pedestrian saga

It is impossible for me to imagine anything hotter than Jonathan Rhys-Meyers making out with Ewan McGregor, dressed respectively (but not dressed for long!) as Ziggy Stardust and Iggy Pop. Despite realizing several of my fantasies at once, VELVET GOLDMINE did not end up being a very good film. The disjointed story never drew me in enough to shake the feeling that the (albeit excellent) cast was merely churning out a series of (admittedly awesome) impersonations. All that acting and impeccable visual design could not make up for a shoddy script. A would-be CITIZEN KANE of rock cinema, VELVET GOLDMINE can’t hold a glittery candle to SID AND NANCY. Go on and seek out its juicy bits on YouTube, but I recommend seeing the latter flick immediately and often.

Do you know what they do to book thieves up at Santa Rita?

–Special Agent Bay, in Bookhunter

A historic bible on loan from the Library of Congress has been surreptitiously swapped for a fake, and the library detectives at Oakland Public have only three days to find the original before the feds “come to collect.” The mild-mannered public library world has previously collided with the denizens of hard-boiled crime fiction (a fabulous Bogart and Bacall trailer springs to mind), but this time it’s personal. Shiga portrays microfilm readers and book demagnetizers in such loving detail that it is obvious he developed a deep affection for the public libraries of his native East Bay through years of experience. This is bibliophilic storytelling of the nerds, by the nerds, for the nerds. Yet nothing is sacred in the hilarious fantasy of breaking the rules in order to enforce them. If you enjoy any combination of procedural dramas, tough cops in a 1970s Bay Area milieu, old technologies, and librariana, you will want to spend some quality time with this graphic novel. And if you have ever daydreamed of kicking ass in a library, you will not want to miss the action-packed finale.

Read it on shigabooks.com, if you must, but I highly recommend finding it at your local library, both for the book design humor and for the heady rush of self-referential play.

*** liked it

Inspires me to…

• explore Meanwhile, Shiga’s choose-your-own-adventure comic, recommended at some point by I can’t remember who
• read Rex Libris (public librarian, fighter of crime: “from loitering zombies to fleeing alien warlords who refuse to pay their late fees”)
• watch Bullitt and Dirty Harry (and the other late ’60s/early ’70s action lingering in my Netflix queue)

There was a big turkey dinner at night and time flowing on.

“April 2000—The Third Expedition”

Heterogeneous short stories, originally published throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, then weaved into a loose narrative that chronicles our colonization of Mars at the turn of the 21st Century. My idea of an excellent beach book, it also lends itself to reading aloud beside a cozy fireplace. (Note to self: Next spring break, find a beach or a cozy fireplace.) “The Third Expedition” showcases the creepy nostalgia for the small-town Midwest that is a Ray Bradbury specialty, and “Usher II” delivers an anti-censorship warning in the guise of a maniacal revenge tale (Poe… in… space!) Meanwhile, “Ylla” casts a classic domestic melodrama in the gold and silver tones of a surreal Martian abode, all fire and metal and fluid crystal. Many of the tales end with a twist sure to delight devotees of “The Twilight Zone” (especially “The Third Expedition,” “Night Meeting,” and “The Silent Towns”), while the stories related to the fourth expedition (the one that sticks) are likely to amuse fans of the space western.

How fascinating to experience a science fiction future that by now corresponds to the past, offering further insight into the era of its imagining. I wonder, has an official term emerged from academia or fandom to describe such expired futures? Turns out that as the turn of the century approached, Bradbury tried to buy some time for his Chronicles by pushing the chronology forward three decades in some editions (and replacing the story that critically depicts 1950s racism). Such revisions don’t sit well with me, and I am grateful to have encountered an original version of the collection. What can I say? Feet firmly planted in the “Han shot first” camp. Plus, a cataloging headache.

*** liked it

Inspired me to…

• watch Forbidden Planet (1956)
• play Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars on repeat
• conclude my Christopher Isherwood project by actually reading some Christopher Isherwood

Elskan hann Dóri
minn sterki og stóri
hann styrir svo vel

(The lovely Dóri
my big and strong one
he drives so well)

–Björk, “Bílavísur” (”Car song”)

Hey, I have a new car!

"Ég hallast að Dóra" ("I lean against Dóri")

He’s a real beaut, huh? Named after a handsome guy in a jazzy Icelandic song. Dóri is dashing and irresistible, but he drives a clunker of an American car and just gets it stuck in the mud. I think it is a lucky name.

"Ertu að koma?" ("Are you coming?")

Dóri the Honda will facilitate hiking excursions with one dog and lazy nights at the drive-in theater with the other…

Hell on wheels

…and will, after five years of automotive abstinence, enable a lifestyle of unbridled hedonism.

Though really it takes more time and hassle to drive him to work, so the trusty bicycle will continue to be my lean mean commuting machine.

Ten years after a happy Indiana marriage
and five years after a sad California divorce
I sold my wedding rings in Portland, Oregon
and bought a chest of drawers
older than the two of us put together.

Now, I do not say it to disrespect
the blissfully coupled, or to incur your pity
but I feel a lightness and an optimism
that my clean laundry will no longer
pile up on the bed.

Agatha Christie meets Mark Heap and (zomg) Stephen Mangan in this most recent adaptation of her 1965 mystery. A pair of witty Janes (Miss Marple plus a young protégé) help Mangan’s earnest but not-as-sharp Scotland Yard inspector investigate a pair of murders at a posh London hotel positively oozing with postwar intrigue. Heap plays the uptight and jumpy hotel manager, of course. Ridiculously convoluted and stagy denouement, of course. Expect nothing less! Hokey and wonderful.

****

SEE… riveting live shows from the extraordinary noise duo of Detroit!

SEE… stylish performance art swathed in exquisite melancholy!

SEE… Canada!

Bless this rockumentary for capturing music from The White Stripes’ 2007 tour and throwing in a geography lesson for good measure. The band endeavored to visit every province and territory of our Great Northern Neighbor, playing informal daytime gigs among larger venues, and we are taken into that Yellowknife café, Winnipeg city bus, Saskatoon bowling alley, Halifax pool hall. How refreshing that many lovely images are allowed to linger: nothing less than the Ken Burns treatment for their last waltz at the 10th anniversary show in Nova Scotia. In fact, my only complaint is the point where their songs are hacked apart and medley-ed together in any entirely unsatisfying way.

Photo: Autumn de Wilde

Most adorable fan: kid who wears horse head to concert.

Best evidence, secondary to Coffee and Cigarettes itself, that Meg and Jack White are perfect Jim Jarmusch muses: “White Moon” at the piano.

Favorite performances: “In the Cold, Cold Night” (hot!) and “Black Jack Davey” in Whitehorse and “Catch Hell Blues” and definitely “I’m Slowly Turning Into You” and… Aw, now I just want to watch it all over again.

Fascinating! Electrifying! Overwhelming! Must-see in splendid 2D!

****

(I am tempted to assign an additional half star for the generous footage of Jack White in a kilt but don’t want to get, you know, carried away.)

It is tempting to think that, if only the words we used to describe the contents of writings were clear and precise in meaning, the intractable difficulties of content-accessibility would vanish or be largely overcome. … But no sharpness of tools would eliminate difficulty; greater sharpness might increase difficulty. For instance, I know more or less clearly what hostility is, that is, the word “hostility” has a fairly sharp meaning for me, but far from a perfectly sharp and precise meaning. Now if I were to supply myself with an exactly defined concept, got by explication of my imprecise notion, I might find that I could never use the new concept in describing any actual piece of writing; the concept might be too sharp ever to find application. There would be instances of hostility (in the new sense) that I could recognize, but no instances of writings on hostility that I could recognize, for no one would have written on hostility (as I now would understand it). If people write on what are for them ill-defined phenomena, a correct description of their subjects must reflect the ill-definedness.

–Patrick Wilson, Two Kinds of Power, “Subjects and the Sense of Position” (92)

subject description
nobody knows what the hell
they’re talking about

Cool groups I might have joined, with illustrative songs, had I only applied myself in high school band, where the other percussionists monopolized the drums and forced me to play xylophone and glockenspiel (*shakes fist*) because I’d come through a junior high program with compulsory bells and they hadn’t:

• U2, “I Will Follow“*
• Elvis Costello, “Veronica“*
• The Velvet Underground, “Sunday Morning“†
• The Jimi Hendrix Experience, “Little Wing“†
• Radiohead, “No Surprises“
• Arcade Fire, “Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)” [Hell's bells, indeed, at 4:00!]
• OK Go, “This Too Shall Pass” [Marching band remix!]

*except I wasn’t to high school yet
†except I wasn’t born yet

This is what happens when I become distracted while trying to study the conceptual design of languages of description for the organization of  information and resources.

First it was Allison Carlyle’s pleasantly accessible article on FRBR as a conceptual model that set me jonesin’ for Waking Life, Richard Linklater’s slacker philoso-fest. And pining for (big sigh) a successful model of Love, one that contains all the answers.

Of all of the things that a model can model, abstractions may be the most difficult. One reason is that the act of modeling, particularly the type of modeling that the creators of FRBR used, is often an attempt to make something that is abstract into something that is, at least in some senses, concrete. That is, it is an attempt to make the presence of an abstraction knowable by identifying the things that point to its existence.

To give an example outside of cataloging, imagine trying to model something like love. Love is an abstraction, but it is something we all know and can recognize. Exactly how do we do that?  To make a model of love that can be used in research or in some other kind of rationalized practice or process, we operationalize it. Operationalizing makes it possible to observe, to count, or to verify something like love. However, operationalizing something very abstract like love is not only difficult, it can cross the line into the comical. For instance, because we cannot see love, we have to identify things that are observable to indicate the presence or existence of love…[B]ut no matter how many of them we come up with, any model of love gives a rather sorry representation of the real thing.

(Allyson Carlyle, “Understanding FRBR as a Conceptual Model: FRBR and the Bibliographic Universe“)

(Kim Krizan on the abstraction of language, Waking Life)

Now it is the FRBR entity-relationship model itself, plus Patrick Wilson’s assessment of the most appropriate level for exerting bibliographical control, that has tangled with the delicious chewy center of a certain rhapsody in blue.

For all these reasons [i.e. texts are valued for more than the information they contain; statements often can be understood or appraised only in terms of their context], and more that might be adduced, it will not be advantageous to make our account of bibliographical control apply generally to units smaller than whole texts and copies of them…The problem of bibliographical control is not simply one of locating items of information, and not one to be solved by attempting to analyze writings into units of information.

(Patrick Wilson, Two Kinds of Power: An Essay on Bibliographical Control)

And if you’re saying good-bye
Please don’t you think me bitter
For recalling every rhyme
From the book, the page, the line, the word, the letter

(The White Stripes, “Wasting My Time“)

Yes, here in my home office, the bibliographic universe collided with the universe of emotions, and all hell broke loose:

I guess this model demonstrates that:

1. (to paraphrase my instructor) abrasions can occur when we try to force common solutions on different domains.
2. I’m really having trouble concentrating.