views are profoundly shaped by his experiences in the trenches of the Great War.
i think it’s interesting and exciting that Besson and Jeunet, whose styles are flamboyant and extravagantly visual, are both influenced by the relative cool and discipline of Tardi.
I AM EXCITED SIGHT UNSEEN!
and after viewing the (quite promising) trailer, added:
Without nerding out, the characters and situations seen in the trailer appear to be fairly straightforward revisualizations of the originals. Ms. Blanc-Sec is more conventionally attractive in the trailer, but despite her creator’s choice to depict her as an idiosyncratic beauty, she is in ink lovely as well.
And finally, provided a raft of links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Tardi
All at Once
ITEM! My Treo 680 has given up the ghost. I suspect I will just drop data and use a non-data phone for a while. I’d love to jump over to an iPhone but while finances are uncertain I can’t commit to the platform.
Eric Sinclair wisely pointed out a shared-minutes, shared-data plan on T-Mobile which I initially dismissed out of hand but on reconsideration am likely to pursue once I have the handsets I want in hand.
Here is my desired featureset:
– Palm OS (not that important, but I have a raft of apps. I’m quite aware that it’s at end of life.)
– large screen
– fully-featured non-lockin ereader available for the platform (nearly all of my leisure reading happens on a phone now)
– alphanumeric keypad or equivalent (screen-only is fine)
– wifi connectivity option
– hackable for tethering, don’t care if it’s outside TOS
I would immediately seek out a Palm Pro or Pre, but it seems that the Pro is Windows Mobile only and the Pre is not yet CDMA/GSM available. Centro is the closest, but it’s clearly a downfeatured version of the 680, the device I just broke.
I can have some of these features but not all at once, it seems. This of course makes me want to map my cell number to Google Voice and just drop the handset altogether.
My desired handset price point is $50 or free. Eventually I can imagine forking out some dough to Uncle Steve for an iPhone or inheritor but right now, fuck that.
So here’s what my findings indicate: I’m fucked, what I want is unavailable. So my next most important goal in this matter is saving money. Our monthly cell expense is about $120. I’m thinking if I port our numbers to prepaid I can get that down to under $40, no data.
ITEM! Viv’s iBook G4 died after about five years of faithful service. The problem appears to be a wear-and-flexion-related soldering failure which is remedied by a procedure called ‘reballing.’ Reballing quotes and anecdotes on the intarwebs indicate that one may expect to pay from $40 to $300 for the procedure. In the iBook G4’s case, if the procedure involves a full-machine teardown and rebuild, it will be around $300 – the 5-year old iBooks are a BEAR to disassemble.
After diagnosing the issue, I was able to clone the boot drive using Firewire Target mode to an old PowerBook of mine, so Viv’s set.
But of course, I couldn’t leave well enough alone. For several years I amused myself by buying old and broken Mac laptops on eBay and rebuilding them, so even a hairy laptop teardown holds no trepidation for me. So I set out to release the motherboard of Viv’s dead iBook, and on the way, swap out the hard drive for another retired laptop drive I had handy.
Things went swimmingly!
It was a complex teardown – the motherboard replacement procedure has about sixty steps to the halfway point – but straightforward enough. The hardest tool to locate was a 4mm socket wrench, not a -hex- wrench, but an actual wrench to fit around a 4mm nut. I have boatloads of Torx and other obscure twisty doohickeys but this was the first time I had encountered an actual nut in years.
Once I had the drive pulled, I went off book, confident I knew what I was doing, and yanked the drive ribbon off the end of the harddrive as I have done countless times in the past.
DISASTER!
The mating end of the drive ribbon was connected to the drive proper with a familiar black connecting comb, but the ribbon itself employs an innovative cost-cutting technique. Instead of mounting the connection points on the familiar green stiffener of a sliver of circuit board, the connection points are mounted directly to the highly flexible ribbon itself. The comb released the ribbon-mounted connectors BEFORE it released the rather more durable double row of connecting teeth at the base of the drive.
The tiny connectors unzipped from the ribbon like spring-mounted seeds from a noxious weed.
After a calm but dispirited hour attempting to reseat and true the liberated connectors, which bear a resemblance to tiny gold-plated squash blossoms, I accepted defeat.
The motherboard is pulled and I’ll get a local quote tomorrow – the hosed part is about $30 online. I kinda wish the local guys would quote me on the phone, I can’t imagine that they are gonna give me a $50 estimate. If they are over $70, it’s out of my range.
Still, even though I experienced chagrin at my idiocy, on the whole, it was a pleasant afternoon. My eyes are not as sharp as they were six years ago, the last time I did a laptop teardown and rebuild, but it was fun then and it remained fun today. I suppose that if it proves prohibitive to reassemble the device, there’s still some money on ebay in he parts, and god knows I have enough parts I need to get rid of.
Stars and rings
Friday night, on a whim, I pointed my old and semi-cheapo Tasco birding scope at Saturn, and was unprepared for the clarity of the disc and rings. The scope, when deployed at maximum zoom to observe a territorial subject, displays bleeding and dimess, refractory halos around discrete subjects. So I tend to not use it at max zoom for looking at the mountains and so forth.
It’s a useful adjunct for nighttime astronomical observations, because:
- it has a relatively wider field of view than the finderscope on the Meade
- it needs to be used on a tripod
- it shows astronomical objects in natural orientation, not inverted, as is the case with the Meade
- it is capable of higher magnification than my binoculars (x50 vs x60)
So on Saturday, I geared up and got the big glass on Saturn proper. As is my tradition, I took absurdly poor pictures through the viewfinder, which I have not uploaded yet.
I was able to verifiably observe Saturn, rings in essence precisely edge on, Titan, and Rhea, the two largest moons. It’s possible I saw Enceladus as well.
Taxes taxes taxes
Finally got going on the taxes, looks like a nice refund this year, which is great. Big unresolved variables are IRA contribs this year and whether or not it’s worth itemizing the cars – we had some big repair bills but did not keep mileage records; I couldn’t parse whether or not you can just waive the mileage claim. In thinking about it I would guess not, if mileage is the basis of percentile usage. I don’t think it affected our refund either way but need to run the scenarios.
The wind seems to have passed, hopefully that’s the weather shifting back to sunny.
Saba shioyaki
at Oishii