We ended up getting 140 groups to do readings of Boggle and Sneak, for a total of close to 300 people. I’ve been saying that the story of this Maker Faire for me will be that 300 people walked up and knowingly did me a personal favor (and this was on top of the giant-sized favor that my crew of Ed, Andrew, Will and Susan all pulled out.) My main reaction is basically stunned and bewildered gratitude. People can be pretty great!
Archive
Ed, Will, Andrew and I spent the day at Maker Faire asking fairegoers to read pages out of Boggle and Sneak in our time machine. Each person or group read a single page, and we’ll be editing all the the pages into chapter-length videos. The readers were great! We had individuals, couples, parents and kids, moms and babies, groups of friends, and a man with the devil on his back. We’re still hoping to get R2D2, but we haven’t been able to get his attention yet.
It’s getting dark.
“Trains,” she says. “You can’t trust ‘em.” She drops sticks on the pile and slowly begins to pace, eyes on the ground. “Just when you think you’re gettin’ somewhere, you end up stranded for half a day.” She sees a stick, and picks it up. “And your feet get tired.” Another stick. “And your legs get tired.” And another. “At least it ain’t rainin’.”
She carries the sticks back, kneels, and sets them on the pile. The crickets seem extra-loud tonight. And the trees. She pauses for a few moments, listening to the dark.
A quarter-inch of cool red flame hunches in the tinder. She purses her lips and blows out a stream of air, and the flame turns orange, and yellow, and begins to spread. “You there?” she asks. She looks around at the empty clearing. Maybe they won’t come.
The fire snaps and a wet branch begins to hiss. A circle of wan light begins to expand. At its edge, a wrecked leather shoe begins to appear, and a sock with a hole, and a toe. “Evenin’, Harry,” she says.
Another shoe appears, and filthy cuffs, and a pair of boots, and ruined overalls, and another pair of shoes—freshly shined—and neatly-patched trousers, and a jacket and a shirt, and a coat and a shirt, and a shiny blazer and a faded white shirt. Three noses. Six eyes. A pair of glasses. Thirty fingers, five of which are holding out a flask. She takes it and raises it. “Seems like forever,” she says, and takes a long drink.
I just finished reading a taped-up, yellowed paperback copy of Forfeit by Dick Francis. The setup for the climactic chase sequence starts with the antagonist threatening to kill the protagonist’s wife and ends with his forcing him to chug twelve ounces of whiskey. The point of the whiskey is explicitly ambiguous:
I didn’t know whether Vjoesterod had made me drink for any special purpose or just from bloody-mindedness. I did know that it was a horrible complication to what I had planned to do.
Exactly! It’s a sack race: an arbitrary handicap to make the sequence more interesting. Diabolus ex machina. Does for the third act what a MacGuffin does for the first. An excellent device! Stowing it in my tackle box now…
My mother-in-law won a copy of The Coasters’ Greatest Hits* last Christmas in a white-elephant exchange, and she re-gifted it to me in my stocking. I threw it on in all innocence just now, thinking it would contain anodyne 1950’s R&B. Of course it turned out instead to contain studio confections of the most premeditated kind. Thus false-footed, I misapprehended the album as en eerie artifact from the future:
I. Pre-irony resembles post-irony.
From my generational vantage, nothing is ever so disorienting as the deployment of humor that doesn’t depend upon irony.
I suppose it’s a common characteristic of novelty songs that they contain actors shouting commentary in funny voices, as with the well-known collaborations between Sonic Youth and Mel Blanc. Considering that I wrote my college comprehensive exams on the uses of romantic irony in German literature from 1790 to 1990, a little more romantic irony really shouldn’t surprise me. Even still, I thank god that Clarence “Frogman” Henry doesn’t follow me around all day yelling things like, “You call those shoes?” or “Tongue-tied, mister?”
III. Alien Technology
Advances in digital music production have been accompanied by the near-extinction of instrument-playing studio musicians. Digital simulation and manipulation have become banal, while actual musicianship has become a form of alien technology.
*Those who prefer the formulation “Gnu/Linux” to “Linux” will probably also prefer the formulation “Lieber/Stoller/Coasters” to “The Coasters”. I prefer the term “Gnu/Coasters,” and in particular the old, wooden style of gnu/coasters. Something about the rattling of gnu on a wooden track thrills my heart in a way that newfangled steel-track gnu/coasters can never do.
I’ve been leaving Ryoji Ikeda’s MySpace up and running while I work.
I first started listening to Ikeda when the Microscopic Sound compilation came out in 1999. The rhythmic elements are built out of little squares of white noise, like turning a faucet on and off, or Suicide’s first album, or the old Ice Fever pinball machine. The arhythmic elements (I hesitate to call them melodic) are built out of high-frequency sine waves, basically like sonar pulses, or tinnitus, or icicles falling off your roof.
I enjoy keeping his MySpace up partly because it’s suited to my dime-sized laptop speakers—ideal for reproducing dog-whistle music—and partly because it sounds so neural, like what you’d get if you ran Flanagan’s high-tension tinfoil induction headphones in reverse. When your Swiss Army knife accidentally slices into the 220 volt line, these are the first sounds you hear.
To stop listening to Ryoji Ikeda, please see my Instructable on converting your halo device into a Faraday cage.
Stove pulls her jacket tighter. It’s a warm day, but the motion of the train makes a relentless gale.
She crouches with the fingertips of her left hand against the floor for balance and watches the yellowing fields flash by.
Something changes behind her.
She looks over her shoulder and sees the stranger standing by the doorway, his dead-seeming arms hanging by his sides. Crazy bastard must have been climbing from car to car.
She nods curtly and turns back to her view. Looks like rain. Clouds coming up. She feels him grab her shoulder, but she looks at him coldly and doesn’t bother to stand.
His head snaps back as if something has grabbed him by the hair. Then his legs go out from under him, his tailbone goes up in the air and his arms and legs dangle like rags. He’s spitting and shouting, but it all sounds like train to her.
As if his ass were a balloon and his body the string, he bobs red and foaming toward the door, takes one last swing back into the car and flies out the door and disappears down the grade and out of sight.
She nods once before returning to her cloud-gazing. “Thanks,” she says, but no one answers because no one’s there.
On the ectomorphic end of the musical spectrum, Joanna Newsom’s 2004 album The Milk-Eyed Mender showed up via interlibrary loan from West Duluth yesterday afternoon. I’ve been listening to it on headphones and wondering why it sounds so familiar. As track seven, “En Gallop,” began, I figured it out: The harp is similar in timbre to the kora. (I have spent much more time listening to Toumani Diabate than to harp music of any sort.) Newsom even sings (alarmingly) “from the head,” a technique I once saw Baaba Maal describe in an interview. This is meaningless coincidence, but all the same: When I get my three wishes, I’m going to put Newsom in a recording studio with Toumani Diabate and Ramata Diakite.
On the way back from town just now, I opened our mailbox and found a copy of saxophonist John Ellis’ new album Dance Like There’s No Tomorrow, with Gary Versace on organ, Matt Perrine on sousaphone and Jason Marsalis on drums. Tenor/drums/organ/sousaphone: There is a god.
As it happens, my father-in-law built sousaphone-sized speakers into the walls of this house ten or fifteen years ago. I never understood why until this moment.
The thought of breakfast had kept her moving the last five miles.
“Jesus, Stove, you been walking all night?”
“Howdy, Pete. You been stealin’ coffee again?” She sticks out her hand.
“Only when I find some,” he says. He half-stands and shakes her hand before returning to his squat. “Where’d you get the fire helmet?”
She squats silently beside the smoky fire and waits until Pete hands over his cup. She wraps her fingers around it and drains it off, even though it burns going down. “Any of you other fellers givin’ it away for free?” she asks.
“Every chance I get,” says a low voice. “Course, it’s only beans.”