Author: Dan

Some thoughts about bacon

Here are bacon-related things I’d like to see more of:

1. Ads for bacon that depict a illustrated pig (optionally wearing a chef’s hat) happily cutting off a part of his thigh and either eating it himself or enticing you to. I have a friend in San Francisco who has an honest-to-god phobia of these ads and can barely even bring herself to discuss them.

2. Sides of bacon that you can order for your side of bacon, growing progressively smaller like russian dolls.

3. Bacon suits, as worn by fine upstanding young men like these:

handsome lads

4. Round-the-clock bacon. In the U.S., it’s primarily a breakfast/brunch offering. In Czech, it comes at dinner time, frequently wrapped around other things (like plums… mmmm). Vive la difference, I say. It should be available during all meals in a wide variety of different artful culinary contexts.

5. Diners and brunch places equipped with bacon dispensers. These could look and function something like a toilet paper dispenser, but with a large spool of bacon inside perforated at regular intervals so you could simply tear off as many pieces as you like.

My friend Brice refers to bacon as ‘man chocolate’, the implication being that it’s a sort of comfort food for him (and other men, I guess). I like the idea of him curled up in front of a Nora Ephron movie, eating bacon and having a good cry.

Dog/frog (blog)

n660301918_1698920_365866Back in high school, we had this weird friend who used to insist that ‘dog’ and ‘frog’ don’t rhyme, and would look at us with stunned amazement when we maintained that they did. ‘Dog…. frog….’  he would repeat patiently, sure that we would eventually be able to hear their non-rhymingness.

It turns out to be weirdly difficult to prove that something does or doesn’t rhyme. Maddeningly, the dictionary seemed to support his side of the argument: the phonetic spelling of dog was given as ”dȯg’ whereas frog was ‘ˈfräg’. How can you make a creditable argument that two words rhyme when one has a freaking umlaut and the other doesn’t? (I note with some satisfaction that the current Merriam Webster dictionary clearly shows them as rhyming with matching phonetic spellings.)

Of course, blogs didn’t exist back then. I wonder if he would have claimed that ‘blog’ rhymes with ‘dog’, or with ‘frog’, or with neither of the above.

Photo: shot somewhere in San Francisco, stolen from my friend’s mobile uploads on Facebook. No frog available. Thanks, James!

Animated GIF party

Via Mission Mission, I was delighted to come across GIF Party, where animated gifs abide in thriving plentitude. Burrito Justice has a nice one too of the La Tacqueria sign at Mission and 25th lighting up, bit-by-bit.

Animated GIFs were a static, frame-by-frame animation technique that ruled the internet before Flash came along and ruined everything by introducing more sophisticated multimedia. I miss animated GIFs: they had that whole technological-limitations-make-it-easier-to-be-creative thing going for them. Plus, they remind me pleasantly of black-and-white TV now in retrospect.

I got really into making animated GIFs after seeing an experimental film at Artists Television Access that had these sequences where two frames of video would be looped and repeat over and over for minutes at a time. The effect was the same as when you repeat a syllable or two over and over again until it looses its meaning and becomes this weirdly suggestive drone. So, I started taking and looping photos of friends, like this one:

kevin

See this one in its full twitchy context here at the original Mock Duck project, where there’s some crude, oddball interactivity thrown in to boot.

I liked to over-compress my animated GIFs on purpose so they started to take on a weird broken-up dotted texture, like the halftone pattern visible when you peer at a newspaper from up close. In this sense, they differ from the ones on GIF Party, which tend to go in for more of a high-tech uncompressed look.

Steve Miller vs. Miles Davis

JohnnyO at Burrito Justice was kind enough include Mock Duck in a write-up about blogs he enjoys. Finally…….. a shred of recognition! I nearly wept tears of joy onto my keyboard before I remembered that the salt would corrode what’s left of my decaying laptop.

He also turned me onto 40 Going on 28, which is a great blog in the time-honored tradition of Some Engaging Guy Ranting About Stuff. Ribald, highly ribald. I was particularly drawn to this lyric deconstruction of Steve Miller’s Take the Money and Run. So, I thought I’d also chime in on the subject of Steve Miller  and his unique brand of wistful, easy-rockin’, middle-of-the-road hamminess.

image001One of my favorite reads is Miles Davis autobiography. For one thing, it opens with the word ‘Motherfucker:’ and also ends with that same word. OK, I made that up, but it’s practically the case. The guy who co-wrote it, Quincy Troupe, commented that [paraphrase]: “Miles had a colorful use of swear words– at times, he would use them to add emphasis, and other times merely as punctuation.”

One great part is Miles’ account of the phase in his career when he would open up for rock bands at giant festivals. Interestingly, he has great things to say about the Grateful Dead, whom he respects both as musicians and personalities. However, he goes on to say [paraphrase]: ‘But another time, we had to open up for this no-playing motherfucker named Steve Miller.’ Hilarity abounds as he goes on to describe Steve’s prima donna behavior on tour and his general total disdain for Steve’s music. You can just picture SM doing his general jivvy pseudo-blues thing to a rapt audience and Miles looking on in complete disgust from somewhere in the crowd (decked out, no less, in his malevolent-space-alien look that he sported through the early 70s).

Siberia

taylor_keith_birdnest_artworkimageI’m a sitting duck for things like Ian Frazier’s mammoth account of his road trip across Siberia in the current New Yorker (subscription required to read article, but there’s also a free podcast about his trip). For one thing, I’m morbidly obsessed with the gulag – Russia’s infamous penal colony system – and once spent a year reading gulag-related literature to the exclusion of almost everything else. Second, I can never get enough of hearing how big Siberia is, always couched in different exciting terms: 8 time zones! One-twelfth the land mass on earth! etc.

Then, perhaps most of all, there’s the sheer haplessness of the place and the stories of persistence of the human spirit in this environment that are equal parts pathetic and touching. Consider, for example, this toss-off line in Frazier’s piece:

Phillip Johann von Strahlenberg, a Swede captured by Peter the Great’s army at the Battle of Poltava, in 1709, and sent with other Swedish prisoners to Siberia, wrote that the region had six species of deer, including the great stag, the roe deer, the musk deer, the fallow deer, and the reindeer. He also mentioned a special kind of bird whose nests were so soft that they were used for socks.

[emphasis added]

Just when you think you’re all gulag-ed out, along comes the heart-breaking image of an exiled Swede dutifully cataloging the wildlife while trudging around in his bird nest socks. I’m sufficiently inspired to have already gotten a beat on my Phillip Johann van Strahlenberg Halloween costume for this year.

Sports before radio

I was just talking about this with a friend, so I was happy to randomly come across photos of it via shorpy.com. It’s somewhat in the same vein as the Harris 20th Century Railroad Attachment in the sense of My god, I can’t believe this was commonplace one hundred years ago.

Prior to the advent of radio broadcasts, people would actually mass in the streets to stare intently at this really mechanical “baseball game reproducer” that looks like a pinball machine. Updates would be phoned in or delivered via telegram and then be put up on the board to – one assumes – thunderous reaction. Amazing how the standards of what passes for entertainment change over time. I can’t imagine announcing to my wife, “OK, I’m off to stare at the baseball game reproducer. See you in three hours!”

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The Gram Parsons Zone

2416_gramparsonsYesterday, I made my annual attempt to develop an interest in Radiohead. As usual, it lasted about 20 minutes. We’ll see what happens in 2010, but 20 minutes seems to be the standard. I have 7 Radiohead albums that people have given me and yet have probably played only about 10 songs on those albums. (Clarification: I’ve heard Radiohead songs zillions of times when someone else put them on or they’ve come on the radio, so it’s not like I haven’t been exposed to them; I’m just talking about how seldom I’ve personally chosen to listen to them). About once a year, I choose an album, put it on, and experience an immediate swell of respect and regard for the band, followed by an almost immediate lapse into disinterest. After a few songs, I realize I haven’t paid attention for the last 10-15 minutes and terminate the exercise.

The weird part is that I literally don’t have a single negative thing to say about Radiohead. I entirely respect them, find them utterly innovative and can immediately detect clear evidence of artistic integrity and creativity in their music. It’s just that I’m not interested in listening to them. Nick Hornby has a great comment on this difference between respecting music and liking it in 31 Songs – I’m paraphrasing here, because I don’t have the book on hand, but he’s basically talking about some dorky pop song he’s recently fallen for and says, “And, yes, I know it’s not as good as Astral Weeks. But when is the last time you’ve actually put on Astral Weeks? It’s something like falling in love: we don’t necessarily choose the best person, or the smartest, or the best looking. There’s something else going on.”

I’ve come to think of this phenomenon as The Gram Parsons Zone– when there’s an artist, or album, or song that you consciously recognize as good and feel you should like, but it just doesn’t take. Of course, the name I’ve given is dangerously subjective– if you love Gram Parsons, or have never heard of him, then it doesn’t make any sense. But, I’m sure everyone can come up with their own artist that fits this description for them. You really know you’re in the Gram Parsons Zone when you feel both guilty and secretly relieved about throwing in the towel. Incidentally, the Gram Parsons Zone can apply to things outside of music. I’ll never forget the liberation I felt when I finally admitted to myself that I don’t enjoy transcendental meditation, Thomas Pynchon or herbal tea.

Mock friends

A few words on each of our buddies in the blogroll:

  • Everyone should check out JohnnyO’s Burrito Justice blog and his excellent post on Mission District trees in particular. This blog shares a lot of the topical preoccupations of Mock Duck (San Francisco, lost urban artifacts, bacon, etc) but manages to cover these themes without falling back on the appalling generalizations, loose inferences and blatant contradictions that riddle this blog.
  • Mission Mission is another San Francisco Mission District-related blog (the authoritative one, I suppose), for those interested.
  • FWIS and NYTimes Book Design Review are both devoted to book cover design, my singular interest.
  • ModularLab is the site of my friends Mark and Kathrin and contains nice visual images.
  • Muzikifan is maintained by the inimitable Alastair Johnston: typographic authority, publisher, world music collector, and occasional Thelonious Monk masquerader.
  • Moonraking is written by Ivan K, professor of English lit and former music critic and Lemonheads poster boy.

Pneumatic tube update

In response to the Pneumatically Prague post, readers TK and DS sent along this link with more info on the system, including this impossibly-cool photo of the control system…

0052b

… and this description of what sounds like a really fun technological show-down between pneumatic tube, messenger and telex system:

There was an experiment in about 1970 in which they tried to deliver 50 telegram forms (it is the maximum capacity of the capsule) from the Prague main post office to the Prague castle post office by the messenger, by telex system (with the fastest operator – winner of the typewriter competitions), and by the pneumatic tube system. The tube system was the absolute winner, taking 8 minutes to deliver the package.

If you could apply advertising trends from 30 years later to promote the tube, it would have been fun to print t-shirts that read Got Pneu?