Author: Gil

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Low-res

Well, it looks like my New Year’s resolution of posting every day is already shot. That’s what I get for having a modicum of ambition.

Amy wrote about our quiet New Year’s Eve celebration over on her site: she cooked a nice meal, we watched Annie Hall & some South Park episodes, and we barely made it to midnight.

We “watched the ball drop” (huh-huh-huh) on Dick Clark’s show, if only to remind ourselves of our mortality during the celebration. Yesterday, Howard Stern read the overnight TV ratings for the New Year’s Eve shows. It turns out that a stroke-impaired Dick Clark still drew twice the audience that Carson Daly drew. Make your own joke.

I didn’t really think up any good resolutions for this year, outside of the aforementioned “post interesting stuff every day” one. It’d be nice if I could keep up with my correspondences with my far-flung friends; I tend to let those slide when work gets too pressing, and it bothers me, because I pride myself on being a good friend.

I would resolve to keep up with the self-taught yoga I started practicing this fall, but that’s just a continuation of something I’m already doing. Howzabout: “I resolve to post a picture of me holding the standing bow-and-arrow pose”? Maybe not this extreme a hold, but hey.

I don’t think there’s any reading resolutions I can make. I’ve read an awful lot of books in recent years, and I’m happy with my ability to stick with significant works like Proust and that Robert Moses biography. If anything, I might actually slacken my reading this year, or at least finish fewer books, because I’m hoping to get started writing a work of fiction this year, and that’s going to necessitate more research-reading and less novel-reading.

Which, of course, opens a whole can of worms for me. I’ve been hemming and hawing about writing fiction for a decade-plus. Mainly it’s because I’m afraid I’d actually suck at it, although I’ve come up with lots of other excuses to keep from trying. I’ve received plenty of encouragement from laymen and established writers alike, but I’ve tormented myself pretty neurotically. I mean, “flat-out crippled myself,” actually.

So here’s my resolution: stop doing that, and start writing a novel. Or collection of interconnected short stories. Whatever.

In closing, here’s a piece from A German Requiem, one of Philip Kerr’s detective novels:

I thanked him and left him to his Engineer of Urban Conduits and Conservancy. That was presumably what you called yourself if you were one of the city’s plumbers. What sort of title, I wondered, did the private investigators give themselves? Balanced on the outside of the tram car back to town, I kept my mind off my precarious position by constructing a number of elegant titles for my rather vulgar profession: Practitioner of Solitary Masculine Lifestyle; Non-metaphysical Inquiry Agent; Interrogative Intermediary to the Perplexed and Anxious; Confidential Solicitor for the Displaced and Misplaced; Bespoke Grail-Finder; Seeker After Truth. I liked the last one best of all. But, at least as far my client in the particular case before me was concerned, there was nothing which seemed properly to reflect the sense of working for a lost cause that might have deterred even the most dogmatic Flat Earther.

Alright, maybe that’s too depressing a note upon which to start the year. Since my iTunes just shuffled up a “duet” of sorts with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Lori Carson, I’m going to share something from that. It’s about seven minutes of the Khan’s qawwali chanting, followed by a few moments of Lori’s breathy reading of some lyrics by Rumi:

The door is open

Let the beauty we love be what we do

Don’t go back to sleep

Don’t go back to sleep

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It was divine!

Not having a ton of family in these parts, I use the time off during the holidays to visit friends. On Friday, Amy & I went down to Lumberton, NJ to visit friends of hers who were in the area for their own holiday family-tour. We had an entertaining afternoon, centering around a lengthy meal at a P.F. Chang and a discussion of why Shawn Bradley never panned out in the NBA. Good times were had by me, which counts for a lot.

Yesterday, we drove up to Providence, RI to visit my friends Paul & Deb. They’d been having plenty of family get-togethers during the week, so it was a nice change of pace for them to get a visit from their weird friends in NJ.

I always love seeing Paul & Deb, because they have an awful lot of diverse interests and are quite passionate about them. We exchanged some holiday gifts — we brought back some neat tea from our Paris trip, and I also made them copies of a few Mad Mix CDs, while they gave us books, fancy knitting yarn, and unique coffee mugs from a local artist, before deciding we also needed to take back an amaryllis and some paperwhite bulbs. And a loaf of sweet bread from a Portuguese bakery.

In between these two bouts of gift-giving, the four of us drove over to the museum at RISD (Rhode Island School of Design), which was exhibiting Wunderground: a collection of Providence poster art from the past decade, and a sculptural village called Shangri-la-la Land. I took a ton of pictures of the exhibit, before a staffer ran up to tell me that I wasn’t permitted to snap pix in the exhibition. I apologized and pretended I’d just taken one. Here’s a collection of 19 shots from the show. (The sculpture area was dimly lit, so I tried a few shots without flash, but gave up and started snapping away. I included both types.)

Comics Reporter and official VM buddy Tom Spurgeon wrote a great (and lengthy) article about Fort Thunder, one of the main groups of the Providence arts scene during that period:

Fort Thunder was different. The Providence, RI group has achieved importance not just for the sum total of its considerable artists but for its collective impact and its value as a symbol of unfettered artistic expression. The key to understanding Fort Thunder is that it was not just a group of cartoonists who lived near each other, obsessed about comics and socialized. It was a group of artists, many of whom pursued comics among other kinds of media, who lived together and shared the same workspace.

As an outgrowth of the Rhode Island School of Design [RISD] where nearly all of them attended (some even graduating), Fort Thunder provided a common setting for creation that imposed almost no economic imperative to conform to commercial standards or to change in an attempt to catch the next big wave. They were young, rents were cheap, and incidental money could be had by dipping into other more commercial areas of artistic enterprise such as silk-screening rock posters. Fort Thunder was also fairly isolated, both in terms of influences that breached its walls and how that work was released to the outside world. This allowed its artists to produce a significant body of work that most people have yet to see. It also fueled the group’s lasting mystique. The urge — even seven years after discovering the group — is not to dig too deeply, so as not to uncover the grim and probably unromantic particulars.

We had a great time in the exhibition. Over the years, Paul & Deb had snagged several of the posters from lampposts and walls in town, but they told us that most of the posters were stuck with pretty heavy glue, making it impossible to take home these amazing pieces. I figured it said something about the confluence of art, commerce and paste, but I say that about everything. I think it was also the first museum exhibition I’d been to where the art was held up by thumbtacks.

Before visiting the museum, Paul wanted to show us one of his favorite places in town, the Providence Atheneum. It’s America’s 4th oldest library (est. 1753) and requires an annual membership. Paul pays it gladly, because he loves coming to the place, reading magazines and newspapers, checking out the great collection, and soaking in the ambience.

After the Atheneum and the Wunderground exhibition, we were off to a Portuguese restaurant where I ordered the Shish-Kebab of Damocles, evidently an Iberian specialty.

If you’ve read this site for any length of time, you probably realize that a day that includes

  1. a comics-related art exhibition,
  2. an old library,
  3. some bizarre cuisine, and
  4. conversation with good friends

is pretty much as good as it gets.

(If you want to see pix from the whole day, go here. If you just want that Wunderground set, head over here. And you can check out Amy’s pix from that day over here.)

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Impulse Power

I was driving down Rt. 17 yesterday, taking care of some errands, when a semi-interesting notion struck me. I passed the closed-down Tower Records and pulled into the lot of the Barnes & Noble in Paramus, figuring a meander through its extensive used book section would do me good. I’m weird like that.

On the way out, I stopped to check out a new book that I was thinking of getting. It looked interesting, and my first thought was, “I’ll pick that up on Amazon when I get home.” After all, the list price of the book was $30, but Amazon would likely have it for $20. Plus, I wouldn’t have to stand on line.

And that’s when I had this odd notion: for many consumers, a brick-and-mortar store is only intended for impulse purchases.

I don’t like to extrapolate from my experiences into the world-at-large, but I know there are an awful lot of people who buy almost all of their books, music, movies, etc. online. For us, isn’t a place like B&N or Borders only there for browsing purposes?

Of course, there are times when you need to pick something up in a bookstore, record store, or DVD store, even though those are all converging into single locations. But in my experience I only buy on-site if the item is a gift for someone and needs to be in-hand that day, or if Amazon has a delay on the product.

That said, even gift-buying is something I take care of online for the most part (supplemented by purchases during my travels). In fact, I wanted to pick up a CD for a coworker for the holiday, so I stopped at the nearby Borders. The CD was $18.99, which I found utterly ridiculous. Back in the office, I ordered it on Amazon for $11.98.
So, maybe I’m asking something obvious, but does it seem to you that a physical location for “content” (books, music, movies) is pretty much a browsing library? Let me know.

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Eco Chamber

I finished the Berlin Noir trilogy on Christmas morning. They’re fantastic novels, and I recommend them highly. I don’t read many mystery novels, but these were amazing (and are highly recommended by Ron Rosenbaum), and I devoured the 830 pages from Thursday to Monday. I’ll hit my local library next week to see if they have the fourth novel in the series, which came out a little while ago.

Finishing the novels meant that I had to choose my next read from the Christmas gifts I would receive that day. (I’d decided against reading that copy of Ajax I brought with me, for reasons I can’t explain to myself.)

The Beckett, I thought, was out. No way was I starting that up in New Year’s week.

No Crime & Punishment, either. (One of Amy’s cousins wanted to get me something from my wish list, but couldn’t find Demons, so he picked up C&P instead)

No Chris Rose’s 1 Dead in Attic. I was heading out of New Orleans for a while.

What I decided to read was Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, a book that had stymied me on three separate occasions.

“Here’s my big chance!” I thought. “I’ll employ The Eco Strategy and finally read this book!”

See, unlike my experiences with Nightwood, I didn’t stop reading Under the Volcano because I didn’t enjoy the book. Rather, I stopped reading it because it is a difficult book and because I have too many other things to read on hand.

Ah, but The Eco Strategy! First employed in July 2004, when I visited Budapest for my friends’ wedding! At that time, I finished the two books that I brought along for the trip: Trainspotting and Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. “Whatever will I do?” I thought. “I have another day here, plus a long trip home!”

I visited a nearby bookstore and realized that this was the only possible scenario in which I would finally read Foucault’s Pendulum! “If I can’t get through that book now, I’ll never make it through!”

My attention focused on Eco’s book, I found it smooth sailing and awfully rewarding.

Similarly, I passed the mysterious 40-page barrier that had stopped me in my previous attempts at reading Under the Volcano, a novel praised so highly by William Gass that I was embarrassed not to be able to read it further. At 130 pages, it’s become quite “easier,” although it’s no page-turner a la Berlin Noir.

Still, I plan on finishing up Rosenbaum’s Shakespeare book tonight or tomorrow morning, then plunging back into Geoffrey Firmin’s last day.

Then, I might start exploring this, for That Thing I’m Trying To Write.

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Tryout

Got back from Louisiana last night, after a 2.5-hour delay due to weather problems up here at Newark. Spent the “day off” dealing with a plumber and running yet more errands.

One of these errands involved stopping by my office and picking up a new 13.3″ MacBook to try out for a few days. We ordered a bunch of refurbished models for editors’ use during travel, and I was interested in seeing how they feel. My G4 PowerBook (12″) is getting kinda long in the tooth, although it’s still fine for travel and all. Still, it’d be nice to have another laptop in the house, so the official VM wife (who’ll likely make me the official MI husband) and I can blog away in the living room, sneaking sidelong glances at each other’s posts.

Or not. I’ll see how the holiday bonus looks, since most of our money’s going into plans for fixing up the house in 2007 (starting with that aforementioned plumber’s visit today).

The holiday trip went alright. On Christmas afternoon, I was deluged by presents. I can’t fault Amy’s parents for using my Amazon wish list to guide their purchases, but I wish they’d pay a little more attention to the size & weight of some of the items. For example, while I was quite happy to receive the four-volume, hardcover, slipcased edition of Samuel Beckett’s works, I wasn’t so happy about lugging it home in my suitcase.

Still, it’s a minor complaint, considering I could’ve shipped it home Tuesday morning.

Anyway, its nowhere near as interesting a gift as the small wooden case they gave me. It has a slide-off lid, and it’s nowhere near long enough for a pen, prompting me to ask, “Am I supposed to hide weed in this?”

That’s the Christmas spirit, I guess. I’ll process my pix from the trip this evening, and try to get those posted.