CULTURE SWAB

writing and desperation

2008-05-01T13:34:00.003-05:00

I've been writing a lot lately.

(Not here, obviously.)

I think I write most out of desperation. Given time, I'll put off and put off and put off indefinitely. Given a deadline, I'll rush through a 24-hour marathon if needed to get it done at the very last moment.

So I've got no books to read right now. I've pretty well gone through my entire library, see, and haven't gotten anything new. And having recently finished Joyce Carol Oates' We Were The Mulvaneys (hi JP!), I never found anything else that caught my attention.

Hence, I write.

Of course, given a choice I'd rather read. It is, as one could guess, a lot easier. Then again, since I don't watch TV, I have to fill my time somehow. Therefore, out of sheer desperation for story... I write.

I know I'm odd.

I need 1000

2008-04-28T14:30:00.001-05:00

All it takes is 1000 true fans.

the weather and Windows Vista

2008-04-26T21:43:00.006-05:00

What a farking miserable day today was. For one thing, it snowed last night. SNOWED. And then today was rainy and windy and sleety and just out-and-out disgusting. Which wouldn't have been so terrible, as I could have used a nice day cooped up in the house, maybe reading, maybe writing...

...except then the power went out.

At some point, either the wind directly or a tree blown by the wind knocked down a power line, which I wouldn't think was a big deal.

I'd be wrong.

That one power line going down knocked out power at least all the way from Baldwin to Hudson, which is 19 miles. Everything roughly north of Interstate 94 lost power. For hours.

Now, call me crazy, but this doesn't sound to me like intelligent engineering. Do you mean to tell me that one power line keeps us all in electricity? What if it had been thirty degrees below zero when it happened? We would have frozen to death. Even today , in the thirties, it was downright cold in the house.

Plus, I learned that the emergency generator for Baldwin Hospital didn't work, so the life support had to be powered by a firetruck.

*blink*

Which brings me to Windows Vista.

Vista is nice-looking. I mean it. As an inveterate Windows user (with the usual underlying Mac-envy), I'm quite pleased with the many changes Vista makes over XP. But then again, Vista has truly and thoroughly pissed me off.

It's the Windows Updates.

OK. So they come up with repairs and patches and updates like every. single. day. Which automatically start downloading whenever you go online, which is sort of a pain in the ass on occasion, because if you're on a slow wi-fi signal, suddenly Windows is hogging all your bandwidth. Painful, true. But what really knocks is that you can't STOP downloading updates, and resume when you want to (as you could do with XP).

But that's just a minor bit of an issue.

The problem comes in shutting down. YOU CANNOT SHUT DOWN UNTIL THE UPDATES HAVE INSTALLED.

Now this really pisses me off.

Sometimes I go a few days without going online. So when I'm suddenly forced to download and install ten different updates, I'm looking at an extra fifteen minutes of waiting for the computer to shut down... but I don't know it until I start the shutdown. And if I gotta be somewhere in ten minutes? Guess who's gonna be late?

Look, Microsoft. I know you're a shitfuck company. I know you don't give two craps in the wind for your users. But what the miserly hell is this?

All of which prompted me to do a quick Google, which led me to the Criticism of Vista Wikipedia entry. Which I am now reading with care....

[EDIT] Apparently I'm not the only one that hates the updates.

new olivia

2008-04-25T11:33:00.002-05:00

I love taking pictures of Olivia, despite the fact she's always in motion, and my digital point-and-shoot is the absolute slowest... which means getting a clear photo of Olivia is nigh impossible.

But there's something about her expressions that I just love capturing. She's incredibly emotive in photos, moreso than her sisters. (Ania's at the point where she's becoming quite bershon, even though she's only 9.) I hope she stays this way. Olivia's got personality coming out her ears.

So here's an Olivia picture.

bars and gays?

2008-04-25T09:58:00.002-05:00

So last night, in honor of completing my trailer park mix, I decided to stop in at this scrummy armpit of a bar on Main Street for a beer.

I don't know anyone in town, really, being fairly new. So I was just sitting at the bar, soaking in the atmosphere, listening to Staind playing obnoxiously loud on the jukebox and drinking my Heineken. There were about fifteen people in the place (it being a Thursday night in a small town), and they were all clustered at one end of the bar while I was at the other.

And then it happened.

One supremely brave, supremely overweight woman was voted spokesperson, apparently, and sent over to ask me the pressing question.

"Are you, like, gay?"

Now, I've come to terms with the fact that I'm an effete intellectual artistic sort. If you've met me, you know I don't exactly exude testosterone-fueled machismo. Still, I find it interesting that an entire bar crowd of scrubby trailer trash (no kidding... half the crowd lives in the trailer park a few blocks from my house) felt the need to ask my sexual orientation as a precursor to introducing themselves.

I said no, I wasn't gay.

I asked if they were fifteen.

Anyway, I had another beer and talked with the group for a half-hour or so. Not a bad bunch, of course. But not my crowd, either. For starters, I only have one tattoo. For seconds, every one of them was flat-out ugly, overweight, snaggle-toothed and grungy. Still, I can't help wondering what the reception would have been like if I'd said I was gay?

Curious.

Small towns with scrummy bars. Gotta love 'em.

all your traffic are belong to us!

2008-04-24T17:01:00.002-05:00

There's a new mix I've made, up at Art of the Mix entitled "all your traffic are belong to us!".

This is its download.

The photo is one I took in St. Paul.

Daniel Dociu on BLDGBLOG

2008-04-24T16:44:00.003-05:00

There's a fascinating interview with Daniel Dociu, a concept artist who has worked on Guild Wars over on BLDGBLOG.

Game designers, and concept artists in particular, are endlessly fascinating. In many ways, these designers are driving the future of art, architecture and design... and in the process, they're simultaneously replacing genre fiction with their creations. I've often commented that I find more "speculation" in video games than I do in supposed "speculative fiction", and Dociu is yet another example of that phenomenon.

It's an intriguing read.

america's OTHER inner city

2008-04-24T16:16:00.005-05:00

A special bonus mix, and my "tribute" to that neglected inner city, the trailer park.

1) Todd Snider - Double Wide Blues
2) Hank Williams III - Cocaine Blues
3) Blood On The Saddle - Born With A Hole In My Pocket
4) The Hold Steady - Your Little Hoodrat Friend
5) Roxy Music - In Every Dream Home A Heartache
6) Alabama 3 - Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlife
7) Waylon Jennings - Hoodlum
8) Mason Jennings - Amphetamine Girl
9) Matt Pond PA - Basement Parties
10) Tom Russell - Between The Cracks
11) Meat Puppets - Roof With A Hole
12) The Long Ryders - I'll Get Out Somehow
13) Drive-By Truckers - You And Your Crystal Meth
14) The Moldy Peaches - Who's Got The Crack?
15) James McMurtry - Choctaw Bingo
16) Southern Culture On The Skids - My House Has Wheels
17) Son Volt - Methamphetamine
18) Iron & Wine - The Devil Never Sleeps
19) Merle Haggard - If We Make It Through December

Yoav on Sounds Eclectic

2008-04-23T16:10:00.002-05:00

Nic Harcourt had my favorite new musician, Yoav on "Sounds Eclectic" performing live in-studio. Fantastic.

I need to write a review of "Charmed and Strange".

brilliance from blabber? marketing and the internet part one

2008-04-21T17:18:00.003-05:00

Last night, and again this morning, I read a piece in the April 14th edition of Advertising Age entitled "Separating Brilliance from Blabber", which I can only assume is an ironic title, given the paltry substance of the piece.

Advertising Age occasionally publishes useful articles. But in the main, I've found Advertising Age to be a lot of trumpeting, without much of a backing band; they're invariably happy to load their pages with a lot of voices saying "You should be doing this, and oh, probably this too... and goddamn, you better do this, or else...!", while generally skimping out on the how and usually the why while they're at it.

In this particular case, "Separating Brilliance from Blabber" represented a roundtable discussion with a baker's dozen of "influential marketing bloggers" culled from AdAge's Power 150. The goal here was to "make sense of the increasingly lawless, shifting relationships among consumers, companies and media". Like any self-respecting roundtable discussion, nothing appears to have been accomplished. As usual, many different questions from all sides of the issue were asked and never answered. As usual, trying to cram thirteen (fourteen, counting the moderator) peoples' opinions into one page was pretty pointless. And as usual the conversation swirled around, with the internet at the center of debate.

It's no secret that marketers and the companies they work for don't get the internet. For fifteen years it's been the same story; corporations trying to monetize the net, marketers using the internet as just another selling medium, treating it as another form of television. Fifteen years on, and marketers still treat the internet as a one-way medium, thereby missing the entire point of the net. Fifteen years on, and marketers are still entrenched in the mindset that produced corporate brochureware websites.

Why?

Because when it comes to the internet, the laws of marketing break down, just as the laws of physics break down at the point of a singularity.

There is a fundamental disconnect in the way in which a corporation (and by extension marketers) approach the internet. Until the advent of the net, marketing was designed to operate in a single direction - from corporation to consumer. Everything that marketing is hinges on this simple rule. Direct mail. Telemarketing. Magazine ads. Billboards. TV and radio commercials. Point of sale. Marketing is a one-way street, with corporations barreling down on the consumer in Mack trucks.

The convergence of technology and the internet, however, has enabled the consumer in ways completely foreign to the laws of marketing. Thanks to the internet, telemarketing has been all but stopped in its tracks. That technology, coupled with caller IDs and call blocking, allowed consumers to stand up and say "No more of this!", with resounding impact. The same kind of legislation is now in the works for direct mail as well, and spam filters already keep out a lot of messages without any real legislation; even so, the anti-spam war continues. TiVo and other DVR technology may not have overtaken typical television viewing as predicted, but the impact is there nonetheless. Consumers who care, or bother to do it, are able to tune out to commercials. And that sort of behavior is spreading.

Every day there's talk of the empowerment of consumers. What gets left out of the discussion, though, is that this empowerment is an ongoing process. Consumers have not "become empowered". They're still learning, still feeling their way through the maze of this empowerment. Behavior has changed already, but it is still changing. And the internet is both a tool of that change and a reflection of that change.

As the internet evolves, so too does behavior. The personal home page evolved into blogs, evolved into social networking sites and profiles. Email lists evolved into messageboards, and evolved into social networking sites as well. File-sharing evolved from hidden warez sites to Peer-to-Peer to torrents. With each evolution, online behavior evolved as well. What people came online to do changed. The way people interact with the internet changed. Each evolution enabled users to do more, to interact more, to become more engaged with the medium. Users learned. And more importantly, with ease-of-access, more users became involved. More and more, consumers no longer sit back and consume. They become producers instead, no longer willing to merely observe.

Corporate marketing, meanwhile, evolved from brochureware websites and banner ads to... well, slightly less brochureware websites, and banner ads and text ads.

All of which is kind of a roundabout way of saying "oh crap".

Grime Street Lounge

2008-04-21T17:12:00.002-05:00

I posted a new mix at Art of the Mix, entitled "Grime Street Lounge Volume 1". A collection of lounge, jazz, hip-hop, soul and some odds and ends.

I spent a good two days working on it, and it was more fun than I ought to admit, guaranteeing future volumes.

Windows Live Writer test post

2008-04-16T18:06:00.001-05:00

OK, let's see how this baby works. Hopefully it does. If not... well, then I have to uninstall it, I guess. C'est la vie!

Disgusting Wal-Mart hamburger

2008-04-14T15:20:00.002-05:00

I happened to be in need of a pound of hamburger, and I happened to be next to a Wal-Mart Super Center (or whatever the hell they call their mega-huge stores that include groceries), so I bit my tongue and bit the bullet and went in.

Now, I hate Wal-Mart with a passion that is normally expressed only by infuriated growling and teeth-gnashing. There are so many things wrong with Wal-Mart that I'd like nothing better than to hear that every single one of their stores simultaneously exploded in fiery balls of retribution for all the egregious wrongs that megacorporation has committed. Alas, I'm not expecting it to happen any time soon, so instead I just refuse to shop there.

But I made an exception.

When I got home, I started cooking up the hamburger. Except, something was wrong with it. Instead of the normal greasy browning I'm used to, the hamburger was instead floating in some watery, pale, icky-looking fluid. With white foam on top. In a word, it was loathsome.

So go to Google. Do a quick search on "Wal-mart" "meat" "water".

Just one link discovered: walmartwatch.com

Ugh. Yet another tick to add to the list of reasons I fucking HATE Wal-Mart with all the passion I can muster.

the infamous blog post to say i'm going to post

2008-04-10T20:51:00.002-05:00

Yes.

I'm going to post to my blog.

Eventually.

It's just.

You.

Know.

*blink*

I'll shut up now.

moving here, moving there...

2008-04-02T15:56:00.002-05:00

I hate moving. Seriously.

But I'm doing it.

I finally gave in. It's time to move back within a few minutes of the girls, by golly. I've had enough of living far from them, had enough of rarely seeing them. Life just isn't life if they aren't around, you know?

So now, to find some furniture....

checking in

2008-03-18T14:54:00.002-05:00

Joy and woe, I find myself somehow connected to a wi-fi hotspot while out in the middle of nowhere. Hopefully it will not last; the internet is a damnable distraction, and I don't want to get distracted just now.

Blah blah blah, writing, writing, blah blah blah.

The only news I've got to report is that I've been seriously considering returning to the Twin Cities area to be close to the girls. I found out that one charity group is hiring for a load of positions, so I've applied there, and I think odds are good I'll be hired... and then I'll be back doing the work I really care about.

I've been listening to an arseload of indie-type singer-songwriters lately: Matt Costa, Gary Louris, Jason Collett, Ray LaMontagne, stuff like that. Interestingly, they all seem to blend together into one massive, sensitive voice that's nearly indistinguishable. Except for Josh Ritter's latest, The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter, which I've been rotating more and more. It's an interesting album, even though I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it yet. Certainly a departure from The Animal Years. Though for my dollars the real standout is still Alexi Murdoch's Time Without Consequence, which has been in heavy rotation and which I have yet to tire of.

Also finally got around to reading Elmore Leonard's American Tabloid and Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Shadow of the Wind. Both are very good so far. Don't know why I waited so long...

the writer descends from his garett

2008-03-06T19:51:00.002-06:00

So, a momentary break from... ummm... taking a break, I guess. But at the moment I'm sitting in a cafe with my daughters, listening to a French girl sing, and the girls are absolutely enthralled. Especially, for some reason, Ava. Fancy that.

Maybe I'll snap a photo or two and upload them.

Meanwhile, I've been off. You know. Writing and stuff.

a new mix

2008-02-23T00:32:00.001-06:00

Inspired by the Danvers State Insane Asylum.

Check it out and feel free to download.

one for remembering, two for flinching

2008-02-21T17:48:00.003-06:00

Sara and I made an alternating DJ mix entitled "one for remembering, two for flinching", which was five or six days in the making. It turned out good and powerful; loads of great songs, with a satisfying narrative arc.

Go. Download it. Enjoy.

Some morning James Cotton

2008-02-20T10:35:00.002-06:00

You're welcome.

Some changes to the page

2008-02-19T23:02:00.003-06:00

You'll note a few additions to my blogpage, here.

Most importantly, I've embedded a playlist from Last FM. I urge you all to check out the tunes. Good, good stuff. I'll be updating it often, as I'm always discovering new music, so remember to check it out more than once.

Next, you'll notice a badge to add Culture Swab to your Technorati Favorites. I'm banking on the hope that I'll be adding regular content. Call me crazy.

Finally, you'll note a distinctive "I'm Voting for Barack Obama" to the right there. Yes. I will be. Have, in fact. I don't buy into Obama's rhetoric 100%, but the combination hopeful cynic in me believes that if Obama is elected, and if he manages to accomplish a third of the things he claims to want... well, that alone puts him head, shoulders, waist and knees above the other candidates. I like the possibility Obama represents.

And man... the thought of a college credit in exchange for community service? Frakking genius, that! I'd love to see it happen.

Leica: 1 1/2 Love Stories

2008-02-19T17:00:00.003-06:00

Via Creativity Online, I find out about Leica's beautiful mini-series "1 1/2 Love Stories", an interesting photographic narrative currently running on their website.

Meanwhile, I want a Leica, like nobody's biznezz....

Also, check out Creativity 50, featuring fifty creative people like Ridley Scott, Radiohead, Jonathan Ive of Apple and 47 others.

Colleen Lindsay, Super Literary Agent

2008-02-19T11:27:00.002-06:00

I'm delighted that my longtime friend/confidante/hero Colleen Lindsay has joined the ranks of agentdom with FinePrint Literary Management.

In my ever-so-humble opinion, Colleen has everything one could dream of in a literary agent. It begins with impeccable taste; despite her weakness for paranormal romance (which could be quite a strength for all the paranormal romance writers out there), Colleen has introduced me to many of my favorite writers... through her work as a long-time publicist both at Del Rey and independently. Which leads me to the next reason she'll be a dream agent.

Colleen has heaps of experience on the most important side of publishing - marketing. As writers, we like to dream that publishing is all about the words; the genius on the page. Truth is, a book is only as good as its sales, and Colleen has been intimately connected to book sales for decades. Hands-down, Colleen has always been the most innovative, hands-on, approachable publicist in the entire speculative fiction field. She was instrumental in promoting the new breed of speculative fiction writers, from China Mieville all the way through to David Anthony Durham. (Remember what I said about impeccable taste?) Never once did she sit back on her laurels, and that's the kind of agent an author needs - someone that's used to doing the heavy lifting, so to speak. The one that gets out there and gets the book sold.

Beyond all that, Colleen knows the internet, which is fast becoming an essential tool in publishing. It may have started with promotion, but Colleen has embraced the internet in the most important way possible; she's open to e-subs.

Yep, you read that correctly.

I prefer email queries. Let's wait to kill trees until after I ask for a manuscript. I'll respond to your query far more quickly if you send by email.

My work email address is colleen (at) fineprintlit.com.

That's pulled directly from her Submission Guidelines, which are posted on her (gasp!) blog, where she (gasp!) has been answering questions and chronicling her adventures as a new agent... which has often been hilarious and informative, and often both at once.

So huge, heartfelt congratulations to Colleen. I envision great things for her and her clients.

The Way of Memories

2008-02-18T13:15:00.003-06:00

Sometimes you meet people that demand stories. People that, in a roundabout way, dig into the narrative of your life and pull out all those little bits you've pretty well forgotten, or at the least haven't taken out to examine in quite some time. It can be a good thing, teasing out those half-forgotten good times and bringing them to fresh light. Or spurring you to recall dim days of youth, or just the silly day-to-day mistakes made over the years. It can be fun to talk about.

Sometimes, though, this memory dredging tears scabs off old wounds, letting them bleed anew. Other memories are like sharp knives, creating new wounds under re-examination. Sometimes perspective can heal; other times, it can make you realize just how horrible you really are.

We're all horrible, you know. Maybe not to the same degree, maybe not all of the time. But no human does the right thing at the right time all of the time. We make mistakes; we're fallible, often ferocious, usually frantic. We mess up. Sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for selfish reasons, sometimes for bad reasons.

That isn't deep thinking. That's humanity.

I've been writing about memories for a while now. Not my own; the characters in my novel-in-progress, The Blinding Pool, are dealing with memories. How the past plays into the present. How the present creates the memories of the future. And the more I examine what I'm writing, the more I realize how the sets of protagonists - one elderly, one middle-aged, one adolescent - reflect that progression of memory.

It wasn't intentional.

Or maybe it was.

I don't remember.

hopping into the creative taxi

2008-02-17T19:47:00.002-06:00

I've been reading through TAXI Design Daily, which I used to read quite regularly but which I've neglected for some time now. Truly an oversight on my part, as it's chockful of really interesting stuff.... Not least of which is this interview with illustrator Jib Hunt, whose clothing designs make me drool.

I want them.