Solomon!
Solomon Alfred Teppo. Born just shy of midnight of New Year's Eve.
Induction Ceremony
Melissa is being induced today. Solomon wants to be the New Year Baby, but we're not so keen on waiting that long. So, we're off to the hospital today to start the birth process by hand. Well, by the aid of medical science. Things will be quiet around the virtual house for a few days as we are off bringing that boy into the world. We'll return in 2004 with pictures and an endless parade of new baby stories.
Gird yourselves, and hoist a beverage for us tomorrow night. Happy New Year all.
Mini iPods
While I have certainly been coveting an iPod, there is the simple fact that such a beast won't really solve any problems around my house and would probably just be a black hole into which I would drop all sorts of time. It's a matter of scale around here. One iPod -- even at 40GB -- isn't going to make a dent in my CD collection. However, a mini iPod with two to four GB of storage would go a long way to replacing the CD player and stack of CDs that I carry with me every day.
Solomon is still unavailable for comment. Which leads me to getting into trouble on the Internet. Hmmm, a mini iPod. Now, what would I put on it? Hmmm, off to make some playlists.
T Plus Two Days
Sunrise behind Mt. Rainier this morning cast the mountain as the villain. Yellow and orange wreathing an oncoming cloud bank, turning the white peak into a smoldering volcano. The blue sky across Commencement Bay held fast for about an hour before the white clouds pouring off the burning mountain covered the sky. And then, it was just another overcast day in the Pacific Northwest.
Solomon is still building lungs or something. We're on baby watch, two days past and waiting...
T Minus One Day
Our fortunes from dinner last night. While we're at T minus one today, it would seem that we're in a holding pattern. Solomon is very comfy inside Melissa. He doesn't appear to be in any rush to come out. So, we're waiting. Watching each other and her belly. Just waiting...
The New Magical Century
From Grant Morrison's introduction:
"Disinformation's Book of Lies is a 21st century grimoire, a How To book designed to inspire the young magician-warriors of this new and turbulent century. In the apparent derangement of our times, this book is both a call to arms and an armory also. Read on, get tooled up, get out there...and start bending reality.
And welcome, one and all, to the New Magical Century."
Shizzolate!
Jason and I just ran the entry from December 13th through Snoop Dogg's Shizzolator. It be the shizz n' all.
"What Katsumoto 'n Algren seek in The Last Samurai is da assurance that they lives has been worth living, that they haven't just breathed 'n eaten 'n shit they requisite number of days before becoming worm food, know what I'm sayin'? It's not that they gots do bomb diggity things, but they gots do something which they can look back upon 'n be like, 'Yes, that wuz 'nuff n' shit.' [...] And, in da end, what will I be like 'bout that shiznit? What will I tell Solomon when tha dude is old 'nuff look at tha dude's dad 'n ax: why should I be proud of yo' ass?"
French Lessons
Yet another couple of reasons to pick up French. Peter at Artbomb makes a note on the artbomb blog about Canardo, a series of graphic novels by Sokal. As Peter puts it: "What's not to love about a smokin', drinkin', down-on-his-luck penguin with a lousy love life, after all?"
Enki Bilal's work is also on my list of things to read. There's a teaser trailer for his new film here. His December 32nd sold something like 400,000 copies in France when it was released. US interest for an English translation was sluggish enough that something that us lingo-phytes can understand won't be out until late spring 2004.
Photo Poems
p/p is a blog of photo poems -- photos taken of tiny poems which have been assembled kidnapper note style and then pasted into the world at large. Some of the poems are recycled for use against different backdrops, creating hauntingly imperfect mobile scenarios. There is a lovely air of zen-like freeze-frame reality captured in each picture.
[via boing boing and opi8]
T-Minus 9 Days
We're in the final push (or "not-push" actually) before Solomon's arrival, tidying and trying not to leave tasks in unfinished states. We've arrange and re-arranged the baby clothes a few times now, trying to pick out our favorite outfit for his triumphant egress from the hospital.
Of course, not everything can be worn the first day. Some of his outfits will have to wait a few months. I'm particularly excited about the outfit from totdots.com. Being a monkey myself, I'm very keen on putting him in a layette which sports a cool monkey logo like the one offered by totdots.com. I wish they made grown-up clothes. I wouldn't mind a shirt with a monkey face on it.
The website has some amusing animated bits as well, including a very silly "mesmerize your child" page.
[Thanks, Andrew, by the way. That was a mighty fine choice on your part.]
Flicker, Flicker
I went and saw The Last Samurai yesterday afternoon after my final visit of the year to the doctor's office. Both gave birth to some thoughts which have been rolling around my head for the last twenty-four hours. The Last Samurai, which could have pitched as "Dances With Sushi," certainly didn't break any new cinematic or story ground, but it did its job fairly admirably and kept the brow-beating of the audience to a minimum. Tom Cruise did a decent job not being Tom Cruise which is about all that you can really hope for these days when a major marquee name gets involved in a film. And our latest Western attempt to summarize the samurai ethos in two hours handled itself well. Of course, I'm saying that as a Westerner, so take that with a grain or two of salt.
I may have been in a suggestible state when I went in. There's another grain. Though I'm not entirely sure why I'm trying to so hard to caveat everything. There's an artificial layer between what I'm saying and what I'm thinking. I don't know if it is a defense mechanism to put some distance between what I consider as my "self" and what I present publically in this journal.
Which also speaks to the other mental train I've been driving in circles around the yard.
So, here's the deal: I'm falling apart. Well, we all are; I'm just in bit more of an advanced stage than everyone else my age. My priorities have been fucked up because I've not been making my health as much as a priority as it needs to be. I'm not going anywhere anytime soon, and everything is controllable by willpower, diet, exercise, and medicine, but there aren't things that are going to go away on their own. It happens, you know, you stop being nineteen and indestructable.
The outward display of all this is that I've been dull. Not conversationally dull, but rather my brain can't quite make synaptic connections like it used to. I have a harder time finding the energy and power to create than I used to. I'm still dreaming -- which is good, they are as weird and colorful as ever -- it is just the conscious periods are marred by static and intractability. Which isn't good.
What Katsumoto and Algren seek in The Last Samurai is the assurance that their lives have been worth living, that they haven't just breathed and eaten and shit their requisite number of days before becoming worm food. It's not that they must do great things, but they must do something which they can look back upon and say, "Yes, that was enough."
Frank Miller once wrote: "This would be a good death. But not good enough."
Melissa wanders through the office and reads this over my shoulder. She has one edit because she dislikes me saying this the way I do. "You COULD fall apart," she whispers to me. And she's right. As mantras go, "you could fall apart" is much better.
Flicker, flicker. This flame is not out yet. And, in the end, what will I say about it? What will I tell Solomon when he is old enough to look at his dad and ask: why should I be proud of you?
Iain Sinclair
Iain Sinclair interview at Fortean Times. Old news, but I'm enough of a fan of his work that I need to get back to this later and read it. Not that it will illuminate any of Sinclair's work, but it'll just give me a few more hints for the next time I submerge myself in Landor's Tower.
"After Lights out for The Territory, a man sent me an X-ray of his brain tumour. He'd superimposed it over a map of London and was trying to heal himself by walking out its routes through the city."
Fortunes
Our fortunes from dinner the other night. I think Solomon's about ready to arrive.
Gigapixel Images
Max Lyons has created gigapixel images. Using a 6-megapixel camera and some fairly rigorous software, Max has been able to create panoramic pictures with a density of over one billion pixels. Sure, it prints nice when you've got a photo quality plotter and some empty wall space, but even at good old computer browser resolution, what the man accomplishes is fairly amazing. Using a fairly complicated plug-in for Photoshop and a machine that doesn't mind churning away at a file for a couple of days, he stiches together nearly two hundred digital images to create the massive single picture.
Enough of me yammering about it. The man has an online gallery of his work. Go look here.
Kneel Before ZOD!
Santa, or "ZOD" as he prefers around our house, just dropped off a Game Boy Advance SP. Just when I manage to uninstall all the distractions from my laptop to ensure that I apply myself appropriately, this small silver box of Satan's Own Distractions arrives. I have no idea how I'm going to get anything done now.
I'm waiting for the battery pack to charge. I'm not watching it. No, I know about the whole watched pot never boiling thing, but I'm not far. And when that orange light goes out and the green one comes one, I'll be ready.
Thanks, ZOD, you evil bastard.
Dead City Library and Joyce
Ran into a reference to the Dead City Library today which is, in the words of the creator, an online collection of weird texts as compensation for the lack of a Lovecraftian lobstrocity ever offering a library card to a forgotten citadel housing forbidden texts.
Hit a link from there to an online edition of James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake which makes me happy to know that I can easily access the text any time I have an Internet connection. In fact, I'm going to cut and paste the first sentence. Of course, I could just write it from memory, but that pushs me into geek land.
"riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs."
Hmmm, not as geek as I thought. I got a few words wrong.
The Cottage Door Has Opened
The Nephilim website has gone live. A respository of all things that Carl McCoy -- one-time leader of the Fields of the Nephilim and sole prophet of the band's new incarnation as "The Nephilim" -- has his fingers in. You too can become a Watchman.
Earpollution Update
Earpollution's last major update of the year went live this morning. There's my KMFDM interview as well as the Central Scrutinizer where I natter on about newsy things for a bit and then we do our yearly wrapup. Craig has interviews with Manta Ray and FILMguerrero and we fill out the final column with a new batch of reviews. Minimalist records from me this week: House of Low Culture, Aidan Baker, and Cordell Klier.
Man, those are all good records. Not to toot my own horn, it's just that the pile sometimes vomits up things that you don't expect in sets which have uncanny correlations. I hadn't been expecting to be talking about minimalist drone and deathly quiet ambient records at this time. Not when I'm working on a book. Writing music tends towards the noisy end of the spectrum.
And yet, here I am, thinking fondly about a trio of quiet records.
It's been that sort of year, I guess.