This isn't from some guy who just spends his time rambling around the tunnels of the MTA. The name is a shortened form of the blog's original title, "That Rambling Guy on the Subway, Online." Hope that clears things up for you.
As I was falling asleep last night, it occurred to me that I'd forgotten to Ramble. But the bed was warm and the room was cold, and the sleeping cat had me pinned on one side and a sleeping Yesenia blocked the other exit. So consider this one last night's entry (or non-entry, as it is) and I'll write tonight's later.
After a seemingly interminable wait, Futurama: Bender's Big Score was released yesterday. That's Tuesday, to you. The hard-core fans of the show within my social group - Yesenia, Jim, Danielle, Karl & Bubba (frankly, that's most of my social group right there) - all gathered at the Doller's house to watch it on Jim's glorious digital projector.
And, you know, when I bought it earlier in the day, I found that I was feeling kind of antipathetic about viewing it. I probed and found - unsurprisingly - that a new version of something I really loved was stirring the fear in me that they might have gotten it wrong. Really wrong. Horribly, unfunnily, way-off-the-mark wrong.
See, by the end of their fourth (and final) season, the team was operating at such peak efficiency that nearly every episode was a perfectly polished gem of comedy, always with nice character touches and very solid sci-fi thrills. Comedy in the realm of ideas with people (and robots and lobstrosoties) that you were emotionally invested in.
But. Once you're out of that zone...
...well, you end up with The Phantom Menace.
Really, how many creative comebacks of this type have been successful on the same level they were as when they originally evaporated? Oh, I don't mean financially - the Star Wars prequels obviously minted cash for Lucas in chunks of hundreds of millions. But even the greatest Lucas apologist that would be me has to admit - that would be me, so I have to admit - that something was off. Over the course of the three films, it got slowly back on, so that the last half of Revenge of the Sith is genuinely great, but, still: Lucas hadn't written or directed a film in over thirty years before The Phantom Menace,, and his writing and direction, as a result, were laughable.
I could, no doubt, find many examples of these pop-culture comebacks that were a return to form. I've already discussed at length how strong a film The Wrath of Khan is, for one. But....
...anyway, it's with these fears mingled with a fan's burning faith that I sat in Jim's basement theater to watch Bender's Big Score.
I'm sorry! I'm sorry, Mr. Groening! I'm sorry, Mr. Cohen! Sorry for having doubted! I didn't know that you could come back after five years with an even clearer, sharper vision! I didn't know that the humor would be just as precise! I didn't believe that the actors could find their way back into character! I couldn't believe that the animation would remain not only unchanged, but in some ways, improved! I didn't think you could go from half an hour to 90 minutes and keep me engrossed!
I was a fool. I'd want to quote you and say 'a fully-justified fool,' but it turns out I was a wholly unjustified fool. You delivered the goods, and in the process deepened both the Futurama universe and my affection and admiration for it.
Now, let's see how badly you mess up The Beast With a Billion Backs.
It's not you. There was no blog yesterday, and now, suddenly, there is! It's right below this one, if you want to read it, and it makes me look like I'm dabbling in irony, or at least foreshadowing.
What? See, it turns out that my hosting service is changing servers - rather, they're moving all their sites from various scattered servers the world over to one beat up Apple Lisa somewhere in the Ukraine, and rather than going smoothly, things have been a little on the kerflooey side, by the looks of it.
Firstly,I noted that Anonymous posted a reply the other day, and I didn't get the usual email from Blogger about it, which goes to one of my copper-man accounts. At first, I'd figured that it'd turn up in email eventually - Blogger is always a little slow with its posting function. But then I posted a reply to Anonymous, and that failed to be emailed to me as well. Then I checked and saw that I had not, in fact, received any email to my copper-man accounts since last Monday. Since I use those accounts so infrequently, I hadn't really noticed. One is for some personal email, and the others just seem to be Spam Catchers. But, no, nothing since the 19th. Not even an offer to earn money watching robot porn.*
So I dug around my Deck yesterday afternoon and got caught in something they called a 'Transition Kiosk,' and too the easy way out: called tech-serv. Right away, and without any prefatory explanation, the gentleman at the other end of the phone - presumably several oceans away, under the Calcutta Moon - had me change my password. I did so unquestioningly, figuring that this was a prerequisite to porting over to the new server.
No, as it turns out. It's just some bullshit 'security' measure they 'require.' That you 'have to' change your log-in and password every 90 days. About 20 minutes later, I got off the phone, a little confused as to whether my problem had been solved or not. It had not. And I had a new one, I found, when I tried to post the Rambler late last night. Blogger now couldn't get onto my server, despite the fact that I gave it the new login info.
Tonight, I headed back to my Deck (still on the same old server, thanks), and added a new FTP login, fed that one to Blogger, clicked last night's unposted entry, and:
WHHOOOOOOSH! Posted like a charm.
Still no email, though, so I'm back on the phone with tech-serv, as I type this.
Really: I'm on hold, and haven't yet talked to a person.
And I have been since I started typing this blog. This somewhat lengthy, rambling blog.
Which I'm now done with, and still no tech-man on the other end of the phone (worst hold music ever, BTW).
I have now set a deadline for the revamp/overhaul (revamverhaul?) of the Copper Man site, of which the Subway Rambler is the only currently functioning part. January 1st, 2008. Instead of the fading memorial to a dead band that comprises the existing site, the new site will be home to Dave effluvium of all kinds, including:
- galleries of various 'art' things, - musics of all kind, - small movieish viewings, - bits made up of words (of which the Rambler will be a part), - perhaps an ongoing comic serial? - shots of your mother, naked, - and whatever else I can think to cram into the gaping hole that is my bandwidth.
I welcome any ideas as to what people expect/want/fear seeing in this new site. Please post your suggestions with abandon below. Most of all, I expect you riders to hold me to that launch date; I have even removed the old front page for the site and replaced it with a shorter declaration of the above (plus a nice picture). Go take a look.
Of course, the damn place will still be named 'copper-man.net,' just to be extra, extra confusing.
My loving and thoughtful wife, knowing that my favorite sketching tool is the famous Sharpie® marker, brought me home such a deal that she'd found at the supermarket a few days ago - a 12 pack of Sharpies® for a single dollar! When you consider that even at the office superstore-type places, the things usually sell for about $1.50 each, I had to commend her for her purchase:
Of course, I'm always a few Sharpies® ahead of what I need, so they sat on the kitchen table for a few days, blister pack unopened. This isn't unusual for our house - 'putting things away' is a lengthy process with many stages, of which being piled on the easiest convenient surface is the first. I did note when first seeing them that the package itself looked a little off-brand - half-assed, even - and maybe was some kind of wholesaler's repackaging of stock to unload.
Then I was standing in the kitchen, and looking at it, and thinking, "gee, that 'h' in the famous cursive logo looks kind of odd, doesn't it?," and took a closer look:
Uh. Skerple? I mean, what? There's got to be some kind of copyright infringement going on here, doesn't there? Right down to the barrel design:
Now, the reason I like the Sharpie® is because of the strong quality of its nice and black line, surprising pressure-sensitivity, and very long-lasting use. This is just a guess, but I'm thinking that the Skerple won't quite match the performance I've come to expect, and, on top of that, may even give me some fungal infection on my drawing hand.
I've never been so apprehensive about using a marker, before...
For the first time this Fall, it's cold. Blissfully, wonderfully cold and clear out. And I'll trade a brilliant cold November sky full of moon and stars over a summer sky any day. Orion hangs directly over our house, the Three Wise Men (what they call Orion's belt in Puerto Rico, the stars Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka), and Mars, directly overhead, shining a red so spectacular that it makes Betelgeuse look reedy in comparison.
Now, I've just got to see that exploding comet that Paul McCartney was singing about...
For my 200th post, I thought I'd celebrate by having the readability level of the Rambler checked. And what do you know:
Should I be insulted? And here I was thinking that I swore too much. But I guess not, if they think that it's safe for grade-schoolers.
Or maybe it's just that my content is generally too lowbrow. More cultural references, perhaps? Let's see what I can do to get at least a 'junior high' rating:
"William Shakespeare, the immortal Bard of Stratford-Upon-Avon, was engaging in fairly run-of-the-mill anal intercourse with Immanual Kant, rolling about in a pool of untreated sewage somewhere down in Whitechapel, named for a small chapel of ease dedicated to St Mary built along the ancient Roman road leading into London. "Fuck, but my Little William seems unable to spend his hot, pearly load," grunted Shakespeare, turning so that Kant revolved like a pig on a spit (Use a meat thermometer and be certain that the internal temperature reaches 160°F for fresh pork, 155°F for cured pork).
Kant was either unwilling or unable to respond, as having his face pushed into the unutterably foul pool of human excrement had sent him soaring to heights of ecstasy that he'd never before dream't of. Many leading epistemologists theorize that it was at the very point of Kant's orgasm that he formulated in his mind the central argument of his Critique of Pure Reason - that our understanding of the external world has its foundations not merely in experience, but in both experience and a priori concepts. Spitting the greasy black feces out of his mouth, he attempted to communicate this sudden insight to Shakespeare. Shakespeare merely called him "a motherless whore whose asshole is unworthy of the majesty that is my cock" and kicked him down to the riverbank."
There. I'll have to check and see if that ups my rating. Either that, or gets me set up on obscenity charges.
Sorry I skipped a night - we had a birthday party for me here on Saturday, and didn't get the last guest out until 1:30, and then I just shut down. But I have to say, it was a nice party, and an amazing haul of gifts for me; one of the best ever. People either know me too well, or my tastes are broader than I thought, but I was both really happy and really touched by the spot-on presents that people brought. This isn't in lieu of 'thank you' notes, but I thought I'd make a listing here of the nice people and the nice things they brought me:
John & Catherine: A copy of the new Alan Moore/Kevin O'Niell "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen." Edz: "Flight of the Conchords" DVD Shaun & Jahaneen & Darrien: A complete Paul McCartney DVD collection - 3 discs of videos and concerts Jay & Claire: AMEX gift card & two lottery tickets (as selected by their four-year-old) Sean: Two high-line beer from Capt. Lawrence Brewery, in Pleasantville Bubba & Fi: "Flight of the Conchords" DVD Homeira: $50 in cash(!) and a small Russel Stovers collection Leah & Val: $50 iTunes Gift Certificate & a dozen cupcakes from "Marigolds" in NYC Jim & Danielle: A man purse, the "2006 Best American Comics" Anthology, a catalog from some Chinese artist's exhibition of paintings of laughing men in swimsuits, and "The Animated Cerebus Portfolio." Gail: A bottle of Tanqueray Sterling Vodka Amy & Vito: "Pow" boxer shorts
There may be more - it's late the next night and I've been catching up on work most of the evening, but I've already started to chew my way through the pile.
Anyway, let me also take a moment to point at my wife and say, wow - not only is she totally hot, but she actually hosted two parties in one day, and the food and everything else for both parties was great. When you consider how hard she's been pushing herself lately with the NYU-Online class she's been taking (which has an unbelievable workload), the fact that she still was able to stay on top of it all gracefully. And the lamb-kebob wraps were fuckin' awesome.
Not to downgrade the wonderful gifts everyone else brought, but Yesenia's continued presence in my life was the best present I got all night. As ever.
You know, the whole series is pretty damn funny, but I particularly enjoyed the Zepplin-Off and the Jem & The Holograms riff ("give it up for Mr. Barry Jordan on the bass"). Go check them out - they're each less than two minutes, and there's only eight of the damn things.
The bout of indecision has come: what the hell to do for Thanksgiving? After seven years of marriage, Yesenia has graciously ceded the holiday to me (she gets ownership of Hallowe'en and Easter, so don't think I got the better end of the trade) - but I find the idea of actually doing anything this year is giving me emotional hives.
Yesenia and I have been tired of late - her due to the really crazy amount of work for her NYU Online Introduction to Spanish Translation class, which the professor seems to be running as a gauntlet where those that don't run from the class weeping are allowed to enter the program, and both of us are beat because of job work.
I haven't quite been able to get my schedule back together since last week, but that's par for the course: I've always been a deadline worker, and things that I could be doing over the course of several days usually happen in the absolute last few hours before they're due. Which works fine when the work-load is light - when I have a lot to do that all comes due at the same time, I get so frazzled that if you took a Kirlian Photo. of me, it would look like a nuclear pile 'going China.'
So, anyway, even though we both probably could do with a nice few days away, neither of us seems to be able to muster much enthusiasm for the customary Rhode Island trip. It doesn't help that the big family Thanksgivings of my childhood are gone, now that all the cousins have big plans and go elsewhere, and Auntie Evvie no longer works her maestro ways in the kitchen, getting up at 4:30 AM to start that bird cooking.
Anyway.
Mostly, I'm just tired now, specifically after only three hours of sleep last night and now after 10 PM, but with a little sleep and by getting over the smallish foothills of work I have to do tomorrow, I'll have a better picture of where my own head's at.
My, what a boring Rambler this turned out to be. Well, I have a few reviews and stuff in store for the coming days - comics, film & music - so that should liven the place up a little bit. Keep yourselves sane, and we'll all get through phase one of the Holiday Season together.
Still needs some tweaking (mostly just want to clean up the two album pages), but I'll call this 99.9 1/4% done. Now to finish designing the Jamaican Style Beefy Cheese Cocktail Patties box...
One of those days of nuts and bolts, springs and wires; various random pieces thrown in a box in the morning, and by the end of the day, I'm supposed to have constructed a working X-2 rocket out of them. I didn't quite make orbit, but I did okay:
- Wrote a new radio spot for an Audi, Acura & Volkswagen dealer
- Put together a postcard for two Harley dealers
- Got the heat back online (well, okay, the heating guy did that, but I was here)
- Made a flyer for the agency
- Put up some curtains in the spare room
- Did some laundry
- Emptied the dishwasher
- Cooked dinner for me and Yesenia
- Played Putnam (our houseguest, who arrived at nine) various prog-rock tracks to show him just how boss Bill Bruford and Phil Collins were.
That's probably enough, right? Let me go put my second load in the dryer, and we'll call it a night.
Here's a window into a little domestic scene: right now, both Yesenia & I are sitting opposite each other at the computer desk, each updating our online identities - me with this daily Ramble, and her on her MySpace page. This multi-computer household is something else. Even given that, it's probably going to be a little slow here on the Rambler this week.
- Folk-singing, hammer-swinging friend Putnam is coming tomorrow night, and we're going to be finishing up the website we started for him back in October on his last visit, and doing a little work around the house with whatever time we have left. Since he's going to be here less than 24 hours, I suspect that's not a lot of time left over for anything else, including Rambling.
- Immediately after Putnam leaves for NYC, I'm heading over to Westchester County for a meeting of the P.C.M.A. And, remember: first rule of P.C.M.A., etc...
- Thursday & Friday are given over to more housework, which I neglected this past week.
- Saturday, we're having not one, but two parties at the house. At one, Yesenia is hosting a Tupperware party, except with jewelry in lieu of burping plastic. Then, in the evening, we're having a party ostensibly to celebrate my birthday, although since I tried to bleed the living room baseboard heating and instead broke it and had to shut down the system, we'll probably just be celebrating having heat again by that time. I sure hope so, since we have not one, not two, but three guests staying overnight, and having guests with no heat at this time of year is more than a little rude...
Mostly, I'm just a little fried, but that may pass and I could be feeling loquacious as anything this time tomorrow night. The suspense is killing me!
So, KPMG asked if I could add color to the comic - I have a little more time, since it's due at the print house on Monday morning. Adding color to a page like this is a little bit of a technical challenge, since I inked the page to be reproduced in black and white.
Still, the first rule of color is to start with a ground - that is, a base color that you then build all the other hues out of. In this case (and, indeed, in many cases), I chose a cool blue as the unifying color scheme:
And that's where I stopped when it was time to leave for the P.C.M.A. recording session today. Close observers may note that I took advantage of the extra time to do a little patchwork on the bottom left panel, which was bugging me a lot. Really, it's the kind of thing that should have been fixed at the layout and pencil phase, but I had to rush through every step and kept thinking I'd fix it when it came to the next step. No - if something looks bad in graphite, it looks double-bad in ink.
Anyway, I didn't do any redrawing, I just realized that the next best thing to erasing and redoing the female figure in that panel was to improve the composition and spatial relationships, so I blew her up about fifteen percent and shifted her right to just behind the chair. At least the design is more interesting - and I'll live with it. If I have a little time after the coloring, I'll see if I can doctor her features somewhat, to tease out a subtler expression and to bring her back 'on model.'
I had hoped to get the complete original version on the page, but in the day and age of Photoshop, the original drawing is just the beginning.
As part of some sort of community outreach, the Rockland Center for the Arts had art teachers from all the local schools come by today and participate in various seminars from the Center faculty. I was, I say with some pride, one that the teachers' group requested, so I gave a talk for about 90 minutes today to a roomful of adults about comics. And I only lost one out of the fifteen of them, which, statistically speaking, ain't so bad.
Anyway, I did my usual distilled schpiel about comics and how great they are as a tool for self-expression and communication, and added to it a litany of skills that kids can learn while producing their own comics, for the sake of the teachers. I do feel, genuinely, that including comics as part of any school arts program is a stellar idea, since comics (at the very least) forces kids to think about narrative order and effective communication. In my own case, producing comics starting at around 12 made me recognize the lousiness of my own handwriting - an interesting topic for a Rambler in its own right - and taking the effort to clean up my lettering for the comics I produced also made my handwriting across the board much, much clearer.
I'll probably continue these reflections tomorrow - for now, I'm a little busy with work, so I thought I'd just share the Vomit Comic that I produced at the top of the session. For those who missed these previously, a Vomit Comic is a full-page self-contained comic, drawn directly in ink (usually a Sharpie), started from scratch and brought to completion under a strict fifteen minute deadline. Today's entry is startlingly literal, but my motor was running a little slow and I'll confess to feeling stage jitters at having to lecture to a room of adults instead of kids.
I'm a Beatles fan, and, more to the point, I'm a Paul McCartney fan. In fact, it's safe to say that I was very much a Beatles fan from my teens into my early twenties, but then I really came to be fascinated by Paul's solo work, and I may even prefer that to the Beatles. Note that I said "preferred," and not "think it's better," because, really, the Beatles work is so perfect from beginning to end that it's not even like the created it - it's more like it was always there, and they just kind of uncovered it.
But perfection can get kind of dull, you know?
Paul's solo work does not suffer under the strain of being perfect. Oh, it's fully flawed, wonderfully human stuff. And if the nearly 40 years since the implosion of the Fab Four, he's also produced quite a bit, being the only Beatle to have anything resembling a work ethic. He had to prove he could make a second run at the top ten after the Beatles, so he worked up a respectable catalogue of singles. But, this not being the Beatles anymore, and having full creative control, the tracks between the hits became stranger and stranger. Everyone knows the man is a huge pothead, and some of his ideas certianly seem like they were dreamt up in a cloud of blue smoke.
Case in point: many of you may know the album Ram. Most famous, perhaps, for the single Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey,Ram was McCartney really getting back to work with a full studio production album since leaving the Beatles - so, something of a commercially calculated affair, but given that Paul's medium is, you know, popular music, it's really an artist returning to his home soil. But how many of you have heard of Thrillington? Shortly after Ram first appeared in stores, another LP followed, credited to one Percy "Thrills" Thrillington. The album was all of the tracks on Ram re-recorded as instrumental orchestral music.
See? Paul set it up for himself so that he could do high art, low art, popular work, deliberate kitsch and whatever else came into his mind. Basically, everything he's done since Let it Be has been Paul's retirement, and he apparently wanted to spend his retirement having fun.
One thing that's slightly irksome for an American Paul fan is that he's so prolific that he would sometimes record and release things just for the British market. Things that would be huge hits over there, but never a note heard over here. It's almost as though he had two parallel careers going, one in which he's known for Silly Love Songs and Jet, and another in which he's the man behind Give Ireland Back to the Irish and the above curio from the early 1980's, We All Stand Together.
I'd been reading references to "The Frog Chorus" for years in various biographies and interviews, but always made with the assumption that the reader knows what the hell a "Frog Chorus" is, and usually with the assumption that the reader shares the writer's dismissive attitude towards this song. It's not an exaggeration to say that I've read at least three full length Paul biographies, and several dozen other pieces here and there, and watched whatever interviews there are to see - at nearly fifty years in the spotlight, there's quite a bit! - but nowhere could I glean anything more than that Paul had bought the rights to old British children's book & character, stuffed bear Rupert, and that some kind of animated adaptation had resulted, and that Paul always seemed pretty defensive about it in interviews (which he always does when he feels he's out of critical fashion).
And I knew that everyone had really, really really thought this "Frog Chorus" was probably beneath McCartney, and most certainly beneath contempt. Beyond that? Nothing. And since I'd been reading these oblique and mocking references to "The Frog Chorus" since around when I first went to college, it's been nattering at the back of my brain for a long time.
Finally, thanks to the magic of the internet, I happened to be online when something reminded me of this mystery, and I realized I could do something about it. To the YouTube!
And let me just say: you hear that song once and it's stuck in your head for days, man.
So, am I crazy? Is this not just a totally charming thing? Turns out it was a stand-alone, and not part of a feature (although he did two more similar pieces to pair it with over the years). What's the fuss? Is a Beatle not allowed to do a nice piece of children's music and animation? Then what the hell was Yellow Submarine? And this Rupert thing is early enough so that it pre-dates the Disney resurgence fueled by the pop-lords of the UK, like Elton John, and Phil Collins, and even Sting, so maybe Paul was just getting harshed on because it wasn't cool to do a kid's song with fucking singing frogs in balloons and a teddy bear in it?
Maybe not. I mean, the attic from Paul's video is probably the same set as the one that Bowie reminisced in at the intro of The Snowman:
Anyhow, I think "The Frog Chorus" is just swell, and people are just grumpy.
I note that the single went to number three, so I doubt Paul is too broken up about the mockery. He can use the money he made off of it to buy an island that doesn't have any critics on it, after all.
Should be working, but I took a couple of hours this evening to watch this in bed with Yesenia. At one point I observed to her, "When my ten-year-old self first saw this in the theater, he never imagined that one day he'd be watching it in bed with a hot mama."
Damn! I knew it was gonna jinx it, but it's hard for me not to get energetic and excited about recording this music, because I really love it and want to listen and share it. But we spent six-plus hours and only got one halfway decent take of one song. Studio fever set in, and measures were miscounted, and a series of tiny little technical problems added up (brand-new OS + beta drivers = seemingly endless funtime for the engineer!).
Anyway, the sound is great, and I'd be lying if I said I was realistically expecting to get more than two songs done, so we got about half accomplished what we could have. Of course, we spent almost five hours on trying to get the first song, Memorial Pub Crawl 2007 into shape (about two of those hours on aborted attempts to record it), and sped through Green Light (pun intended) in less than an hour, by which math you can see that one drum track is not a good labor-to-results ratio.
Oh, well. It will be done, and sound great. Still, there's some fear that the Port Chester Town Board may come and revoke our music license. Then the acronym will have to stand for "Port Chester Music Association," or something less, you know, authoritative.
The Port Chester Music Authority is open for business Saturday, all day. Starting to record the album. Now I've probably jinxed it, but I'm all ready to go 'n shit.
You struggle hard to separate, But turn around and join again. Skittering for second place And racing on to morning.
I feel nothing for you. I like these quiet times. I feel like it’s coming For you and your kind. Everyone is happier now…
You always want to measure up, But you define the tally. And your bid for posterity Is stars and comets falling.
I feel nothing for you. I like these quiet times. I feel like it’s coming For you and your kind. Everyone is happier now… Your season’s coming to an end.
