Seen This Guy Lately?

I am, of course, pretty passionate about The Godfather, and like many people with that particular enthusiasm, I tend to look out for Al Pacino wherever he turns up. So this A. O. Scott piece in the New York Times (go ahead, register! It won’t kill you! You don’t even have to give them real information!) would have interested me no matter what. As it turns out, it also happens to be well-written and insightful - so check it out, yo.

Roy Orbison in Cling-Film

This had me wrapping my whole arm around my face at work today, so that I wouldn’t have to explain all my giggling to anyone around me. That it is just as likely the work of a demented prankster as that of an actual weirdo with an unhealthy fixation about wrapping the singer of “Only the Lonely” in Saran Wrap really doesn’t help make it even a tiny bit less insane.
What really gets me is the incredibly stilted prose style:

‘Hello Roy,’ I say. ‘What are you doing in Dusseldorf?’
‘Attending to certain matters,’ he replies.
‘Ah,’ I say.
He apprises Jetta’s lines with a keen eye. ‘That is a well-groomed terrapin,’ he says.
‘Her name is Jetta.’ I say. ‘Perhaps you would like to come inside?’
‘Very well.’ He says.

I’m thinking I’m going to have to make “I have a surprising amount of clingfilm” into a sigline somewhere. (Via the always wonderful Making Light by Teresa Nielsen Hayden.)

Nina Simone R.I.P.

So today I heard the news that Nina Simone passed away in her sleep yesterday at her home in France. I thought of a story I read about the New York poet Frank O’Hara, how when he was told that Billie Holiday was gone, replied “I don’t have to believe it if I don’t want to!” For some reason, I thought it was at least heartening that I first got the news over the radio. Terri Gross closed her show this evening with Nina Simone’s beautiful recording of Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released” which I hadn’t heard before and which brought tears to my eyes in the car. I usually feel awkward about mourning for celebrities that I never knew personally, but in this case I’m making an exception: I am saddened by her death, yet comforted that it sounds to have been blessedly peaceful, which I think is only just. God Bless.

A wee metablogging observation

So, I’ve never really found the question of what’s making the blogging meme so damn popular lately to be especially difficult, mysterious or interesting, personally. I mean, the individual vanity home page was invented about three seconds after the w3 itself; the blog is just an easy, templated implementation. Also, I think even keepers of personal paper diaries or journals (even those who go into mortifying secretive detail and hide their scribblings under lock and key) have always secretly written and longed for readership. So that everyone and his cat suddenly seem to be blogging right now, I don’t think that should be so surprising, nor that motives are very hard to understand here.

That said, I did notice something yesterday that I think explains a part of the appeal (or what the kids back in the zany dotcom boom days used to call “stickiness”) of weblogging software systems themselves. See, yesterday I went ahead and went back to Blogger and set up a separate new blog for strictly personal use. (For this here blog that you’re reading, I’m using Blosxom, if anybody cares. I wanted Blogger for the other thingo because setup requires zero thought.) It’s not that this other blog has supersecret private informations or anything

I just wanted a handy place to type little mundane notes and reminders to myself. And so that’s the thing: while I’m typing away over there, I start wondering to myself, “why did I think I needed a blog going for this? Why type these items in a webform, why publish to HTML? Why couldn’t this just be a big text file, or a Word doc or something?” Well, apart from detesting to use Word, and the convenience of being able to access my little notes to myself from any browser, the real answer was immediately clear: automated date and time stamps attached to entries. There’s just something irresistibly cool about typing one’s random brain droppings as plaintext, and then seeing the result not only formatted with stylesheets, but organized into little dated dispatches, all at the press of a button. Without even noticing, I find myself utterly charmed by this simple bit of technical marvelousness, and I imagine I am not alone.
One final, completely self-reflexive note on this entry itself: I am still generally not sold on the stupid overuse of the prefix “meta-” (which strictly speaking signifies “after” or “behind”) in its popular sense of “one level of description up”, such as I’ve used it (jokingly, mostly) in my title right above, here. This usage pretends to be modeled after metaphysics or metalinguistics, but I don’t think that blogging about blogging really invokes the same sort of transcendence.

More geeky musics

Though I’m in danger of turning into a record review blogger, I did want to share about the latest score, the splendid Mille Plateaux compilation Clicks & Cuts 3. As the name suggests, this is the latest in a series of compilations, of which I missed the second, but I’ve been awfully fond of the first for a long time, so I was excited about this as soon as heard it was out. It’s better than I’d even hoped. The biggest surprise, especially compared to the original entry, is that so much of the music on this latest one is really, truly, deeply funky. It’s certainly avantish and v. v. minimalist and has those crispydub “glitch” crackles, but most of it is not, at first, recognizably indebted to drony stuff like Oval that usually gets termed under the “glitch” rubric. It’s more like hip-hop for art galleries. It’s kickin - I can’t recommend it strongly enough.

Mira Calix [linked site requires Flash] is what’s in my headphones today, and I’m here to say, it’s really neat. I don’t have her new one yet (tho I aim to snag it soon), I’m listening to One on One, her 2000 release. Which may be 3 years old, but it sounds pretty fresh. When reading reviews of her music, comparisons to Autechre abound, but I think that’s mainly because the reviewers all seem to have forgotten The Black Dog, whom our Ms. Passamonte here reminds me of in the best possible way. (Only with much, much more stripped down bits of melody. While Plaid & co. are nothing if not ornate, Mira Calix proudly waves the blank banner of minimalism - for which of course I for one dig her all the more.

So yesterday morning (or thereabouts - actually I guess it was probably Saturday), there was a headline on the front page of the Seattle Times, which read “MARINERS POUNDED BY RANGERS”. All other double entendres aside, I swear I had to stare at that for several long moments before it dawned that it was a sports story, and not about the war.