January 2009 Archives

You've heard all the conspiracy theories--U.S. Presidents are controlled by the Freemasons; they are concealing the reality of alien visits from the public; they have a mysterious secret phone line that can call the future; and they only wear underwear in months that contain the letter R. All of these are true, of course, but what of their personal secrets? Each of our presidents, believe it or not, was a distinct and unique person (except, of course, for John Quincy Adams, who was really just John Adams with sideburns [see above image]). Here are just a few things you didn't know about the presidents you know (or knew in eighth grade) and love (or feel complete disinterest towards).

Made this artist trading card for an as-yet-undisclosed friend while listening to the music Tom Waits composed for "The Black Rider." Beautifully eerie and ominous. I feel like it should have been part of that Faust class I took last year.

Another week has gone by without being blogged. This one wasn't crazy like the last one; I've just been focusing my attention more on the Garg site and also on heavy-duty relaxation.

Last Friday was the first Mason Proper concert since the CD release party back in September. It was pretty good, but certainly not the best I've been to. Maybe everyone's energy had been drained by the fact that it was -20 degrees outside. I managed to travel everywhere by car that day except for the walk from the Garg office to the Blind Pig, which was enough to deprive my feet of sensation for most of the rest of the night. It was DAMN COLD.

I spent the rest of the weekend exclusively indoors, all the way up to Monday night, when I was forced to leave the apartment to go to a screening of My Fair Lady. Tamar had been gone for most of the weekend at a conference for her Honors Fraternity, and she came back with a pretty terrible stomach flu. I think I successfully escaped catching it, since she seems to be recovering now and I don't feel bad.

On Tuesday, we got the issue back. It looks pretty good except for some printing issues. We screened our first video projects and mine got a pretty good response. Also, Obama was inaugurated. I feel I need to include this for posterity. I listened to his speech on the laptop speakers of someone in my discussion section for film history. It was a beautiful, albeit cold, day.

Yesterday I finally got to purchase CS4 and Final Cut, the latter of which came in a 20-pound box that I later discovered contained its 4 volume manual. It is truly a girthy program.

Today I'm cleaning the apartment because it's sorely in need of it and I'm still slightly worried about lingering Tamar germs. I am also baking bread and attempting to get a mixed starter going for further breads. I feel incredibly domestic. It's probably really just a way for me to procrastinate instead of looking for internships and writing some papers due next week.

You have to burn the rope.

This is really fantastic. Could it be...THE ULTIMATE GAME?

Well, it's been crazy the past few days. I will go through it chronologically.

On Saturday, I waited for Adrian's bus to get in from Chicago and edited the Mason Proper bowling footage, as you might have noticed from the previous entry. When he finally arrived, we worked a little and then went to see The Hard Lessons and My Dear Disco at the Blind Pig. The bulk of the people at the concert were there for My Dear Disco, which seems to have experienced a surge of interest and fans over the past few months. The concert was pretty good except for the fact that we were standing at the front, apparently in the area where the most enthusiastic fans like to do sort of a cross between grinding and moshing. This resulted in my spending most of the concert pushing back with all my weight against a group of 40-50 enraptured bleached-blonde pseudo-hipsters. That part was not very enjoyable.

On Sunday, Adrian and I spent most of the time working on the issue and we got to destroy the papier mache robot Danielle and Stu made for him. He left in the evening, but happily I had finally made some substantial progress on the issue.

On Monday, I continued working on the issue and a good number of people came in to proofread. In light of my recent successes with Movable Type on this blog, I started working on setting up Movable Type for the Garg website, along with a new domain name (www.gargmag.com). I've run into a few technical difficulties, but hopefully they'll get worked out soon.

On Tuesday, I finally got around to checking out the necessary video equipment for the video project that has to be finished by midnight tomorrow. I did some shooting around StuPub and Zack and I finally hashed out the finished form of the Mason Proper interview, the last major missing piece in the issue.

Today I headed to class only to discover that Terry Lawson had mysteriously cancelled class and proceeded to the office, where I spent the next three and a half hours laying out the Mason Proper article and polishing up the rest of the issue. I also did some research online and found out that the video camera I was using has a 4-pin Firewire port and my computer has a 9-pin Firewire port. I went to Film History, then a screening of Snow White, and then the first NYA meeting of the semester, and then Danielle picked me up to go grocery shopping and look for the elusive 9-pin to 4-pin Firewire cable. Our search was unsuccessful, as apparently the 9-pin Firewire port is part of a grand scheme to not allow me to connect my computer to anything.

Anyway, tomorrow, I have a complex master plan for getting all the things I need when I need 'em. We'll see how well it works out. Just another day or so, and things will probably be back to a reasonable pace. I hope.

I spent today waiting for Adrian to get back into town with the missing pieces for the upcoming Gargoyle issue and editing the footage we got from the Mason Proper interview. Until about 6 PM I was running on the one Cafe Mocha I had at about midday. Now I have eaten and feel much better. The Mason Proper video is moderately good. Sometimes it's hard to tell whether what you're doing has any value once you've been staring at it for a certain period of time. I'll probably post it once YouTube finishes processing it.

Earlier this week I had my first experience riding popular Ann Arbor bus route, The Link. I waited at the stop near my apartment for a while, but I got nervous when it didn't come at the time I expected and, full of doubts, jog-walked toward the C. C. Little stop. When I was a block away from the stop I had been waiting at, I looked back and saw The Link drive by. The high-tailed it to C. C. Little and just barely caught it. Good times. I think fear is good for you.

I'm attempting to combine my entire site into this Movable Type thingie. I feel kind of like I'm groping around blindly or throwing darts at an impossibly distant target with it. So far, as you might have noticed, I have managed to put a banner at the top of the page. THIS IS A MAJOR ACHIEVEMENT FOR ME.

Anyways, hopefully the next step will be to make www.illustomp.com actually LEAD here. We'll see how it goes.

So the past few months I've been sadly ignoring my banjo in favor of class and internet and Gargoyle and sleeping. I figured the new year is as good a time as any to get playing again, so for the past few days I've been doing the Daily Frail on Tangier Sound, which is the home base of my banjo heroes, father/son duo Pat and Patrick Costello. They're really fantastic teachers and are great at utilizing the web's ability to create social spaces and propagate knowledge. Although the banjo is their primary focus, they also do workshops for the steel guitar and ukulele and have some interesting and enriching thoughts about the nature of music-making and life in general. They are also designing and selling a growing line of high-quality American-made banjos that seem excellent. I would really recommend checking them out.

Anyways, today was the first day of classes, including my much-anticipated class with Terry Lawson. Lawson used to be the primary film reviewer for the Detroit Free Press, and I grew up reading his reviews, so he's kind of a pseudo-celebrity to me. So far he seems extremely high-energy and a little prone to heading off on tangents. The title of the course is "The Screenplay as Literature," but he seems resistant to the concept inherent in the name, and has pitched it as moreso an introduction to the structure and history of screenplays and a precursor to the Screenwriting class. Anyway, he seems cool and knowledgeable and will tell us stories about interviewing Rob Schneider and other excellent adventures in journalism.

Okay, well I'm obviously out of practice blogging and the past two paragraphs have exhausted me, so I'll stop now.

[Cross-posted to my Xanga]