Brain Stem
The following is a list of observations muttered to no one in particular by the part of my consciousness that wasn’t occupied reading a very large book this morning.
This part isn’t connected to my eyeballs, isn’t following the plot, and spends most of its time attending to stuff like page turning or coffee sipping or leg itching or all of the other little environmental concerns that crop up during a really productive hour of reading. This part is also easy bored and has some serious attention deficit disorders, but fancies itself something of a deep thinker regardless of the fact that it’s not, technically speaking, capable of thought. It is also extremely envious of its more prominent counterpart, who is in charge of all the fun stuff like stimulus appreciation and eyeball control and front-of-brain-type thinking, and who seems to take all of these more glamorous brain functions (not to mention credit) for granted.
Ahem.
• Apparently, if you allude to metaphorical relationships between objects/characters and weighty concepts early on the the story, you will sound profound and complex no matter how things play out. Fiction writers must just depend on people failing to keep up. Random example: consider Beauty and the Beast. And so now Beauty is Democracy and the Beast is Communism and the stereotypically significant bits of kitchenware with thick accents can represent European heads of state. Shazam! I’m sure an elaborate allegorical interpretation could be teased out of all that, but who could keep track? Maybe I’m just easily impressed.
(• Related: This must be why fiction writers often seem to be such good journalists (but might not actually be). Attaching metaphorical significance to various actors and/or objects in a story gives the whole thing a broadly applicative quality, as though big philosophical questions are cleverly being addressed through a more accessible medium.)
• Ah Ha! A thought: To make any sense of clever &/or meaningful references to older books in newer books, those older books (ALL of them) need to be read in a certain order. (And boy oh boy do I like ORDER) Which is to say that if you’re reading Book A, which references Book B, but Book B needs Books C & D to have been read for Book B to make any sense at all, a certain order reveals itself. I wonder if anyone has tried to map this out. It would look like a tree diagram, right? Or several tree diagrams. How would they end up breaking apart? AND if certain authors can scamper squirrel-like from tree to tree, does that make them more likely to win a Pulitzer?
• So this slight, slightly balding bespectacled guy just pushed a stroller up to the front of the coffee shop and left it there while lining up for his morning Joe. Jesus! Ok, he’s back, kid must be asleep. He’s writing postcards, and has Jonathan Lethem in German (Die Festung der Einsamkeit) on the table. White patent leather shoes, pastel patterned shirt, gray pullover. Quiet.
Minutes pass.
So then these two women come outside speaking German and he looks up from his postcard writing and stares at them very intently, which looks weird and sort of creepy until you figure that this guy might be absolutely starved for some familiar sounding morning chatter, and thanks to the Lethem clue, this really intense/creepy staring is explained, and even gives us a tiny one-sided/unspoken bond; I too have looked up hopefully as what I think at first to be natives of some foreign locale break out in to a familiar dialect of english. It’s incredibly reassuring for some reason.
I feel very sympathetic.
• Speaking of feelings: It just occurred to me that the extremely positive nature of the comments made by my fellow scouts in Troop 319 of Canaan, New Hampshire (in the year of our lord nineteen hundred and probably around ninety or ninety one) regarding how impressed they were by my crisply rolled-up shirtsleeves – comments which induced an intense pride in my 7 yr old self, which pride possibly manifested itself thereafter by my insistence on sheathing both arms in crisply rolled up shirtsleeves for the next, like, fifteen years, might not have been as genuine as I was first led to believe. Assholes.
•(Related thought on Google: Given The Search Algorithm’s awesome power and the average Bored Bob’s penchant for using it to dig up instances of their own name online, I’m afraid to properly identify the short-sleeve-fold-commenters, all of whose names I can still recall for some reason. Google’s role in this feels Big Brotherly somehow. Definitely not not evil.)
• Scratch leg.
May 14, 2010My Superpowers
A brief list:
I can, from the freshly sneaker-scraped 3 pointer groove on our driveway, make a hookshot without looking. Sometimes. (This superpower is sort of hit or miss, so to speak, depending on the day/angle of sun/temperature/blackfly-to-breathable air ratio/etc.)
Asleep, I can detect which family member is climbing the stairs. I can also make rough guesses as to what kind of mood they’re in, depending on step tempo, speed, shoe-type, and arthritic joint sounds. (Until very recently, I could do the same w/r/t canine footsteps, but this power became considerably less super after the family dog count dropped to one.)
I can consume an entire tray of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies in under 30 min. If they are covered w/tinfoil or a dishtowel, I can do this without anyone noticing. (And if someone does notice, I can empty my cheeks, jam up to three partially masticated cookies between my teeth and look as though I’m not chewing anything at all in under a second. I can even get out crumb-free, single-syllable responses if interrogated. (I cannot, however, laugh, sneeze, cough or breathe in this condition. ‘Stealth’ mode is only really tenable for 20-30 second bursts, and can be seriously dangerous if attempted whilst sprinting and/or climbing ladders.))
I can drink 3 cups (24 oz) of maple syrup without a chaser or any serious side effects, apart from occasional blurred vision, (very) occasional involuntary jaw clenching, and a slightly increased rate of blinking. (All three slight side effects are temporary, and usually fade after less than eight hours.)
I can pogostick.
I frequently dream that I can fly, and can maintain this belief all the way through breakfast. For some reason breakfast grounds me. (Translation: I can fly before breakfast, and cereal might actually function as some sort of personal kryptonite. Hmmmm.)
I can juggle eggs for more than ten seconds outdoors, and a little less than ten seconds indoors. (The culprit for this discrepancy remains unclear, however I should note that indoor conditions are often considerably less hospitable and can cause me to tense up and/or lose track of the airborne eggs more easily.)
I can magically bend spoons. Not only that, but I can also gauge, with superhuman sensitivity, how long the owners of said spoons can cope with their new spoonless situation, and return them (the spoons) back to their original shape before anyone does anything violent that they might regret later on. (Superhuman sensitivity takes some practice.)
I can make a dishtowel look more like a dead chicken than you might think.
That is all.
April 8, 2010A Good Wednesday
I was still stationed in front of the computer at noon, dressed in the same t-shirt and underwear that I’d worn to bed the night before. My tongue kept running absentmindedly over the clothy covering of bacteria on my teeth. I hadn’t made it to the bathroom yet.
When you’re self employed and mobile, it’s easy for your day to sort of collapse in on itself in stages. For me, a good day is waking up early, not touching the computer until I’m clean and somewhere public that serves caffeine, and then switching places after lunch. The next step down might be just making it to one of those places. Down one further would be getting to one of those places without the shower. Then never leaving the apartment. My room. My bed.
Clearly, today wasn’t going to rate very well unless immediate action was taken. So with the sort of quick, jerky movements you’d use to pull off a band-aid, I slammed my laptop shut and stuffed it in my backpack. A few seconds later, the bolt inside the lock of our front door slid in to its little female counterpart (do lock pieces get the same overtly sexual nomenclature that electrical sockets do?) and I was practically skipping my way down the stairs. It must have been eighty degrees outside.
I figured I would head towards a subway stop and let my iPhone figure out how to get to where I wasn’t sure I wanted to go just yet. What about the zoo? All cities have zoos, don’t they? Surely New York has a zoo. iPhone, find a zoo.
iPhone wasted no time in finding me no less than 3 zoos, two of which appeared to be figments of the internet’s imagination. A zoo in central park? Prospect park? No, I don’t think so. A petting zoo perhaps, but I was quite sure I would have spotted a full sized zoo in the middle of New York by now. I mean jesus, they’re supposed to feature elephants. How do you hide an elephant? You cannot. Unless of course this zoo was underground. I pondered this for a moment, and decided that if the powers that be in Central Park were keeping elephants underground, I wanted nothing to do with it. I headed to number 3: the Bronx Zoo.
It looked as though I was going to be on the 5 train for a very, very long time. I had come prepared. I wiggled my way in between a woman with astonishingly large thighs who was sweating and wincing (literally wincing) along to the beat of whatever was pumping through her headphones and a skinny dude grasping (but not reading) a very worn copy of Paradise Lost. Backpack on lap, I pulled out the magazine section of McSweeny’s Quarterly, number thirty three.
A BRIEF DIGRESSION REGARDING THE GOODNESS OF TRAVEL
Jonah Lehrer is a science writer whose articles I have seen with increasing regularity over the past few months. He’s young, has already collected a trophy case of impressive academic credentials, and likes to write about the brain. Apparently, he was going to be a doctor, but was too good at writing. Or something like that.
The article that he had written for McSweeny’s (hence the digression) was about how travel can be good for your brain’s creative flexibility. He cited several scientific studies involving thumbtacks and candles (I won’t got in to it here) which had practically proven that a person who has traveled a bit thinks ‘outside of the box’ more often than someone who has travelled less than a bit. I was thrilled, and planned to cite this to myself when the usual schizophrenic/bipolar arguments started to crop up before my next trip. (To be honest, one of the studies seemed to prove that the simple act of thinking about a foreign place was enough, which, though I would tend to agree, did nothing for the travel argument, so I’ll leave it out for the time being.)
We arrived.
THE BRONX ZOO
At this point, I think you should know that during every one of the fifty-four minutes it took to get from the Atlantic Avenue Station to the Bronx Zoo Station I was trying very pointedly to not stare at the human sitting across from me who was wearing an enormous parka, fur hat, equally enormous sunglasses, mittens, boots and snow pants. There was almost no skin was showing, and though I sensed that the body underneath all of those layers was female, it was impossible to be sure. She was staring straight at me the whole time. When we got off the train, she walked to the zoo as well. Except that while I was on the sidewalk, she was walking down the middle of the street. People pointed, cars swerved, horns honked.
We were going to the ZOO.
And after an hour of shrieking children, crying children, shrieking parents and sleeping animals, I left. The bronx zoo has very little to recommend it. I bonded with a baby turtle (I think) but so far as interesting animal viewing was concerned, that was about it. On the fifty-four minute train ride back, I read the next article in McSweeny’s, which was all about a woman from Georgia who went to work on the South Pole for a while. She was a much better writer than Jonah, and – impressively – made the south pole sound like a pretty steamy place to be. My two favorite lines are as follows:
“Nearly 17 000 condoms will be ordered for the season. That works out to about fifteen condoms per person. That will not be enough”
“If I was twenty years younger, I’d bang him like a screen door.”
A young woman sitting to the right of me saw that I was reading an article about the south pole and took the opportunity to tell me that a) her friend was working in the south pole right now, b) he had just been attacked by a polar bear, and c) when attacked, he had been in the process of saving a little girl. Before I could reply, the guy sitting on her right said “That’s absurd, there are no polar bears in Antarctica.” I kept reading.
When I got home, I played guitar until little bits began falling off the ends of my fingers (22 minutes) and then went downstairs to get a felafel sandwich and a beer. The whole process took about eight minutes. Armed with dinner and my laptop, I headed for the roof, which after the hot day was pleasantly warm against the cool night. With my feet dangling over the edge I ate my felafel and drank my beer, and then flipped over on to my back to do some thinking about airplanes. After ten minutes of heavy thinking, I still have no idea why airplanes keep their headlights on when flying. Will there be time to stop? Swerve? I doubt it.
Then I pulled up a chair, switched on my laptop, and began typing.
It was a good day.
April 2, 2010Angsty Scrawl
For some reason, I have this long held belief that writing frequently will cause me to think more clearly. And as thinking clearly is a something of a rarity for me, I try to write just about every day. For the most part, it ends up being the angsty scrawl common to directionless 26 year olds: whole entries given over to brow furrowing articulations of how the universe appears with me as its axis. Y’know, journaling.
And this sort of works. Or I think it has until I read what I’ve just written, which is invariably crap. So, frustrated by my various attempts at writing frequently and WELL, I have, over the past year or so, tried to take writing, on my blog at least, a little more seriously. And it has been a disaster.
In my head this desire to write well roughly translates to slowing down the process, so I can more thoughtfully consider what it is that I’m trying to get across (I blame a starry-eyed infatuation with David Foster Wallace for this, whose essays are sort of a holy grail for writers who wish to sound thoughtful and intelligent and not completely full of shit.) Of course, what ‘slowing down the process’ means in this case is unclear. It’s easy to imagine ‘real’ authors engaging in a sort of monastic contemplation of their subject before they begin writing, but after having tried that particular method, my guess that hollywood has furnished my imagination with yet another glamorous lie about the lives of others.
However, the slowdown method follows with the little that I have learned over the past five years while teaching myself graphic design. The golden rule, simply put (and get ready for the laughably obvious) is that the first version of anything you make sucks, no matter how much time you’ve spent on it, and that forcing yourself to treat a ‘finished project’ as a starting point the next morning pays off in dividends. (Artistically speaking that is. Financially speaking, the opposite might actually be true.)
So, wanting to be good at something and having only my limited success as a designer to lead the way, the assumption – and this is classic designerthink – is that if I can just spit out the raw material, the ‘writing’ part is where you slow down and rearrange those chunks in to coherent paragraphs. If enough time is spent carefully fitting all of the component pieces together, a certain poetic clarity will almost certainly emerge after a while. The same rules should apply I reason.
Not quite.
Apparently, the brute force technique doesn’t work with writing. Looking back on the things I’ve written here over the past 3 years, it is the reckless little bits, unedited, typo-ridden, and drunkenly posted at 3am which resonate the most. In the same way that no amount of careful labor can reproduce the loose lines of a successful drawing, good writing – or the stuff I like anyways, which is how I’m defining it here – seems uninhibited by the belabored revision process inherent in good design.
The moral of all this is unclear. Perhaps I’m using the wrong model. Perhaps I should find a different way of clearing my head and focus on things I’m good at. But just as with innovative design or beautifully descriptive sketches, great writing causes an uncontrollable to desire to try it out myself. Just to see. So if it’s here to stay, where to next for some direction?
March 14, 2010Crickets : The Low Anthem is On to Something
Week One
The first week of living somewhere new is roughly the same just about anywhere you (I) go.
Day one begins with the jarring realization that you have stopped somewhere long enough to put your bag down, and won’t be leaving for quite some time. Which is scary. This leads to the panicky feeling upon waking up on day 2 that perhaps you haven’t stopped at the right place, which is then confirmed that night when you get lost getting back to your own apartment. This results in an unpleasant day 3 spent pacing, frowning, coffee drinking and frequently visiting kayak.com just to make sure there aren’t meaningfully cheap routes to somewhere nicer.
Acceptance, or whatever you want to call it, arrives with the lebanese takeout you got for dinner on day 4, and usually requires several hours of lying on the cool tile of your new floor, looking up at the ceiling as the roomier sections of your brain play host to the various arguments for and against moving in the first place: right city, wrong city, no friends, new friends, too pricy, etc.. Then comes a day of serious nesting, where you finally shove things around in your room until they seem to compliment your sense of space; your priorities. And then, suddenly, as you wake up on day six, things begin to feel familiar. A system emerges.
It is the same. Every. Single. Time.
Dogs have to circle three times before they lie down in the sun, I have to give my consciousness over to this welcoming committee of neurosis every time I move before things feel right enough to stay.
And here I am on day 7, spoonful of cheerios in hand, snugly nestled in to my new niche, feeling protected and relaxed for the first time all week and looking forward to what the next one has to offer.
Now, watch as I get mugged on my way to dinner.
February 8, 2010Just About Right
About fifteen minutes in to my drive up from Boston yesterday I realized that I was going to spend the two hour stretch between South Station and Lebanon in a state of relative solitude.
For the first time in a long time, I wasn’t on a bus. No one would be sitting behind me talking dirty on their cell phone, no horrible period films would be awkwardly flickering through the only two working TV screens onboard, no rosy-eyed gang bangers would come lurching out of the bathroom followed by a thick cloud of pot smoke, and I wouldn’t have to spend twenty minutes hunting for that widely advertised but strangely elusive wifi connection. (Note: Lucky Star busses don’t actually HAVE wifi, they just like putting hotspot stickers on their busses.)
In fact, driving up couldn’t have been easier. I left as soon as I wanted to, I arrived before I was supposed to, no one needed to drive 30 min to pick me up at the station, and I probably saved a good fifteen dollars by NOT taking the bus. But to be perfectly honest, I missed it.
I like busses. Most of you don’t, and that’s fine. But since we’re all sitting around MY little campfire, I figured I’d explain why I do, and, in the process, cast myself as one of those particularly hardy sorts who find just about anything that is boring, monotonous or otherwise unpleasant to be an excellent character building opportunity. Those of you who know me well will of course confirm this.
The Chat
The most obvious appeal of long distance bus travel is the social life. Passengers on local busses are famously distant and defensive, but after about three hours of bumping down the highway together, people begin to loosen up. Certain types just click.
On busses to New York in particular, I have noticed that the big jolly (read:loud) guys with hipster beards and disarmingly bright LL Bean backpacks (cinched up kindergarten tight so they don’t have to take them off while sitting down) always seem to strike up a conversation with that one beautiful girl on board who is unlucky enough to be traveling by herself. This causes a strong group chivalry/envy reaction in every male within a ten seat radius. It’s too weak to produce any real action, but strong enough to cause group loathing towards the Neon Beaners, which in turn gives us all something to talk about. They are lucky and unpleasant. Nothing bonds strangers together quite like a good dose of collective hostility towards something that is as easy to see as it is to hate.
Good conversations happen as well. I have ridden long distance busses in a whole host of different locales, and in each place, no matter the host culture, there is a rapport between bus travelers that simply does not exist elsewhere. I have had the fortune of conversing with a semi-pro soccer player from Namibia (very pleasant), with Germans who presume George Bush was actually acting on behalf of the American people (rather unpleasant), and with two chicken owners – while their chickens were being fed bits of my sandwich. (Which, while it was sad to see a perfectly good sandwich go so quickly, was a surprisingly informative little chat, revolving – for the most part- around the fate of those very chickens. )
The Arrival
Arriving by bus, while perhaps the least dramatic arrival you’ll find, is by far the most satisfying. It’s a far cry from having used your own two legs to make the trip, but the weariness, that sense of being a little beat up for having crossed over a sizable distance, is heightened by the feeling that you have arrived in a place that wasn’t necessarily expecting you.
Train stations and airports are, by their very nature, the easiest places on earth to land. You can count on there being food, maps, and a whole host of taxis waiting outside to convey you to that exact final location, without ever really having to deal with the newness of a place until you wake up the next morning, refreshed. They set you down in a commercialized mechanism for removing that sense of arrival and replacing it with a rather limp imitation of what’s outside, usually realized as a different set of stores selling you local variants on what was on sale back home.
Bus stations on the other hand are notoriously seedy affairs, having no real reason to boot out the resident homeless crowd like an airport or train station might. (Although that being said, there are some that give it their best shot. My favorite is the Santa Cruz bus station that uses loud classical music as an auditory bum repellant in the front entrance.) And it is thanks to this decrepitude, thanks to this inability to keep the grungy reality of your destination at bay, that they maintain a far more honest sense of arrival. When you land in a bus station, there is no questioning the fact that you are somewhere new.
Dot, No Dot
And that’s IF you happen to be on a big dot (versus small dot) sort of trip. Small dot dropoffs (which is to say, no station) result in about as shocking a touchdown as you can hope to find, short of having a bag thrown over your head by the Homeland Security department and being tossed in to a jet bound for Egypt. (I suspect that this, and other shocks felt on a trip like that, would be significantly stronger, but thankfully I haven’t had the pleasure just yet.) Nope, no station needed, just a sign on the side of the road. Hell, all you really need to do is convince the bus driver that something unpleasant and difficult to clean up is about to vacate your body in the next few seconds and he’ll helpfully stop the bus just about anywhere!
Just Better
Of course small dot travel can be done more easily in a car, but – and here, I’ve made my way to the only real point to be made – busses are packed with raw material for cracking good travel stories. Nothing else comes close. It’s all there: a poorly ventilated brick of tightly packed humans, all closer for having gone through a low-grade ordeal together, that fresh excitement of a midnight arrival on a strange street corner, and ultimately, the prospect of feeling as though you’ve really gone somewhere.
January 23, 2010The Right Spoon
Awe
you know what that’s like?
its like closing up the Eggars storybook and feeling vaguely disappointed that the long one you read first didn’t include any steamy midnight scenes on the beach (even after reading patiently through ten pages of buildup) and then turning off the lamp and remembering that the one you liked, the one you just stopped reading halfway through had had a TV in it that wouldn’t turn off and you realize that he was using it as a thematic device to indicate something-o-rather and wasn’t he clever for doing that, but not so clever that you’ll keep reading so you turn off the light and close your eyes
five minutes later you snap awake thinking that maybe the TV was telling a story entirely on its own and wouldn’t two stories be better than one and what if they complimented each other to create a third story and what if that third story – the one that was never really told – was really the nerve center behind the whole thing. you consider that the unsaid is very often just that. this is getting good you think, and then it all seems very obvious and perhaps Eggars is even cleverer than you thought, but maybe not because that might just be something ELSE that you missed in third grade english and you wish you had a fucking clue when it came to how your own language works.
or its like flipping through the big book of Jean prints and reaching the last page that features the girl with tiny chinese shoes sitting in front of a mirror. The one where her head has exploded in to this grotesque orgy of color, as though eagle sized butterfly wings have been ripped off and stuffed in to some girl’s neck and you notice for the first time that there’s a kid in the window behind her and then you notice that his head is shaped like a penis – and for a moment the shoes and the mirror and the penis and the orgy all fit together exactly the way they’re supposed to and even though you can’t swallow that thought whole, you can see it speeding by like the reflection of someone beautiful in the rearview mirror that was probably just a trick of the light but maybe it wasn’t and fuck, should you go back and check?
and its like lying in bed in the dark feeling small and chilly and directionless, trying to place yourself in a world that features people like this, and you figure they must have different eyes, Eggars and Jean, special glasses maybe, to capture such much and convey it using so little. and you wonder at such elegant little spaces they have carved from thin air with their magical ice cream scoops to serve up this one, blissful pre-sleep jolt of consciousness.
December 31, 2009My Tribe
Peets Coffee & Tea. At five, this place was a noisy hive of caffeine addicts, shoving their way towards the front of a line that reached the door.
Just three hours later, the afternoon crowd has subsided. The whining two year olds in their neon safety suits are no longer clogging the doorway. The lipstick laden high schoolers are no longer sitting sullenly across from one another, silently texting someone comfortingly less real than their actual companions. And now – though you never notice them actually plugging in – Brookline’s local tribe of lonely laptop people (LLP’ers, or just ‘lepers’ for short) have quietly arrived en masse and taken up positions near all of the available outlets. Feeding.
Having observed fellow LLP’ers hunched over their little consoles during the past few years, I can confidently distinguish the few serious breeds out there from the innocent email checker. These are the ones who will, once they have spotted someone Sitting Near An Outlet, stare unabashedly in their direction until the poor bastard feels uncomfortable enough to leave. These are the ones baristas have to mop up under every night because they won’t leave until the posted closing time. They are a type.
Actually, there are several types. Lets start with the innocent and work our way down to the unforgivable.
The Graduate Student
All LLP’ers would like to be graduate students, and the few genuine articles out there know this. They are classy. Some even wear ties, as if they’re showing up for a real job. They turn off their cell phone when they work. They take lunch breaks. They are doing important things that require serious thought, and deserve our respect for having purchased that four dollar cup of coffee while still $200,000 in debt.
The Musician/Artist
Not unlike the graduate student, the musician/artist types seem to be pursuing a real life outside of the coffee shop. They are quiet (though the cell phone stays on) and are always doing something interesting. You can tell they’re doing something interesting because they have brought enough equipment in with them to open a small studio. Scanners, amps, digital tablets, headphones the size of coconuts. Outlets aren’t enough, these people need power strips.
The Crazies
I have a soft spot in my heart for these guys. God knows where they found a laptop*, but I’m glad they’re around to keep things interesting. After ordering dangerous sounding caffeine combinations that aren’t on the menu, they will find your spot and sit immediately behind it. They are not afraid to ask questions about what you’re working on, and, on occasion, read uncomfortably long passages from your screen after doing so. (“Sooooo, writing about Peets eh? You work here?”)
* – The term LLP’er broadens for your typical crazy, as many of them don’t actually have a laptop. They bring computers instead. There was a guy in Minneapolis who routinely brought in a full sized 30″ iMac and set it up near the bathroom.
The College Student
We’re getting down to the pretty scummy types here. Perhaps the most common LLP’er, the college student has absolutely no real interest in getting anything done, so most of their time is spent updating their facebook status (‘omg, STILL studying’) or conducting longwinded cellphone conversations about last night’s sex debacle in breathless detail. The graduate student would rather they study elsewhere.
The Businessman. The Webbie
Here we are at the rotten bottom. Meet me and mine. We fancy ourselves rogue entrepreneurs! Wanderers free from the confines of a suffocating office space! And you hate us for it. You see, the problem is that we need an office sometimes, and when a client calls, we will not only treat you like a cubicle divider, we will actively pretend that the coffee shops is Our Own. That’s why we purchased those commando-style Skype headsets. They might look a little silly to an outsider, but be warned, we take them very seriously. Can’t you see that we’re WORKING HERE?
December 12, 2009One More Arrival
As always, Anna managed to wrangle a beautiful welcome out of New York.
Within three hours of landing at JFK, I was elbowing my way towards five figures bathed in bright blue light on a cramped little stage in downtown Brooklyn. Four of them were standing around a fifth, who was sitting in the middle, hunched over a detached kick drum.
With a tap from the second drummer (sitting behind a full kit in the back) the guy in the middle started to whack his drum in time with the second drummer’s quicker taps. Each time he raised the drumstick, you could see muscle groups under his shoulder tightening in time with the beat, beginning a song that I was about to love.
The music was great, the beer delicious, and through a lunatic haze of my own making (eight hours of sleep over the past three days, six time zones away) the whole night constituted a reassuring moment: New York is still glamorous and ludicrous and awesome and – most importantly – I still want to live there.
December 2, 2009Soapbox
Wherein the author reveals his true nature to be that of an egomaniacal hermit who created this overfed pseudo-biographical tabloid as an incubator for his various delusions of personal celebrity.
But first, France on a cool summer day.
Just over two months ago I was sitting on the TGV from Bordeaux to Rennes, staring out the window; my eyes tracking hedges as they ticked by with a pleasant regularity. The day was bright and clear, and as we accelerated to cruising speed, the little French villages became momentary blurs; summery palettes of stone gray and grass green smeared across my window.
After a few happy minutes of thinking about absolutely nothing, it was time to begin. I rummaged around in my backpack and pulled out the little pad of lined paper I’d purchased earlier in the trip. It was about half full of urgently scribbled fragments; only a few were legible and none were worth the ink. No matter. I found a fresh page, clicked open my pen and began to carefully outline the new design of this website.
Natelaffan.com has been redesigned eight times over the past two years, and each time – as I find whole days being sucked in to serious, brow furrowing considerations like whether a border should be ten pixels wide or five – I feel that little prick of doubt in the back of my skull, which upon closer inspection appears to be a total lack of purpose behind the whole damn thing. Purpose has never stopped me before, (in fact it is something I gave up on quite a while ago) but at a certain point at least a cursory inspection of why is in order, as I would hate to find that the project which has occupied the majority of my time over the past eighteen months is just an enormous waste of coffee.
First, some context
The notion of blogging as a medium for compulsive self promotion is sort of the norm these days, right? The term itself has evolved in to ‘social networking’ over the years, but that doesn’t change the fact that you still heave gigabytes of yourself up on the internet for friends/family/total strangers to admire every day of the week. (And if you don’t, you’re friends do it for you.) Big players like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter coddle this need to be seen by packaging their services up in to templates and limiting the expected input from a user to almost nothing (which oddly encourages exactly the opposite behavior), but these are cosmetic changes; the underlying expectation; that people will find your life worth watching, is still the same.
Now, I’m not saying that it’s healthy – I’ll leave my various crabby geezer opinions about facebook and the horrible panic I feel after checking my ‘news feed’ for the tenth time in a day or thoughts on watching the word ‘friend’ be torn down to something essentially meaningless and trite for another post – just that the act of putting yourself online is so streamlined at this point that having a website of your own seems like overkill, as there are already hundreds of communities that will happily broadcast you around the world for free.
In the dark
These communities put actual website owners in a category all our own. We become the weirdos muttering to ourselves far from the comforting glow of any known social hubs, which makes contact of any sort something of an accomplishment. Facebookers may wish they had friends who they actually knew, but lets face it, those of us with regular ol’ websites will take anyone who happens to swing by. If it’s popularity I’m after, I’d be better advised to find it through the traditional channels.
So if it isn’t popularity, then the perhaps the driving force is some raw need to just be noticed. Maybe we’re the kids that went off and played by ourselves at recess as a way of garnering attention and sympathy at the same time. Jeffery Zeldman (one of the design community’s most famous bloggers / web-standards evangelists) wrote a short article recently, gloomily suggesting as much. “The dirty little secret to success”, he concludes, is “a longing for love and approval” that comes from “a brokenness in you that continually craves attention and affection you somehow missed out on”. (It should be pointed out here that Zeldman was in the middle of a rather public divorce, but he’s absolutely right.)
A “brokenness” of sorts. I guess that sort of hits the nail on the head. But if the best we can come up with as ‘a purpose’ is creating a place that caters to my needs as an attention-seeking sociopath, I’d rather look elsewhere. So sue me.
not all bad
Alright, I think we’ve covered most of the sinful/damaging things. How about the good ones?
The obvious upshot to having your own space is getting to use it as a venue for absolutely anything. Like ill-advised art projects or dismal Valentines Day poems or photos of your feet. In my case, the whole undertaking has an oddly centering effect in my life, which comes – in a large part – from having created the site myself. I carry around a camera for XXVI, a sketchbook for restless, and write thoughts worth pursuing in a little pre-post moleskine. Publication, even self publication, creates a catalyst for creative production. Production is practice, and practice is necessary if all of the things you’re interested in pursuing professionally lie outside the scope of your educational background.
And maybe that’s all I need.
which is all to say
I doubt I’ll ever be a professional photographer, writer or artist, but having a little nook to try on various hats and practice a trade without any ‘real world requirements’ (ie, an education tailored to any one of those three or producing content that has to pass a review process) is an incredibly valuable thing, and despite the drawbacks, I think it might be worth keeping around for a little while longer.
Huh.
(As is often the case when I reach the end of these meandering thought posts, I’m not sure if any of that was worth typing or if I just managed to fill three pages with crusty platitudes that have already been worked over elsewhere, but at the very least it gave me time to spit out a thought. I’ll try to make the next one a touch shorter.)
November 23, 2009A Lazy Sunday
It was a slow Sunday. I woke up at ten, squinted at the window long enough to confirm suspicions of rain, and then pulled the covers back over my head until eleven.
My phone started emitting plaintive low battery chirps at eleven thirty, and try as I might, there was no going back to sleep with a pitiful gadget broadcasting its death rattle from across the room, so I threw back the covers and began my day.
After dismantling the phone, breakfast was found, captured, and hauled back in to bed before the covers cooled down. Thus began my first hour of consciousness: sipping tea, munching tea-soaked cookies (then happily spooning out the mushy confection at the bottom of the cup) and slowly paging through Mike’s three volume boxed set of Calvin & Hobbes.
This post is really about Calvin & Hobbes.
My summers used to be loosely structured around the exploits of those two. After careful scrutiny of the Sunday color comics, afternoons were often lost to an extended round of Calvinball. Our rules weren’t quite as involved as C&H’s, but then we were managing this outside of the confines of Bill Watterson’s imagination, so some cuts had to be made. On the unlikely occasion everyone wasn’t up for a game with insanely complicated rules that changed every 40-50 seconds (or less, depending on whether Munsey was playing), Calvinball could easy be reduced to Race; a C-ball derivative that is a hundred times more dangerous and perhaps the only activity I cared to exert physical energy towards before the age of fifteen. It goes something like this:
1. Nate goes and finds his swim-coach-style stopwatch that someone game him for Christmas last year.
2. Participants (usually Nate, his up-for-absolutely-anything little sister Margaret, and the aforementioned Mr. Munsey) assemble about fifteen suicidally dangerous obstacles across the property. These obstacles may include hair-raising combinations of: string, rocks, ladders, gasoline, balls of all sorts (tennis, soccer, croquet, baseball, basketball, etc..) roofs, hula-hoops, branches from nearby trees that Matt has removed but doesn’t know what to do with, electric fencing, bicycles, tires, trees, fence posts, lye, manure, pipes, the sprinkler, more string and – on very rare occasions – the dog.
3. Margaret goes first to make sure it isn’t too dangerous.
4. We race.
Bill Watterson deserves a Nobel Prize for lots of reasons, but that one in particular – creating a comic strip that inspired kids go do out and do crazy shit – I think is his most impressive achievement. I don’t know of anything else like it. Computer games are obviously out. Books aren’t collectively read the same way comics are, and my other favorite comics – The Far Side, Dilbert, Get Fuzzy, Doonsbury – were often hilarious, but never moved you to leave the chair you were sitting in and go be part of the action.
There’s no real bang at the end of this thought, I just love Calvin & Hobbes. There will be more posts about how wonderful they both are soon enough, but so far as this one is concerned, I’m curious if anyone who has gotten this far down the post disagrees and had a similarly motivational touchstone from their childhood that I missed out on. Don’t be shy, I know at least one of you still has a D&D board lurking around back there…
November 2, 2009Up By One
Mike dropped me off just near the gas station at the corner of Massetana Romana and Cassia Sud last night.
After collecting my things from the trunk, I managed to hang it all off one shoulder and headed down a narrow little sidewalk towards Buonconvento No. 26. I poked the doorbell a couple times, Lisa let me in, and I dropped the whole pile on to my new bed. Then I unpacked for the first time in fourth months.
Though it’s only for the month of November, it feels nice to have a little box I can call home. The bed is a bit saggy – more of a cot really – but when I finally fell asleep, it was for twelve full hours. I woke up utterly refreshed and more than a little chilly (Finding a suitable hat is next on the list). Lisa leaves for school pretty early in the morning and there wasn’t anything to eat, so after a quick shower I began hunting for breakfast.
The nearest bar is just down the road, right behind a dirty metal sign that advertizes: ‘Parking + Bar this way’ then an arrow that points in the opposite direction. The place was all but abandoned by 10 – the woman working there was sitting on one of the stools watching TV – but I suspect it’s pretty busy in the morning. Beads are hung above the main door, and the only decoration behind the bar is a photo printed out on computer paper that’s been taped to a bottle of scotch.
It’s a cell phone photo of a scoreboard that someone took last year.
AC Milan : 0 | Siena : 1
October 21, 2009From Time to Time
After having a very productive morning, my day fell to bits when I realized that next week is SIS’s student break and people will be taking trips. Not wanting to be left out, I decided to sneak a little peek at Google Maps.
Y’know…just to see.
I can’t wait for the day that Google Maps becomes available as a satisfyingly enormous digibook that you can barely lift up on to your lap on frigid evenings somewhere snowy, and plan out trips to microscopic little locales that look suitably distant from anywhere that might feature high-speed internet.
Over tea and toast. The tea and toast is important to fend off the frigid & snowy part.
I guess what I’m really getting at is that I’d like my maps to be in book that is as big to me now as the Time Atlas was to me when I was five. Gigantic! You had to lean forward just to reach the corner of the page, and then turning them was roughly equivalent to shifting tectonic plates. Huge, heavy, beautifully printed pages, with what looked to be every single nameable spot on the planet listed out in absurdly (wonderfully) tiny print. Lisokwene Congo? Why of course! It’s right next to Boliama and Wamba! These villages probably don’t even feature people, yet there they are; reassuringly real (and oddly accessible) thanks to a magical combination of GPS and ink.
I’m too mobile to own a Times Atlas at the moment (specifically, The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World, 12th edition, to anyone who missed my birthday) and, to be honest, having one of those really would suffice, but still…just imagine …. A GOOGLE ATLAS.
* sigh *
October 4, 2009Death by One-Ply
Dear They,
You have made rocket ships that land on Mars. You have made computers that will soon take over the world. You have invented Nutella. Would you mind thinking up something better than 1 ply toilet paper for those of us stricken by both crippling cheapness and a runny nose? Clearly you have the know-how and the free time. I know for a fact that there are members of your mysterious group working on things like attack dolphins and robots that don’t slip on ice (not problems or solutions I was aware we had or needed) so what could be the harm in a little side project?
You will find, upon the successful completion of this project, MILLIONS of grateful consumers, red-nosed and miserable, eager to snatch up as much of this magical product as you can crank out.
Nate
PS. While you’re out and about making life for us thrifty-types easier, please note that we would also like solutions to the following:
1. How to own a car without living in it.
2. Where the ‘free sample’ nights at nearby grocery stores can be found.
3. Healthcare.
PPS. Regarding QP. With any luck, I’ll be posting a new album every day until the photos run out. This might take weeks.
May 25, 2009Goodbye Eats
Leaving hurts. Until that first bite of homemade waffle on Sunday morning, my progress from west to east was marked by increasingly limp, chemical foodstuffs:
Portland: Fresh coffee and a bag of delicious treats.
PDX > MPLS : “Organic” peanuts.
Minneapolis : Boxed microwave pizza and a coke .
MPLS > BOS : Tasteless cookie & (iceless) Pepsi.
Boston : An unfortunately durable (lukewarm) meatball sub (I think).
I had conveniently forgotten how jarring a departure from Portland can be to one’s digestive system; or, for that matter, to one’s interest in food altogether. Even a short visit can seriously hamper my willingness to choke down the assorted flavors of reconstituted corn-base that the rest of the country gorges itself on every night of the week; but six months? It’s like being given a pleasant new appreciation for all things edible, and then having that whole delicate world torn down over the course of six short hours. Somehow Portland has maintained a hold on being home to America’s last healthy lifestyle, and the sheer number of boutique eateries that pride themselves on serving exclusively Fresh & Delicious meals (for a reasonable price) make the the city a delicious gem, home to gustatory opulence of every stripe.
I miss it already.
Now, bear in mind that I’m referring to the occasional dinner out or sidewalk lunch. I habitually sustain myself (for a certain percentage of the time anyways) off of the ubiquitous cup-o-noodles, numberless boxes of cinnamon toast crunch, and every other shrink-wrapped horror that can be gotten at the nearest gas station minimart. The battle of good food against easy food is sometimes a losing one. However, even at the Plaid Pantry, the minimart closest to my last apartment, Portland manages to shine. Where you would find only the dingiest assortment of piss-weak “lite beers” at a comparable place on the east coast, my little Plaid managed to stock whole refrigerators full of specialty ales from local breweries. I can’t count the number of times I would realize – suddenly – that this day was meant for sitting on the porch with a beer, and after being briefly disappointed at what the refrigerator had to offer, march over the Plaid and grab a six pack of something which, if I were in Boston (or NH for that matter), could only be hunted down in specialty shops.
As Matt Gross (aka The Frugal Traveler) wrote in his recent review of PDX:
“My eight-ounce sirloin cost $5.50 and came deliciously medium-rare. This being Portland, the meat was locally sourced, too, from cattle on the owner’s ranch.”
And he was writing about a goddamn strip club.
Oh Portland.
May 18, 2009Look Away!
Dear All,
There is no way I’m going to be updating this thing for at least another week. Another 30 will hit Quarter Past sometime today or tomorrow, but apart from that, I’m afraid it’ll stay dead until this whole packing/sending/moving /flying/unpacking/repacking process finishes up.
Back soon,
n.
PS. I’ll leave you with my very favorite -recently rediscovered – Arcade Fire cover : “Born on A Train”.
(Update : The song works now.)
May 1, 2009Watch. Listen. Leave.
Backspace. When we walked in, the barista was up on an A-frame next to the stage, tying prayer flags to a disco ball and humming the bass track to “You Are My Sunshine” as it loped along through the stereo.
At first the flags just hung there, like a raggedy little sibling of Sputnik at Mardi Gras, but she kept working (and humming) and pretty soon the ends were tied off to speakers, lights and even the treehouse itself. Now, an hour later, she’s back serving vegan cupcakes and all those Sputnik legs are splayed out above the stage, looking more than a little predatory. What sort of musicians do Tibetan Disco Spiders like to eat?
*ACT II : Y’KNOW?*
“I see both of my parents as failures.”
The conversation happening in front of me is a sad one, but not for reasons that either of its participants would appreciate (or, for that matter, comprehend). The topic being tossed back and forth – so much as I can make out – is: How I, the unloved inhabitant of society’s dusty outer fringe, having struggled past enormous obstacles, have become the glorious, rather attractive (if I do say so myself) beacon of wisdom sitting across from you now. The primary life obstacles that have been listed thusfar are as follows:
1. A loving but woefully under appreciative “failure of a family” that “just holds me back … by … like … existing, y’know?”
2. Professors (all of them apparently) who spend their energy not teaching, but “cramming their, like, ideas down the throats of [students] who just, like, don’t care , y’know?”
3. The entire population of Portland, OR; which is made up of “just, like, uppity fucks who don’t get it. I mean, not you, but, like EVERYONE else. Y’know?”
Ten minutes later: Now they’re showing each other journal entries which contain short poems about favorite meals and carefully recorded quotations by people who have – mistakenly, I promise you – told one of them that he looks like James McAvoy.
(Note: They will still be doing this in three hours, when I decide to leave.)
ACT III – WORKABLE BEAT
Before I go, let me leave you with this beautifully constructed little electronic piece, entitled “Dictaphone’s Lament” by Tycho. It isn’t the sort of song I normally put up here, but if you happen to still be tapping away at some project when three AM swings around, I highly recommend feeding it through the headphones.
(Interesting tidbit, when he’s not producing ambient ear-candy under his Tycho persona, Scott Hansen assumes his other identity as one of America’s best known graphic designers, ISO50.”:http://iso50.com/iso50.html You might know him from the gorgeous set of “Obama Posters that he did last year.)
April 24, 2009Projected Dead
It has been a strange week. I’ve woken up on two couches and seen 4am pass me by while conscious three times (and the second time wasn’t even a long night, I just happened to wake up then.) Thanks to some dark mixture of serious caffeine and a few concentrated bouts of sugar consumption, time hasn’t really registered. I woke up this morning not quite sure where I was. Not in a scary way, just … unsure.
To top it all off, Friday has proven to be one of those rare (but persistent) occasions where I innocently wander in to the internet and am attacked (invaded, molested) by an enormous number of shiny little shards of everyday adwork that only buoy to the surface with the help of design blogs, CG nerds and the occasional bucket of money that ad agencies feed them. I try to keep days like this from happening too often, but it has been a while, so I guess I was due.
The problem is, where to begin?
Well, it started out with the widespread excitement over Scrabble’s new ad campaign (those are 3 different links by the way) in which Scrabble decides to go completely nuts and hires several artists to watch them do it. After watching all three, headed over to watch Onwards , a short film by James Jarvis . Stunning. The best part is, though Nike paid for it, there isn’t a swoosh to be seen for the entire thing.
Then I took a short break from crazy adverts to check out Carolyn London’s fantastic Lost Tribes of New York , and a rather beautiful short called Parallelostory by Kelly Meador and Daniel Elwing (from Portland! Woot! Their Peace Corps spot is also great, but didn’t quite make today’s cut.)
Finally, after a day of glitzy motion graphics and fancy after effects, I settled back and thoroughly enjoyed the work of “Filipoiu Marius. “:http://www.altphotos.com/Gallery.aspx?&a=MemberGallery&memberid=12825 Excellent, excellent stuff.
There were more … hundreds more, but I’ve whittled them down the ones that won’t waste your time. :-)
April 13, 2009More Me, You See
After a brief visit, my parents have moved on towards Santa Cruz to visit Margaret, and I’m back to eating scrambled eggs balanced on gas-station bread at my desk.
It’s a good thing I only eat like a king a few days out of the year, as it might otherwise get to my head and insight wild spending frenzies at low-light little boutique foodie hangs like the one we dined in last night. There are no words that I can think of which adequately describe how delicious my meal was, so I’ll just leave it at that. However, I will say that if you’re ever wondering where true (honest/pure/magical) happiness can be found, I’d start looking here.
Two more things before I go. First off, I recently stumbled upon an absolutely fantastic collection of photos taken by Hunter S. Thompson that are now on display at M+B in LA. They’re all beautiful; though I particularly like the self portraits.
“Click here to check out the rest.“:
And second, though I have already told most of the people who read this blog about them in person already, I figured it couldn’t hurt to recommend Empire of the Sun more publicly. If anyone has spent time around MGMT’s first album (and were enormously disappointed by their second) this might be just the kind of medicine you need.
I’ve included my favorite…
April 6, 2009Let There Be Light!
Portland experienced its first summer day of 2009 yesterday. It was blue and warm and perfect and absolutely everybody was outside and in a good mood.
This is the upswing of having a whole population that suffers from severe depression for six months out of the year. When they emerge on the opposite side, those pasty white faces are smilin! Frisbee was being played, boats were being sailed, and for the first time since November, hipsters didn’t look totally absurd wearing those enormous sunglasses.
I spent the day wandering with my camera, and came home totally unable to pick just 30. So I picked 50, and will split them in to two albums. The first I just posted, and once I pad the second with ten more shots (tomorrow?) I’ll post that one as well.
While I’m at it, I might as well post the song that was listened to the MOST today, as a tramped around town. I don’t know much about Starsailor and if it turns out that the only other people who like this song are thirteen and female, so be it. It wouldn’t be the first time.
April 2, 2009AndreaBailey.org
I’m not known for having outstanding taste when it comes to birthday gifts (recall, the watertight credit card holder, the box of crayola markets ((sans black)), the two bags of M&Ms duct taped together, etc…) but that might be changing.
This year, picking up on a stray comment that Andrea probably regrets having ever uttered, I decided to purchase Ms. Baileyher very own blog. I realize that this might be the nerdiest gift a human can give, but don’t worry. Andrea has been dealing with aggressively nerdy types her whole life. She can take it.
So, with no further ado, I present Andrea Bailey.org
(Plus an Iron & Wine cover of Such Great Heights that Maura unintentionally brought to my attention. Far better than the original.)
March 28, 2009Thumbtacks
Margaret pushed off yesterday afternoon on a train bound for Santa Cruz, leaving me without house-guests for the first time in three weeks. It has been a wonderful three weeks, mind you, but I must say, there is something to be said for occasionally basking in the silence of a solitary Saturday afternoon. My internal clock needs a little resetting too; after seeing Margaret off at 2pm, I went home, took a five hour nap, and was up until 4:30 this morning noodling around on the computer, writing letters, etc. It will take a few days for life to settle back in to it’s normal humdrum groove.
Beyond that…. nada. Well, apart from the fact that I can’t get this goddamn song out of my head.
I’m not a big fan of Matt Costa’s, but for some reason, this one has stuck like peanut butter to the roof of my skull, and no amount of replaying can get it unstuck. Better that I just ignore it for a while. Pay my curse forward.
March 23, 2009Flew The Coop
Monday. 4:50pm. 3 Friends Coffeehouse.
The room has gone from average to empty in no more than four or five minutes. All that’s left is the BPB (Black Plastic Barista. So-named due to the thick black frames on his glasses) and a ginger-haired twentysomething woman who needs to get to Boston by Thursday. BPB suggested cheaptickets, but she doesn’t want to spend more than $300. I’m tempted to ask what she’s after in Boston, but this temptation is totally overwhelmed by my desire to assume the following:
She’s a singer, bluegrass/punk fusion mostly, born and raised in downtown Des Moines near Windsor Heights, a few blocks north of the freeway. Her house is a short drive from the Des Moines Renaissance Fair, where her mom works in the summer (at the Olde Ye Flower Arrangements Booth) and where her band had it’s first gig in 2003. It was a disaster, mostly, and embarrassing to the point where the band – then known as “The Wormy Apples” had to take break and change their name to “Rita Smiles and Lampshades” (explanation: her real name is Iris, but her father – much to the chagrin of her mother – insisted on keeping a framed portrait of Rita Hayworth on the mantle of her childhood home. It left and impression.)
Anyways, Iris is here on tour. Or she was, until meeting Allison (the blonde girl who just left through the back door) last night at a house party that Rita finished up with the drummer of RS & tL’s. It was loud and worthwhile and when Allison introduced herself after their set, Iris was in the mood to meet someone. They hit it off, one thing led to another, and upon waking up this morning, Iris felt a rather powerful need to keep Allison near by. The problem is, Allison is Canadian, (from Montreal, old town), and is currently going through an unpleasant extradition process due to a coke charge that was unfairly levied against her in December of last year. Allison is being taken back to Montreal tomorrow by a nasty undercover Mountie named Wilma who comes down to Portland for the cheap strip clubs (something Portland specializes in) and who – by chance – was in this very coffee shop last week flirting with BPB.
Iris doesn’t know this yet, but she will soon.
Alison just left out the back door because she saw Wilma walking towards the 3 friends, but as it turns out, Wilma was just cruising past 3 Friends again to take another gander at BPB before tomorrow’s departure. Iris doesn’t have a passport, but figures the easiest way to reconnect with Alison would be to cross the Montreal border in New Hampshire, where she has heard you don’t need any papers; only a case of beer for the Mountie in charge and friendly quip about how much better off Montreal would be as it’s own country.
This is true.
The band, such as it is, knows nothing about Allison or BPB or Wilma or the mountie in charge of New Hampshire’s border crossing, but is currently wondering where the hell their lead singer has disappeared to.
Just a guess.
Sorry I had to leave that hanging. Work calls.
PS. Greatest Link Yet – The Flickr Clock
March 19, 2009Nothing New
Andrea just left and Margaret is about to arrive, so it won’t be a while until I post something new here. However, if you’re having difficulty filling the hours until that next post, you could: 1. count sheep. 2. Check out James Jean’s recent foray in to chalk drawings, or 3. Be faintly creeped out by the oddly addictive Silhouette Masterpiece Theater. They’re all great, and I promise that I’ll actually write something soon.
*9:35 PM UPDATE* : This needs to be watched. Especially if you’re visiting this site from the comfort of your small, windowless bedroom. Tokyo Cyber Drifters
March 9, 2009Eleven Seventeen
Work-wise, I achieved astonishingly little this weekend. Some portion of my brain was aggressively useless; hellbent on taking afternoon naps and staring in to space. The only marginally worthwhile thing to emerge from the last 48 hours is the little movie below; cobbled together over the space of 45 minutes on Sunday night. It’s very rough around the edges (was made while waiting for Andrea’s plane to land) but it sure beats the hell out of napping.
A Sunday Evening Minute: 11:17 from N Laffan on Vimeo.
March 1, 2009Don’t Look!
I put up new photos, but the three shots of yours truly were quickly zapped when it was discovered that due to the position of this coffee shop’s only free table, I would not be able to work on them without my screen facing The Public. For some reason, tweaking photos of one’s self in public seems enormously arrogant to me, so I’ve caved to whatever social phobia that falls under and deleted the whole lot. (That this reluctance is wildly at odds with my apparent willingness write about myself on a website that bears my name will certainly be pointed out in the comments section. I will fight you.)
In lieu of the deleted self portraits, I’ll toss in a couple favorites from the masquerade ball I was hired to take pictures of last night. It was a birthday party for Heather Watkins, and a night to remember. (Heather being the one person responsible for the full extent of my graphic design education) If I’m lucky, a reasonable percentage of the 1200 frames taken (over the course of four hours) will come out. (10% would be fine; though I’m expecting something closer to 7%.) To the whiners, I promise the Heather-replacements are more interesting than the shots which were dropped. One of them had made the cut only because I recently discovered a shameful lapse in my journalistic coverage of open-wound photos over the years (the only ones thusfar are of Becca’s left foot from 2006), and the others you couldn’t make out my face for all the peanut butter.
And now, two things which I learned while riding the No. 70 bus heading north along 17th and Powell.
1. Bus driving can result in chilly fingers. Our driver was wearing what I assume to be the normal TRI-MET summer gear – powder blue shirtsleeves and black pants – but both of his hands were covered with heavy woolen mittens that he had to remove at each stop to hand out tickets. Clearly, last week’s climatological deviation from cold and shitty had infected him with some crazed notion that spring was upon us. Poor bastard. All of his passengers were done up in sweaters and full rain gear and were extending politely brief but appropriately pitying glances in his direction. I think someone had donated the mittens.
2. You can – roughly – gauge our national economic health by counting the number of cars on freight trains. While our bus was waiting for one such train to pass, the guy behind me (the same guy who had almost started a fight with a new passenger over the basketball team displayed on his hat) started to explain how he had come to realize this length-to-economic-well-being ratio after working at the Portland’s northern train depot for several years. Though totally obvious, it struck me as being brilliant and I remained mutely amazed until getting off eight blocks later.
I would also like to take this opportunity to make a more public HAPPY BIRTHDAY to one reader of this blog (possibly two) in conjunction with tomorrow’s phone call and in apology for what will be a woefully delayed gift.
Good night!
February 23, 2009A Grunge Thing
I’m not sure why this website has been getting so much attention lately. It would be easy to assume that so many posts in so short a span of time (and photos, and drawings and flickr additions) might mean I’ve nothing better to do; like a job. Sadly, this is not the case, and if you’re going to make any speculations, they should probably be about my attention span and/or lack thereof.
Below, a few scans from my current sketchbook.
Sticky
There are eight power outlets to be had at Powell’s coffee shop, and today the only free one is located inside the boiling square of sunshine along the south wall.
It must be 100 degrees in here. I’m dripping with sweat, and can feel heat radiating up under my elbows from the black bar table (little pools are forming where my forearms touch the plastic.) The sun is in my eyes, and the aluminum surface of my laptop gets too hot to touch if I move my hands for more than a few minutes. These are pretty much the maximum conditions I will suffer for a $1.50 lunch. My crippling cheapness is being put to the test.
And now, your daily lump of wisdom, thanks to a group of people that have even less to do than me.
“If you watch the movie `Jaws’ backwards, it’s about a shark that keeps throwing up people until they have to open a beach.” (via reddit)
Discuss.
February 16, 2009I’ll Chew That Gum
I’m not much of a dancer.
It’s no secret. In fact, most of the people who are reading this have seen first hand just how ‘not-much-of-a-dancer’ I really am. But that could change. Let me explain.
I spent the hour lunch break between my Sunday Nap and Sunday Movie today munching on sliced apples and peanut butter, watching a few TED talks to keep my eyeballs occupied. If you’ve never spent time at ted.com, try it out. It is one-stop-shopping for day-long distractions though, so if you do go, do it between two firmly scheduled events like mine to prevent any ADD wandering that could lead you to the murky timesuck that is Wikipedia.
Anyways, the featured speaker this time was Elizabeth Gilbert, author of ‘Eat Pray Love’ and The Muse of the Coyote Ugly Saloon , a 1997 GQ article which spawned that horrible movie. (To be honest, until I found out that this was the same person, the Coyote Ugly movie and Eat Pray Love occupied completely opposite – though similarly distasteful – categories in my brain. Now I know. Her talk is exactly as advertised though: funny, personal, rather wonderful in a way, and entirely worth the click.) After the talk, I jumped over to her website to see if any good trip-photos could be had. They can’t, but you can find a link to wherethehellismatt.com , and here is where the dancing begins.
Apparently, Matt was an unhappy video game designer in LA and wanted to travel the world. So he quit is job and used the money he’d been saving to do exactly that. Well done Matt. Then Matt decided he’d like to continue traveling, which is where most of us collide with the unfriendly reality of being poor. Not Matt. He simply found a chewing gum company who would pay him to travel around the world three more times. What does he have to do for them? Smuggle crack-gum? Nono. He has to film himself dancing for approximately five seconds in each country. I shit you not. I bet this bastard doesn’t even like chewing gum.
If anyone would like to pay me to dance for five seconds at a time in various countries of my choosing, please do not be shy. I would even sweeten the deal and chew gum while dancing.
Now, on to the Valentine.
As a few of you know, I came up with the the rather lonely idea of making an online Valentine this past Thursday. The idea was to paint something small, post it for a day, then be done with it. Obviously, that didn’t happen. What emerged from my dank little cave after two days of painting, drinking and typing is only distantly related to Valentines Day, and certainly isn’t anything anyone would have wanted to see in their mailbox. (Watch out for single people on V-Day. They’re a moody bunch.) To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure you’ll want to see it now, but if you’ve nothing better to do, by all means feel free to check out Nate’s 2009 Valentine.
February 12, 2009Blink. Blink.
The following is a word-for-word transcript of my thought process at 7:09 this morning while lying in my bed staring at the ceiling. To get the full effect, read very slowly and add emphasis to the adjectives.
Staying at home makes the most sense. I have food at home. String cheese! This room is boxy. I like string cheese. Plus it’s food I don’t have to buy. If I go to a coffeeshop – ugh, eyegoo – I’ll have to pay. Kate just woke up. Coffee is expensive, but if Car – what the hell is she wearing high-heels for? She hasn’t even taken a shower, ugh, I drooled. Yellow is nice. No, that’s not yellow, it’s – of course, if I go to Powells – Updike! I need to read Updike. What time is it. 7:11. I wonder if I can itch my eyebrow by scrunching up my nose.. Scrunch.. Scrunch..What killed Updike anyways, was it his heart? Scrunch… Maybe his brain exploded. Scru… Dammit. Hmm. I have bananas too, they’re yellow. No, that’s more of a ocher…… What a weird movie. Or maybe his ears fell off and his brain spilled – I should go to Powells, wouldn’t even need to pay – living forever would be nice…well that makes sense, he was about to die…looked a little like the Steve Jobs E.R. guy… what movie was that black guy in… imdb later. Rememberthatrememberthatrememberthat. Books, yes, I could sit in the corner near the tapes. Good plan. Headphones. Doublegood. But that’s so LONG, he couldn’t have been sad about the dead guy. Cavemen didn’t have feelings… did they? I need to blow my nose. That’s right, George Clooney was on ER too, Jesus I feel old. That’s right! He was Jesus! I wish I were Jesus. Except Jesus couldn’t fly. No, I wish I could fl – laser beams would be good too though. Maybe just those two, flying and lasers. Jesus would go to Powells though. That’s reason enough. Ok, first things first. Bracelets. String cheese… two should do nicely. Goddamnit, now she’s in the shower…. (etc, etc, for another ten minutes until Kate was finished with her shower and I dragged myself out of bed.)
And so it came to pass that I spent the day at Powells, happily eating lukewarm string cheese that I had smuggled from home.
February 6, 2009Drain-o
At about 10am this morning, I decided that if I didn’t do something quickly, the day would be in serious danger of stalling out before lunch. It was gray outside, my workload was looming and the inside of my head still felt like an enormous mucus balloon from the head cold I had suffered earlier in the week. Without wasting any time, I grabbed a shot of espresso, a screwdriver, a spray-bottle of Clorox and a pair rubber gloves and charged off to see how I could change the world for the better. (Sidenote: this combination will work miracles for any problem you might have. Be careful to always include all four items. Forgetting one can lead to disaster.)
It soon became apparent that what the world desperately needed was for someone to lead a thorough investigation as to what was clogging the bathroom sink. After some unlatching, some spraying, and several defensive squirts of the Clorox, I extracted the following specimen from our plumbing.
Don’t worry, this is only a picture. The real thing was so horrific that most of you would have passed out within seconds. I cannot begin to describe the smell.
Nothing starts off a productive day like a little dry heaving.
February 3, 2009The 8
If you pick up the 8 JACKSON bus on Third and Pine downtown – you won’t wait long, fifteen minutes at the max – it will take you due south for a few blocks and then jog right, continuing on Broadway through the middle of PSU; underneath the brick walkway, past the parking garage and post office and then at Jackson Blvd, it’ll bend left again; over the freeway towards Duniway Park to begin the steep ascent towards Oregon’s Health & Science University (OHSU).
The north side of Marquam Hill – where I live – is given over to OHSU’s enormous sprawl of constituent buildings that rise up out of the trees; a cluster of polished honeycombs of the sleekest construction. A lot of thought has gone in to the design of each one, and they look elegant indeed; glowing, as they do, with that confident aura of computerized efficiency. Gray windows stretch along the east wall of the main hospital, ending smartly at a brightly lit staircase that stretches up to meet one end of America’s longest skybridge, another gargantuan marvel that reaches out for 660 feet across two roads and a parking garage to the veterans hospital.
It’s a sight to behold, though for all of the glitz, one hopes that whoever was in charge put some money aside so that the interior might fulfill the promises of the the exterior. (Of course, give me a few months; pretty soon I’ll be waxing on about the restorative qualities of architecture and how if the building were beautiful enough, they wouldn’t NEED doctors.)
The 8 is the only bus to service OHSU regularly. It loops up through the veterans hospital, along a small residential zone above the complex, and then swoops back down the other side to the main exit, collecting everyone who would rather be downtown. I live on the northern fringe of uppermost housing cluster, and get off at the Plaid Pantry stop (“The Plaid” being Marquam Hill’s only commercial building. An outpost of sorts.)
As you might imagine, living at the peak of such a loop means that there is an entirely different crowd going in to town than there is coming out. On it’s route along 3rd Ave, the number 8 stops at the corners of Stark, Yamhill and Madison, picking up every stripe of veteran you can imagine, and they’re usually a pretty lively bunch. The ones out of wheelchairs give advice to the bus driver, the ones in em’ will chat amicably with anyone nearby, and those who have spent the afternoon muttering to themselves along the waterfront huddle near the back next to newfound friends (who soon remember that they still need something downtown and get off at the next stop).
The other direction is different though. It is, I suppose, as you’d expect the departure from a hospital to be – if you’ve no one to take you home. At mid-afternoon, when there aren’t any doctors commuting, it’s quiet. The passengers appear distracted, and those same veterans that were so boisterous just a few stops ago, now seem to be gearing up for re-entry. I wouldn’t say it’s despair that’s lingering in the air, but something is there and it’s a palpable weight that keeps people reading their book or staring out the window. I often wonder what each person is carrying around inside behind that stare, and I’ll get off at my stop a bit bewildered; momentarily detached from whatever put me on the bus in the first place.
…
Not sure where I was going with that, but it’s an odd feeling.
Anyways, new photos soon.
January 23, 2009God & Suicide
I’ve moved in to my new home.
The sheets are borrowed and the walls plain, but that’s the way most of these things start out. Give it some time. It takes a week of fussing to arrange things properly, and a few more after that to figure out what to put on the wall. Today’s breakthrough consisted of the careful dismantling of my closet door so that it could be used as a desk. Tomorrow….who knows! People frown on wall-painting over here, so that’s out, but I’ll do something.
Suggestions welcome.
Ah, and for those who haven’t been aggresively pushed in the direction of Blitzen Trapper over the past week, here’s your nudge. I’ve been trying to get this song out of my head for two weeks now to no avail. I think it’s in there for good.
January 14, 2009Hey Friend
The last three days have been a nonstop march of coffee shops. One after the other after the other. What a wonderful place to be an antsy graphic designer.
The one I’m in now is called ‘Three Friends Cafe’, and features a little taste of everything you’d hope for in an ‘internet office’. The entrance is flanked by enormous plate glass windows that are papered – up to a certain height – with fliers that brightly lure you towards various fragments of the evening scene. Once inside, the ceilings are high and the light low; little leopard print lamps sit at some of the tables, and a couch or two stretch back in to the room. Wood floors… a little stage that was probably first used to display mannequins (in another life, the room itself was a clothing store); collage art dangling from random spots on the wall, and where it doesn’t, potted plants. The bar is covered with big jars of tea and ends at a dilapidated little desk that holds up a painted computer advertising ‘Free Net!’. The names of each drink above the register are illustrated with a Polaroid ……. the bagels are delicious.
Mmmmmm yes. It has the vintage, the hip, the homely feel and the open spaces…and lightning quick internet. Four stars.
January 12, 2009Zap Capital
I’ve been in Portland for three days, and already my cups-per-hour coffee intake is up to college levels: three cups between consciousness and nourishment, another two to brave the Outdoors, a shot of something hot and powerful to keep me going, after-lunch, before dinner, after dinner and a goodnight brew.
With this much UP, you’d think Portlanders all moved like hummingbirds or some bright-eyed gaggle of Mongeese; but no! Still the same sleepy town I left four years ago. Still the tight-jeans and faux leather shoes. Still the slicked back grease under a vintage fedora, the horned rimmed funk framing the handle-bar mustaches. Still the threadbare Carharts topped with authentic plaid, wrapped snuggly inside those god damned earth-toned down vests. (vintage, of course). I’m sure you can still find climbing shoes being quietly toted around by the black-haired hipster or ostensibly salt of the earth types (that’s how salty earth types dress, isn’t it?) whipping out the iPhone or Blackberry or perhaps they’re new and can still be caught – gasp! – driving.
If you’ve never lived here, you might think I was complaining.
For a city that prides itself on maintaining the bleeding edge of progressive hip, refreshingly little has changed. I’ve spent the past two days walking, sipping, and writing emails to absolutely everyone in all of the nearby zip codes who may want to give living with me a shot.
December 29, 2008And We’re Off!
I’m tapping this out on my telephone, so it will have to be brief.
We just left Putney VT, and are heading west along a newly prescribed route – thank you Emily – which will take us farther South, so as to avoid the nasty weather sweeping down from Lake Erie. This won’t be the rambling two-month trip across that I’ve been hoping to make (we should be pulling in to Santa Cruz by the 3rd) but it will be well documented, that I promise. Click the flickr steam link for photos as we go …
December 16, 2008Packin Up
This is what -30F looks like…from the inside. I’m packing at the moment, so that’s about all the verbiage I’ll throw in for today’s POTD. Boston tomorrow, and then, New Hampshire!
December 15, 2008Inside the Icebox
I woke up this morning to discover a worrisome quantity of ice INSIDE my bedroom window (pictured above) and a forecast which promised that Minneapolis “will feel like -30F all day!”. At first, this prompted what I assume is the normal human reaction to -30 degree weather: I opted to stay in bed. When I finally ventured out (mittens and a hat indoors are a must around here) I found Becca in the Cave (80?), hunched over her computer, cramming in the final few facts for her 10am exam. I’ll be spending the day hunched over the heater thank you very much.
Onward!
There is nothing that destroys the Christmas mood like America’s seasonal tradition of re-releasing sexed up Perry Como hits for the millionth time, spicing up each with a new beat and breathy female lead in. My hat is off to _anyone_ who works in a shopping mall or convenience store where this dreck is pumped through the stereo 24/7. Nobody deserves that.
So I’m offering an alternative. I’ve been thoroughly enjoying ‘ Coeur de Pirate’ by Béatrice Martin lately. Great, easy album. It has the added benefit of being entirely in French, so I am blissfully unaware as to whether or not she can write decent lyrics. Check it out….
Sunday Guest
Becca spent some time on the OTHER side of the camera this afternoon. :-)
PS. To those of you viewing this site in Internet Explorer, I apologize; it must look horrible. As soon as I can get my hands on a PC to test it out on, fixes will be made.
Good night!
(Update: Becca just announced that it “feels like -20F outside, according to weather.com”. I’m going to go find more blankets.)
December 13, 2008Squint
Needless to say, my first forays in to manual focus tricks have not been enormously successful, but the effect is nice. This is in the car, waiting for traffic unlock. The only thing that really ‘worked’ was to focus on the windshield, and after the first few winter snows, there’s actually some interesting texture built up around the ice and dirt. Minnesotan glamor shot.
December 12, 2008Cowpath
Ninety percent of the photos displayed on this website have been taken within a two block radius of my walk to the coffee shop (the shot above is just a block or so east of 2nd Moon). This serious lack of adventuring has a lot to do with the cold, but there is also something to be said for getting to know an area, a shop or a street really well. (Or as well as you can over the course of three months.) I’m not sure how reflective those first 8 blocks of Franklin Ave are of greater Minneapolis/St. Paul, but for better or worse, they’re going to be what I think of as Minnesota for quite a while.
December 11, 2008Morning Layers
After using up all of my spare photo-of-the-day photos on last night’s _Quarter Past_ update, I woke up this morning prepared to take a fresh batch on my walk to morning coffee. Had I checked out weather.com (and discovered that it “it feels like -6°F out there”) things might have gone differently. Today’s photo might have been of an exploratory foot, poking out from it’s wonderfully warm bedding, only to retreat while I did all this from bed. But no. At 8:15 I was shaking like a leaf in the early morning Mississippi breeze, at the peak of the Franklin Bridge (where “it feels like -100°F”) taking This Goddamn Photo. It is only due to the wonders of image stabilization and a very fast shutter speed that it came out at all.
December 10, 2008Freedom!
I don’t think humans are capable of the frenzied, orgasmic delight a puppy must feel during its Afternoon Walk. After a morning spent sun-bathing and licking himself and/or various bits of furniture, Finn is practically vibrating with anticipation by the time we move purposefully towards a mitten or boot. One hour of pure, unrestrained freedom! Oh rapture!
December 9, 2008The Cave
The Cave is small and windowless. I suppose you could call it an office, but if I were selling the place, I would hasten to add that it also functions perfectly well as a walk-in closet or possibly – in the event of a citizen arrest – a snug little prison cell.
You rarely see Becca outside the Cave these days, and with good reason. Any sensible Californian wouldn’t go anywhere near Minnesota in December, and I’m sure those that live here are visiting relatives until at least June. This particular Californian is sticking it out, but she _has_ discovered that if you shut yourself in the Cave with the furnace vent open and the thermostat cranked, it’s almost like being in a _Mexican_ prison cell.
December 8, 2008Workday
Briefly: I discovered the _multiple exposure_ feature on this crazy little toy yesterday, and suddenly Becca’s normally heroic patience was forced to achieve new heights: now I want her to move between frames. All this, and she’s trying to write three papers, study for three tests _and_ occasionally love the dog (whose feelings are seriously hurt that this horrible little black box is getting more attention than he is.) Ach mein!
December 7, 2008Sleeping Helps. Apparently.
The sun set immediately after lunch yesterday. The above photo – a lamp set against a window – was taken at 3pm. Not knowing all that much about astronomy, I just assumed the apocalypse had come and was manifesting itself in a rather benign way; but no! Further investigation reveals that these celestial mood swings are totally normal during the Minnesotan winter and are due – as you might expect – to the sun suffering from severe occupational depression after several weeks of failing (spectacularly) to provide heat anywhere north of the Mason-Dixon.
Seems a little defeatist to me.
December 6, 2008The Routine
It would be fair to say that a healthy portion of my relationship with Becca revolves around hard-nosed, utterly trivial, to-the-death competition. This has manifested itself in various ways across the years, (including a cross country trip that I’m sure beat several world records) but most recently it’s been Othello. (otherwise known as “Reversi”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversi ) Our morning visit to the coffee shop now includes a hard fought game of Othello that takes up to two hours, and can often dictate whether or not I consider the day as a whole to be a success. Above, Becca concentrating on this morning’s game. She won. By a lot.
Too Much Information?
And now, *a daily photo*!
“Too much” is a dramatic understatement. The amount of information I put up each day about my Minnesotan goings-on has reached a whole new level of absurdity. Thankfully, there are 3 people who spend any amount of time around here, so why not?
This whole Photo of the day thing will be temporary. Keeping this sort of thing up over long periods of time can lose people their social lives (however meager) very quickly. But it would be a shame to _not_ have one while I’m getting used to this new camera. I’ve taken several hundred photos during its inaugural 24 hours, and god knows there will be more. So many more.
NOTE: Each photo will be linked to its Flickr page where comments can be left and higher resolutions downloaded.
As you were.
December 5, 2008What Next?!
Today, at approximately 10:15am, the mailman (or UPS guy or FedEx grunt or whoever it was that leaves treats on doorsteps at this time of year) delivered my BRAND NEW CAMERA.
Briefly: it rocks, and features technology hereto unused by your humble photographer: a lens. It will take me a while to get used to all of this craziness, so I should warn you now, there may be a photo-of-the-day coming soon to help me get my bearings with this thing. A temporary photo-boost in case Quarter Past and the flickr stream weren’t enough.
More soon!
November 18, 2008Lapse
I’m not sure why, but over the past few days my brain has decided to shut off mid-sentence. Not when I’m just muttering to myself, no … there has to be someone else around to impress. Phone calls in particular seem to bring out the worst cases. Several times – more than I’d like to admit at this point – I’ll be formulating an otherwise perfectly acceptable sentence, and whatever lobe it is that produces adjectives blinks hopefully for a moment, and then sputters to a complete halt. Dead Air. Seconds tick by.
It’s really quite disconcerting.
I’d like to think that my recent jump in Time Spent Reading might have something to do with it. With all of those new syllables needing shelf space for the GREs, one should expect some reorganization along the way. I just wasn’t expecting some of the old workhorses like ‘toothpaste’ , ‘redundant’ or ‘haggle’ to get tossed without notice. (Toothpaste in particular caught me by surprise. I spent ten very focused seconds this morning holding a tube of Crest, starting at the blue paste it had produced and totally unable to come up with a convincing noun.)
Becca suggested that I write more, surmising that that there might be some connection between blogging and speaking that neither of us were aware of. I’m willing to give it a shot, but if anyone else has a better suggestion, I would happily take them up on it.
November 5, 2008Well Done Obama.
October 30, 2008
Fingerpaint
Normally when I don’t write anything for a long time, there have been several attempts made; my fingers poised above the keyboard, eyes closed, face tilted back, bathed in divine light, waiting to be struck with inspiration from above.
Perhaps a quiet meditative hum to get things started…
No, this time I skipped all that and just put up some photos in QP and drawings in Restless. October’s a workin’ month.
n.
PS. In honor of my iPod dying for a THIRD TIME, I will post an angry song by Beth Hart. Beth wouldn’t put up with this shit. She’d probably hit the damn thing as hard as she’s whackin’ this piano. Good riddance.
October 23, 2008Politico
In the past forty-eight hours I have found (with help) two totally fantastic articles written by the commie pinko terrorist left which I cannot recommend enough. (Even if they don’t come from “Real America”:http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/index.jhtml?episodeId=188632 )
“Act I – Matt Taibbi”:http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/17504
“Act II – Robert Draper”:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/26/magazine/26mccain-t.html
More soon…
October 22, 2008Backstage Obama
I thoroughly enjoyed this. Photos by Callie Shell
October 20, 2008Worth A Thousand Words
After laboring over a ‘listen-what-just-happened-to-me’ post for several hours, I inadvertently deleted it. I am taking this as a sign from above that it wasn’t meant to be, and nobody really wanted to hear about my inability to digest peanuts anyways. (Thought it _was_ a pretty exciting read.)
Instead of having another go at it, I decided to post photos instead. I hope that they’ll keep you all entertained until I have another free moment. With any luck all the major work-chunks will finished in the coming week.
Then you’ll get to hear more about those peanuts.
October 12, 2008Quick Thinking
A few days ago, in a typical buffoon moment, I spilled coffee all over myself. Atypical – to me at least – was that this time the spill ended up covering not only my crotch, but laptop as well. I swore quietly, and looked around to see how many people were extending pity in my direction. Surprisingly, no one had looked up, which was lucky.
Some poor bastard the week before had done the same thing, except that instead of quietly cleaning it up, he decided to yell at his coffee cup for five full minutes as though it had intentionally disobeyed him and could be cowed in cleaning up the mess. Yelling does not help in these situations. You need to be clear, firm and reasonable with the delinquent cup or it won’t learn a thing.
I stood slowly, not wanting to attract attention, and looked over towards the napkin stack near the cash register. Twenty feet. This would be easy. Assuming the bent, crab-like scuttle that is common among people who have just spilled things or their crotch or peed their pants, I hobbled over to the napkins, grabbed a handful, and pressed them against the wet spot.
So sue me, I wasn’t thinking clearly.
Everyone who had seconds before been so good at minding their own business suddenly stopped what they were doing to look at the pervert pleasuring himself with napkins in the corner. I slowed, trying to assume what I judged to be a friendly, I’m-not-a-threat smile and tried to make eye contact, but it didn’t help. They were now staring at my damp upper thigh, which looked surprisingly as though having been caught, I had just wet myself. The napkin-pervert suffers from incontinence!
It was then that I got the pitying looks I had hoped for earlier, but with the alert type of pity people extend to middle aged men who mutter to themselves and read magazines upside-down. I was suddenly a threat. By the time I got back to my table a few of the people seated nearby had decided it was time to go, and I realized that my manic toothy smile was probably not having the desired effect.
I now realize that the guy who yelled at his coffee cup knew exactly what he was doing. Lesson learned.
(new photos up)
October 5, 2008Drink Mix
Currently, my office time is evenly divided between home and the two independent coffee shops near our house.
The farther of the two is a friendly, crunchy little java-joint with excellent drinks, frequent Bob Dylan tracks and a proprietor who smiles when you walk in the door. They’ve even invented a mixture of condensed milk and espresso which is so delightfully sweet that since first tasting it last week I’ve found my normal formula of matching sugar packets with ounces of coffee to be downright bland. The atmosphere is friendly, the internet fast, and apart from a few pieces of uncomfortable furniture in the back, it’s a delightful place to spend your day. The problem is, unless you arrive at six in the morning, you’ll find forty-five other people with the same idea, and have to resort to bathroom seating for a place to put your laptop. (Which is less than ideal, as neither of the bathrooms feature natural light or a sturdy side-table.)
The second, closer, option could not be more different. Inside the UMN campus, it is run by horrible ogres who hate humans, never smile, and whose only distantly service-related talent is an ability to cajole their aged cappuccino machine in to secreting a pale, milky fluid that even Dunkin’ Donuts wouldn’t identify as safe, and that I personally know to be poisonous. It is a war against the coffee-drinker. I would not be surprised to learn that their free time is spent putting razor blades in breakfast muffins or scratching dandruff in to the sugar packets.
It was a hot day a couple weeks ago when I first wandered in, looking for something cold and caffeinated. The place was totally empty, and I would have thought it to be closed, were it not for the lights and blaring music. After a minute or two of making loud noises around the cash register, a sullen looking ogre appeared from the back wearing goth-ish eye makeup and a smock. She lumbered up to the cash register and, maintaining a constant nasty-glare-look, growled “You want coffee.”
It was closer to an order than a question, so I tried initiating some given-and-take.
“Well, I was wondering what the ‘Caffeine Shake’ was like.” I asked, “Is it like a milkshake?”
It occurred to me, as she stood staring at my mouth as though I’d just spat tobacco juice on her clean cups, that perhaps she was hard of hearing, and I’d really just been very insensitive by speaking without hand signals. But no, she was just trying to gauge how dumb she could make me look with no one around to point and laugh.
“It’s … a SHAKE.” she finally growled, beginning to work up a good head of indignation, “I mean, don’t know what else to even say, I mean, it would have said MILK SHAKE if it was a milkshake. I mean, It has CAFFEINE in it. That’s why it’s call CAFFEINE SHAKE.” She paused for a moment – I could she was trying to think of other ways I had just asked a dumb question – so I interrupted and said I’d like one.
It was iced coffee.
Nothing beats a potent combination of unfriendliness and ineptitude. This formula is applied to every customer who makes the mistake of coming in, and it is a boggling thing to see at 7am, when real energy has to be put forward towards being a cold, unfriendly turd. I’ve seen one of them yell at an old lady before eight in the morning because she hadn’t ‘cleared her table properly’. I’ve seen red-eyed medical students refused service because they have a difficult time choosing between coffee or tea, and – my personal favorite – I’ve seen one of them tell a customer to ‘hold it’ when asked where they might find a public bathroom.
These people make sport out of being horrid.
Which, incidentally, makes it a fantastic place to work. If can I trick them in to selling me some coffee before they have time think up a good reason not to (no questions, use exact change and maintain eye contact while saying “Thank you”) then the rest of the day can be spent in relative isolation, getting work done and sitting back to watch the occasional customer wander in and be barked at; which, when it isn’t you, provides a certain, masochistic kind of entertainment.
All around, an excellent setup. The End.
Sidenote: If anyone missed giving me a present for my birthday this year, I would like to officially state my desire for one of these or possibly one of these Oh AND Daytrotter updates every day!
September 30, 2008Rebirth… Afterbirth, Whatever
Welcome back! First of all, an apology to all of you who wore the pad on your index finger down from refreshing natelaffan.com on the eve of September 26th. I was not expecting the largest work rush I’ve ever faced, and I certainly didn’t expect it would coincide with the promised launch of this thing. Couldn’t be helped. This is the first step towards recovery, the next is responding to any one of the many emails I just ignored to stay afloat. Time! All I need is time!
I’m not finished with all of the things I hoped to have ready for the launch, but if this doesn’t go live in September, something horrible will happen to me. (Don’t mess with your birthday month; it’s a useful bit of superstition that has kept me going thusfar.) What _has_ made it through is as follows:
1. QUARTER PAST – QP is the new photo album, and it has been re-coded from the ground up. There might be some little tweaks down the road, but it should be a lot faster than the old one. And prettier.
2. RESTLESS – This is something I’ve been meaning to do for a while. A box a week. No rules. I’m not going to art school this year, so Restless will have to suffice. I’ve started it off with 2 slides.
3. A Year in Five – This is samples from all five of the sketchbooks I kept while I was twenty-four.
4. Me. At Flickr – This may seem repetitive, but the flickr is account is solely for iPhone photos.
5. The Rest – Everything else has been on here at one point or another, but I’ve cleaned it up and shuffled things around so that they’re all up-to-date and work properly.
Apart from that, It’s all the same. I’ll start posting “strange links”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUensqImzXM soon enough.
-n
September 2, 2008Floating
In sixteen hours I’ll be rubbing the sleep out of my eyes on a bus bound for Rome. Provided the bus doesn’t blow up or crash, I’ll then get on a plane to Shannon; then NYC.
Then Boston, then Canaan, then Minneapolis.
I’m not sure how Siena will fit in to the next couple of years, but if anything is clear at this point, it is that I’ll be back. In fact, I won’t really have any choice in the matter; which, when you think about it, is rather comforting.
( “btw”:http://awesome.goodmagazine.com/features/011/Wanderlust/ )
August 25, 2008Reboxx’d
I spent this past weekend knee deep in glue, cardboard and colorful little bits of leather. By the end of three very full days (Friday afternoon got tossed in there as well) I had produced a diminutive looking little box for the three journals that followed me back from Africa.
More than anything, this functioned as a way to appease my fetishistic desire to arrange all objects in reach at right angles to one another, but it also served as a harsh reminder as to why I will never – ever – professionally undertake any project that requires long division and/or unit conversion. That it looks like a box at all is thanks to several rough estimations on my part, a reckless application of glue, and some artistic slices with a box-cutter.
As is the case with any project of mine, the whole thing was several aneurysms more complicated than necessary, and I don’t mean that in a “you-could-have-just-used-a-plastic-bag” sense either. It was complicated even for a box.
Otherwise, the days are steadily lurching towards September 3rd, at which point my life and lines will be re-stuffed in to their – rather worn looking – bag and tossed back across the Atlantic to begin a glorious autumn with these two :-)
Oh, and before I go… I was listening to some older tracks in the ol’iPod a few days ago and came across this, which could well have been my favorite song for the final two years of high-school, but for the fear of being tagged a Dusty Springfield devotee thirty years after that was considered _cool_. Thought I’d pass it along….
August 18, 200839d : 10h : 25m
It occurred to me this morning – as I looked up to check how much progress the mold near my window had made towards the already moldy door; a rather fixating chemical romance which I hope to see consummate before I leave – that in fewer than forty days, I will be twenty five years old. No one seems to notice, but time has been steadily accelerating since I was ten, and this past year went by like a colorful smudge on the highway towards retirement and burial arrangements. (Twenty-five year-olds have to take these sorts of things seriously.)
There are many reasons to give you all fair warning – not the least of which is my dramatic emotional collapse, scheduled for the eve of September twenty-sixth – but most relevant to this medium is next year’s photo album. The three of you that actually check for updates regularly should have some say regarding the next iteration, and if there are any features you’ve seen turn up in facebook or flickr over the past year that might be worth implementing here, don’t be shy. I can’t promise that I’ll be able to figure out how to include them, but I’m looking for some feedback from people who might benefit from possible improvements.
August 14, 2008Ten Plus Fifty Six
My new, post-Africa self doesn’t like working this late. My new post-Africa self doesn’t like screens either. In fact, come to think of it, my new, post-Africa self has actually developed a serious aversion to work altogether.
Surprise surprise. Thankfully, I’ve discovered another helpful voice to keep me from blinking too frequently. This is grade-A, uncensored, utterly pure ‘tortured-soul-with-a-beard-and-raspy-voice-playing-guitar’ material . If he hasn’t been picked up by the likes of Grays Anatomy and/or this summer’s latest heavy-breathing teen romance…just wait.
Which is sad actually…I rather like some of these songs. This one is called San Jose. May I introduce Joe Purdy
Outside, Siena is baking (it has got to be 90 degrees at 11pm) in preparation for Saturday’s palio. Cannons have been going off regularly for the past three days – they mark the beginning of the race, of which there have been several trial runs recently – and I’ve got to say, the sound of heavy artillery at such close proximity never fails to ramp the heart rate up a few notches. It almost makes sitting motionless in a windowless cave all day…. exciting.
August 8, 2008Three Hundred
The Africa photos are up. Enjoy! Comments can be tagged to this blog entry. (for those new to the site, photos are gotten to by clicking the ’24′ in the upper-right-hand corner of this page.)
August 5, 2008Clean Socks!
A month, a week, a day … an hour spent stumbling blind around the back of a grocery store in Chipata; it all boils down evenly. First lesson learned: Time is relative. African seconds fold in on themselves more quickly than I could keep up with, so my readjustment period might be a little longer than first projected.
Photos? Sifting through the pile is my first order of business (after the business orders are dealt with); and I promise at least a few hundred will make it through the censor.
Until then, breathe peacefully .
July 1, 2008Off Again!
I had meant to write this one in Italy…but things got a little cramped.
For those of you who don’t know, I’ll be in East Africa until August 3rd. If I’ve met you along the way, please leave a quick comment with your email (it won’t be displayed) and I’ll send you my real email address ASAP.
For those who knew already (the regulars!) I’m writing from a cleanish little internet joint (pricey sprites, sticky keyboards) just off the traffic circle in Mzuzu, Malawi. Andrea and I have covered a lot of ground in the past 5 days, and should be able to rest a little in the next few. I’m trying very very hard to stay away from computers, but if one should catch me by surprise, I’ll post another update here.
All the best,
N.
Utterly Undone
Hark! The herald angel is shrieking in tongues again!
A broken half bottle held high, stabbing wildly at cheeky ghosts with his good arm, oratorical sweeps with sticky green shards of jagged truth, each catching the dim reflection of an empty room. Belch forth that white plume of unchecked, unread gospel and watch your wings fold up – rot, wither and crust over with disuse. The correlation is direct, the lines parallel. Pluck the last bit of hope off each naked flap before they disintegrate completely.
Whispered : Keep it safe!
From up here the whole stage is set in fragmented plan view, wretched dots trudging along tightrope lives, giving off that neon whorehouse flicker you’d expect from uncertain belief. One drunken cherub in a barfight with himself won’t change the outcome, of that you can be sure. I’ve picked the feathers off those wings for long enough. Can you reassemble a thought from the decaying vestige of its freshest victim?
Can you sew the wings back on?
Whispered : We’ll see.
June 8, 2008Yum Scrum
The A.D.D Flambé
Ingredients
2 recently distilled quarks
1 delightful discovery
A half pint of random
A couple shakes of downright strange
Several boxes of beautiful
And a slice of stunning
Pour some of your random in to a large bowl, slowly mixing it in with historical significance and some deeply strangeWhile you stir, take a large handful of crushed beautiful and sprinkle it in evenly. (This creates that exciting flavor
Put that on the stove to simmer for a few hours.
While you’re waiting for it to finish, pour the rest of your random in to several pre-refrigerated cups, adding as muchangsty awareness to each as you see fit. On top of that, add a dollop of impressive and if you’re feeling really generous, a fresh discovery
That’s it! Serve this potent concoction to guests before they try to do anything at all, and voila, they’re useless!
June 5, 2008Curses Happen
At a certain point in anyone’s life, there comes a critical moment when cosmic forces, powers larger than you could possibly comprehend, conspire to serve up the shittiest possible combination events that can be crammed inside twenty-four hours. There’s no explanation really… presumably cosmic forces like that don’t have much to do in their spare time. One thing is for sure though: Friday the 13th has absolutely no claim on such phenomena. In fact, I can promise you next Friday will be utterly fantastic.
How do I know?
It was _yesterday_ that my washing machine caught on fire.
June 3, 2008
Click-a-holic Confessional
Had I been twenty-four years old forty years ago, my life might have been in real danger of moving in some worthwhile direction. Not towards medicine and chemistry mind you, but the law? Maybe. Diplomatic corps? Very possible. Even Architecture has a nice ring to it. (Until you’re asked to hold up a building using only concrete and math that is. Forty years can only cure so much.)
The point is, forty years ago, there was no internet, something which has done more to derail any serious career path of mine (not to mention any serious day) than Nutella, James Jean or the White Stripes combined (which is saying a lot.) Members of my generation have an attention span roughly akin to that of three year olds around bubbles, and those bubbles are sparkly, distracting, delightful websites. Billions of them.
Looking at it this way, I would say that I am doing you all a favor by bringing the shiniest bubbles up to the surface for inspection. However, I know you. All four of you. You’re doing exactly the same thing. Not everything on the internet is click-worthy though, and the real problem lies in how ideas are strung together so that a simple desire to know more aboutbreakfast
Anyways. This happens to me pretty frequently. On to the rehash.
Typography is a strange cult, no doubt, but when you mix it’ up with some quirky motion design I think you’ll agree the result is pretty awesome (Althought even more awesome than that would be making your own font from scratch I spent a good portion of the morning moping around after I realized that all of my favorite songs had been fixed (at least rock-n-roll still has awesome posters but to be perfectly honest, compared to some it could be worse. Much worse.
June 1, 2008On The Up’n'Up
This past Monday I drove a car down to the Rome airport to pick up the summer batch-o-learners Mike left early with the first seven, and I stayed behind to pick up the afternoon arrivals. Due to funky plane schedules and possibly my recent fascination with Richard Dawkins , the last flight was delayed, delivering the final student around six.
To avoid going completely out of my gourd for the seven hour wait, I grabbed the most recent Herald Tribune. It wasn’t cheap (nor was there anything I hadn’t seen online already) so put it down and was about to grab a magazine instead when my brain realized that it had registered something strangely familiar. I flipped back. Occupying half of page four was a chart designed by the absurdly talented Nicholas Felton That my brain subconsciously picked up on the fonts this guy uses should be some indication how often I see his work.
This is also worth nothing because Felton might be only famous designer I’ve actually met, thanks to the one and onlyHeather Watkins He’s been featured in featured in Print Kottke.org and recently designed a short story for Penguin over atWe Tell Stories All awesome. (I should also mention his 2007 annual report has appeared in every design blog I’m aware of.)
On to the rehash.
For anyone who occasionally clicks that black 24 up in the corner, you’ve already seen this, but local newspapers also picked up on Eliza’s lightbox” href=”blog_images/eliza_newspaper.jpg”>wedding jump. Much of Tuesday morning was spent sifting through “OMG Posters a blog that regularly updates with fantastic stuff; my favorites being Tyler StoutDaniel Danger and John Dyer Baizley Though she doesn’t do posters, Jinyoung Shin creates strange/beautiful work as well, and couldn’t really be any more different than another favorite, Chad Pugh (for anyone who has ever used illustrator, the video…is amazing).
With that, I’m off to find some dinner
May 21, 2008Irked Octopod
This is just a quick update on the progress of my room’s octopus battle. As I’ve already sent photos to 90% of you, I’m doubling your incentive to stick around with some rough sketches and shoddy photos! (Update. Octopus post has been moved to Various & Sundry section)
That pretty much covers the entire weekend. ElizaJane gets married on Thursday, and I’ll wait until the photos from that come out to post anything new on 24th. However, if you’re bored, I recommend you check out either Rolling Stone’s take on China’s ever-tightening police state or, if that got you down, this guy playing the Hang Drum which I think might be one of the more beautiful sounds I’ve ever heard a wok make.
May 16, 2008Drugless Scribbles
I’ve begun doing little speed-sketches while our afternoon coffee brews. Though I doubt it will become a real habit, it’s a nice way to pass an otherwise useless four minutes.
Also, in a brief follow-up to the “stakeout entry”:http://www.natelaffan.com/?p=42, I recently took a look at the natelaffan.com visitor map and was stunned to find Massachusetts in the lead! Obviously the contest is a little skewed; owing – perhaps – to a more disparate fan base around Boston. Still, you would think that the California contenders might step it up a little. A mere three visits a day to a site that gets updated weekly? Come now, five at least! I check for comments on the hour, and those are even rarer than entries!
That…sadly….is the full report. Things have been slow.
May 13, 2008Baby Steps
I’m getting closer.
There’s nothing to report from the real world – save my extraordinary poker win on Thursday – but there’s no shortage of interesting internet, so here’s Tuesday:
Anyone who doesn’t want their personal history sucked off them from 150ft will be happy to know that instructables.comhas just begun a little brother feed which, apart from jump-starting the techno-revolution, might be of some interest . Following the peaceful resistance vein, Shepard Fairley has a enormous body of beautiful Soviet-inspired propaganda posters including my favorite Obama image yet.
Draw’in. Tessar Lo is worth a look, and I was heartened to see that the hugely successful Audrey Kawasaki has a studio
which looks much like mine Oh, and I’ve already got a copy, but my god the cover is beautiful
These are the sounds my thoughts make when it’s quiet:
May 8, 2008Unlucky at Uno…
Let me explain. There’s no telling what can happen when you feed a picky designer some beer and then beat him soundly at four consecutive rounds of UNO. Nobody likes to lose, and a questionably sober me is no exception. After gamely congratulating Mike for his lucky streak last night, I retreated in to the padded recess of my new room and tried to regain some sense of self-worth by redesigning this blog.
It didn’t really help.
On to the weird and wonderful! Canadian photographer la flâneuse is a new favorite. Three parts photographer, two partsdesigner and one part poet, she doesn’t really seem to have an equal in this particular genre of photography. Sam Javanrouh is something else entirely, but I particularly liked this one . Italian -born designer Marco Ammannati shrinks animals for fun, and though I doubt anyone who reads this blog will be as excited as I was, my recent discovery of thisgiant repository of vintage crate labels stopped my workday entirely for four solid hours on Wednesday.
May 2, 2008Shot!
I can’t say that I’ve ever been overly excited to get shots, but this morning was a hoot. After a very serious looking doctor gave me forty-five minutes of important advice about the drugs she was about to administer (I could tell it was important advice because she was very serious the entire time) I signed a form promising I would do something involving stomach aches and they vaccinated me against Typhoid and Hepatitis A. All in all, I highly recommend getting your next round of shots from people whose language you only understand some of.
I’ve also started a little list on my desktop for distractions too good keep to myself, but not quite good enough to merit their own post. This week started out with my discovery that Miles Davis is part frog, Zip Codes actually have some logic behind them, American Roads apparently do not, and New York’s Subway Map might just have logic added regardless of what’s going on underground. That was Monday. I found Stuart Kolakovic’s Never Been on Tuesday.
And now, music. A short playlist recently made its way to my ears by rather unconventional means, and has since wrapped itself around me in more ways than I’m willing to blog about. Songs, I’ve found, have a way of doing that. Anyways, I haven’t listened to much else lately, and though I can’t put up the whole list … perhaps just a taste test would be ok.
More at Wintersleep
April 28, 20088mm Schizophrenia
We thought it had been lost. All the backups had been destroyed…all the work files deleted (an obvious security measure) and the film itself….forgotten. The last remaining copy was found in the dark recesses of Antonio’s iPod; put there – I’m sure – as an afterthought.
He’s back. All three of him.
No only that… we also found the old 7am in Salicotto .
Finally (i’m adding this on a little later on) I found a song which was referenced in A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor . It’s called Hallelujah, I’m a Bum, (possibly written by Harry McClintock ) and does an excellent job of summing up my attitude towards springtime. Just thought I would share.
April 23, 2008The Stakeout
*Ahem.* I spy on you.
Thanks to the nerd-magicians over at Google, I get poked every time someone actually visits this website. It doesn’t happen very often, and there are some days where my magic poke-o-meter reads only a three or four …. or on the really slow days, a one. (Margaret, you deserve cookies for this; don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.) Recently however, things have picked up a little, and I can proudly say that no fewer than fifteen people mistakenly found my website yesterday, and stayed long enough for Google to activate the poke! (before you become too impressed, Google is quick. They know you’ve arrived before you’ve even thought up a good reason to leave – which take the average user roughly eight seconds. More on that later. )
So thanks.
(and if this is just Margaret binge-clicking over there to avoid doing something productive….that’s ok. That is what college is for.)
I doubt anyone is all that interested in things outside the statistical success of my website, but just in case, Pete Kinnecom (he of natelaffan.com sidebar-link-list fame) is biking across the country . The man is certifiably nuts, and I could not be more envious. His trip blog is linked below as well. (Again, for those few who are uninitiated in blog-iquette, comments are not unlike cookies, and are always welcome. This – I imagine – is true even of those unstable enough to think a summer hammering irrevocable harm in to their nether regions is fun.)
To close, a couple scans from my most recent moleskine.
A couple napping in the campo
Bedtime sketch: Paints, elephant and chocolate.
Blood n’ Bubbles
Distractions, distractions.
I’ve only strayed from work twice today, but both times have been due to LEVEL 5 DISTRACTIONS. (which, to give you some reference, is the same category assigned to gelatto pangs and certain songs by The White Stripes. In other words: extreme.) The first (and infinitely more time consuming) is the new-and-improved portfolio of Sam Weber , an illustrator whose range is so staggering you almost forget about that worrisome penchant for drawing dead things that bleed electric orange goo. He had been featured on LTWF a while back, but just about everything has been switched up since then.
Second is Fallon’s new Sony ad, “Foam City”.
Fallon and Sony have been in love for quite some time now, and everything they produce; from balls to bunnies toblowing up buildings has been pretty astonishing.
April 11, 2008Insomni-zine
Design deadlines are tough, and due to my inability to say no to anyone, they often stretch late in to the night. At roughly the same moment Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy show up on their respective evenings to deliver hope, mine starts to evaporate. I’ll stop, curse, bang my head on the table, lie down and close my eyes.
This lasts for a good half hour, and has occasionally resulted in my just falling asleep, which is a decidedly undignified way to be found in the morning; especially if I’ve picked an elevated surface – like a kitchen table or a washing machine – to lie on.
I didn’t fall asleep this time though, and the local copy guy is currently printing three of these for tomorrow’s conference.
Structured Seafood
Generally, I try to stay away from the office at 2am on a Tuesday. The bloodshot stench of an honest-to-god workaholic doesn’t feel quite right coming from under my own skin until at least Thursday, if not the weekend.
This time however, the God of Responsible Employment was out to even a pretty hefty score, and there wasn’t much to be done apart from spending an embarrassingly long time staring at this . Should you, dear reader, ever find yourself in a similar situation, fear not. Grab some big cushy headphones to wrap around that overworked noggin and ease the following song in to said situation.
“More here.”:http://www.explosionsinthesky.com/
The nerd rundown for this Tuesday is as follows:
1. Designers or code newbies looking to use WordPress as a cheap backend or CMS for control-happy clients, pay attention. Aral Balkan’s Inline Includes script is a godsend. Use the original or this version that I’ve tweaked to leave out the titles.
2. Anyone putting together a shopping form like this one need not worry about ruining their entire friggin weekend, so long as they were clever enough to have gone here and here first. This will ONLY work if you change the McFedries script to use each item’s title instead of the name. ( Just change “form_name = form_field.name” to “form_name = form_field.title” )
3. The above audio player is equally godsend-ish, and can be added as a plugin to your wordpress site simply by goinghere
4. James Jean … always James Jean. I won’t slip in to another on of those misty-eyed exaltations, but you really must see this .
April 2, 2008The Experiment
I never knew how much amazing you could pack in to 15 seconds. Cutandpaste.com recently had a competition to see who could pack the most in to a fifteen second advert for Adobe Photoshop CS3. A few of them are impressive, but only one did I have to watch again and again and again….
If you’re on a mac, hold down Option + click here
If you’re on a PC, right click the above link and select “Save Link As”
This was just published at cpluv , where other creative excitements from across the web are collected and parsed out each day. It was made by The Action Cats”, whose only public member seems to be “Mike Landry (whose website I linked to for the movie).
March 29, 2008Saturday, Distracted
This morning I arrived at the office will all SORTS of good intentions. I was going to get a weeks worth of designing polished off, respond to client emails, write a few letters and, if I could squeeze it in, try my hand at a new Shogunflathomepage. Everything was possible, and the clock hadn’t even reached 10am.
Four hours later, not a single thing had been checked off. I hadn’t eaten breakfast, hadn’t considered lunch, and all I could show for the morning was a list of the most delightful distractions a March morning on the internet could offer. Sometimes this just happens. However, I have never been attacked by so many at once, so I thought it would be polite to share.
Here they are:
Bernstein at Harvard
A rather wonderful (if not a little dated) discussion of metaphore in music with Leonard Bernstein.
NOVA: Jazz Animation
Beautiful stop-motion clip using newspapers to describe Katrina.
Cecilia Carlstedt
Fashion illustration at its best.
GAP : The Sound of Color
Music video for “Black and White” by the Ravonettes. Great mashup of analog/digital techniques.
MAT-0
The revolution might begin here…don’t remember how I found it, but there are hours of left-wing fun to be had.
Beringer – Vineyard Animation
Wine commercial directed by Michael Gondrey’s brother…something about stop motion and paper today…
Russ Mills
Expressive (and a tad aggressive) ink drawings.
Hellzapoppin Swing Dance
This one is sponsored by my father, and he was right; it IS the most amazing dance scene I’ve ever watched.
Bayan + Tsymbaly
We were walking to the Duomo this rather drizzly morning and came across these two, who were playing outside the museum entrance. This was the first time I’d ever heard a tsymbaly, and… well… I couldn’t get enough.
According to their CD booklet (I couldn’t help myself) the Tsymbaly is the “Belarussian national musical instrument”. I had no idea..
March 21, 2008Electro Folk-Hop
Any music collection sounds a little stale after a while, and unless you’re around people who know what they’re talking about, finding new tunes can be something of a chore. There are a few friends who routinely point me in the direction of great material, but then… those people know what I like _now_. I want to find what i’ll like next!
It was while in this frame of mind that I thought maybe downloading the SXSW MP3 Sampler Pack would be a good idea. For those of you blissfully unaware of SXSW; it’s big. It covers not just music but film and interactive media of all sorts. Thankfully, their schedule keeps the themes separate, so if you went there to demonstrate how cool your new PHP-activated flash-widget is you won’t get beat up by _DJ Jester the Filipino Fist_ when HE arrives (real name by the way).
Anyways, the point is, I’ve been sifting through these 763 songs (everyone gets to submit their favorite) for a few days now, and a terrifying trend has surfaced. Someone out there, fighting for the right of music to finally be free from the horrible oppression of GENRE has started the electro-country-folk movement. It’s here. It has arrived.
Not my cup of tea, but then I generally like my genres a safe distance from one another. I was that kid who ate each ingredient out of his sandwich separately, so maybe I’m wrong…. Here… listen for yourself.
(In – hopefully – unrelated news, Jason Langdon just started his own blog. Worth a look.
March 19, 2008Watch This.
I don’t spend much of my spare time YouTubing campaign stops, but this might just be the best speech uttered by an American politician during my lifetime, so what could be the harm in posting? I won’t add any commentary; god knows there was enough of it BEFORE he took the podium, except to say that it is a wonderful thing to realize I can actually be floored by both the rhetoric and eloquence of a speech without thematic music in the background or a cut to credits at the end.
I thought this sort of thing had gone out of style.
You can also read it here. Did I mention Obama wrote it himself?
March 15, 2008I’m Movin’ Across In This World
I need a desk…. and maybe some sheets.
I can’t remember the last time I lived in place that had too much space. For any number of reasons, I’ve always found myself in comically small rooms that barely fit ME, let alone anything I might have brought along. Why only last fall I was renting a room that I could touch three walls of at the same time. Now I have a king size bed with enough space left over for a ping-pong table and a couch. Sadly, I have no ping pong table or couch.
I needn’t worry. My housemates, sensing that this absence of furniture might be psychologically damaging (such material loneliness!) have put our laundry rack in the corner near my window, next to the rubber no-slip mat that i’m currently using as a carpet. It’s a touching gesture, but something tells me a desk – or even a ping-pong table – might be better company than wet underwear and strangely smudged towels.
The things that did come with me, the accoutrements of my current lifestyle deemed useful enough and light enough to lug across the Atlantic: sketchbooks, bags, cords, maps and a lamp, are now spread haphazardly across the surface of my mattress with an air of discouraging permanence, threatening to evict my sleeping bag entirely unless I find them a new home soon.
The room itself is rather boxy. There are occasional brown smears on the wall; gruesome evidence of Roni’s four year war with those horrendeous, leggy insects that like to creep up from the baseboards at night and drop rather dramatically on to whatever you’re reading. For the first few months of my living in the litle house (where one can find whole tribes of these things, and where Roni is going to be living from now on) I would spend my first ten mintues in bed carefully tucking the blankets around my feet so they wouldn’t crawl up my leg while I slept.
Now I just use a sleeping bag.
February 14, 2008Breathe In!
Quiet, cold and drippy.
These may not be the most common words associated with Valentines Day, but at the moment, as I watch the clock unknowingly tick its way towards a solid twenty four hours of Hallmark Hell, they are certainly the most accurate. At just past one in the morning, all is peaceful. Mara’s sleeping form is sprawled out next to my desk, snoring loudly; each breath a raspy loop that is only occasionally interrupted by the sound of all that pent up air from her lower intestine rushing out to fill my room with yet another dogfart. She doesn’t seem to notice this rather dramatic deflation, and to a point, neither do I. Breathing in more gas than breathable oxygen probably helps me fall asleep. It IS Valentine’s Day after all.
Hatchet Man
I suppose it goes without saying that this blog has … languished a bit over the past month.
Thankfully, I can assure you it wasn’t for lack of things to write about; rather just a lack of time to write about them (that, and the fact that that I’ve been spending time with this blog’s primary readership, which makes the whole exercise sort of absurd). Rest assured, along with the photos I just posted, more interesting material in the days to come. For those in need of immediate distraction, I recommend heading over to James Jean.com and check out his work with Prada. Prepare to have your hair blown back and your socks knocked off.
Oh, and I’ll explain the ‘Hatchet Man’ thing next time. Something to look forward to.
December 3, 2007Two Weeks, Four Bullets
It has been a very busy two weeks, and as a result, this blog has been all but abandoned. Nothing earth shattering is going to be posted today, but I thought I should at least share some highlights from the past 336 hours if only to keep this whole blogging experiment relevant.
A short list of things that have happened around me since the 18th of November
1. Draught. For the week preceding Becca & Meg’s visit, my apartment had no water. I’m not sure why this happened – something involving our aging landlady and an irritated water company – but it was a thirsty, smelly, four days.
2. Becca & Meg! For a week that now seems like a scant few hours, Becca and Meg graced me with their company, and if I do say so myself….it was a blast. They are the world’s easiest house guests, and what with the water functioning again, it was an all around great week! Photos on 24th.
3. A New 24th. The 24th photo album was re-written (re-coded) from the ground up, and though the changes might only be appreciated by their author, they are enormous and make the whole experience bucketloads better. (note: for habitual visitors to 24th, I recommend always using the “fullscreen” button. Looks much better that way.)
4. Zurich! Suddenly! Thanks to an offer extended by K. MacLeod and T. Cacciola, I rather suddenly decided to join them in their drive up to Zurich on the day of Italy’s big transportation strike. Everything went wonderfully (photos on 24th) and I’m now spending another few days in Munich.
November 18, 2007Weekend Walk Number Two. Mapped.
After a week of sitting on my ass in a windowless room making websites, I was looking forward to doing something computerless this weekend. I did. Then I went back and sat in front of my computer for 3 hours putting the whole thing online. Beh, It was a strange Sunday.
You can see the result below, neatly packaged in three speed-sensitive options:
2. A bit smaller (slower connections)
3. Google’s cramped little viewer.
If you liked that, I did the same with last week’s walk (with a few more photos):
Fullscreen | Medium | Google’d
NOTE: For whatever reason, the path occasionally disappears. I’ve found that if you just zoom out, and then back in again the problem is – temporarily – fixed.
(This bit of advice, it just so happens, seems to also apply to my life in general.)
You Couldn’t Make This Up If You Tried
It just isn’t one of those things you think about.
Nobody warns you about situations like these. Your parents might have mentioned the unfairness of life, your pastor might have preached on the dangers of unchecked evil; you might even be a boy scout. I don’t care how level headed you are, there is nothing that can prepare you for coming home at 3am to a toilet that is boiling over on to the floor.
Yes, BOILING.
Now, even though he was a little tipsy, Mike actually was a boy scout, so after seeing that hot water, having melted through the plastic tank, now covered his entire bathroom floor; he lept in to action. Within seconds, everything within reach that he thought to be dry and absorbent was on the floor, soaking wet. Towels, clothing, underwear, q-tips, it didn’t matter, this was a disaster. Innocently dry objects were thrown in to service without warning.
It was at this point that someone – I think Roni – remembered the basic reality of plumbing that had somehow managed to escape our collective attention. Never try to fix a problem while the water is still running. You will fail, becoming drenched in the process. Great idea, only these particular pipes – in their quaint, provincial Italian way – could not be turned off. We looked everywhere, but all of he essential on/off valves either didn’t exist, or had been plastered in to the wall a long time ago.
Fourth five minutes later, things were fourty-five times worse. Water was everywhere, the three of us were soaking wet, it was 4am, and we had somehow made a NEW hole in a nearby tube that had sufficient pressure to create a little fountain. The decision was made to call Antonio. He lives downstairs.
Poor Antonio. After briefly assessing how much damage the Americans managed to inflict on his home this time, he opted for a quick solution. Turn off the power to the entire compound; five apartments in all.
He did, it stopped, and we all went to bed. Christ.
Update: the plumber came, and it was discovered that there was a huge buildup of gook inside the tank, causing it to malfunction. He also said they were lucky it didn’t blow up. Lucky. Huh. Depends on how you look at it I suppose.
November 8, 2007I Can Fit You In Next To Hitler, Will That Work?
Every so often, when the day runs a little long, when lunatic Sienese driving doesn’t quite get your heartbeat up where it should and when Italy begins to seem like a reasonably normal place to live, you stumble across something like this: The Benito Mussolini Day Planner.
Yes folks, that’s right, Italy has seen fit to feature their ex Fascist, Nazi-sympathizing dictator on a new line of back-to-school goods. Only €9.95! Inside they’ve got good ol’ Benito in a variety of heroic, “man of the people” poses: kissing uncomfortable looking children, giving speeches with his shirt off, and my favorite: hands on hips, chin thrust high, sitting atop a new Fiat mini-tractor. They save the obligatory friends-with-Hitler shot until late in December. Dont worry, it doesn’t look like he’s enjoying himself.
Perhaps I am unaware of some great good that Mussolini bestowed upon the Italian people, but I find it amazing that they would bestow ANY honor on a guy whose only lasting accolade is being the guy who forced Italians to be punctual. Coming from someone who has lived in Italy for just 18 months, I can assure you this was probably a large part of the reason he was shot by his own countrymen before they unceremoniously dangled his corpse from a gas station.
Italians arrive when they goddamn well please.
Adding to the absurdity is that the only OTHER famous-person-day-planner is emblazoned with the visage of Ché Guevara, who – were he alive – would probably have a word or two about sharing shelf space with Italy’s most famous fascist. Honestly, it’s a lot like printing planners with rival soccer teams, except here it’s just a matter of a few picky little ideological differences.
Ché fought for the plight of the common man in South America, Mussolini gassed half of Ethiopia.
The comparison also raises another valid concern. Ché is rapidly becoming the most recognized pop icon of the new millennium. Does this mean Mussolini is next? Holy shit, don’t tell Milan! God help us if the one country in charge of international fashion decides to use this little gem from Italian history as the centerpiece of next year’s underwear line.
November 6, 2007Another Redesign? This Is Absurd.
So this is what it’s like to have an honest-to-god compulsion. The twitching, the irritability, the relief…and oh…yes…the FIX. I just spent a beautiful, sunny Sunday indoors redesigning this blog; perhaps the last truly warm day we’ll have this fall, but I honestly could not pull myself away from the goddamn computer screen. Small things kept dragging me back; the red was too strong, I’d overdone the sidebar line-height by a pixel, the numbers were pudgy. These are the maddening minutia of web design. Things I had no control over occupied hours and hours; I toiled long in to the night…
And then, rather suddenly, God saw fit to smite me for being such an idiot, and I spent the rest of the night curled up on the bathroom floor with a nasty case of food poisoning.
Good riddance.
Anyways. Before you go, you should notice that among the many improvements to be found in this particular iteration of natelaffan.com, I have re-instituted the Pearl Street and Italia albums for your viewing pleasure (mine really…) and promise to re-post the NZ sketchbook when I get back to the states.
October 29, 2007Wise Words
I haven’t quite worked out the kinks in my next post, but while you’re waiting, I highly recommend two links that I recently found at Drawn!. The first is Bill Watterson’s commencement speech to the 1990 class of Kenyon College (link here), the second is a rare set of comics he did while studying there. (link here).
October 25, 2007On Mystery Tubes
I forgot to plug my washing machine’s mystery tube in to the bidet.
In retrospect, I was relatively lucky. It could have been a lot worse. The toilet could have backed up, the sink could have exploded and my clothes could still be dirty.
But as I stood in my bathroom this afternoon, barefoot and ankle deep in water that had been burped up after the rinse cycle, my thoughts were not on my astonishing luck. In fact, I even allowed myself a short moment of deep, unrestrained self pity. No matter how the following two hours worked out, they would not be fun, they would smell terrible, and they would certainly involve me wading though this pubic-hair infested muck until it was all gone.
You never really think about what inhabits your bathroom floor until situations like these. At least I don’t. Occasionally I’ll notice the odd fingernail or hair that has made its way some place it shouldn’t have, but I figure that’s just part in parcel with having a bathroom. Of course it’s dirty! You can’t expect the place where you defecate, shave AND clip your nails to be constantly sterile.
And yet ….
October 23, 2007On Music
Music journalism. It’s weird worried upside-down world these days, and one hell of a leap from the heyday of Rolling Stone, Billboard, Mojo or Spin. Those old guides through the mucky pools of new and questionable talent have all but abandoned the pursuit of fresh blood at precisely the time when we outsiders need their assistance the most.
How the hell are we supposed to sift through all the crappy two man enthusiasm projects that only a mother could love? Sites like myspace provide a level stage for everyone; a circus with several million rings that is both seductive and absolutely impossible to navigate. I – for one – need some help.
It is to this end that I am telling you (all three of you) about the two best online publications that I am aware of. Pitchfork and Daytrotter.
Pitchfork is a music journal in the old tradition. They’re impossibly hip, but routinely predict the new sounds for just about every genre out there. There’s nothing to download, but it is a place to find articulate, to-to-the-point reviews. These guys know their shit.
Then there is Daytrotter. Although you won’t find new material here every day, you should check back, because it’s worth the wait. The good people of Daytrotter actually invite artists to record sessions at their offices, and then post those songs for FREE, along with an interview and article. Oh, and be warned, their session archives are an absolute time sink.
October 14, 2007Perfect Timing
I was JUST about to take a nap before dinner (I slept roughly 2 hours last night) when the upstairs neighbors decided that RIGHT NOW would be a great time to pound nails in to the floor.
Honestly, they couldn’t be doing anything else. Just as I pulled the sheets up under my chin, this irregular hammering sound started to shake the flat. It’s been going on for 25 min now, and occasionally reaches an absolutely frantic tempo. I assume they’ve start a big floor-pounding project that needs to be finished as soon as possible (god forbid this extend past dinner.) Antonello comes out of his room every few seconds to swear and hit the ceiling with a broom, but I don’t think they’re that easily put off. Jesus.
October 10, 2007The Dinner Party Question
I arrived at work this morning with a genuine desire to get things done, but Ms. Roni Kennison had other ideas. As soon as I sat down, she wrote me a quick chat-note:
If you could have dinner with any five people that have ever lived..who would you choose?
Now, this is one of those questions that has no purpose beyond distracting you to the point of agitation. Well gosh! I don’t know, lets see…only five…oh maybe a rock star, probably a president or two, but not just any old pres….. (etc) Five minutes after the question was posed, any useful energy I had brought in to the office was completely occupied managing the The List. Forty-five minutes later I had a good thirty names in mind, and had jotted the winning fifteen on a scrap of paper. This was going to be tough. FIVE?
I know this isn’t a new question, in fact I’ve been asked it before. However, there are two reasons why it’s worth another go.
First, it has the general appeal of being pseudo-psychoanalytical. Anything that professes to reveal more about who you are is fun, simply by virtue of plain old human vanity. Your list changes from month to month because you do. As life changes, so do the various figures you admire; not to mention the fact that you learn about new possible guests ever day.
Second is the Conversation Factor. Once you’ve assembled this dream team around the dinner table (god knows what they’d eat) you’d want some interesting conversation going on. Here lies some pretty complex social footwork, because there are several combos that just wouldn’t work. For example: if you’re going to have Malcolm X and Ty Cobb sitting at the same table, you probably want a mediator. Ghandi or Carter are obvious choices, but how about someone unexpected…why not throw Keith Richards in the mix! Racism would evolve in to something equally destructive (I’m thinking cocaine, meth, something like that..) but in a cooperative way.
Anyways. I’d love to use this question as a gimmick to get people to leave comments, so just click on the “comments” link at the top of this post, and send me your top five.
I’ll start.
October 8, 2007Farewell, Tiramisu
After having just started to settle in to the rhythm of my new life with new roommates, one of them has decided to leave. Antonello, who is – as far as I can tell – some sort of pre-med student, has decided that he needs to be closer to the hospital. This is troubling for lots of reasons, not the least of which is that Antonello is only one who can make Tiramisu. Not just regular Tiramisu mind you, but the sort that you take one bite of and become instantly and irrepressibly happy for the rest of the evening. (at least that’s how I remember it, Antonello claims it had more to do with the wine, but I think he’s just being modest.)
In his place we will be getting a Spaniard named…Xio? Xiu? Yio? I forget. It’s some exotic combination of the last few letters of the alphabet. Anyways, the switch happens in November, so I have exactly 3 weeks to learn how to make tiramisu.
September 30, 2007Earplugs in Tuscany
It’s a quiet Sunday afternoon, and out my window you can see the urban grid of Siena dissolving in to the rural hills. The sun hits each brick structure individually, giving the landscape an orange glow; the horizon punctuated every so often by cypress trees and church steeples. Birds are silently catching thermals from a nearby hill, then swooping around one another for another go. Suddenly, from the flat above me: “MOTHERFUCKER SHOT TO HELLLLLLLL OH YEAAAHHHHHHHH” – 30 second guitar solo – “RARIINN TO GOOOO!”
It goes without saying that my dreamy recollections of Siena – the orange evening sunlight painted across rustic churches, the open piazzas with romantically charged couples devouring buckets of gelatto – do not quite mesh with the reality of my upstairs neighbor. Mr Speakers – as he shall be known henceforth on this blog – is a man who has a deep love affair with two types of music: Death Metal and Butt Rock. He is also a man who knows his audio equipment. If you put that much electricity though a normal pair of bookshelf speakers, and they’ll start to crap out pretty quickly. Mr. Speakers however, spins the knob up to 10 on a regular basis; converting his apartment in to a kind of home-grown sonic weapon. Focused properly, you could topple buildings from 300ft with this sort of volume.
Over the past half hour, Mr. Speakers has explored the full gamut of ‘speedy-guitar-solo’ music, with selections ranging from Slayer to IronMaiden; occasionally slowing down for butt rock breaks featuring tearjerkers from Def Leppard, Quiet Riot and Whitesnake (I haven’t actually heard any Whitesnake yet…but I know it’s coming.)
As I imagine him – I haven’t actually seen the guy – he’s hairy, in his 40s, wearing a bandana and strutting around the apartment playing air guitar on a broomstick.
Wait…wait….I found the song he’s listening to RIGHT NOW… (the fact that I can pick out lyrics to identify a song should be some indication just how LOUD this is…). Tell me…what do YOU think?
What a way to spend a Sunday. I’m going for a walk.
September 27, 2007By Reason Of Failure To Pay Poll Tax
*Item #1*: Today is my birthday. Gifts may be sent to: Siena Italian Studies / Strada Massetana, 38 / 53100 Siena, Italy. Please do not send anything alive or recently dead. Customs officials make me pay extra.
*Item #2*: This blog … rather… this BRAND SPANKIN NEW blog is just chock full of spicy delights. Spiciest of all being *Twenty Fourth*; the third iteration of my online photo journal. I have been obsessively taking photos of everyone I know for 2 years now, and you can find every last shot in the sidebar, under the titles “Italia” (Sept 2005 – Oct 2006) and “Pearl Street” (Oct 2006 – Sept 2007).
*Item #3*: I wrote a short blog entry for shotgunflat today, and it can read here.
*Item #4*: My dearest little sister successfully wished me a happy birthday over iChat today. Look!
