FontCast #12

(based on the novel Push by Sapphire)


FontCast #12 — Damon Styer from FontShop on Vimeo.
Oh, how I cringe at the sound of my voice, coming from outside my head. Many thanks to Stephen and Chris, and their editing help, for distilling a mostly intelligible five minutes out of an hour-plus of blather!

In other sign movie news, the folks, Faythe, Sam and Travis, filming a doc about sign painters around the country, stopped by to film the shop last week. We don't anticipate they'll have quite as speedy a turn-around as the FontShoppers.

Hyperbole and a Half

(based on the novel Push by Sapphire)

Sometimes I get an idea, like, to subtitle everything with "based on the novel Push by Sapphire", and I think I'm funny, then I read someone like this and I'm gutted by how sorely I fail at funny.I mean, it's not that she's the be-all and end-all of funny, or anything... Ah, screw this! I don't know when to shut up. (Did I say it all? I don't think I said it all. What all is there to say? Let it rest already! What kind of funny do you think you're trying to be anyway? "Funny-uncomfortable"? "Funny-annoying"? "Funny-you-hope-everyone-recognizes-but-you"? No--I just wish it was as easy for me as that chick makes it seem)

Shabbos recipes

So, last night, our Integral Awakening Group celebrated (as mentioned in a previous post), a Shabbos (or Shabbat, or Sabbath) dinner, practicing our mindfulness and presence with the deliciousness and abundance of pot luck dining with friends. We ate a lot of good food, drank plenty good wine, and were encouraged to share recipes with one another. So, I'ma strike while th'iron's hot, while the processes are still fresh in head, and also because this is how I traditionally celebrate my Shabbos--by spending much of the day on the couch writing wordy emails and occasional blog posts. I don't know quite how true to the Shabbos spirit my practice is, but it feels more than a bit like I'm getting things done, without actually working... I guess I'm straining to exert mastery over words, so in that sense, I'm 'failing'...

Whatever. Here, enjoy some good food:

Ye Olde Tea Party

(tote bag available thru gemmabear, on Etsy)

I never expect to learn much out of the Chronicle, but here's an item they pulled off something called the History News Service, that gave a little bit of context I hadn't heard before, about the Boston Tea Party:

The original Boston Tea Party was also partly a reaction to a government corporate bailout. Britain's huge East India Company was in big financial trouble, and English policymakers feared the impact failure would have on the economy. So in May 1773 Parliament passed the Tea Act, which allowed the East India Company to sell tea directly to American colonists. The additional business would help the company stay afloat, the empire would get its taxes, and, because middlemen would no longer be taking a cut, colonists would be paying less for their tea.
Bostonians had no stake in the London-based East India Company, just as most Americans today see little benefit from the large Wall Street financial firms. Bostonians resented the tax, even though they paid much less in taxes than British people did, just as many contemporary Americans resent today's federal taxes, notwithstanding that Americans have a lower overall tax burden than any other developed nation...

Purposecast

I'm awful keen on things lining up, on serendipity, coincidence, or whenever it is that what's floating about over here, pops up over there, too. I know Tim Kelley encourages us to recognize these instances as indicative of "flow", of our somehow working in concert with the universe, and thereby, more purposefully; or, at least, to heed their call to "pay attention to this".

Bearing that in mind, since joining the Integral Awakening Group, I'm frequently delighted to find how the themes we're discussing in a given week resonate through other conversations in other corners of my life; and also, how often the assorted mass media I absorb expands on those themes. To wit, a few months back, when we were first reading, in Soulcraft, pp. 167-172, about "talking across the species boundary", I spent a long day of painting, listening to some podcasts I'd cued into a playlist, that went from a Radio Lab episode called Animal Minds, to a Fresh Air profile of Temple Grandin, to a Radio Lab short, The Shy Baboon. I was just catching up on shows I hadn't listened to, but it turned out all the shows were exploring different aspects of how we communicate with the animal world.

Show Proposal

We had to write a "proposal" for our show at the Adobe Books Backroom Gallery, despite already having the show set up. I guess it was for publicity purposes, maybe? Or record-keeping? I volunteered to write it, and asked everyone why they wanted to put a show in a gallery, and then tried to phrase it in a way that made sense and incorporated something of what I enjoy about sign painting. Here's what I came up with:

We'd like to do a show about sign painting.

Signs, like any kind of advertising, and most of design for that matter, employ aesthetic concerns to achieve directive ends, perhaps to elicit an emotional response, often one conducive to the more rapid flexing of your purchasing muscles. The "signs, signs, everywhere signs" that ever increasingly break up the scenery, whether or not they're even so bold as to call attention to their own physical beauty, typically do so on behalf of some corporate entity, big or small, wishing you to ascribe whatever design sense is evident in the sign, to the quality of their goods or services on offer. The "language" of signage, meanwhile, encompasses a constantly evolving and multiplying variety of materials and methods to communicate ornately complex nuances of meaning to a bewilderingly polyglot populace.

We sign writers, here at New Bohemia Signs, are a comparatively simple lot--not precisely Luddites, as much as that we perhaps tend to focus more intently on some of the most rudimentary parts of sign language, or any language: the little squiggles, curves and strokes that form our alphabet. Our tool chest holds brushes, enamel, some gold leaf, and not much else; and we're each harboring a cultured intimate familiarity with, and to some extent, abiding love for letter forms, which themselves take shape from the habits our limbs have fallen into, drawing and painting them again and again and again and again and again.

We want to build a show that illustrates something of the path whereby our signs move from idea to sketch, to pattern, to painting; a show that makes apparent the relationship of letter forms to the arc our individual arms take, or to the way we each roll a quill between our fingertips; a show that celebrates, from amidst this digital era of limitless copiability, the joy of fine tuning the only copier that draws its current directly from our hearts.

We relish the opportunity to put our work in a milieu that calls more attention to the concrete shapes of one color against another, and that lends more weight to the aesthetic pleasures of sign painting, in counterbalance to its purposeful functionality. We like to juxtapose the two ends of that scale. We like how the results of our "outmoded technology" of sign making draw out certain feelings, due perhaps to the "human-ness" of the work, and how that is in some way cued by the shapes letters take, and have taken historically, in lending themselves most readily to graceful brushwork. We'll enjoy exploring the craft of sign painting under the rubric of art.

On the walls of the gallery, alongside and underneath finished work, we'll mount patterns, sketches, practice alphabets and iterations of finished work in its earlier stages. We'll also mount one of our workbenches, which will hold some signs, and will also serve its innate purpose for a few evenings of on-location sign painting instruction, and/or souvenir production.

Sibley labyrinths

Deb and I spent some of our Valentine's Day afternoon over at Sibley Volcanic Preserve, an erstwhile rock quarry, since returned to nature, in the Oakland hills.

I can't remember where I first got the idea to visit this park, sometime in the mid 90's--it may have come up in a conversation about nearby hiking spots, while at a barbecue with friends at Tilden--but the surprise and awe I still recall registering, at coming across the labyrinths tucked away in the various quarries therein, has me remembering that no one had mentioned them beforehand. This can't be true. I can't now believe that someone would recommend visiting Sibley without also mentioning the labyrinths...

I've only been there maybe three or four times since, years pass in between; but I remember, that first time, getting some unusual help in appreciating the place as a sort of resource: I feel like we'd maybe been taking the least "up" of whichever forks the path took (although, again, there's not much trust to be placed in my memories of this), and thus had stumbled across three or four "lesser" labyrinths before we topped a small berm and looked down into the deep quarry home of the Big One. The other labyrinths had been some peculiar pieces of geo-art to find unexpectedly in the wild, fun things for hippies to do with rocks, and fun, too, for the rest of us to find, in their far flung locales--kinda like anthropogenic twists on the natural order, like, if you've ever taken a long hike in the Sierras, across broad granite surfaces where no trail is evident, and found your way marked with small cairns. But this bigger labyrinth, situated on the floor of the deepest quarry, had at its center a little pile of... tchotchke? Sort of a little altar, an agglomeration of odd items items mixed in with the rocks. I remember digging through it and finding all sorts of small treats. One of them was a tiny black plastic box with a button, which, when pressed, spoke something along the lines of "take something and leave something". It was revelatory.

Tab Parade in the Clouds

My laptop broke, sometime in December. I think I'd done some grocery shopping at Costco, and the bulk packages filled up the pannier space in which the Mac would ordinarily fit, so I foolishly strapped it in, under the lid, but atop the bags--I got most of the way home before it tumbled out onto the street. The dents looked pretty ugly, but when I got home, I was still able to push all the peripherals into their chosen slots. Nonetheless, it froze up when I popped the lid (it had already had some troubles under a previous owner, including body damage, so "popping the lid" means removing the rubber band that straps it shut in transit). However, curiously enough, the next day, it returned to normal. I immediately took the opportunity to back up to Time Machine, not expecting to duplicate the start-up success, but it kept on trucking for another few weeks. Then, one day at work, it had a "kernel panic". I only know those words because a client happened to be in the shop at the time and recognized the message flashing on the frozen screen. Ever since then, it makes the noises (the orchestral "dunnnn") of starting up, and the fan whirs to beat the band, but no screen ever appears.

It's been a couple weeks since I tried now... maybe today? Nope.

I've been waiting for a basic MacBook to show up among the refurbished itemes on the Apple website, but they're few and far between, so weeks have passed now, wherein I've been stealing time on Deb's computer at home, and laying out patterns on Scott's computer at work, while I dream of one day "getting a good deal".

On Deb's Firefox browser, I opened a separate window for the tabs I tend to accumulate in browsing; but I haven't been doing a very thorough job of reading and deleting those tabs--even the tabs I've read and may want to keep, I've been hesitant to log bookmarks for, since I'm not using my own computer. The other day, I inadvertently clicked the red button to remove the window, instead of the yellow button to stow it in the dock, and a message popped up, saying "you are about to delete 61 tabs". I canceled.
Okay, all that stuff's gonna have to just sit in the library for now. There's no way I'm going to read through all the materials on 61 tabs anytime soon. So, I'll use this post as a bookmarks folder, that I can dip back into, if and when I ever end up replacing my old laptop. I'll eliminate some of the weak links, putting this together, and in the meantime, maybe someone else will find something interesting among the tabs below:

Erring on the side of "do"

I was just absorbed in reading thru all (or most) of my old posts, mostly as a way to avoid having to write a new one; but the task seems unavoidable: I don't know if it's seasonal, or cyclical, or what... It doesn't seem to happen on any sort of reliable, regular schedule, and it has failed, as yet, to become a self-reinforcing habit, but every so often, the urge to blog arises, "every so often, it feels like the reasons to write gain enough weight to tip the see-saw's end up out of its muddy wallow", as I wrote so long ago in one of the earliest of numerous posts bemoaning my posting infrequency, and yet, still, the see-saw refuses to continue rocking of its own accord...

Well, anyway, I've definitely been agitating for some action on this front--perhaps it's the turn of the new year, the season for resolving this, that and the other. The closest to a resolution I've been able to verbalize, is to err on the side of "doing".

Prominent Aeronautical Disasters in History

I threw this together this morning, thinking t-shirt or poster. I was inspired by the latest adventures of Der Untergang:



That YouTube embed has apparently been removed due to bogus DMCA takedowns.  I had enough advance notice to have pulled a copy off the web and am re-posting it here, where it's less likely to be noticed by law-abusing copy-grumps:

For more information about the removal of Hitler parodies, due to bogus DMCA takedown notices, you might still find a YouTube video here (which, having downloaded,  I'll re-post later, if I notice the link's gone dead).

Here's another video that hints at some of what's stupidest about copyright law, as it stands:



And here's a more scholarly explanation of how to cite fair use, in opposition to such takedowns:

News from the East

Mom visited a museum exhibit about Princess Diana, in Philadelphia recently. Among the artifacts was a room full of condolence books from around the world. She was excited to report that one of them lay open to a condolence signed, "Love, Damon and Debbie". I had a hunch that, although there may well be plenty of "Damon and Debbie" couples in the world, it might possibly be related to the British soap opera characters of the same names.
I think it was pulling up the Wikipedia page for Damon and Debbie, that inspired me to google my name. I came up with this Chinese language article about the sign shop. I could recognize other names mentioned in the story, which indicated that this was either written by or copied from someone who had actually spoken to me about sign making. I used Google's convenient translation tool (which popped up alongside the search results), to generate this, entitled The Charm of the Traditional Identification:

Doored

AAAUGGH-- FRAK!

frakfrakfrakfrakfrakfrakfrakfrakfrakfrakfrakfrakfrakfrakfrak, batch-horse COUNT!

FRAK!!!!

Those words, sanitized for my parents' sensitivities, comprised a few of my early thoughts, some spoken aloud, others not, as this morning, for the first time ever, after having biked in SF since '91, and less than a month after getting my first new bike since '93, I plowed into a car door, swinging open in my path.

A quick survey of joints and bones suggests nothing's broken. I've got a nasty laceration in my right ring finger 2nd knuckle (assuming knuckles are counted starting from the tip... oh yeah, I guess it's the 2nd either way. Okay, I'm a little shaken up), but I can't see any bone peeking out in there. So, I cleaned it up and put on a butterfly closure, a Band-Aid, and a splint for good measure (prob'ly unnecessary, but it'll elicit sympathy and maybe generate awareness of checking your goddamn side view mirror, even tho' she says she did; plus, I get to complain about how hard it is to type, and I'm always scouring for misbegotten reasons to complain).

My right bar end got twisted around, but everything else seems normal on the bike. I'll try to drop it off at the Basement today, and get it checked out, since I haven't even had my introductory tune-up yet.

So, in short: lots of initial shock, but fairly minor injuries all around. I didn't even manage to leave a decent scratch on her door. But, man--for those first few "fraks", I thought for sure I'd broken my hand.

Oh yeah: this happened just after turning east on Mission, from S. Van Ness, exactly where last month, the front cog of my old bike spat a few teeth into the street--leading to my finally splurging on a new bike, after all these years. Something good may ultimately come of this dooring incident, too, but just the same, I think I'll avoid that intersection from now on.

Why?

This morning, I got an email from Mom, something with multiple 'FW: Fwd:'s in the subject line, about a song "written by a 13 years old boy". It had a couple of links, to a ".wmv" file and to a ".txt" file, both of which required downloading. Against my better judgement, and because I'm in a band with a 14 year old boy (and have been since he was 8), I downloaded and watched the ".wmv" file. It was a maudlin video of some British lad, Declan, presumably a creation of Pop Idol, or some such program, asking repeatedly, why certain bad stuff exists in the world.

I replied as follows...

El Corte de Madera

I bought a new bike last week. My previous bike, I'd been nursing along since 1993, finally gave me sound enough reason to pull the plug: I cranked hard to avoid an oncoming bus, on my way across town for an appointment; I felt a jolt and heard the clank of metal on the street. I looped around, up a driveway, onto the sidewalk, and rode back to the source of the sound: a chunk of cog, with about 3 teeth in it, lay on the road! Strangely, this did not stop the bike from operating normally. I carried on, and rode all the way up to the top of Russian Hill, where I'd never actually been before, to meet my clients. Afterward, I saw this plaque about graves, for which the hill is named:"[T]he graves were removed or built over"... Or? Like... we just don't know? This reminds me of a film by one of Deb's friends, Trina Lopez, Second Final Rest, about the removal of all of San Francisco's cemeteries in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake, raising questions about just how thorough said removal was. I haven't actually seen the movie yet, but it's playing this coming Wednesday, at the public library main branch. So, maybe I'll go.

Anyway, in the past, when stuff on my bike done broke, I'd just buy another part, or buy a cheap used bike with good parts, and swap stuff out. But missing teeth on the central cog? That's a lot of work, and this bike's put in a good tour of service. Scott told me I could afford a new bike, so I went for it. And this weekend, I put some knobbies on the wheels, and took it down to El Corte de Madera Open Space Preserve, where I used to run a couple loops with my old work friend, Gabe, some dozen years ago or so. I followed the same old path: Fir Trail, to Tafoni, to Resolution, and back up the El Corte de Madera Creek Trail. The video up top is of the last few tenths along Resolution Trail. Here are the sandstone formations in the park:



And here's a madrone tree I stared at for a while, at the vista point:



I've put the slicks back on, now, and I prob'ly won't bomb much single-track any more, it's true--but I like seeing the visual explanation, in that video up top, for why my hands get so numb after racing down a mile or so of that stuff. Also, it's really nice, after such a long time, to have gears and shifters that are indexed properly, and brakes that don't squeak because I put the shoes on crooked--in short, to have a new bike. It'll also be nice to take advantage of the 2 years included service that comes with it. Thanks, Sports Basement! I've already customized it, with my name, and assorted accessories ripped off my old bike, like seats, handlebars, and rack. More good rollin' times await.

No reservations? Maybe some...

I was just biking around town this afternoon, and the memory came flashing into mind, of the time, a few months back, when we saw Anthony Bourdain at Bender's bar, around the corner. Much of the usual Thursday crowd were there for a Sunday afternoon, effecting a masculine contrapunto to the Guerrera-Malenfant baby shower. From our table in a back corner, we spotted Bourdain, at the bar, up by the door. I don't have any faith in my capacity to recognize faces, so I was struck first merely by having recognized his. Then, I was struck by how blue his hair is. They must work hard to keep all yellow wavelengths out of gray TV hair.

I went up and offered, on the table's behalf, to buy him a drink, in such a way that he didn't even need to respond in order to politely decline.

What I wish I'd said was something along the lines of...

Sea Ranch

Check in later for an updated post, with actual Sea Ranch journal writing. Still editing. In the meantime, enjoy my psychedelic kelp videos.

Health care debate!

Moved, I guess, by how the lack of ideas being reported as coming from the conservative side of government, during the current attempt at health care overhaul, resembles the lack of conservative ideas reported way back in the financial bail out days, I got back on my high horse, and decided to prod Dad, again, with assorted liberal rhetoric on the topic, in lieu of any evident "debate". I sent him a link to a Krugman column, asserting that the "public option" was a necessary gambit for reducing costs, and a recent Matt Taibbi piece, from Rolling Stone, wherein he explains why the entire process has been completely bungled by corporate interests, and is doomed, as a result, not to save anyone any money.

Dad responded in kind, sending me a list of 14 conservative talking points, that I don't suppose he wrote himself, since they display a wit that's a bit snarkier than I'd characterize his as being; but he didn't say who wrote them. I imagine these are the points that are just hit on, repeatedly, on conservative talk radio--some of the points themselves are repeated--and, as a result, don't do much to explain anything, only to incite indignation in their target audience.

So I responded, perhaps a little too graciously, "This is the first time any republican thinker has managed to squeeze a cogent argument for some completely different idea to the way health care works in the entire rest of the developed world outside the U.S., into the San Franciscan airspace!", before getting down into the dirty work of actually trying to read the stuff, and then debunk all the poppycock therein. I don't think it's likely I got any sound counterpoints across, but at least I was able to highlight some paradoxes in the conservative grab-bag of horror stories. At the same time, I have to admit that, on both ends of the political spectrum, we share a lot of pessimism over what's likely to come out of the process.

Destroy man!

How did I go nearly 40 years without ever discovering that this is an anagram of my name?

I must amend story to stay modern, in the steady norm--keep the stony dream alive--avoid the stray demon and damn oyster!

God bless the internet. It spares me the need to regret not having spent more time playing with the letters in my name.

This reminds me of my old friend, Anna, who could compose long form anagrams of full sentences or emails, if I recall correctly... Her email name was "apalindrome", which reminds me both of the sample sign Tauba put in the shop window, reading "palindrome is not a palindrome" (and which seems to provoke more commentary from bus stop patrons than any other in the window); and also my favorite failed palindrome:

Edna St. Vincent Millay, top bard, notes putrid tang emanating, is sad.
I'd assign it a name: gnat dirt upset on drab pot toilet.

Narratives and the Narrating Narrators Who Narrate Them

I got up, and forced myself to start reading Errol Morris' Seven Lies About Lying (parts I and II), which have been sitting on two tabs of the browser for, I guess, a week now, waiting for me to get through every little thing that's crossed my sight line since. My interest in that article (besides being kindled by having enjoyed Mr. Morris' previous multi-part essays in the Times, largely about the relationship between truth and photography), was sparked--before laying dormant for a week--by the inclusion of an interview with Ricky Jay, who's a pretty fascinating bloke, enjoying a sort of renaissance, I think, here in the early 21st century. That is to say: I have the impression, based partly on faint memories from my childhood, but mostly on a pictorial of him using playing cards as darts, to pop balloons taped to an otherwise nude bunny, from a December 1977 issue of Playboy that used to live in the bathroom mag rack, that he reached the pinnacle of his celebrity some 30 odd years ago. Lately, he seems to be popping up more often on the pop radar--I was surprised to see him in a "dramatic" role in Gus Van Sant's pseudo-bio flick, Last Days, about the end of Kurt Cobain's life--but it may be only my radar on which he's blipping more frequently, since I was commissioned recently to paint his name on an old vintage magician poster, to be a birthday gift for Mr. Jay, himself (I hope, in posting it here, that the birthday has already come to pass):


I can't help but wonder if someone who collects such vintage posters, as does he, might not be a little appalled to have a perfectly good one defaced in such fashion... I mean, I'm fine with the lettering and all, I just feel like, if it were my name on there, I'd be saying, like, "Why did you have to go and do that to it?" But I don't know the first thing about assessing the value of such old posters; I'm not Ricky Jay, and I don't know him as well as does David Mamet, from whom the commission came (more celebrity name-dropping! Actually, it was just "his people", and they only talked to "my people", i.e. Scott).

The week I was working on that, I swear, I told at least a half dozen people what I was doing, and not one of them had heard of Ricky Jay. Just now, I had to tell Deb who he was, though I swear I must have told her then, too. And I think only one person even recognized David Mamet's name! I mean, c'mon, people! David Mamet?!? I feel like I should just be able to say, "What the fuck?!", and that would be a kinda weak inside joke about the coarse speech patterns of the Western Male, as commonly represented in Mamet scripts. But really: there's no excuse. You should just know this shit. Here, check his wiki. Jesus. Now, Jay, okay, I grant you, he's been a little under the radar for lo these many. You should just read the Errol Morris article, but here, you can check his wiki, too.

Palimpsest

I've been puttering around on the couch this morning, as is my way, using the interwebs in the fashion for which they are seemingly best suited: to reveal, in an ever-lengthening row of tabs, ever more info about whatever caught my passing interest in a previous tab. Thusly, have I increased my vocabulary to include menefreghismo, and its variants. I thought, for a while, maybe I wanted to read Nick Tosches' book, Dino, about Dean Martin. Then, as I was trying to find some online version of a Tosches magazine article I remember fondly (and, I swear, only just now, typing this sentence, long past having scoured New Yorker, Harper's, and McSweeney's archives in vain for a hint, does it dawn on me that it was in Vanity Fair, here, and I recommend it: a stellar description of the fullest use of one's skills and resources to feed a seemingly pointless obsession, as the seasons pass, concluding that "nobody with a decent map needs rainbows"...whatever that means), I somehow stumbled upon mention of a Jack Pendarvis, described as a "Southern Gothic David Sedaris". I thought of my friend, Huw, whom I've mentioned before in his capacity as priestly aspirant, and who, being Southern, and prolificly blogulous, has much to write and link to, of the South and of his experiences carrying it north in his heart. We've been chatting recently (and through him, and his Canadian proximity, I've begun watching some of Little Mosque on the Prairie), and I wonder if he'd be interested in Pendarvis. Then, I thought, I should just see if it's any good myself, before I go recommending it. The Mysterious Secret of the Valuable Treasure seems like a good place to start, being as it's a short story collection, and my ability to read actual book-length books has largely atrophied (help me find a less oxymoronic adjective for atrophied, please), despite some recent success with Reason, Faith, and Revolution (approaching halfway!).