I’ve been a consumer of a number of very good and very bad musical titles lately. Today I purchased Pinback’s new Summer in Abaddon and without listening to it more than once, I can say it’s a superbly rendered and sung album. Influenced by the likes of The Shins and Superchunk, two favorites, the album is sadly forceful, commanding, and while slightly derivative of bands like Modest Mouse, contemporary in all of its alt-pop glory.
I don’t love Summer, but it’s far better than Killers Hot Fuss, which sounds like it was written to compete with Interpol or at least play on the same stage with them, perhaps during intermission when everyone is smoking outside. Killers is a good name for a band. It’s too bad their “domain” name was taken by very average musicians that are riding the wave of 1980s throwback glory. (Oh, I can’t wait for the new Interpol and Elliott Smith albums to come hither.)
All posts by Andrew Boardman
Conspiracy
I’m no conspiracist but I do indulge occasionally in reading highly educated pundits make sense of the world through suspcious facts that come together nicely.
I thought I’d take a stab at it myself, since it’s the kind of scary fun that we all love during this Halloween and Election Season and the fact is — with the current administration, anything truly is possible. Note these are only fictional hyper-thoughts about the short-term future of the world and are not gleaned from science, pseudo-science, news headlines or overly caffeinated beverages. Here goes:
- If Kerry is elected, the administration will allow a nuclear device or series of very large, indefinable explosions to go off in a small city in the United States. This will cause the Government to suspend the transfer of power and martial law will go into effect. Bush will stay in office for a long period of time while the country decides what to do.
- If Bush is elected, the Government will find that Iran has built up to ten nuclear warheads, all of which could be readied against Western allies. With a large number of troops already in and around Iraq, a memo will be publicly leaked that calls for plans to invade Iran in early 2005. A draft will soon become necessary and Congress will authorize it. Bush, though he stated there will be no draft, will have his politically dry hands tied and young men and women will be called upon to fight in the hundreds of thousands in the Middle East.
- After Bush is elected, the stock market will take a precipitous fall in February, sending the economy into a deep recession. The twin causes are the European, Asian, and Saudi pull-out of investments in the United States and the decline in profits being taken by American companies who no longer sense their privilege in world markets. It will make the crash of 2000 look like a cough. The new Bush administration will need to lay out a massive plan for saving the U.S. which will include reforming four-year presidential limits, collapsing domestic and foreign intelligence agencies, and expanding Federal work programs while deporting illegal foreigners to save American jobs.
- If Kerry is elected, a huge cyber-attack will be set off in early 2005, propagated by Texan Republicans through back-channel Russian computer systems. The attack, which could be either a trojan horse, virus, or something entirely new, would cripple U.S. government and business connections, supply chains, and communications and send the economy into a spiral. The Internet could no longer at all be relied upon, emails would be confiscated by the government, and online privacy will no longer be a right. Telephony and information technology generally will become artifacts of the past and the U.S.P.S. will need to govern (paper) communications. After four disastrous economic years, in 2008 Arnold Schwarzenegger will be elected to the highest office to tame the electronic wolves.
Noise
Walking my daughter to school every day takes about one half an hour up and back. During that time, I get to listen to the screeching of car brakes, the rumble of the subway underground, the scraping of truck tires along the road, and the pounding of fearful hearts at rush hour. I’m privy to listening to the roar and rumble of the commuting crowd, the sneak previews of music coming through someone’s iPod, and the generous “sharing” of typically crap music coming out of massive bass speakers lodged in tiny Honda Civics.
Then I’ll hear, above the din, my daughter say something like this: “Dad, do you sil exot stracked streekly cranst?” And then I’ll ask her to repeat it and then repeat it again until I’m two inches away and I’ll get it and answer her.
Mayor Bloomberg has recently made noise pollution an important facet of his means of cleaning up New York City, and I’m all for it. The car alarms, however, are barely the problem. It’s the shiftless sounds pouring off the street, off the buildings, and into people’s ears that is deafening.
I think about what it would be like to not hear anything and whether the perennial noise in my ears would be stoned by the silence.
Win on Mac
With the purchase of the newest version of Microsoft Office Professional, I fearfully installed Virtual PC for Mac today.
It was absolutely a piece of cake. Microsoft in its infinite wisdom (and its massive advertising campaign in “creative” publications and websites) has made it very easy to install a full-blown Windows XP Professional operating system on a Mac. The company bought the software only recently but they’ve reconfigured it to run very smoothly and quietly for those unaccustomed to “Start” menus, green grass and white clouds, and strange iconography in the system tray.
A few notes:
- While I feel some ambivalence about supporting Microsoft and their generally crappy software, as a Web design guy, I really feel obligated to ensure that what I’m designing is being properly seen and read by the 90% of those out there. I do have a laptop that I use for checking sites out in Windows but having the system on my Mac creates a greater obligation for me to ensure compatibility, legibility, and design and standards compliance.
- The first thing I did when I saw the Start screen was expand the window to fill up the entire frame. I knew that this would give me the full-on feeling of being in a Windows environment and I must say, it felt like I was being strangled by a ghost in glasses. I quickly figured out how to minimize the Windows window and then quit the operating system completely.
- The second thing I did was to download Firefox, which is quickly becoming the safest and fastest way to view websites with Windows. It’s installed and I’ll probably use it as my second browser.
- I imagine I won’t actually use Viritual PC for Mac very much. While it automatically creates a relatively safe connection to the Internet through the Mac and it prints documents perfectly through existing Mac driver software, it is nicety, not necessity, informing my decision to use Windows on my Mac.
Commenting on a Monoblogue
I love MovableType, the blogging/content management software that is used on Deckchairs and many other blogs. Before I deployed MT, I was a bit of an early devotee of Blogger, which had a very simple interface and the ability to control only limited amounts of content. But one thing I really liked about Blogger, at the time, was that it did not have an inherent capacity to allow other people to comment.
I fancied writing Deckchairs as a monologue, or rather, a monoblogue.
And I did. I felt that visitors commenting on my silly charades of posts was an insult to them and a useless exercise of vanity.
Then I moved the weblog to MT and, well, I allowed comments to occur on most of the posts. I somewhat regret it for two reasons: First, because I’m still creating silly charades of posts. But second, comment spam has become a major issue. I probably spend about 5 minutes of every day just killing off comments that have automatically been generated on my weblog. These spam posts are invariably poorly written links to non-existent or porn sites. Comments spam is an evil form of using Google to get your site recognized because more links = better site. For all of its brilliance, Google plays into the dirty hands of those who use “majority rules” to gain in the search engine optimization race.
I’m tired of it, and I thought about killing all of the comments on the site in order to save it.
I’m still not sure I’m going to do it, and I know it doesn’t matter a whole lot. I’m putting together a list of comment spam resources which I’ll post sometime soon.
Postscript: This is not to discount the many generous contributions many commentors (commentators?) have made to this site. Whether Deckchairs on the Titanic is a monoblogue, as it was originally stated, and whether comment spam is worth my while is at issue.
Is Bush Wired (for Speech)?
My buddy, V., sent me this weblog cum report called Is Bush Wired?. At first it looked like utter nonsense but, if you visit this site, take a good look at the photographs — be sure to scroll down.
Granted, it could be doctored but it seems plausible that the President was repeating back words that had been spoken to him through a (ostensibly encrypted) wire. Of course, the logic of his poor performance last Thursday may be that the repeater was somehow turned off and he was left without a feed. I don’t know. But if this turns out to be a real lead, it could upset the election.
Checkpoint
I finished the “scummy little book” (termed by Leon Wiesltier in this review of it in the New York Times), Checkpoint, by essayist and novelist Nicholson Baker and what can I say but that it’s kind of scummy.
The United States is going through waves of nauseau at the country’s prospects under either presidential candidate and authors like Nicholson Baker just add more fried food to the stomach mix. In the book, Baker depicts two middle-aged men, one of whom is discussing offing the current President. The scene takes place in a hotel in Washington, D.C. around the Spring of this year. The men speak in well-rounded, interesting sentences and one character attempts to convince the other not to go ahead with the assasination. I won’t give away the ending, but suffice it to say that it contains no moral, aesthetic, or intellectual transformations and one comes away from the book feeling cheap and tawdry, as if one just spent the night in a cheap hotel talking about killing the President.
Whether this was exactly Baker’s intention, I don’t know, but Baker is a great writer who appears to have simply cashed in on the phenomonon of hating the present Administration, deserved as it may be.
BM
I went to a relative’s bar mitzvah today and found myself mildly fascinated by the totality of the event. While I did not stay for the reception/dinner, I was at the service, held at a Jewish Community Center in New Jersey.
What was found?
- Being around adults and a small kid all the time, thirteen-year old boys and girls look, to me, a bit like weird eight-year olds. They all have that funny, estranged look of angst and cynicism on their faces but their bodies themselves are essentially twigs with sticks coming out where their extremities shoud be.
- For some reason, the boys all sat in the same row and the girls all sat in another row. There seemed to be little if any contact between the two rows. When I was thirteen, we did this, too. Little did I know that at this age, I probably would have had more luck with the ladies than three short years later when I actually wanted “luck.”
- The bar mitzvah boy did a stellar job of reading from the Torah. However, back in the day, I had to read about three or four times that amount of text. I don’t know if this is a measure of current attention spans, the time of day (5:30 p.m.), or a new custom – but he got off easy.
- I was impressed that the Hebrew school he had attended required all students there to work with a community organization as part of their learning process. He chose to work with a group that helps physically challenged kids play sports and will continue to work with them throughout this year.
- The bar mitzvah itself was a kind of non-event. And yet, in America, it does truly mark one’s mild transition to adulthood and adult responsibility. I found it odd that a one-hour service could have the stature of major transformation. And then I remembered that marriage, childbirth, and going to a funeral can all take place within a matter of one solitary hour.
New My Yahoo!
Yahoo! is slowly transforming it’s old Times New Roman image to a more sophisticated search engine that actually looks like it’s 2004.
Most relevantly to me, the company is now beta-testing refurbished My Yahoo!. My Yahoo! is an old friend of sorts; it’s been my homepage for about 7 years, which means that I probably see this page about 7 times more than any other page on any site. On this page, I get news, weather, stocks, box office info, horoscopes, and now RSS feeds from blogs I like. But this new version of the confabulator is a bit like watching an old friend don new pajamas where the fit is a bit tight in the shoulders and too loose in the waist — and yet, the pajamas look kind of nice overall. The stripes work and the colors are gentle and calming but the overall package feels like it’s going to be uncomfortable to sleep in, particularly in the groin area.
Identity in Brooklyn
On Saturday, our block had its first-ever block party. For many reason, including just plain old forgetfulness, it was scheduled on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year for Jews.
We stepped out in the morning to people preparing for the day of games, rides, food, and fun. Most of the block consists of old-time Park Slopers — real Park Slopers, perhaps, people who have lived here for a few generations with their families on the same few blocks of houses, lined with trees and cars. People on this block are predominantly white, middle class, Irish Catholic, and they are amazingly insular. For the majority of my eight years on this block, only a few of neighbors have said more than a word to me, though I’ve tried. Other blocks, I might note, are very different and more diverse.
Anyway, what was interesting about the block party on Saturday/Yom Kippur was our coming home. It was around 6:00 pm, and all of the families on the street (and there were many) were sitting among folding tables, eating BBQ and drinking and carousing. At first, it felt like we lived in another part of the world, perhaps Pittsburgh, but then as we moved down the street toward the apartment, feeling increasingly alone and unwelcome, it felt like New York, perhaps not at its finest. The few Jews on the block were not there and the two newly transplanted Southeast Asian families were nowhere to be seen.
It was not exclusion, nor indifference that I felt. Nor did I feel persecuted, disenfranchised, or scorned.
Rather, I felt like this was why I had moved to New York, to be part of the great mass of anonymity, to be a part of everything and yet have no one know you enough to acknowledge, credit or blame you for anything (unless you’re famous). I couldn’t blame anyone, including myself, for those feelings. I’m assuming my neighbors see me as an interloper, a temporary resident, a non-Catholic, a minimal participant in the life of the neighborhood, a recipient of the general safety and benefits of the area. And they are right.