The Subway Rambler (Online)

This blog has moved

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Kopperman) — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 21:51:00 +0000

This blog is now located at http://subway-rambler.copper-man.net/.
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Enter the Draggin'

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Kopperman) — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 03:01:00 +0000

So, good and bad:

1) Blogger extended the cutoff date for FTP support until May 1st. But
2) They put a message at the top of the Dashboard that pretty much said 'fucking get with the program, already.'

So I think the time has come to make the switch. Starting soon - not this weekend, but early next week - the Rambler's new address will be 'www.subway-rambler.copper-man.net'. I have no idea how this will affect those who access these dwindling presumptions and observations via RSS, but just the fact that you use RSS means you know about this stuff and will plan accordingly. Or is that play accordion? I forget.

Supposedly, the migration tool that Google has set up will port not only all the existing entries, but the comments, too - but I apologize in advance if I do something that makes your comments on previous posts go spiraling out into the black haze of the digital void. I actually do really treasure the comments here, and in fact the main reason I haven't yet dealt with the FTP situation is that I was afraid of losing them.

The Blogger migration tool also promises to make sure that all links - internal and external - to individual entries will be automatically redirected when the blog republishes. Which seems pretty magical, to me. They also promised me a pony and a new bicycle, so we'll see just how trustworthy they are. This is Google, after all.

Anyhow, I've gone ahead and called my host and set up the CNAME, so as soon as that resolves (within the next 24 hours), I'll be free to make the change. I will, of course, place a redirect at the Rambler's current address, so you can't miss it.

D.

Digging the Foundation

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Kopperman) — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 05:44:00 +0000

Sketch (above) and colored study (below) for a portrait I'm preparing for. Obviously, there's some distortion in the drawing - the elongated head - this happens when you work freehand. I only have photos to work from, and I wanted to really try to internalize the subject, and sitting and drawing is the way to do that.

Click for a closer look, if you like. More on this later.

D.

Banner Week in Crazytown

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Kopperman) — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 04:22:00 +0000

So you've had a bad week, and you think a good solution would be to bring a gun to a staff meeting and shoot your co-workers; or burn your house down, get in your own plane and fly it into the local IRS offices; or - I dunno - I'm sure some other fucker will come out of the woodwork shortly and show us some pointless, petty act of horrible violence that we hadn't yet considered.

Resorting to violence is essentially the acknowledgement that you've lost whatever argument you thought you were having, and now you just want to hurt people. Wow, you're so terribly clever with that weapon in your hand. You've sure proven everyone wrong. You were driven to it. They made you do it.

There is nothing empowering in causing others to suffer.

D.

The Compleat Diner Experience

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Kopperman) — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 03:19:00 +0000

Unbelievably tight day today, as my Wednesdays are going to be for the foreseeable future. Didn't walk back in the front door until 10 PM, with a turkey sandwich being the entirety of what I'd had to eat. So I was very happy that Yesenia had made pancakes, of all things. They were sitting in the oven, under a dishtowel, and I wolfed a couple down dry while heading upstairs to kiss Yesenia goodnight before she went to sleep.

Then I headed back downstairs, put a few more on a plate and poured on the syrup. Then - well, what follows pancakes as an entrée? Think it would be something with eggs? The closest thing we had to that was some matzoh ball soup that we made the other day, and that recipe called for four eggs. Too many eggs for the perfect matzoh ball soup, as it turns out, but still pretty edible. To follow the pancakes, I had a bowl of that.

To polish it all off - well, I'd like to say that I had either a wrapped peppermint or some buttermints with trace amounts of urine on them to really make it seem like the diner, but I opted instead for a Lindt milk chocolate truffle heart from the box that Yesenia got me for Valentine's Day.

There was no check, of course - but I'm sure I'll be paying for it later.

D.

Blue Smoke of the Moon

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Kopperman) — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 04:03:00 +0000

I blew my writing wad this weekend on a review of The Flaming Lips full album tribute to Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. I didn't really like it, and the comments section thus far are in disagreement with me. See if you agree with me or the commentors - you can listen to the whole thing on LaLa for free. Admittedly, the premise of my review is that it's really not worth fifty minutes of your time, but you'll never know unless you try it.

D.

Hiding in Plain Sight

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Kopperman) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 05:26:00 +0000

Couldn't find the damn thing for years. And it turns out that it was just sitting in the corner of the bedroom.

I'm pretty stoked.

D.

Low Moon

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Kopperman) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 05:22:00 +0000

Just rolled over to see the moon lurking like a streetlight outside our window/

D.

Goddamn Blogger

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Kopperman) — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 04:15:00 +0000

Just got a message from Google today that they'll be discontinuing their FTP service as of March 26th. Which means that I'll no longer be able to publish the Subway Rambler to my own site folder. I can switch to their host, or something they call 'custom domains,' which I haven't yet looked into because something about the name sounds depressing to me - like they know it's a fairly lame service so they gave it a sweet-sounding name to candy it up a little.

The main selling point with Blogger, as far as I'm concerned, was the ability to host it on the main Copper Man site. Google claims only 1/2 of 1% of Blogger users use the FTP feature, a figure I don't believe at all and yet have to assume is true. If it is true, it's partly because they don't make it easy to use the FTP publisher, or even to find it. One more part of the increasingly annoying Google service based on their economy of free is the sheer opacity of navigating the help directory or even finding out about their tools searching elsewhere on the internet. As much as I've enjoyed digging around and solving problems on Blogger, I'll admit that pretty much every solution I've come up with to meet my needs has been very much one of the spit-and-sealing-wax variety, and I'm kind of tired of having the seams showing.

So, the big question: do I use this opportunity to switch the Rambler to WordPress? There are apparently WordPress tools that migrate the site seamlessly, but I've also got 715 entries (nearly three years' worth by the deadline), and I'll become positively apoplectic if I lost them. But the fact is that I've been needing to learn WordPress for a while (and Joomla, if I can ever bring myself to), and this may be the writing on the wall for me and Google, which is a company I've grown daily less fond of.

Perhaps the main reason why only .005 of all Blogger users use the FTP feature is that those who have the skills to work it out just go ahead and use WordPress instead, because it's better.

One thing's for sure: time to break out the printer and get a hard copy of all this. Ugh.

D.

Let It Be Known That I Am A Complete Photoshop Genius

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Kopperman) — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 05:13:00 +0000

That's the final product, a poster for Putnam's side project. Click to see the luscious detail. No big deal? Well, check out the raw materials:

Hosannas may begin in the comments section when you're done picking your jaw up off the floor.

D.

Disney Gets Going

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Kopperman) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 22:26:00 +0000

Waited longer to see The Princess and the Frog than I usually do with new Disney films. The delay was for a lot of reasons, but mostly a feeling from the previews that this would be lackluster.

But I have to say, it was very enjoyable. The animation wasn't quite up to the peak of their late 90's run. Too, the character designs were a little bland, and the color palette was hazy and undefined, leaving the whole production feeling a little more like an animated Thomas Kinkade painting than any Disney film should.

All of that aside, the film was well written, easygoing and had two really stunning sequences - namely, the heroine's first song, as usual, the villain's song. Apologies for no full video on that second number, which is wonderfully kinetic and spooky, and psychedelic in the best Disney tradition. Dr. Facilier is a wonder of lanky animation, and it's nice to see that the artists aren't afraid to push his design a little bit into caricature. You can see a little of it here.

If this film is the starter's pistol in a new run of amazing animated features from Disney, then not only is it a good start, but also placing them a little ahead of the game, since I think it's a bit stronger than 'The Little Mermaid,' with the exception of Ashman and Menken's excellent songs from that film, of course.

PS: Yesenia liked it, too.

D.

The Swing of Things

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Kopperman) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 02:29:00 +0000

The Spring semester starts this week, and I'm still only taking one class, although it's a doozy - Pre-Calculus. Just the fact that - unlike Intermediate Algebra, which met once a week - Pre-Calc is Monday and Wednesday nights, gives the whole thing an air of being harder, so the math anxiety is coiling up accordingly. Ready to strike at the first sign of weakness.

I've also started work on a 'secret project.' Nothing spectacular about it, I assure you, but I've always wanted to have a secret project. No animals will be harmed during production. The work itself goes/will go slowly, so I won't make any further announcements until there's something to announce.

D.

Still Sad

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Kopperman) — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 00:42:00 +0000

Return of the Son of Vomit

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Kopperman) — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 05:32:00 +0000

Clicking on the images gives you nice, large versions.

It's been a long time since I graced these pages with a Vomit Comic. The feature (and exercise), such as it was, had migrated over to the Walrus Comix site, but even there it had stalled in September of 2008, a victim of flailing interest on the part of myself and the universe at large.

The point is that the Vomit Comics work best as what they are - sketchbook exercises, with all that entails. This means an exploration in drawing and/or writing, a ground to figure out how to work quickly and with as little of myself and my ego or sense of what's 'good' in the way. That's sometimes harder than it sounds, ego being both the drive of great art and also its bane.

Case in point: this page exists only as itself, a literal comment on the fact that it was the last page in that particular sketchbook, and I wanted to have something nice on that page. I also wanted to mess around with my grey tone Pitt Brush Pens, because while I've moved away from an interest in really involved line work, I still like to have a page display a sense of volume and tonality.

The Pitt Brush Pens, I can't recommend highly enough. If you're at all interested in drawing, they're wonderfully versatile and freeing at the same time. Not too expensive, either - I'd say they're comparably priced to Sharpies. This particular set has six markers, three in warm grey tones and three in cool grey tones. I didn't pay that much attention to the temperature of the tonality when I was putting this page together, as this unaltered version shows:

The temperature of the tones on the page is obviously kind of random, so I thought (and Yesenia agreed) that it looked better essentially in neutral grays, as at the first image.

And that's pretty much it. The writing is an automatic recursive meditation on the act of creation, which is important to the artist even when nothing of any real value is being said. It's entirely about art as being about nothing more than the fun of making marks on paper.

D.

He's Not Your Pal

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Kopperman) — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 09:41:00 +0000

I'm starting to wonder a little bit about the free pass that our generation has apparently given to Bill Murray. Apparently, an avuncular screen presence in a chunk of good movies now means that we love you unconditionally. Despite the fact that it's pretty clear that easygoing, melancholic, funny guy we think we know is a complete and total projection. Well, maybe the melancholy is real.

Behind all that, I think Murray is a venal guy awash in self-loathing, and like a lot of people of that temperament, he takes it out on those around him.

Think about it; he did Ghostbusters to get Columbia to support his dramatic turn in The Razor's Edge. Then when the latter film tanked but the first cemented his status as a comedic leading man, rather than celebrate having been a part of a real cultural touchstone and true comedy (and cinematic) classic, he went off to study at the Sorbonne for four years, licking his wounds in defeat.

Are we clear on this? The guy who came to fame playing a lounge singer on late night television, a goofy camp counselor and a brain damaged groundskeeper who blows up a golf course while Wile E. Coyote-style trying to kill a gopher got pissy that his first attempt at a serious leading man role - in an adaptation of a W. Somerset Maugham novel about a WWI layabout who experiences spiritual enlightenment in India, no less - wasn't a smash hit.

Of course, years later, when he did start to receive the critical acclaim as a serious actor that he always pretty clearly thought he deserved, it did nothing to improve his lousy sense of self. He famously looked as though he was going to cry when the cameras cut to him at the 2004 Academy Awards right when the best actor winner was announced and it wasn't him.

And he kept taking out his sense of failure on those around him - stories are rampant of feuds he's had on set when he doesn't feel that the other performers are working up to his standards. Here's a hint, Bill: don't sign on to a film with Lucy Liu and expect Lawrence Olivier in drag to show up opposite you. Collect the paycheck and understand that a movie update of a show about three women who solve crimes in bikinis is not the place to find 'timeless comedic grace,' or whatever the hell it is you think you're looking for.

The deep irony in all this - and one that may be lost on him - is that Murray owes all of his later career success as a sad clown to directors who grew up loving him as, yes, a lounge singer, a goofy camp counselor and a brain-damaged groundskeeper. Not to mention a guy who catches ghosts with a portable nuclear accelerator.

Worst, and saddest, of all is the fact that when his wife of ten years - whom he married after cheating on his first wife with - filed for divorce in 2008, she cited domestic violence as the reason.

Seriously. What does it say about us as a generation that this self-important emotionally distant asshole control-freak sad clown vortex of egotistical solipsistic self-loathing is our beloved icon? Nothing good, I fear.

D.

(Of course I'll go see Ghostbusters III.)

Twaddle

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Kopperman) — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 04:40:00 +0000

the mystic we

1. the world is ripe
with ghosts in walls
and invisible membranes
a thing that is impossible to see
at best
and at worst, an ineffable
probability

the authorization of
a tired attendant
that free-running time
at the back of somebody’s
unused toolshed

A COMBINATION:
too many words
too few thoughts
has perhaps given rise
to too, too many
imperfect attempts at perfection.

2. Having sometimes known
what it is that I am attempting
to get at,
I find that the most frustrating
game of all are those
oceans between
that roll and heave
an unnatural sickness
difficult to explain

"You would have to have been there"
she says, thinking me
incapable of comprehension
capable of incomprehension
I am both-

a fantastical janus
a new-fangled kind of cat
that lands on its back
without even having
fallen from some higher perch
going for the goldfish?
the bird?
the squirrel?
the sun?

no-one could catch
my nimble-footed failure
but I'm sure that I was
impressive to behold.

3. EVEN SO...
the trees are words
the bed is a book
the clock is a volume
of unlearned responses
knowed by some other
non-transcendent.

The Year We Make Contact

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Kopperman) — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 04:05:00 +0000

I'd be interested to see this one again and check how close it got to an accurate vision of contemporary domestic life. Lord knows, most of the science-fiction and political bits have either failed to come true or been consigned to the dustbin of history. Actually, the novel had bits of sociopolitical prognostication that were pretty impressive but were excised from the film - foremost among them, China as a major player in the space age.

One thing that I recall as being pretty interesting were the special effects, which had a completely unique look, the type of thing we don't see anymore in this age of homogenous CGI. Which is another big difference between the 2010 of 1984 and the actual year.

D.

Snow Day

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Kopperman) — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 16:34:00 +0000

The snow today came as a complete surprise to me. Not because I'm a weather watcher - I'm not - but because Yesenia is, and she usually notes me about any possible inclemency days in advance. This time, however, not a word from her, and I suspect she was as surprised by this morning's snow as me. More so, since it started to come down during her commute.

Not sure what this does to our New Year's plans, but we will see, we will see. Looks as though it's actually stopped as of 11:30 am, and accumulations for the entire day aren't supposed to go over 3 inches.

At any rate, here's hoping you all have a good night, and a great year to come.

D.

Oddly Sad

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Kopperman) — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 04:16:00 +0000

Just rewatched The Beast With a Billion Backs, the second Futurama film. Among the voice cast is Brittany Murphy. Her character arc ends with her leaving the universe to live in heaven alone with God. Weird and sad, like a dream.

D.

That Was Nice

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Kopperman) — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 04:59:00 +0000

Of all the possible ways I could spend my weekend, I can't think of a better reality than what actually transpired: me and Yesenia, on the couch, under the blanket, Christmas lights on, watching DVD after DVD while snacking on leftovers.

Hope your pre- and post-Christmas were as lovely as ours.

D.

Covers is Bad for Business

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Kopperman) — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 02:47:00 +0000

Your Weekend Listening • 12.26.09
I Won't Back Down • May, 2008

Here's something strange and vaguely pointless - my multi-tracked solo acoustic version of Tom Petty's mid-career hit. A song I don't particularly even like, although I do have a begrudging respect for Petty's ability to build songs out of thin air and not much else.

The backstory, as far as it goes, is that a childhood friend of Yesenia's (José) was learning how to play guitar. To that end, he was taking classes at some New York guitar school (on 30th Street). At the end of the semester, the students would give a solo performance, and José asked me to join him on a couple of numbers. The Petty was one of them, and I think Desperado was another, so you can see the general area of material.

At any rate, when we played, it turned out that the original key was a little out of Jose's vocal range, so I transposed it and very quickly threw together a Garageband version - literally sitting on the porch in about the time it takes to listen (not, of course, counting the overdubs).

The cover itself is pretty disposable as well, but when I stumbled upon it in my iTunes the other day, I found that I liked the way my low-energy playing and nearly tremulous vocals give the song an air of desperation that the original never had - Petty doesn't sound much like backing down is even an option, but the above version sounds like I'm bleeding on the mat, weakly waving off the referee.

I make no claim for greatness with this, but sometimes, I like the sound of confident half-assedness that comes with experience, and I'm pleased that I have enough ability at this point to convey that.

D.

PS: Apologies for the return to the embedded QT MP3 player instead of the SWF. For some reason, the SWF decided to stop working - indeed, all previous Ramblers with the SWF MP3 player now feature nothing, so I'm using this temporarily until that gets back up and running. I'd be tempted to blame Blogger, but it always seems to be some weird thing with my host, so we'll see.

So This is Christmas

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Kopperman) — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 04:05:00 +0000

Had the family over today, and it really was a very nice, fun day. Rather than do a big sit down meal, we did more of a buffet style eat-what-you-want-when-you-want-where-you-want, with a Puerto Rican vibe (in addition to the turkey, Yesenia made empanadas, fried plantains, rice with pigeon peas, etc.

Really nice day, what can I say? Hope yours was just as enriching.

D.

Pretty Lights

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Kopperman) — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 05:43:00 +0000

Bout of insomnia and I'm down on the living room couch - trying to allow Yesenia her beauty rest. It's a slight problem and always will be, but she's a morning person and I'm a night person. Hopefully, that will change somewhat when I start teaching, since I'd have to be up and out at the same time. Whether or not that means I'd go to bed earlier is another story; in past experiments with getting up early, I still stayed up to the same late hours, pretty much against my will. I can easily see myself rotting my brain on long weeks of four hours of sleep a night. Just the way I'm wired.

Anyway, the living room is super nice, now, since Yesenia got all of her decorating moxie up on it. If I have to be awake now, no reason I can't be awake in style.

D.

The Rambler Just Got Roomier

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Kopperman) — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 04:14:00 +0000

Believe it or not, after two straight years of posting seasonal threats that Copper Man - the site which hosts the Subway Rambler - was finally going to be getting a complete overhaul... well, Copper Man has gotten a (mostly) complete overhaul. In what I'm tiresomely calling the 'beta' version, if you go HERE, you'll see a complete layout, admittedly with some holes when it comes to actual content, like an Entenmann's box with only one plain donut left.

The Rambler itself will be folded into the larger site, although the address won't change. What will change is the look, however - it's probably going to get a lot more stripped-down looking, which may be kind of a drag to look at. On the other hand, I've had this billiard room look going for almost two years (after I changed from the original hunter orange), so it's time for a graphic clean-up no matter what. I'll try to strike a balance between what will look nice on the main site (where the Rambler will appear in an iframe in the site layout) and what won't be distressingly bland when viewed away from the site, the way I expect most regular readers will continue to do.

Actually, I'm fairly certain that a batch of you follow me on RSS feeds, which are the most dispiritingly dry-looking way of viewing content on the web imaginable, like reducing everything under the sun to the status of a stock ticker. So there won't be much of a change for you, either way.

As far as the revamp to the main site, rather than run the risk of repeating what I've written over there about its current state and future implementation, I direct you there and, as always, invite you to make feedback.

And Christine: that graphic on the home page is an animated gif, about as old-school as such things get. Let me take this moment to say that although I still kind of miss ImageReady, the animation menu in Photoshop is nicely done - straightforward and intuitive, which is something that Adobe has been having a harder and harder time with as their applications grow more massive and unwieldy.

D.

The 700 Club

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Kopperman) — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 03:36:00 +0000

Your Weekend Listening, 12.19.09
Shine On You Crazy Diamond, Pt. I-X / Us Not Them, Live @ the Bruckner Bar, May 2008

Although "Echoes" is my favorite song (both by Pink Floyd and in general), "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" seems to be appropriate for me this weekend. Flashback to the day that my childhood cat (Janet) was buried back in 1998, Edz and I were jamming with a guitar player, and when I came back down from burying her in the side yard - my parents were there, too - we launched into an impropmtu but heartfelt version of the song.

This is not that version, which probably wasn't recorded. For the bulk of 2008, I played keys in a Pink Floyd cover band named "Us Not Them," before I made the decision to return to school and realized I wouldn't have the time to continue it. While it's true that the band's focus on later material was not mine and their approach to the earlier material (which I love) wasn't quite the feel I thought it should be, the band was full of talented and dedicated musicians. I felt badly about leaving, but as it turns out, my financial circumstances in 2009 would have warranted it inevitably.

This particular set featured all of the Wish You Were Here album, but I've just edited together the two halves of "Shine." I'm not 100% thrilled with some of the keyboard work, here - I didn't have quite as much time as I would have liked to get my parts together - but what the heck. It was my first real experiment with playing three keyboards at a time, in the progressive rock fashion, a fetish of mine ever since I first saw the inner sleeve image of Rick Wakeman from The Six Wives of Henry the Eighth. It's stressful and fun to add that layer of bouncing around from setting to setting and from keyboard to keyboard, suddenly adding the Y-axis to what's normally the straight line of keyboard playing. Like the equivalent of Spock's 3D chess, only I was a novice, rather than a grandmaster.

At any rate, with yesterday's death and subsequent burial of Kiko, this came to mind. Enjoy.

D.