RT – The Life and Music of Richard Thompson.
Five CDs, all rarities and live material. Sixth “write in” CD of even rarer material. 168-page book.
FANGASM. Went on pre-sale in the US today via connextion.com, was already on sale in the U.K.
Huff huff.
Hey look everyone, it’s a big bike that holds seven upper-middle-class white collar workers in Office Casual clothing! It’s perfect for those painful rituals in which people are forced to be jolly and play along until their spirits are broken and they’ll say anything to be cut loose for a box lunch!
It’s so great working here at PleaseShootMeInTheFaceCO!
Found serendipitously on old memepool entry. “Thanks”, nrrd.
Found by eyeteeth: The Cit in Love!
On this morning’s friends list scan I saw mention of the death of someone I don’t know. He was far too young and a lot of people liked him, and it’s a sad mess. Looking around to see what kind of person he was, I got to a thread on his local web forum.
Most of it was either just “oh god that’s awful” on some level, or memories of the guy that made me wish I’d met him, which I’m sure was the intent. Also some good pictures of him, and some references to how difficult his life had been in some ways. So all of that was ordinary and appropriate, and I certainly got an appreciation for him.
The odd part was that, since it was on one of these typical phpbb type forums, everyone had their wacky .sig files with graphics and catchlines still included. So there was the expected and very sad “Oh God no I wish I had seen you before” stuff and then a .sig like “rm -Rf . The world is 98% full, delete anyone you can”.
I’ve seen threads like this before and found them equally jarring, with things like explicitly Christian wishes for a happy afterlife with Jesus right above gothy sex vampire graphics, etc. I found them both very “Internet” and somehow familiar, but I couldn’t quite pinpoint why until I’d thought a bit.
It’s the teenager funeral. You know, some poor kid crashes her car or commits suicide and it’s just awful, and then at the service her friends all show up in club gear or gang attire, and they want to play her favorite Revolting Cocks song or pour out some peppermint schnapps on the ground, and the older people are outraged or just completely puzzled. Sometimes the “kids” have their own wake for the departed, often unfortunately engaging in the same behavior that offed their friend. And there’s frequently a memorial shrine of some kind now, and not just if the kid has perished in a road accident. Going by high schools and colleges I occasionally see a small mountain of flowers with sad notes and a photo on it, but almost always also some chunks of pop culture like CDs or lifestyle stuff like a bottle of booze or a pack of Marlboros.
When my friend L. died at 27 of a brain tumor, the service had this huge divide. All the “straights” were there, and her family was very straight: Orange County Republican, engineer dad, lawyer mom, engineer brother, lots of wealthy white people in tasteful black. And her friends were there: an art mob of gay men, media Jews, art atheists, and rebel esthetes. Her parents and their friends eulogized her in a conventional way, talking about her singing talent and how strong she was in death, both of which were true and moving. And her friends got up and told a comic story about shoplifting with her and almost getting caught by the cops. The straights were enraged and horrified, because L.’s cheerfully sociopathic personality and her campy, rebellious friends weren’t respectable.
The Internet message board memorial is a young person’s place right now. So, it’s the teenaged roadside memorial and wake, full of slangy pop culture and kid lifestyle references like the ball cap at the gangsta funeral. I wonder what it will be in ten years? The question to me is whether Teenage Nation will just keep being teenaged, or whether we’ll start memorializing our friends in more conventional ways even in this medium.
In some ways it’s touching and appropriate to see the “kids” talking about how they’ll miss their friend while wearing Stripper Nouveau outfits, and seeing them lovingly put 50 Cent CDs and bongs around the makeshift shrine. It reminds us that when young people die, they die unformed and childish, and it’s terribly sad. We have a problem in this country with staying teenaged, though. It’ll be an awfully odd thing if we’re still posting our goodbyes on the forums of the future with yearbook-style catch phrases and fan graphics attached.
Mainly, though, I’m sad this guy killed himself. It looks like he was damn cool, and it’s a terrible shame.
IT’S THE ART POLICE!
Only in Italy would they have enough to protect and the will to care.
They’re serving in Iraq now too, trying to hunt down missing Mesopotamian artifacts.
Podcasting is bad. I’ve bitched about it already. Mouth-breathing geeks droning about technology. Even the ones who are good writers (0.1%) are unlistenable like bad college professors. Fire it into the sun.
But something worse looms. The video iPod and its cousins, and the ease of making small downloadable portable video magazines, offers a future of what I’m sure they’re calling vodcasting. This unfortunately does not provide vodka, but may require it. The thought of tapping on my handheld video device and seeing Dave Winer or some person who has the best blog about Babylon 5 talk at me is, frankly, emetic.
My opinion is that mumbling, whiny, unsightly geeks who insist on being media personalities should restrict themselves to text like the other mumbling, whiny, unsightly geeks over the last 10,000 years and stay out of the public eye and ear. The reason we’re not all on the radio and the TV is not just that access to media is limited. It’s also that very few people have either the skills or the charisma to do either of those things without making others dizzy with loathing.
But I can deal with that just by not watching any of it. The second part of this is worse. Right now, blogging is a text medium, and I love it. I have maybe 200 RSS subscriptions to personal and institutional weblogs and weblog-like things and I get a lot out of it. I make fun of the bozosphere, but mostly it’s great.
Video may not kill it, but it’ll be a huge kick in the stomach. Video is seductive. It’s immediate and TV-like. It’s visual. It makes people feel like stars to be in videos. It’s dumbed down and easy. And it’s made for ad insertion. Video podcasting, when it gets to a certain point, will be adopted by just about all the commercially-run weblogs and a huge portion of the homebrew ones. And I see it as having an unpleasantly TV-like effect on the web. You might not think a three-paragraph blog update on one of the Weblogs Inc. or Gawker sites is a heavy chunk of ideas, but it’ll get smaller and dumber in a video. Instead of a galaxy of smart little snide magazine article squibs, we’ll have huge numbers of local news quality “segments” with stock footage and maybe 200 words of idea in them. Inevitably the commercial blogs will be done by prettier and prettier faces. And because there’s less money in blogging than in actual TV, the use of stock provided footage from commercial sources will be universal.
With luck, we’ll keep a core of text-based weblogging that has actual ideas in it, the way we kept an intelligent chunk of the Web after the flashmonsters and marketing droids ate most of it. But it’s not a good thing, not at all.
I hate video.
Courtesy Anna Pirhana, here’s an Amazon listing for How to Date a White Woman: A Practical Guide for Asian Men
The best review of this book is by Crazy Ed from Cupertino, who says:
I personally found the book lacking, in what I like to call “chutzpah”. I gave this book to a friend who needed some help and the “step-by-step guide” provided in this tome is anything but. In many cases he found the steps to be nebulous, ambagious, and even geared towards the derelict reader. The book, as a whole, was definitely not multifarious. I would not extol this literary work.
Thanks for the tip there, Ed. I like my racist sex advice books to be multifarious and loaded with “chutzpah”, and I wouldn’t buy anything you didn’t extol.
People who considered this book were apparently also interested in How to Date Young Women: For Men over 35 vol II (Advanced Skills)
I used to work for a guy who was the God of Copy Editors.
He was an intense, slightly built man with fine features, a Roman nose, and long flowing brown hair. He wore tailored clothes and carried a man-purse. He spoke precisely with a fairly thick East Coast urban accent. He had been editing copy for 20 years when I met him. I was a young ex-rock-critic demoted to editorial assistant at a medical journal, and not at my peak of maturity, but I learned a lot from him.
He had geek social skills and frequently alienated others because he spoke very directly and did not engage in argument; he was just right. There were no differences of opinion about editing. There was a right way, and a wrong way. When the style guide offered two ways, he had one. His knowledge of all sorts of journalism, book editing, and publishing production was encyclopedic. We used to joke that he should be placed in a four-sided cubicle prison and have worked dropped in the top that he would slide out the bottom to avoid interpersonal conflict.
He remained a friend after I left that job. Years later, he took another technical editing job where he reported to an editor-in-chief who did not enjoy his brusque way with small editing disagreements. He would just say “You’re wrong. This is the way to do it.” Increasingly, she felt her authority was being undermined, and although he was undeniably talented and experienced, she was after all the boss.
One day he corrected her in his usual charming way on some small, abstruse bit of style. I think it was a type size, or whether a caption should be in italics. She finally lost her cool. “Goddamnit!” she yelled “I’m sick of you telling me all the time what to do without any reference. I’m the editor-in-chief here, and you’re not in charge. If you’re going to reverse everything I do you have to cite an accepted style guide for this or I’m not going to change a single thing!”
Without any pause and without looking up from his desk, he said: “Words Into Type, page 169. The footnote.”
She walked over to the bookcase, pulled out Words Into Type, and paged a bit. There was a long pause. With a snort she slammed the book back into the shelf and walked out for a long lunch.
He was right. After that, she didn’t yell at him any more.
I miss that guy.
Be My Blog 