Life – Page 13 – Steven D. Krause

June 2, 2009

David Lynch’s “Interview Project”

This looks pretty cool: via boing-boing, I found David Lynch’s INTERVIEW PROJECT, which is going to be/is a year-long project where David Lynch’s people (I don’t think it is the director himself) goes on a road-trip and interviews everyday people. If the first one and the promo are any indication, the “real people” in question are more or less drifters, which is pretty fitting for David Lynch’s style.

It looks like it might end up being pretty interesting, and it also very much looks like the kind of thing that might work well for something like English 121, especially as I’m doing these student documentary video projects this term. I have no idea how they’ll turn out yet, of course….

May 24, 2009

Some thoughts on Jeff Smith, Bone, Indie Comics, and Columbus

The fam took a mini road-trip to Columbus, Ohio Friday and Saturday mainly to see The Cartoonist: Jeff Smith, Bone, and the Changing Face of Comics. I personally am not a particularly big fan of Bone and/or Jeff Smith, but the complete Bone is one of Will’s favorite books, Annette is teaching it this spring in a class, and I generally like comics, though I think I like them more in theory– that is, what they mean in terms of visual rhetoric, teaching with images and words, etc.– than I do as a fan. Though the movie made me think that Bone might be something I ought to give another chance.

One of the highlights for all us was Will getting his complete Bone signed:

Smith was super-duper nice to everyone waiting to get stuff signed, and he chatted a bit with Will, noting that his copy of the 1300+ page well-worn book had obviously been read.

The movie itself was pretty good/kind of so-so, mainly because it was essentially a Jeff Smith love-fest/puff-piece. But I thought it was interesting in a lot of different ways. Smith had an extensive background in making animated television commercials, and that definitely had a major influence on his approach to comics and Bone in particular. Bone began as a self-published comic, and I suppose it still is self-published in the sense that Smith and his wife (and his wife seemed to be the real business brains behind the scenes) still run what appears to be a pretty lucrative operation.

What I didn’t realize before this movie was that lots of the independent/underground comics sold in places like Vault of Midnight in Ann Arbor are self-published, though obviously not on the scale of Bone. Which made me wonder why this hasn’t worked in conventional “words in a row” publishing; I mean, self-publishing a novel or a collection of short stories or poems is pretty much a good way to not be taken seriously, and while I know that’s changing a bit with some web sites, you’re still not likely to see a lot of self-published books even in locally-owned and independent book stores.

I suppose the same is true with academic writing and publishing.

Some of the difference seems to be in the materiality of the comic and the collecting fetish. There were many geeky 30 to 50 year old men waiting in line with Will to get signatures from Jeff Smith, only they were holding stacks of the individual issues of Bone or other Smith comics. In the movie, Smith and some of the other featured comic writers (including Scott McCloud, BTW) spoke a couple times about the physicality and “object-ness” of comics in a way that just isn’t the same with words-in-a-row books, IMO. Interestingly though, one of the ways that Bone caught on and one of the main ways comics continue to be promoted was/is the Internet.

As for Columbus proper: we didn’t get to see much, unfortunately. We had so-so Ohio “Mexican” food in a place in the Short North area, which looked like it would have been a fun place to hang out but which probably involved more “adult” entertainment (e.g., bars and stuff) than might have been fitting for Will. He did have fun in the hotel room though:

And now it’s back to a “working holiday:” stuff around the house today, commenting/grading on papers tomorrow.

May 20, 2009

This is perhaps the only post I will ever have about “American Idol”

I sort of watch American Idol, sort of don’t care, etc. Last night, we actually ended up over at some friends’ house after dinner watching the big finale, and everyone in the room– even children– remarked at the crappiness of the last song that both finalists had to both sing. Then this morning, I was greeted with this Facebook update from my friend and colleague Bill Hart-Davidson: “RT @spinuzzi: Kara’s song was the Kobyashi Maru of American Idol. (Heh. If that’s a spoiler, welcome to geek club!).”

Indeed. Only neither Adam nor Kris changed the outcome/rules of the song enough to “win” it.

We now return to the usual meaningless posts….

May 19, 2009

The square foot garden continues

Last week, Annette and I took some time on a Tuesday to go to Blocks Stand and Nursery to buy a wide variety of plants for cheap, including everything now in the square foot veggie garden seen here– except the peas, which Will and I planted from seed a few weeks before. I suppose if I was a “real gardener,” I’d grow everything from seeds, and I’d preferably start growing seedlings in about February under some light in my basement. But since I’m not a “real gardener,” I buy fairly large plants ready to go into the ground for that impressive, “wow he must be a real gardener” look.

Will and I did most of the planting together on Saturday last weekend. Will simultaneously complained about the work and diligently planted things, as if he was unsure if he was supposed to think that gardening “sucked” or was fun. We had some cold weather that could have been a freeze, but nothing so bad as to damage the crops. And at this point, I think weather-wise we are in the clear. I think.

As you can see from the picture (if you click on it, you can seem more or less a map of what’s here), we’ve got lots of tomatoes, zucchini, and yellow squash. For whatever reason, we don’t seem to get that much zucchini or yellow squash from the CSA farm where we get a share of produce, and tomatoes you grow in your yard are always the best. I’m attempting to grow the zukes and squash “up” with the help of tomato cages; we’ll see how that goes.

I also mixed up Mel’s mix for flower pots, hanging baskets, and window boxes too. I’ll be curious to see how that works out because I think it is basically a somewhat better deal than buying potting mix at a place like Home Depot, and it is more satisfying to make your own, too.

May 17, 2009

Pretty much, this sounds like us…

From today’s Ann Arbor News, “Ann Arbor area homeowners – like those across the country – struggle with “underwater” mortgages.” The short version is that we too probably owe more than our house is actually worth. Now, I guess we’re lucky/fortunate in the sense that we aren’t that underwater (some of the people in this article are more like $80K upside-down, and we’re nowhere near that) and short of some unforeseen disaster, we have secure jobs and will be able to keep making our payments.

Still, it’s frustrating, and it is especially frustrating when you do everything you’re supposed to do as a responsible citizen and the only people who seem to be catching a break in terms of refinancing houses and negotiating deals with banks are people who were always way in over their heads. I mean, if we had had one of these goofy balloon mortgages and were telling the bank that we couldn’t afford to pay anymore, we might get some help. But since we are homeowners who just want some kind of break to be able to refinance, we’re getting nothing. Oddly, I wonder if we’d have a better chance of getting a banker’s attention if we just stopped paying our mortgage. Which, of course, we aren’t going to do.

Anyway, we’ll see what happens. Annette has grown weary of being on hold for an hour at a time only to be told by the bankers that we are SOL; I might give it a whirl next week.

May 7, 2009

JJ Abrams and “The mystery box”

If you are into Lost or looking forward to the new Star Trek, this TED talk by J.J. Abrams will have a certain kind of value for you. But what I thought was most interesting and spot-on about it are his comments about technology and its relationship to creativity, writing, and film making. Especially film making. As he says, nowadays, if someone wants to go out and make a movie, they can pretty much just go out and do it with fairly accessible equipment because that’s how much more accessible and easy the technology has become. Interesting and entertaining stuff, and maybe something to squeeze into 328 or 516, especially if my desires for students to actually make “good” movies increases.

April 29, 2009

Upgrading the office and (unexpectedly) the computer

It seems like I move my office/desk space about once every two years. Maybe that is some sort of subconscious/unconscious response to life; maybe it’s just instinct, like migration. Or maybe, more reasonably in this case at least, it’s just in response to events and the way the house was being used.

As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, we have this study/loft kind of space in our house where Annette had set up her desk. But because she does her work in the living room, dining room table, coffee shops, etc. (in other words, anywhere but at her desk), this really nice space was largely a place for her to store stuff. So I convinced her to let me move out of the basement (aka “the man cave”) and into the light.

Since we’re between winter and spring terms around here, this seemed like a good time to make the move. I underestimated the impact of rearranging, particularly how long it would take. Moving into this space first meant moving stuff out of here into other rooms, which caused other things to move, and before you know it, I was rearranging half the house. And then there was moving about a ton of books a couple of flights of stairs, which definitely worked my gluts yesterday.

And just to throw another wrench into the works, my three year old iMac had what I would equate to a major stroke. Basically, just as I was setting it up on my new desk, the processor and video started going wacky. I am fairly confident that it was just a coincidence that this happened while moving stuff around (in hindsight, it was easy enough to remember a couple of kind of bizarre crashes and the like), but I have to wonder if that computer just did not like the sunlight in the new office. The good news is I was able to boot into target disk mode and the hard drive was/is fine; the bad news is that the diagnosis at the Apple store was that fixing the logic board/video would probably come close to $1000. So, seeing that price-point, I went ahead and bought the iMac on my new desk.

I might have been able to limp along with the old iMac because it was not completely dead. Just now, I was able to reboot it and do some software rig-a-ma-roll and get to iTunes to deauthorize that computer so I can use iTunes on this new computer. Who knows? Maybe it could have been/could still be fixed for less. But just dealing with my iTunes account was a strain on its poor rattled computer brain. Besides the wonky screen (lines, whole chunks just dropping away or getting warped, etc.), it froze completely after five minutes, forcing me to reboot it again. So while I wasn’t crazy about buying a new computer right now, I think I made the right choice.

It’s weird because I’ve had Apple computers for almost 25 years now, and while I’ve had some laptops crash and burn on me, I’ve never had a problem with a desktop unit. I’ve got two desktop computers in my office, an iMac maybe a year older than the one I just replaced and one of those “Lamp-style” iMacs that’s probably 5 or 6 years old. Both of these computers are servers and are on 24/7, and both are trucking along just fine. I’ve got a couple of G4 laptops (one of which was repaired several years ago) and both of them still work, though they are slow and clunky in comparison to what’s available nowadays. So I guess I’m going to chalk this failure up to just one of those things.

So far, I like the new desktop set-up a lot. I boosted the RAM up to 4 GB and the processor is noticeably faster. The keyboard is too little, but I think the Apple store people are going to be cool with me swapping it out for a numbered keyboard. I’m backing up with Time Machine over the wifi to a 1.5 TB drive I bought so everyone in the house can back stuff up as needed– since we already had a base station, this was a significantly cheaper option than Time Capsule– and that seems to be working well. And hey, there’s actually this non-cave-like light in the room! Go figure!

April 28, 2009April 28, 2009

Tulips

Just in case you are wondering where my recent header here came from….