Author: Dan

Jazz 78s, part two and unrelated ranting

• Looks like I spoke too soon about my back. After victoriously crowing about it feeling entirely better on Monday, I screwed it up again on Tuesday playing basketball. Not good times. Bad times.

• To follow up on an old post: my buddy Tol is blowing through Prague this week and reports having heard that Zoltan Rex is out of jail now. Might just be a false rumor, but three years in a Hungarian prison seems about right as appropriate punishment for faking your own death.

• By sheer coincidence, my father’s cousin and mother’s cousin were both visiting Prague last weekend, giving me a chance for some quality time with the ol’ cousins-once-removed.

This got me pondering my own weirdo family tree a bit: my father’s side of the family is Jewish, but my own distinct branch bears little evidence of this because my father’s mother was a social climber who found it inconvenient to be Jewish in the Manhattan of the 1940s and essentially smothered all consciousness of it in our family. What’s interesting is that members of the family who don’t descend from this dubious grandmother seem discernibly Jewish, whereas my father and I don’t (even though my father is no more or less Jewish racially than they are). It’s strange how the awareness of being something (or lack of awareness) can seemingly alter one’s very physiognomy. They should do one of those experiments where they take two identical twins and raise one with an awareness of being Jewish and the other without and see what happens (whoops, I just used ‘experiment’ and ‘Jewish’ in the same sentence– let’s just move on…)

• It’s become clear that the train ride from Budapest to Prague is Central Europe’s 9 hour version of the 14 Mission bus line in SF. If you take it at night from Prague to Budapest, they stuff you into old commie-era trains that have seats like slippery church pews, so you spend the entire night groggily sliding around as the old train SCREETCHES around curves, whinnying like a terrified horse in a lightning storm. In the daytime, meanwhile, the air conditioning inevitably breaks down, amidst other sundry horrors: when I last rode it, I personally witnessed an organized purse snatching; when one of the cousins-once-removed took it last week, the guy sitting next to her had an epileptic seizure in the middle of the air-conditionless heat. To my undying amazement, my cousin suddenly remembered her training from 5th grade home room and stuck a pencil in her hand into the guy’s mouth to keep him from biting his tongue.

• Imagine if there was a rare condition that caused your head hair to take on the wiry roughness of body hair and your body hair to take on the fluffy lustrousness of head hair. That would be disgusting.

OK, here’s another round of those vintage jazz 78s I was talking about. I love the Harold Owens Hawaii one in particular…

Paul the Octopus, and the like

Nice World Cup final. My only regret is that when Iniesta scored and the Spanish team began celebrating, the producers didn’t cut to a split-screen view of Paul the Octopus being deliriously mobbed by other octopii in recognition of his prefect record of prognostication. (Above: artist’s conception of what this might have looked like, using a still from the Japanese TV series Gimmie Gimmie Octopus.)

In other news: my wife and kid are out of town this week on another mom-and-little-tyke retreat, giving me a chance to recover from the vicious case of Dad Back ™ I contracted during the previous family-filled weekend that involved picking my kid up roughly 200 times. As of Friday evening, I was moving around like a mummy, to the point that my visiting older relatives were raptly warning me about oncoming disk problems and writing down URLs of recommended back pain therapy tip sites. Fast-forward to today, and – presto – it’s all better. (Although I’m still probably in for a world of disk problems).

For those of you without kids, I liken the situation to this: imagine that you’re going about your normal business at home, making coffee, doing Sudoku puzzles, whatever… and virtually every minute, a 30-pound bowling ball is rolling across the floor and its your job to make sure that the bowling ball doesn’t crash into anything. And so you’re constantly grabbing the bowling ball in awkward positions while also handling coffee filters and lucky Soduku pencils or whatever. Also, you have to imagine that the bowling ball is conveniently greased up and often tries to wriggle out of your grasp, and you start to get the picture.

I would tell you more, but I just back from the dentist where I received a mammoth shot of novocaine that’s starting to creep up into my brain and numb various frontal lobes. I feel like the writer in this great recent piece by Oliver Sacks who suffered a stroke and suddenly lost all ability to read but bizarrely retained the ability to write fluently. He just couldn’t read anything he wrote… weird.

Jazz 78s, part one

Back in 2003, I took an advanced typography class where we had to do a sort of self-generated thesis project. I wound up looking at typography associated with different genres of Jamaican music, which actually held together as a topic more coherently than I’d dared hope. One of my classmates, Lora Santiago, did something around the crates of old 78s that her dad had collected. I immediately her asked for the images, and still love to just put them on as a slideshow from time to time…

The Girl In The Abstract Bed and other finds

OK, I’ve never blogged the ongoing process of working on a project before and so I have no idea whether it’s interesting, illuminating, unseemly or just dead boring (or some heady concoction of all of the above). In any case, I promise this is the last image dump I’ll do on the Legs of Izolda Morgan project for awhile. If I post on the subject again, it will be to show new designs.

What can I say– I just love book covers, and one of my favorite parts of designing one is having an excuse to trawl around and dig up interesting covers that other people have done (plus a few posters and woodcuts that have slipped in here too).

Life's gay paegent

Favorite new Czech word: Zázrak. Means ‘miracle’. I can’t tell you how much enjoyment I’m getting out of this one. The next time something mildly surprising or fortunate happens, lift one hand, say ‘ZAAAAAZ-RAK!’ with great zest and make a face like Doug Henning (above). If you’re in a public place, just say it under your breath and only go half-Henning. I guarantee you’ll enjoy yourself in either case.

Favorite new air travel horror story: the Daily News article that TK posted about a flight where someone brought raw meat onboard and the passengers wound up being sprinkled by maggots falling out of the overhead luggage containers. Aside from the basic mind-altering, horrifying parameters of the story, a few other notable things here: as TK mentions, the fact that the Daily News story absurdly includes a generic stock photo of maggots not related to the ones on the flight just to get the point across; second, the detail that horrified passengers complained to the flight crew and were robotically asked to ‘please take your seats and remain calm’– I love this. My friend is flying from Mexico City to Prague next week and is terrified of flying– I can’t wait to run this scenario by him.

Favorite spring/summer holiday calendar: Czech Republic’s, naturally. First, let me introduce you to something called ‘Easter Monday’– it’s just like Easter Sunday, but you get a day off work. Second, there’s a weirdo configuration where we get May 1st and May 8th off for separate holidays– as these are exactly a week apart, you wind up sort of inadvertantly re-living the same holiday a second time through one week later.

But, best of all, thanks to Saints Cyril and Methodius, a FOUR day weekend around the 4th of July. This meant I had enough time for a proper weekend of oozing around Prague in blasting heat and watching World Cup in beer gardens, followed by a second separate weekend, as it were, at a friend’s cottage, enjoying family fun time and village idyl stuff.

Dork Season Cometh

Czech people are really into the past. Bars almost uniformly go in for a comfy, old-timey vibe, such that the white leather sofa — so ubiquitous in the nightlife of other former Communist capital cities — is a rare sight here. Anytime we go to visit my wife’s parents and I stop to inspect the steady drone of weekend daytime TV going on in the background, the show is always something medieval-themed along the lines of Xena: Warrior Princess– there’s rarely any sci-fi or Saved By The Bell-type contemporary teen fodder. (Of course, there’s always the occasional exception– check out this great 1963 Czech sci-fi clip that JohnnyO passed along to me, in which futurist Slav-onauts discover a capitalist ghost ship).

The celebration of olden days of yore reaches its peak every year in September, when the annual harvest of a special kind of Moravian wine called Burčák arrives. Burčák, which doesn’t mean ‘the stinky wine’ but should, tastes like juice but smells terrible– the tongue may be fooled into thinking it’s not particularly alcoholic, but the nose knows better. I usually quaff it with my left hand while using my right hand to daintily pinch my nostrils closed. Anyway: the point is that the arrival of Burčák sets off a tidal wave of Renaissance festivals and other such pagentry, such that I tend to mark this time in my mental calendar as Dork Season. If you have a phobia of town criers or heaving, bodice-clad bosoms, definitely stay away from the Czech Republic in September.

Even though it’s a few months away, I was acutely reminded of the coming of Dork Season because we were visited this weekend by a friend from Paris who’s a veteran of historical reenactments. His first visit to the Czech Republic a few years ago was occasioned by the 200th anniversary of some Napoleonic battle, where he and a hundred other buffs dressed up in authentic uniforms and ran down some hill together. Naturally, I plied him with questions, attempting to disguise my mirthful curiosity as legitimate historical inquiry. Here’s what I learned:

1. Apparently, one can just hit ebay in order to buy one’s Napoleonic-era military outfits. Over here in Europe, the participants tend to be fairly relaxed about how carefully you adhere to historical authenticity, but the Civil War guys in the U.S. are another story altogether, and are much more likely to take you to task if your musket is a few years out of date or something.

2. Clannish factionalism runs amok in these historical revivals. Especially between Flemish Belgians and French-speaking Belgians. I guess this probably mirrors the regional rivalries roiling under the surface of Napoleonic-era armies pretty accurately.

3. It sounds like the revivals are often poorly organized and, in that sense, also accurately reflect the realities of 19th century warfare. Our friend said that he had gotten off the group bus in some town in Austria and started wandering around the town center, thinking they had a few hours of free time, when he suddenly noticed clouds of cannon smoke and shouting coming from a nearby hill and had to rush over as to not miss the skirmishing.

Your mouth is the top end of the food tube.

I continue to labor at the Legs of Izolda Morgan cover, kicking around various ideas. I think it’s safe to say that my wife is tired of being beckoned over to look at new directional sketches. Meanwhile, I’m not sure I’ve ever accumulated so much research for a project that will eventually result in just one single image (well, two, if you count back cover). I’ve certainly done much more extensive digging for larger projects… but this is like reading the amount of material associated with writing a dissertation, only to produce a haiku in the end.

Anyway, since I have book covers and related imagery falling out of my ears, here are a few more recently discovered (or, in some cases, rediscovered) images:

The bottom image here is a photograph by Dallas Sean Hyatt, a San Francisco-based photographer who happened to be having a show at Brainwash cafe that I walked into when I was there in April. I exchanged a few emails with him, told him that I like his work a lot. The above image strikes me as being in the same spirit as the second image on the Right Reasons web site (although his is considerably better for being a raw photograph rather than a jived-up collage).

Humans and chimps: bad bedfellows

Thanks to a recent link from I Blame The Patriarchy, there has been a steady stream of incoming hits to something I wrote about Bubbles the Monkey last summer shortly after Michael Jackson passed away. Revisiting this post has refreshed my sense of what a disappointment the relations between man and his close neighbor have been over the years. Somehow, despite being immediate neighbors in the DNA chain, we remain odd bedfellows at best in the social sense. A Malcolm Gladwell article I recently read about dog trainers explained that, although dogs are much further removed from us on a genetic level, they have an unaccountable curiosity about our behavior and therefore are able to take subtle cues from us in terms of the body language we demonstrate. Chimpanzees, meanwhile, despite all the apparent commonality, really have little more sensitivity to us than seagulls or mollusks do. Unlike dogs, they can’t really be trained to exempt us from their inborn aggressive impulses. And so things tend to add badly, both for the apes that are conscripted to live among us, and for the ill-advised human dummies who acquire them.

Consider the poignant case of Travis the Chimp, whose story was included in the annual New York Times Magazine obituary issue and passed along to me by my father. A retired TV chimp, Travis could apparently do just about everything a human could do. He could drive a car, draw pictures, and surf the web. But then one day – as is rivetingly recounted in the Times story – he freaked out when a house guest arrived, attacked, and tore her face off. When the police arrived, he loped over to one squad car, knocked the side view mirror off and then managed to tear the door open. The officer, pinioned between the wheel and monitor, barely had time to draw his weapon and shoot the monkey to death.

One of the more practical and sobering revelations that Michael Jackson’s last days could have provided us with as a society is a deeper reckoning with the sad orphaned state of Bubbles and the terrible demise of Travis. Perhaps at some point in the future, opulent loons and wingnuts might learn from Jackson’s story and stick to sleeping in crytogenic anti-aging chambers and advancing up the ranks of Scientologists, rather than adopting apes in a misguided attempting to bridge the apparently insurmountable distance between man and chimp.

Second Banana All Stars

We interrupt this blog for a bilious, snarky rant…

I see Ray Manzarek, the former Doors’ keyboardist, is back at it again. Yesterday, as I walked through the metro, I was confronted with this:

OK, first: can we please all agree to let 30s socialist propaganda poster style die a richly-deserved death and rest in peace? Shepherd Fairey had a nice run with the Obama Hope poster (so potent was it, in fact, that the incresingly right-tilting AP threatened to sue him for copyright infringement in the most ridiculous lawsuit ever, apparently fearing a spate of galvanized left wing politicians), but that poster was about five times better than anything else he’s ever done, and the whole style was already tired out when he did it. It’s a great aesthetic to start from so as long as you add something new to the mix, but in and of itself, the life has simply been beaten out of it in recent years. Another recent culprit– this Bernal Heights poster that JohnnyO posted:

It’s not cool anymore, people. We killed it. Let’s just let it go…

Second: why must God take from us Joe Strummer and Joey Ramone, but leave Ray Manzarek to wander the earth and haunt us with his self-aggrandizing nostalgia? I notice that in recent interview clips with the guy, he’s managed to tone down his act and come across as a benevolent elder statesman of counterculture… but he doesn’t fool me. Back when the Oliver Stone movie was coming out, he was constantly giving interviews that fulfilled every possible stereotype of self-congratulatory Baby Boomer exceptionalism. (Even in his more toned-down current incarnation, note how he still slathers all this over-the-top religious hyperbole on his description of meeting Jim Morrison for first time).

The only time I’ve ever liked Manzarek was in the Doors movie, when he wasn’t really Ray Manzarek but rather Kyle Maclachlan (aka Agent Cooper, aka most un-rock-n-roll male lead of our generation) playing Ray Manzarek in one of the strangest and most compelling casting decisions in recent memory:

I once had the idea of assembling a supergroup of all the annoying self-promoting second-and-third bananas in rock music culture who were riding on the coattails of someone more talented at the time but now take an inordinate amount of credit for things and basically try to pass themselves off as self-appointed spokesmen for their generation. The lineup could include:

Keyboards- Ray Manzarek

Drums- Dennis Love, Beach Boys (widely reviled, was conniving and underhanded in his dealings with Brian Wilson… plus made a pass at my friend’s sister once and then said, ‘You know who I am, don’t you?’ when rebuffed).

Vocals: Grace Slick? I don’t know enough about all the sordid intricacies of Jefferson Airplane to say for sure, but she seems like a good candidate.

Bass and guitar I’m still working on. Bass is a tough one, because bass players tend to be unassuming types. Noel Redding would have been absolutely perfect, but he’s by all accounts a super nice, humble guy, so that doesn’t work. Sting is a rare example of the outspoken jackass bass player, but he’s too much of the primary banana in his projects. Somewhere in between those two…