cinema

Checked out two excellent, very different films this week.

Tekkon Kinreet, a near future anime, and Cache, a psychological thriller often horribly misrepresented as "Hitchcockian".

Both dovetail nicely with the junkpile of my recent history, but they're also impeccable examples of their genres.

Tekkon is based on the manga Black and White, which I haven't read, but the visuals are so reminiscent of Geoff Darrow they should be paying him royalties.
Technically, it's the best melding of computer and human animation I've seen.
Plot wise, it's a neat balance between the outlandish conventions of anime and familiar comforts of Western screenwriting.

The examination of nihilism vs hopefulness hit me harder than it might some others, and it gets a little off track in the 'showstopping' third act, but pulls back together for a thoroughly satisfying ending.

It isn't like a Miyazake film, the kind of anime I'd recommend to everyone without reservation- it will exert more gravity on comic/anime/game nerds than the general populace. But it deserves an audience outside the anime ghetto.

Cache is one I wanted to catch on the big screen but didn't, and there isn't much to say about the plot without giving it away. It's one of those movies that works on multiple levels simultaneously- it's a good psychological thriller, it's works as a political and racial metaphor, it's a penetrating examination of a certain type of marriage.

The aspect that hooked me was its examination of guilt and how twisted up a life can get when someone abdicates responsibility for their actions, however understandable the motivation.

It's a movie you have to watch closely, where everything has a purpose. The wife noticed a Kubrickian flavor to it, and I agree. There are a lot of seemingly static shots and scenes with tremendously powerful undercurrents that generate palpable surface tension.

I don't really like anything else I've seen from this director, which is strange given how much I loved Cache.
Pelf is mad for the German version of Funny Games, but I'm too old for 'torture as cultural criticism'. Maybe I'll give The Piano Teacher another try.

Then again, maybe not.

Holiday Sales

Fulfilling my prophecy that used books look pretty good when the economic ceiling caves in we're doubling last years numbers.

I'm also sensing an uptick in the population that equates a trip to the bookstore with exotic, potentially dangerous outings like African safaris. They huddle nervously by the door like nerds at a kegger.

So far so good!

apropos retro video

I think I wrote something last year about the insane inappropriateness of this seasonal moniker...it's even less acceptable now that the economy has slid off the table and shattered on the floor.

Oh well, Happy Holidays from Wal*Mart!

extra reason to give NANX

Devra's car broke down, so we get to keep her for the holiday!

Happy Nanxgiving!

Hope everyone has a grand holiday with their loved ones.

Warning sign that you're an effete Liberal intellectual

You drink gin & tonics from crystal because you find the clinking of ice against proletarian glass to be dull and offensive.

Hair Poll

Regardless of the enthusiasm of customers, my hair has reached that awkward stage where it's long enough to bug me but not long enough to tie back in an archetypal middle aged bookseller PONYTAIL.

I've added a poll to give you, my loyal readers, a voice in its fate.

I do enjoy the Siegfried-esque quality of my current mane, but I've never had much energy for maintaining a 'look'.

My hair has been on a boom/bust cycle for the last 20 years or so.
Until a few years back, I would let it grow until it started to bother me, then buzz it all off with my trusty clippers.

The wife was not a fan of this ad hoc approach, so nowadays I let it grow until it starts to bug me then pay someone to give me an unsatisfactory hair cut. My hair is a bird's nest of contradiction and swirling mayhem (like the brain beneath?) and mom was the only person who could wrangle it.

In lesser hands I end up looking like an escaped mental patient or a gas station attendant in the Ozarks.

I grew it way, way, way out a few years back and donated the resulting braids to Locks of Love, but it was a bit of an ordeal.

Keep all of this in mind as you vote on my fate!

Obama

Democracy Now just played a sound bite on the financial crisis and it's SO NICE to hear a speech delivered by a competent grown up instead of a querulous, mush-mouthed alcoholic.

I hate most of his appointments, but I'll forgive a lot to have a sane adult running the show again.

Eff iTunes!

It has finally pushed me over the edge, with it's laggy, retarded interface and ceaseless pimping of their puerile store and the goddamn iphone BS it launches at startup and the way nothing it burns will play in the car.

Love the hardware, hate the software.

I'm checking out Songbird, will post a report once I get it installed and put it through its paces.

visit from the Fiend

She stopped by today, with mama and nona and grandpa bill in tow.

We had a discussion about a potential intruder.

"Teeb, I hear growling."
"Where?"
"Behind the bookcase."
"Behind...zeee...BOOKCASE?" Young Frankenstein fanatic that she is, this got a laugh.
"Yes!"
"Then you'd better check it out."

She crept slowly to the art section and peered theatrically around the corner.

"I see something!" she whispered.
"What is it?"
"I see its terrible paw! Come and look!"

I poked my head around the corner, and sure enough there were the monstrous carved feet holding up our oak table.

Vampire Frenzy

Twilight is a big fat hit!


This is excellent news for my 1st edition of New Moon, which I will now let age in the cellar, like a fine wine.

customer comments

middle aged gal, browsing the calendars:

Your hair is amazing, it's so wild!

later, checking out

I didn't mean to embarrass you about your hair, but it's just so beautiful!

People read all kinds of things into my work poker face.

is it almost Thanksgiving?

This week?

Christ!

I'm even more disoriented by the emotional tilt-a-whirl than I thought.

I think we're making pies, and I need to make gravy.

The wife's aunt has a lot of weird food hang ups she imposes on guests at the table, one of which is the yearly vat of mashed potatoes you're supposed to eat plain.

EFF THAT.

I'll roast a few chickens this week and save the drippings.

four months

Yesterday was the fuss's 4 month anniversary.

I don't think he's changed much until I scan the photographic record, which documents a startling transformation from angry red grub to professional sumo wrestler.

He's the size of babies twice his age.
I'm hoping he won't be any larger than me. I'm at the very edge of that sheer cliff over the edge of which you have to buy your clothes at the Freak Store.

The fear is that mom's prenatal partying, two pack a day cigarette habit & reliance on formula for my nutritional needs inhibited my own growth, implying the sky's the limit for the Fuss, who swims in the bottomless sea of breast milk pouring from his teetotal mother.

He's strong as hell and revving up to crawl. He has my tree trunk legs, and during Tummy Time uses them to plow across the blanket, face first. He hasn't integrated his arms into the equation yet, but it's just a matter of time. And he can keep his balance standing up, with some helping hands.

And he's doing a lot of talking.
I used to think little kids from Ireland made the cutest noises on earth, but Fuss Babble is the new heavyweight champion. I got a good 5 minute stretch on tape yesterday, once I figure out how to get it on the computer I'll post it.
We've also been calling random friends and having him leave messages.

I haven't been successful at separating the craziness of having a baby from the generalized chaos of the last year, it's all wound up in a single massive tangle.

The moment-by-moment demands imposed by the Fuss have short circuited my habitual brooding on and chewing over things until I figure them out to the 10th decimal.
Modern life is shooting an endless series of rapids, with no time to consider much besides dodging the next boulder and avoiding that mid-stream tree trunk.

It's a different set of challenges and rewards, more immediate and overt than what I've been accustomed to.

recipe

It's been a while!

Last night Devrits and Meggsie dropped in and I whipped up a variation of my standard quick tomato sauce. It didn't add much prep time and was a hit with the guests, so here it is.

ingredients
1 28oz can diced or crushed tomatoes, preferably packed in juice and not tomato puree- they don't usually tell you, so check the fine print on the label.

3 tbs olive oil

2-3 cloves of garlic, minced

3 Anchovy fillets, minced

1 handful of good olives, roughly chopped (I used some Kalamatas from Trader Joes)

1 tsp salt

1/2 tsp sugar


Sautee the garlic and anchovies in olive oil for a minute or so.
dump in the can of tomatoes and cook over medium heat until the sauce begins to thicken and the tomatoes to break down, stirring occasionally, about 10 minutes.

After the sauce thickens add the olives, salt and sugar, stir well and cover until the pasta's done. Check and adjust the seasoning if required, then mix it all together and serve with grated Parmesan.

If you time it right (which I hardly ever do) the sauce & pasta will be ready simultaneously.

glasses

Last night we drank wine from my great grandmother's crystal goblets, paper thin and etched with vines and leaves.

Mom ignored these heirlooms, piling the loot of three generations against the back wall of the garage like chests of gold in Ali Baba's cave. The upstairs cabinets she stocked with mis-matched cups and glasses from thrift stores, and gracelessly modern plates and bowls in blank white ceramic.

As a particularly insightful therapist once told me, you can't deny the tragedies of your past without also denying the treasures. Mom packed it all away together, boxes taped shut and doors locked behind them.

I've rescued some wonderful, impractical pieces from the vault.
Gilded teapots, purple leaded glass vases, a stack of monogrammed highball glasses, a box full of mantle clocks. A pristine movie projector from the dawn of cinema.

I've also given away truckloads of chipped, broken and irrelevant junk.

Successfully opening the door to the past demands an absolutely unsentimental appraisal of reality. If you can't separate the wheat from the chaff there's a real danger of suffocation.

tis (nearly) the season

cross-posting Ivan's re-gift



Now more than ever, our post-prop 8 world needs the Bear Force.

attn ADRIAN

Follow up on Arthur Agee and William Gates.

Hoop Dreams is a top ten all-time documentary and I urge all my readers to check it out. You don't need to like basketball, it's mainly a story about race and class.


You can watch free on Hulu, so no excuses!

the power of Flight of the Conchords

A couple of tourists came in looking for books on Marilyn Monroe, and I could tell they were from New Zealand, not Australia.

ANNER WILL BE SO PROUD!

Most Over the Top Cover Copy of All Time

And it's not even close.

From Psychiatry: THE ULTIMATE BETRAYAL by L. Ron Hu...er, Bruce Wiseman:

IS THERE A SINGLE FORCE BEHIND SOCIAL CHAOS?

Our cities didn't become lawless battlegrounds ruled by criminal gangs without a reason. Nor did drugs travel by themselves from the streets to our grade schools. There have to be reasons why today's high school graduate can't read or find his own city on the map. Or why teenage pregnancies are at an all time high. Why divorces continue to mount and families shatter. Why feeling good is better than doing good. And why morality is considered out of date. None of it just happened. Earlier this century the world took a wrong turn. And since then, something has been eating at the foundations of our culture. This something has infiltrated every aspect of our lives-our schools, our courts, our homes- without most of us even knowing it. It has been staring us in the face and we haven't seen it

UNTIL NOW.....

Psychiatry: the ULTIMATE BETRAYAL, tracks this destructive force from its historical beginnings, lays bare its web of influence and reveals the actions we must take to survive as a society.

I'm guessing the solution involves bowing down to Xenu and accepting Tom Cruise as our benevolent overlord.

man bites dog

band interviews critics.

I don't like Squarepusher's music, but thought this was an interesting experiment in table-turning.

strangenesses

Chatting with Devra the other night about personality types and horoscopes and whatnot, reminded me of some odd synchronicities in my family group.

I'm an INFJ, so is Uncle Timmy.

The wife in an INFP, like the Burl.

Contemplating the Chinese Zodiac, we find a herd of horses.
Your humble narrator, the wife, the burl, the Fiend.

The two exceptions?
Uncle Timmy and the Fuss, both RATS.

One wonders if the Fuss and the Fiend will someday maintain the cosmic balance by sharing a personality 'type'.


And here's an online test thingie, Devra!

this takes the cake

I've read a lot of idiotic political spew over the last 8 years, but even this hardened observer gapes in awe at the monolithic intellectual dishonesty of Phil Gramm:

Speaking at a bankers’ conference that month, Mr. Gramm said the problem of predatory loans was not of the banks’ making. Instead, he faulted “predatory borrowers.” The American Banker, a trade publication, later reported that he was greeted “like a conquering hero.”

Let's say someone came in with a couple of bags of REALLY terrible books, and I bought them.

In the Phil Gramm-verse, the fault would lie not with this long suffering book buyer, with my years of experience in the industry and intimate knowledge of the marketplace, but rather with the PREDATORY SELLER who had the temerity to haul in a bunch of Harlequin romances and decade old textbooks, demanding I pay cash for them!


Just astonishing.
In a world of free market wonders unleashed by the economic collapse, this star shines brightest of all.

contemporary tunes

Kelly Hogan sings harmony on all Neko Case's albums, and has one of the purest, loveliest voices on earth. I haven't found much to inspire me in her solo outings, but this song is brilliant.

She was part of the Pine Valley Cosmonauts back in the day, they cut some excellent covers.

old friends

Having the same phone number as when I was a kid is a mixed bag.

Not having to memorize a new phone number is a big deal, given my innumeracy.
It took a handful of years before our last number finally sank in.
And it has good archetypal juju going, engaging the past and whatnot.

The down side is the occasional caller looking for mom.

Thanks to control issues and a bi-polar mother in law who phones multiple times a day in direct relation to the phase of her mania, I never pick up until the machine has vetted the caller.

The wife, marred by fewer neuroses and with a rosier view of humanity occasionally answers live, with mixed results.

Last night she picked up and began her half of the conversation with

"I'm sorry, Linda's dead."

She had to stop saying 'deceased' because nobody understood what she meant.

The caller was a guy I remembered, a hippy jeweler who's signature pieces were spiders and scorpions dipped in gold. He hung the morbid trinkets from chains and sold them as necklaces. Sometimes he used the scorpions for belt buckles.
They were sequestered in a big divided aquarium in his living room and I would bang on the glass to make them jump around.

I think he made my parents wedding rings. I think we lived with him for a while after my parents divorced. We'd visit him or he'd visit us every couple of years after we washed up in Los Osos. I found a stack of letters and postcards in her effects, so I knew they'd kept in touch.

Like a lot of hippies he never really grew up.
He was always living somewhere new, doing some temporary job, always single.
He lived in Alaska off and on, working a fishing boat. One summer he led a youth group camping trip in the Sierras, and we went along.

He's living in Missouri now.
She told him about the baby/funeral confluence and he said how it was nice that she tied things up at the end of her life.

Standard emotional boilerplate when someone dies.
There's truth in cliches, or they wouldn't persist.
And they buy you time.

It's hard to think about terminal events before they happen, even if you have the inclination.
How do you envision a world without a mother in it?
With my long head start, it was still unknowable.

Or, to mine another cliche, 'where there's life there's hope'.
Through all the years when we had no relationship at all her existence still meant potential, like a seed in a dry lakebed.
Presumably all it needed to flower anew was a soothing rain.

In a Utopian world, one with Frank Capra seated on the Throne of Heaven dictating third act re-writes to a phalanx of typewriter-wielding angels, that's what we'd have had those last few months.

But in this one, you have to say "dead" instead of "deceased".

more Nabokov on youtube

heartening sign

There's a big crowd of students marching through downtown chanting

STRAIGHT GAY BLACK WHITE, MARRIAGE IS A CIVIL RIGHT.

Given that they don't usually rise up in great numbers unless liquor is involved, this is an unexpected but welcome development.

Title of the Day

I did a double take.

fires

The fire in Montecito is menacing the ancestral home of Devra's beau Tim, and also the Frank Lloyd Wright estate of our friend (and Bobo's co-worker) Mr. Boyle, purchased decades past with the film proceeds from The Road to Wellville.

Everybody implore the cosmic force of your choosing for a happy outcome.

fiend

She's learning to read and write (!!!) and has been making booklets for school.

Her latest had a page headlined, in her deliriously adorable hand,

I love all the people that I love

above a page full of crayola-drawn figures.

"That's you, and that's Eenie, and that's the Fusser!" she exclaimed, picking us out of the crowd with her dainty index finger.

That's a great title, it sounds like something Raymond Carver or Alice Munro would write.

mixed signals

So the recent evolution of the blog has me thinking.

The 'serious' posts don't harmonize with the overall tenor of lighthearted cynicism. It's like finding bits of tinfoil in the cotton candy.

I don't know what I'd do about it, since that's what life's been like the past half year.

But does it bother anyone else, or is it just me?

retail

Took a header last month.

Well, except the used book biz- we were up a bit.

The secondary market thrives when times is hard.

But locally Mervyn's is going down, Linens n' Things (which opened about a year ago) is going down, and there are a lot of places running light on inventory during what is traditionally the ramp-up to Christmas.

I think there's going to be blood in the streets this January.
Big chains don't shut down before the largest yearly buying spree unless things are dire. I expect several more to crash and burn if/when Christmas sales are in the toilet.

call for links

In my redecorative zeal I annihilated my links- those I missed adding to the roll of honor, drop a link in the comments or via email for reinstatement.

I am enjoying the part where it rats out shiftless non-updaters (like BOBO).

attn DEVRA

Online adjunct to your late birthday present.

Wednesday Brunch

If anyone's in the neighborhood, drop by.
I'll be making buttermilk waffles, breakfast sausage and coffee around 11-ish.

NEW EVERYTHING

decided to go all out with the renovation.

half measures are for sissies!

proof God reads the Baxblog

Toward closing last night one of the semi-transparent old timers who haunt the neighborhood from their subsidized apartments in the hotel across the street bought a book for the first time.

He usually kills a few hours reading quietly in an out of the way corner before shuffling back across the street, but last night mysterious forces compelled him to pick up a biography of James Jones. He sounds exactly like one of the characters in Vernon, Florida ("and that's just the TOP of it!"). He never trims his nails and they curl yellow and jagged over his fingertips, like an inscrutable mandarin from a 1930's Yellow Peril serial.

A few years ago he was looking scabbier and acting more disoriented than usual and I figured he was due for a last ride in one of the ambulances that circle the block like taxis around a bus terminal.

But after a short disappearance he returned, minus his belt and with a couple of plastic hospital bracelets on his arm. It took him several months to lose the bracelets and find his belt, but otherwise he seemed good as new.

Unaccustomed as he was to buying things, assembling payment became a haphazard business involving several pockets and the sifting of copious handfuls of scrap paper and gum wrappers. The requisite folding money was gathered after some touch and go moments.

Then came the change.

"Oh, wait..I can't give you this one!" he fluted in his high pitched Vernon, Florida voice.

"That's NORTH DAKOTA, I need that one!"

"Guh," I moaned.

"Yeah! Did you know, they started making these STATE quarters?"

"Ahhhhhhhhuk," I sighed.

"At the mint! PEOPLE COLLECT THEM!"

"Hurrrrrg," I gurgled.

Eventually he found a useable quarter and departed to his lair, taking James Jones and a not inconsiderable piece of my sanity with him.

attn VIDEOGAME NERDS

click for election funny.

my favorite comment from the source thread:

I fuckin love it but man I wish they'd gotten the font right

There is no tougher crowd than a virtual room full of committed geeks.

attn WOODY

Revenge is sweet.

adventures in retail

Today's curmudgeonly complaint is quarters with states on the back.

Note to customers:

Don't worry about whether you're giving me Georgia or Nebraska, or waste our time tediously excavating your purse looking for a Hawaii to unload, because you know it's down there at the bottom somewhere, recumbent on a cushion of decomposing receipts and tangles of hair.

None of them are ever going to be worth anything.

Remember those bicentennial quarters?

Or how about the legendary two dollar bill?

So, yeah- a quarter is a quarter.
Don't obsess.

headlines around the world

the global village shares our joy.

the only good song

the Smiths ever did, and Johnny Marr's finest moment.

this week's search engine keywords

A fine vintage:

batman sound effects

HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES ANIMATED GIF

Mike Funk Angus Young

and last but certainly not least!

elongated clitorises

tis (nearly) the season

Ever forward looking and eager to curry favor with my loyal and attractive readership, the Baxblog is now taking names for a special holiday surprise to be delivered by Clydesdale-drawn sledge, or alternately, the US Postal Service.

Interested parties send old timey mailing addresses to

dasbax at gmail dot com

attn: HOLIDAY ELVES

I'm figuring two months of lead time is sufficient to overcome the chronal depredations of the Fuss and my natural procrastination.

Hint- the surprise will be auditory in nature.

Beat the rush, sign up now!

floors and ceilings

The wife's Cousin Don is arriving next week to install a new floor downstairs, necessitating removal of the scattered, tattered relics of the sewage flood.

Past the rarefied realm of friends who'll help you move, beyond the borders of friends who'll help you paint, there was an uncharted frontier.
Uncharted, that is, before the dauntless expedition Devra mounted yesterday.
An expedition that made her the founding member of Friends Who Will Help Rip The Floor Out of the Downstairs, a pantheon of one.
Thanks, Devra!

With the wretched carpet, the space belowdecks inspired a low level existential dread, like a doomed ship's boiler room as shot by David Lynch.

Now, stripped to bare plywood and absent its dismal shawl of ridiculously patterned polyester curtains, it's sort of nice. The afternoon light pours into the main room and aside from the unmitigated disaster of the kitchen/laundry room/furnace/entry hall, which reeks of zero-budget improvisation, it's a nice space for one person.

The multipurpose hallway is what it is, barring extensive (and expensive) reconstructive surgery, but the other three rooms are rife with potential. It'll be fun to see what our pal does with it.

COMMENT APOCALYPSE

My Haloscan sub is about to run out and I'm not gonna renew it.
It loads like an anaconda swallowing a boar, devours comments like a survivor of the Irish Potato Famine and in general comports itself in a manner unbecoming a steward of my reader's priceless musings.

I'll be dumping it and reinstating the annoying-but-reliable Blogger comments sometime in the next couple of days.

Your deathless Halo-prose may vanish along with the software, but will live forever in the blackened lump of my heart.

And isn't that what all this is really about?
Hmm?

musique nonstop: TV on the Radio

I mentioned their new one a while back, but after a stint in heavy rotation I demand y'all pick it up.

Nothing weak, a handful of solidly A-list tracks and a couple of instant classics make for one hell of a record.

It's exciting to find something so good and fresh and intentional.
This one reminds me of picking up 1999 in my youth, when Prince was hitting his stride and you could tell he was ready to tear off a run of amazing music.

fan video of my favorite track-

stream of unconscious

Devra paid a visit tonight.

There was Son of Frankenstein with its German Expressionist sets and scenery chewing hunchback, and cookie bars in a pyrex dish, and the baby crying for a while, passed around fluidly like a garden snake though sets of hands above the ground.

Basil Rathbone was the finest swordsman in Hollywood but had to lose every fight on the silver screen.

We read her a letter from our German friends, and gave her a copy of the Arion Moby Dick as a belated birthday gift.

Where to hang Rineke Dijkstra?
The green wall was serviceable, the yellow was better.
Devra ran across an exhibition of her works while carrying the volleyball across Europe last summer.

The sewage downstairs is gone, but the wreckage remains.
The insurance check is in mom's name, and I know she'd like to spend it on everything except fixing the floor.

Things were always too expensive to fix.
All problems called for the makeshift solution.

She once took me to a therapist for my intractability.
I tracked dark circles across the pages of several booklets and stared at hieroglyphics.
He blamed my behavior on my grandfather's death and instructed her to lock me out of the house and search my room for drugs.

I forget how long I didn't talk to her.

Living here with all their relics, I can call her up like room service.
It's sad to have better conversations with her dead than alive.

Ghostyhead, ghostyhead, standing in the door
You think if you don't answer
I can't hear you anymore
Chains you hung from ear to ear
Finally drug your head
But I can see through anything
I know what you bled

Ghostyhead, Rickie Lee Jones

favorite victory post

Courtesy Digby.

courtesy Devritsko

Title of the Week

Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism by Mary Daly.

Taking it to the next level is the battle axe graphic on the cover.

Halloween Report

The party was epic, as always.
I wasn't tremendously excited by my costume but had very little energy to spare, and it turned out okay.
I'm already stockpiling ideas for next year and vow to come back strong.

Costume of the night goes to Mike Funk's Angus Young.
As the evening progressed weaker partygoers laid down their props, but Mike rocked his Gibson the whole evening.


The founders of the feast, Neal and Patty, aka Popeye and Olive Oil.


Your humble narrator, chatting with Cindy and Shawn as the Devil Twins:


Angus wasn't the only rock god in attendance- here, he chats with Nigel Tufnel:


Teri, rocking her Dio de los Muertos look:

Pictures don't do it justice- she looked like a Posada engraving come to life.

Heroic trio in the dungeon:

The decorations this year were the best yet. Patty picked up a couple of rolls of vinyl stone wall paper and the results were spooktacular.


The Fusser dictated an earlier than usual exit which saved everyone from a repeat of last year's 3am dance floor striptease, when I threw my tee shirt into the crowd and handed out the potatoes stuffing my shorts to any lucky lady within the scope of my blurred vision.

This year there was more dancing, earlier in the evening.
The ball got rolling when a TV on the Radio tune lured Mike, Lisa and yours truly onto the dance floor.
A few tunes later there were 10 of us rocking out.
Been Caught Stealing by Jane's Addiction hit, and suddenly the whole place was jumping.
Very very fun.
The world needs more drunken Caucasian gyrating.
I think next year I'll bring a strobe light.

remix

our pal Mike Funk did a Radiohead remix you should vote for.
Oh, and you can listen to it if you like.

Help him win bragging rights over his music nerd buddies, won't you?

AT&T- your source for the worst broadband available

You might think my DSL trials would be over after a month of the run-around.
You'd be wrong!

I just got a call from some customer drone who told me I'm too far from the CO to get the 6mb pipe they pre-qualified me for and that my account was being downgraded to their 3mb pipe.

At this rate it may not be long before I downgrade them to Charter cable.

Charter was way too expensive, but their service did what they said it would and it came without the heaping side order of BULLSHIT AT&T has delivered.

attn SALLY

big fat DFW article.

election news

Naive Progressives and Why They Piss Me Off, Prop 8 Edition:

So the big final ad push for the No on 8 crew is a happy appeal to the better nature of voters, showcasing smiling families being together, the implication being 'who would vote against THIS?'

Which I don't think will impress anyone except those who've already set up their tents in the NO on 8 campground.

What would've worked better is pointing out the army of Mormons and other out of state Fundie groups who've poured millions of dollars and thousands of volunteers into the Yes on 8 campaign.

Take a page from the tribes running casinos- when Vegas poured millions into a campaign for indian gaming regulation, they made sure the voters knew about it.

Fairness and equality are a hard sell here.
It's much easier to get people riled up about outsiders sticking their big noses in California's business.

Maybe I should become a big money political consultant...

online!

Checked the modem tonight and got the (literal) green light.

Finally, only took them a month.

Normal updating has returned, hallelujah!

PELF staged reading

attn Los Angeles readers!

Published works, notable theater groups commissioning plays...I'd say Pelf has 'made it'.

Not on the Tony Kushner/David Mamet scale, but how many people in the world ever make a penny writing plays?

GRATZ Pelf!

Uncle Timmy Paints a Bust

Snazzy!

Click the thumbnail for a more substantial image.
Our friend Mike is a world-class sculptor who Timmy spotted in a bookstore and struck up a conversation with. Now he paints his stuff for box art.

Way back in the mists of prehistory the Wife, then known as The Little Red Headed Girl from the Coffee Merchant, confided to her brother that she thought I might be....a geek.

Uncle Timmy became incensed.
"He is NOT a geek!"

Moral of the story-
When a guy who works next door strikes up a conversation about the merits of different Japanese metallic paints, it pays to indulge him.

catching up

Still no internet.
Daily calls to various brain damaged AT&T service drones has hopefully made me such an pain in the ass they'll hook me up just to spare themselves the static.

The highlight thus far- the service guy (the replacement for the one that never showed up) finally arrived and spent 40 minutes poking around and calling various numbers, which were not obviously more potent than the ones I've been using. You think they'd give their own people the Bat Phone, but no.

He wound his way through a labyrinth of wire, physical and bureaucratic, eventually discovering the secret at the heart of the maze- AT&T had never actually turned on my service.

You think it would be obvious to any of the 5000 people I've complained to over the past few weeks, but no! Sherlock Tech must be dispatched from the home office to discover these enigmatic, buried truths.

They claim that NOW they've turned it on, but I still have to wait a few days until they "wire it", whatever that means.

In the meantime, Halloween!
There are some pics of the Fuss in his holiday regalia I'll be posting shortly.
The Fiend went as the Sugar Plum Fairy and was an otherworldly vision, down to the purple pumpkin that matched her outfit to a T.
Keith and Terri's daughter Vera broke gender ranks by going as a hockey player, complete with personalized jersey and tiny hockey stick.

Our party is tonight, and there have been drastic revisions in my look.
Out with the unqualified teen mother, in with Edwardian big game hunter!
Which would make my ubiquitous gin and tonic a prop, not a drink!

The wife is working with a disgruntled cafeteria worker in Soviet Russia concept.

Two late inspirations that we've filed for future consideration are Giant Ghandi, where I shave my head, get a spray tan and wrap my loins in linen, and a Diane Arbus family theme (the fuss could be the dwarf gigolo, I like the True Patriot, or maybe the Jewish giant, the wife as one of her eerie portraits of retarded people.)

Babies take a lot of energy, moving and settling in takes a lot of energy, probating estates takes a lot of energy, battling AT&T takes a lot of energy...all of this has undermined my usual enthusiasm for the only holiday that matters.


On the house front, the bedroom is done. The kitchen is done. The office is done, except for the ongoing debacle with AT&T's posse of drooling clowns. Up next is the bathroom, which needs painting and shelves.

The wife's cousin is heading down next weekend to repair the anarchy of the Turd Tsunami, installing a new floor and patching up the holes in the walls. We have a tenant lined up.

Everything is coming together, if more slowly and disjointedly than I'd like.