It's Bad Behavior Friday™! -- smoky edition

Environmental activists in the U.K. stopped a train carrying coal to a power plant and are prepared to occupy it for several days. They're offloading the coal shovelful by shovelful, which doesn't sound like a really fun way to spend your summer.

A woman who wrote a memoir about growing up in a dysfunctional family is a liar, say her parents, who published their claims on the amazon.com page for her book, and who went to a TV show where she was being interviewed and passed out leaflets "about what a 'tramp' their daughter is as the audience made their way to their seats."

In Colorado, a prison guard shot by his wife is one of ten guards accused of organizing attacks on inmates at a state prison in the mid 90s. And... this is from March, but it's too good to miss. A Missouri man killed his wife by firing through a wall in order to make a hole so he could install a satellite TV system. Watch a YouTube posting of a local news report. Local authorities decided not to charge the man.

Courtesy Wonkette, a former chairman of the Clark County (Ken.) GOP pled guilty to sex charges in a case where he woke up a friend by sucking his cock. "In addition to his position as Clark County chairman, he was chairman of the Young Republican National Federation." Hottt!

L.A. is just one of the cities where post-riot grrl feminism has expressed it self in a newly popular Roller Derby scene.

A 61-year-old American was deported from Cuba to face sex and pornography charges. Authorities in the affluent San Francisco suburb of Orinda say they found evidence in his home that he traveled to Costa Rica over three dozen times to have sex with minors. And in Sana'a, Yemen, a 10-year-old girl was granted a divorce from a man "three times her age" who beat her and forced her to have sex. Now that she is free from the abusive situation, the girl says she would like to become a lawyer.

In Minnesota, 40 cleaning supplies salesmen were kicked out of a hotel for being loud, rude assholes. Video caught a mugger in New York. One of the operators of the escort service that had Eliot Spitzer as "Client 9" pled guilty without "cooperating" and got three years in prison.

In the affluent SF suburb of Danville, a woman delivering newspapers ran over two 15-year-old boys who were lying in the middle of a residential street under a blanket in the middle of the night. No word on what they were doing there -- my guess is stargazing. (Update: sure enough.) The woman was not charged.

Welcome back, Anna

A friend's coming back to the Bay Area from the hot-as-hell East Coast today. This weather report, showing the departure and arrival weather, was on the airline's website, showing the 30 degree difference:

Nail, meet Mr. Hammer

A man whose skull was penetrated by a nail from a nail gun was saved by doctors wielding a common claw hammer.

"'Does anybody have a hammer, a claw hammer.' I thought he was teasing at first, but then he says, 'No. It went in like that. We can pull it out like that,'" Chandler said.

No word on whether the victim, a carpenter whose nail gun's hose had become tangled, shouted "Oohhh! Oohhh! Moe!!" during the procedure.

Pilates godfather: Yur doin it wrong

Ron Fletcher, the man who is responsible for passing on the Pilates bodywork technique, says it shouldn't be thought of as an exercise regimen but as "an art, a science." Millions of grim-faced twenty- and thirty-somethings disagree.

No one ever points out that the regimen, or whatever it is, is named after the Roman administrator who famously washed his hands of guilt for the crucifixion of Jesus, and how fitting it is that such a strenuous exercise should be named for a torturer. Coming soon: the Torquemada.

It's Bad Behavior Friday™! -- Munchausen Syndrome By Internet edition

You may have heard of the mental disorders Munchausen Syndrome, and the even more nauseating Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy. In the former, a personality disordered person deliberately injures themselves to gain attention and sympathy; in the latter, they injure a loved one, usually their child, so that they can appear to everyone as a loving and selfless caretaker of their poor hurt little darling. The phenomenon experienced by the writer Armistead Maupin, in which an insane woman built up a phone relationship with him based on a supposedly seriously ill but actually non-existent child, was written up by him in the novel "The Night Listener." The J.T. LeRoy hoax, which was carried out primarily on the telephone by a manipulative former phone sex worker, also had a whiff of this.

With the internet, we have a new version of this illness. There are two websites called Dogster and Catster -- run by the same company -- which are social networking sites for pet owners. The conceit of these sites is that the pet owners don't post as themselves, but in the personas of their pets. My wife Cris has been a member of Catster for several months in the persona of our cat Milagrito. She is essentially writing tongue-in-cheek blog entries about current events; right now Milagrito is running for president.

Of course, pets do get sick and die. When this happens, the other users in their network -- their cat's "friends" -- naturally post sympathetic messages and condolences. One of the users, I mean cats, makes little "angel wings" graphics to bestow on the departed kitty.

By now you may be able to see where this is going. According to a post from the wing-bestowing user, someone is going to elaborate lengths to create fake users, complete with pictures taken from cat adoption websites; after their cat has acquired several "friends," it begins to suffer a series of illnesses and accidents and eventually "dies," all accompanied by an outpouring of sympathy from their "friends." The wing-building user realized this was going on when she sensed something strange about a request for wings for a newly dead cat. I'll let this user, Krishna, take it from here:

A couple months ago I was contacted by a member of our community with a request for wings. The person asking for wings had recently lost their cat to a degenerative health problem that they did not name on their profile.

Something about the request set the hairs on the back of my neck up. As I read the pmail and looked at the picture I had a sense of deja vu. I had seen the writing style before and had seen the same picture on the profile somewhere else on the internet.

After spending about an hour or so searching google images using countless search strings I came across the picture of the departed kitty same cat same picture of a garden in the background same everything. The cat was alive and up for adoption on petfinder. The petfinder entry was a new one too. I was infuriated! I started searching for pictures of the persons other cats and dogs and found them on google. Some were stolen from kittenwar some from petfinder and some from independent breeder sites.

I was so angry I confronted the person. They first tried telling me that they travelled extensively and picked up animals from all over the world. I asked them for the pets pre-adopted names, they couldn't. They told me to go to hell and stop being so nosy. That I was cruel for doubting them and their pain. Then they dissappeared off of dogster and catster completely. I breathed a sigh of relief.

But a day later I was asked to make wings for a new member. After reading the profile outlining their rapidly declining health and final death; my suspicions arose again. I went to google and again found the profile pictures mocking me. Mocking the pain I felt at the death of my beloved pets. I couldn't understand it at all. Why would someone fake a death? Is it the attention, is it the rosettes [virtual presents given from one user to another -- ed.], is it the wings, or something else?

Honestly I couldn't figure it out. Anyway as the weeks passed I started noticing more and more profiles using the same writing style, same flash toys on the pages, same backgrounds from the same site, and the same types of dramatic deaths. It was amazing to see the unbelievable events that lead to the deaths of these pet profiles.

It has prevented me from enjoying this site. Following the new profiles that come on, the insurgence of users that only join for the free giveaways, it's overwhelming. Understanding the freebees was easy. The fakes sickness and deaths is dumbfounding.

So, that's pretty pathetic, faking the death of a pet to get people's attention and sympathy. I suppose it's better than actually hurting yourself or, worse, a child or pet, but really, how gross.

technorati: Munchausen Syndrome, pets, catster, internet

It's Bad Behavior Friday™! -- social climber edition

Two men climbed the 43-story New York Times building yesterday -- an experienced French daredevil who's performed such stunts many times before -- and some Brooklyn dude who saw all the commotion and decided he wanted some attention too. Despite his lack of training and preparation, the second guy made it, too, despite visibly tiring toward the top.

Less agile were two heroin addicts who jumped off a ninth floor balcony during a drug raid in the Bronx.

Courtesy SFist: a lunatic in the San Francisco suburb of Danville who set fire to a Starbucks and two gas stations using fireplace logs -- anybody remember the character on Twin Peaks known as the Log Lady (pictured at right)? -- claimed she did it to protest high gas prices.

Why does it need to make sense? Climbing a skyscraper to protest global warming doesn't make all that much sense either.

A former Silicon Valley executive is facing hundreds of years in jail for criminal charges stemming from his out-of-control behavior while CEO of a network equipment firm. Among other more boring charges, "he slipped ecstasy into the drinks of business associates, maintained a drug warehouse and concealed his illegal conduct with bribes and death threats." He financed "drug parties in airplanes and luxury homes and (built) a secret tunnel and room beneath his mansion" in which he lured people -- call girls, I presume, though he may have snared some high-fliers with the drugs -- to have group sex with him."

And there's more! At one point:

In 2001, Nicholas smoked so much marijuana during a flight on a private jet between Orange County and Las Vegas that the pilot had to put on an oxygen mask, the indictment states.

Dude! Talk about a dot-com bubble!

In a small Georgia town, a high school science teacher resigned after threatening to rip out a student's eyeballs. The story says he resigned on the last day of school -- a week and a half after the incident. Where's the cellphone video??

In San Jose, 17 members of a huge shoplifting ring were arrested, charged with building "a criminal Costco" in which they fenced the work of "freelance shoplifters" to flea markets, the internet and other retail outlets to the tune of over $5 million.

Parents indulging adolescent insecurities with $$$$$ procedures

Middle-class parents are catering to the insecurities of their teenage girls with beautifying procedures that cost tens of thousands, says this article. Of course, this has always gone on: nose jobs, ear jobs and the like. It's the scale and detail that have changed, along with technological solutions.

In 2007, teenagers got 67,523 (laser surgery) procedures -- more than double the number that age group had in 2000, according to the society, which surveyed its members and board-certified dermatologists but not aestheticians or other doctors.

Many children seek to be denuded because excess fuzz embarrasses them. Others want to avoid a lifetime of battling hair. For Christine Furman, of Greenwich, Conn., getting laser treatment for the unibrow of her 16-year-old daughter Teresa was a celebratory event, not unlike ear piercing. Classmates had also nicknamed Teresa "Uno Brow."

Ms. Furman was wary of electrolysis because it had left pockmarks on her chin. But she wanted to give her daughter the gift of never having to maintain her eyebrows again. "She got the first treatment the day after she got off her braces," she said. "It hurt a little bit, so she squeezed my hand. Then we went to Bloomingdale's."

More writers than readers: more evidence

Writing about a publishing industry convention, the annual Book Expo America, Salon's Laura Miller recounts the general pessimism about whether or not people are still reading books. Nevertheless:

Publishers complained that they received more pitches than they had a chance to deliver. "It's relentless," one sales rep sighed ... "Every time you turn around, someone's shoving a manuscript into your hands. I keep telling them I'm not an editor, but they don't seem to understand the difference." Aspiring writers planted themselves in autograph lines in a bid to pass unpublished manuscripts to established authors or to beg celebrities to plug their book on TV. (Apparently, all those Americans who claim to be too busy to buy or read books can still find plenty of time to write them.)

Previously: literary agent says "There are more writers than readers"

Back to writing

I must be back in one of those periods where I have thoughts to spare only for my work. I can report that I'm finally back to actually writing on a new draft of my India novel, Bangalored, as opposed to just making notes for a new draft as I did throughout April and May -- or rather, the weekends of April and May.

I thought that rewriting would involve rewriting from scratch, but so far I've just been reworking the novel's first section, which is set in San Francisco before my protagonist goes to Bangalore. When I get this nailed down, I really will start rewriting the Bangalore section, which is 80% of the book.

Yee ha

That's not just any tornado, it's a tornado in the desert on Riverside Co. in southern California. It flipped 30 freight cars on a train, among other minor damage.

In the Bay Area, a wildfire burned in the Santa Cruz mountains, and forecasters were, as usual, glum about the coming fire season. Another fire was burning in central California, and even the Everglades was on fire. If you really want to get into the mood, read this excerpt from Joan Didion's famous essay about the Santa Ana winds, a phenomenon of southern California but generally appropriate to the topic.

All too dry for you? You could read about acidified seawater in the Seattle Times.

Focus on the Fundies: Scared to death of trannies

A bill in the Colorado Senate would extends gay rights in the state, so the local Taliban are up in arms, saying giving any rights to transexuals would mean "sexual predators will be able to cross-dress and legally use restrooms designated for the opposite sex" and so on.

Focus on the Family and another group are behind this disgusting crap. They are based, of course, in the same city that's home to the Purity Ball I recently wrote about.

technorati: fundamentalists, transexuals, SB200

Very white, very clean

The NYT had this strange article on Saturday about an Austin family that wants to get rid of all their extraneous possessions and lead a simpler life. Pretty much standard until you get to this telling quote on the second page:

They are exchanging e-mail with a woman who has a remote cabin available in central Vermont... (where) there is no electricity, Mr. Harris said, just propane power and a wood stove.

"We want to be in clean country with like-minded people with access to clean food," Mrs. Harris said.

Emphasis mine. In addition to the crypto-fascist quality of this statement, it reminded me of the dialogue in "Five Easy Pieces," where the aggro dyke hitchhiker announces she and her girlfriend are going to Alaska:

BOBBY: Where are you going?

PALM: Alaska.

BOBBY: Alaska? Are you on vacation?

TERRY (sullenly): She wants to live there, because she thinks it's cleaner.

BOBBY: Cleaner than what?

PALM (to Terry): You don't have to tell everybody about it. Pretty soon they'll all go there and it won't be so clean.

BOBBY: How do you know it's clean?

PALM: I saw a picture of it. Alaska is very clean. It appeared to look very white to me... Don't you think?

BOBBY: Yeah. That's before the big thaw.

PALM: Before the what?

Woody Allen not dead yet, critic laments

An American critic, Joe Queenan, has written an attack on the later films of Woody Allen in which he pleads with European producers to "stop funding this man":

Americans can be blamed for many things, but the perpetuation of Allen's zombie-like career is one atrocity for which we refuse to be held accountable. It is Europeans who are providing much of the money for these projects, Europeans who are welcoming the director to their communities, Europeans who are marching through the turnstiles in support of Allen's interchangeably neurasthenic films.

I've written before about my despair over Allen and his career. Queenan gets it about right. I couldn't last through Allen's last successful film, Match Point, and I only stayed through several others out of morbid curiosity over how bad they could be.

technorati: Woody Allen, cinema, film criticism

More on the 'Purity Ball'

I posted the link to the Colorado Springs Gazette's story yesterday, and this morning the New York Times also published a substantial piece, including a photo of the men with the swords.

Here's a local mother on what the event means to her family:

In a word....the Father-Daughter Purity Ball is about Daddy being his daughter's knight in shining armor until her earthly prince comes for her. Our daughters are beautiful and I suspect we may have occasion to meet many would-be princes who would sweep them off their feet. If their Daddy doesn't teach them to stay pure in mind, body, heart and soul....how will they know which one the Lord has chosen for them?

Egad. And Colin Morton pointed out the poor choice of words in the NYT's tagline for their article:

At the Purity Ball, fathers and daughters unite to make public pledges of sexual abstinence until marriage.

So romantic!

Focus on the Fundies: Creepy story of the month

Some fundies in Colorado Springs (where else?) stage a bizarre "Father-Daughter Purity Ball" annually -- this was the tenth annual such rite -- which judging from the photo seems to involve using a cross like a maypole. And is that a crown of thorns they're doing ring-toss with?

A twirling mass of white lace surrounded a rough wooden cross as a troupe of young women danced in a circle looking like porcelain dolls come to life.

Then Randy Wilson and Kevin Moore hoisted swords in the air and a ballroom full of 149 fathers and daughters walked beneath them toward the cross and laid white roses at its base. The swords symbolized the fathers' commitment to battle for their daughters and the roses symbolized the daughters' commitment to God to remain pure.

Then Wilson announced, "Let the ball begin."

Good Christ, what are these people on? Of course, they has a website, which contains this strange passage:

The Father Daughter Purity Ball is a memorable ceremony for fathers to sign commitments to be responsible men of integrity in all areas of purity. The commitment also includes their vow to protect their daughters in their choices for purity. The daughters silently commit to live pure lives before God through the symbol of laying down a white rose at the cross.

Yes... They live in a fantasy world where women are still chattel and cannot legally sign anything, so the men sign the documents and the girls "silently commit" to the deal.

There is something else mentioned in the story, an organization called the Abstinence Clearinghouse. I'll let you Google that for yourself, but the mind boggles. "What do they clear??" Cris asked. "A clearinghouse is a place where accounting takes place... Do they have a database of all the virgins or something?"

But the best quote from the news story is:

(The family who started the event) say most in the mainstream media see their family as a fundamentalist freak show.

You think?!

technorati: fundamentalists, Colorado Springs, celibacy

Tonight's reading

Woebegone


His voice is just a whisper, but amplified by the microphone, it rolls out over the audience, low and mellifluous. What isn't soaked up, by the sellout crowd and the velvet stage curtains, resounds warmly in the auditorium. They've been waiting for him. Standing in the wings during the early parts of the show as a klezmer-bluegrass band plays, he can feel the audience's tension. They'll smile widely at the bands, laugh generously at the skits, and give a big hand to everybody. But they don't come for the country-polka-shapenote singing Prairie Grass Girls. They will never buy an album by the delta-blues-Appalachian-jazz Hep Cat Swinging Cowboys.

They're waiting for this, his monologue. When he utters the first words -- which rarely vary, the better to signal that the waiting is over and the main attraction has begun -- "It was a quiet week in our little town..." -- half the audience applauds for nothing, as if he were Liza Minnelli and the piano player had just plinked out the introduction to "New York, New York." Then they lean back and sigh with pleasure. This is what they came for.

What's he going to talk about this week? The same thing -- loneliness, frustration, pain and death; the despair of those who long to break away, and the smug self-satisfaction of those who don't have the imagination to. But because his stories are told gently, and because they're set in a Normal Rockwell small town, people think they're just cute stories. Look at 'em -- drinking up his words like cats licking up milk. Nostalgia for a small-town past most of these folks never knew. They don't live in small towns. They live in suburbs, and they go to yoga and Pilates and shop at Whole Foods. They have double masters degrees in English and Psychology, and half of them have their own blogs. Yet they want to spend two hours pretending, pretending with him, that they all live in a fantasy world where there's one stop light, one grocery store, one bar, where they've never heard of WalMart.

Now it's time for a laugh, a sure-fire one. Since they're doing the show from home base in St. Paul, there's one sure-fire laugh. As sure as Woody Allen could get a laugh making fun of his Jewishness, as sure as Richard Pryor could get a laugh with the n-word, he can get a big belly-laugh by referring to the only thing about his audience that is remotely ethnic. It doesn't matter what it's about, or even if there's a joke at all, as long as he can work a sentence around to ending with the word "Lutherans."

Man, they love that. How long has he been standing up here? Not today -- how many years? Since the early 80s, and the show has hardly changed. He knows why they like it -- it's reassuring, like a Starbucks or a chain motel room -- the same, week after week. Take that detective skit, it hasn't changed since 1990. The story never makes sense and God knows it's not funny. The audience barely even laughs. But at the end, they applaud just as warmly as they do for anything else.

He knows -- has known for a long time -- that they're not really listening. The detective who never solves anything, who never falls for the dame, who is sidetracked as easily as a character in an Ishiguro novel -- who is doomed to repeat, week after week, the same failure with the badly-voiced femme fatale, the same confusions over small things like keys and street names. Don't they understand -- It's modernism! It's Beckett! It's the theater of the absurd! The jokes aren't supposed to be funny. They don't get it; still, they laugh politely, and then the Bulgarian tango singers file onto the stage.

Same thing with his monologue -- nobody's really listening. What's he talking about? The Lutheran pastor has to perform the farmer's funeral using hymns from the 1890s that no one knows, with the second verse in Norwegian, so he stays up half the night translating hymn verses from Victorian English to bad Norwegian and pasting the words into Photoshop. That's the thing -- it's not like the town is truly stuck in the past. People have cell phones and cable TV -- the better to make them miserable. But his audience just laughs. They know he'll never really overturn the mise-en-scene. A teenage girl might get pregnant, but it won't be because she was raped. A sensitive boy might dream of leaving town, and he might actually do it, but he won't shoot up the high school with an AK-47. There are certain boundaries, and everyone knows what they are.

He's tried making things edgier, veering into politics from time to time. Before the 2004 election he expressed outrage, attacked the Iraq war, said he was ashamed about Abu Ghraib. His audiences applauded in the same warm way, and a columnist even compared him to Walter Cronkite turning against the Vietnam War, saying "If you've lost Keillor, you've lost America." But in the end it didn't make a bit of difference; Bush was re-elected anyway.

Since then, the stories are sadder. Fans of his work notice that he's killing off some characters. The owner of the tavern, the old Catholic priest, the organist at the Lutheran Church. The Norwegian Bachelor Farmers have been dying for twenty years; he kills another one today, and soon there will be none left. The young pitcher on the town's very minor league baseball team suffers a living death by never making it to the majors. If the pastor preaches a brilliant sermon, it is drowned out by the crying baby, the sound of the agnostic across the street mowing his lawn, and the high-pitched buzz of teenagers surreptitiously listening to iPods. And if people crack, their breakdown is quiet. The name of the place alone -- doesn't anybody get it? Would it be any clearer if he'd called it the Valley of the Shadow of Death, or Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here-ville?

Well, he's not stuck like one of his characters. He got out. Not once, but twice. First he got a job on the New Yorker. He could have become the next Thurber, if only he hadn't followed the dictum to write about what you know. A few years later he was back, doing a radio show that has turned into this monster. Then after 15 years he said the hell with it. He ran off with a Danish woman and moved to Copenhagen. But the dark, endless Scandinavian winter was like being confined in the world's largest maximum security prison -- by comparison, winter in Minnesota is like a night in the drunk tank.

He gets a signal from the stage manager -- it's time to bring the monologue to a close. Somehow he has got the Lutheran minister in a car on the melting ice in the middle of the lake with the ghost of the Norwegian Bachelor Farmer whose funeral he just conducted. Since Lutherans don't believe in exorcism, the pastor politely asks the ghost to leave, but the ghost replies, "You're cold? I'll show you cold," and clutching at the door handle, his dead, white, already translucent fingers threaten to open the door and flood the car with ice water. And the pastor begins to cry and pray to God, "Don't leave me here. Don't let me die like this," so God in the form of the monologist sends an ice boat that has gotten loose from its moorings and is spinning crazily across the lake, and the pastor manages to jump into the hull of the ice boat as the car begins to sink. The pastor is taken by the ice boat not in the direction of town but, like Jonah, far away from where he wants to be, way to the other side of the lake, where he spends the night huddled on the shore with nothing to keep him warm but a fire which he started by burning the pages from his Bible, just the Apocrypha was enough to get it started, and since Lutherans don't recognize the Apocrypha anyway, nothing was really lost. The next morning he hikes around the lake and back into town, where he sits down to write another sermon to be delivered next Sunday, and the new organist will play a hymn, and everyone will wait expectantly as he rises to deliver his sermon, and everything will be just as it was.

technorati: Garrison Keillor, Prairie Home Companion, Lutheran, Minnesota

I'm reading on Saturday

Please come to my reading on Saturday at the Makeout Room. Purchase tickets for the event, the Progressive Reading Series.

Students protest Schlafly's presence at graduation

Washington University in St. Louis gave an honorary degree yesterday to Phyllis Schlafly, one of the dinosaurs of the Christian Right. The 83-year-old founder of the Concerned Women of America pressure group lives in nearby Alton, Ill. As she was awarded her honor, dozens of students and some faculty members turned their backs in protest.

Schlafly is famous for her anti-feminist views, which she expresses in deadening language that is hardly quotable. She is also well known for being strangely obsessed with the teaching of reading using phonics, blaming other systems for everything from illiteracy to liberalism.

technorati: Phyllis Schafly, Washington University

It's Bad Behavior Friday™! -- Austrian edition

A 39-year-old man who was ashamed after running his finances into the ground killed his wife, daughter, parents and father-in-law in three different cities before driving back to Vienna where the killing spree began, leading to this headline: Austrian man 'exhausted, relieved' after killing spree, police say. (I read the lede out loud to Cris, who quipped "'Best workout I've ever had,' he added.")

It's no longer surprising that the most over-the-top psychopaths are from Austria, is it? After that guy who kept his daughter a sex slave in the basement for 27 years, a mere killing spree seems like par for the course.

Ashley Dupre, the hooker in the Elliot Spitzer affair, tried to sneak back into New York Thursday but the New York Post was all over her. All she did was arrive in a bus at Port Authority and catch a cab to the Flatiron District, but they've got video and a photo gallery. You'd think they would have somebody making a cast of the impression her butt made in the taxi's backseat.

An American art expert who worked for a Thai museum was being held on charges relating to an antiquities smuggling ring when she died in federal custody in Seattle.

A woman who lives in the L.A. suburb of Huntington Beach was under investigation to determine whether she intentionally sicced her dog on the mail carrier, who turned out to be a winner of eight Olympic medals. Unfortunately the medals were for swimming and they were not near the beach, so the former Olympian merely locked herself in her mail truck and called 911.

Two Pennsylvania men who tried to steal power lines right off the poles were electrocuted, but unfortunately not killed. And elsewhere in the same state, a couple discovered an extra $280,000 in their bank account, so they spent it. Now the bank wants it back.

Credibility

I have a few closing remarks on the third (1965) New York Film Festival. Thirteen symposiums took place as part of the festival. Now I know what Pauline Kael lost at the movies: the taste for cinema. Hollis Alpert spent much time trying to persuade us that his reviews are really too intelligent, that cinema does not deserve the intelligence he is giving it...

A curious thing: Although I haven't seen any of them at any of the avant-garde and underground film screenings, all critics participating at the symposiums kept stressing their deep concern with the young and new cinema.

-- Village Voice film critic Jonas Mekas,
writing in the Village Voice, 23 September 1965

That's one of my idols, Jonas Mekas, as collected in the invaluable anthology of his Village Voice columns from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, Movie Journal. Another critic writes here about coming upon Mekas' book. I mentioned it here in 2005. An early Voice column is here.

technorati: film criticism, Pauline Kael, Jonas Mekas

Women bathing

Check out a new blog by a friend of mine, Whores of Bath, in which they review bath products and also take "fantasy baths" with celebrities like Lindsay Lohan and Robert Downey, Jr.

technorati: bath products, bloggers

British band "shoots" video by performing for surveillance cameras

This is so awesome! Instead of shooting a video the old-fashioned way, a British band performed in front of their city's ubiquitous surveillance cameras, requested the footage from cops and private companies using the British equivalent of a Freedom of Information Act request, then edited the footage to produce the finished product. Courtesy BoingBoing.

The finished video, viewable at that link, shows the band performing in crosswalks, taxicabs, public plazas, and the entrance ramp to a parking garage.

technorati: surveillance, music

Dept. of It Could Be A Story In The Onion

I was agog at this headline:

Platonic ideal of a cheese sandwich realised in Britain

No, it's not from The Onion, it's an actual news story about a real reaction to an actual sandwich. A food critic went to London and:

The food across all levels is fantastic in London. There has been an enormous change. But the one highlight I remember the most is this cheese sandwich. I was walking through Borough market with my 15-year-old son Nick and we bought one from the stall.

I was knocked out by it. It was so delicious that we had to have another one. It meant I was more full than I should have been for lunch but it was worth it. It was so good.

The £3 toasted cheese and onion sandwich was "the creation of Bill Oglethorpe, an expert in cheese who works for the specialist suppliers Neal's Yard Dairy." So, not just something thrown together by some slob. Still a good story. But the headline makes it sublime.

It's really very relaxing

Please buy my chaise longue. Sold.

See Daisetta before it vanishes

A sinkhole started two days ago in tiny Daisetta, Tx, halfway between Houston and Beaumont (map). By this morning it had swallowed an area the size of about a city block -- and the whole town is only about ten blocks wide and long, judging from the map. Now why doesn't that happen to the Houston suburb where I went to high school?

Quoth the mayor:

It's unreal -- the earth just wallered up.

But the best quote was from a Houston Chronicle story: locals are referring to the maw as "Sinkhole de Mayo."

technorati: Daisetta, sinkhole

It's Bad Behavior Friday&trade! -- Mother's Day edition

The 83-year-old mother of French novelist Michel Houellebecq is interviewed in the Guardian today (courtesy Galleycat), calling her son -- a French version of Chuck Palahniuk and Dennis Cooper, if their work was merged, cleansed of male homosexual content, and made even more obsessed with death -- an "evil, stupid little bastard" adding that "this individual, who alas came from my womb, is a liar, an imposter, a parasite and above all -- above all -- a petit arriviste ready to do absolutely anything for money and fame."

See, that's what happens when your parents read your work. Never let your parents read your work! Or, at least, work as if they never will.

Speaking of mothers, searching on "Britney's mom" turns up this amazing video, which does not depict either Britney or her mom. I love how that guy catches the babies on the first bounce.

Forty-one states have laws allowing women to abandon their babies at fire stations or other government facilities without facing prosecution. Curiously, the time limit for doing so varies wildly, from 72 hours (many states) to 45 (Indiana, Kansas) or 90 days (New Mexico) to a whole year (North Dakota). For some reason, all the states with long deadlines are rural flyover states, though New Jersey, Connecticut and Maine give you a month.

technorati: mothers, flying baby, Michel Houellebecq

I'll be back again

I'm taking a long weekend to work on my India book, and following my usual pattern, I took a nap about 45 minutes after starting to work, then walked to a nearby cafe. The girl behind the counter couldn't have been more than 24, but she was playing an early Beatles album on the stereo, and I found it impossible to resist quietly chiming in on the harmony line of "I'll Be Back."

"That's a great album, isn't it?" the girl smiled.

"The best," I nodded. But then I couldn't remember what album it was on. ("A Hard Day's Night" is the answer. I was confused because "If I Fell" was playing when I walked into the cafe, followed by "I'll Be Back," and I couldn't figure out what album that might be. She must have had "A Hard Day's Night" on shuffle.) Anyway, it always does my heart good when I see kids in their 20s appreciating the Beatles; I want to give them a certificate of appreciation or something. Then I realize it would be as creepy as one of my parents' friends patting me on the head when I was 8 just because I liked "Sing Sing Sing."

technorati: Beatles, San Francisco cafes,

If being on hold weren't bad enough

A company is marketing the "wasted time" you spend on hold, delivering advertisements to you instead of hold music. It's bad enough to hear happy-voice promotions for the company you're calling while you wait on hold; I pity the customer service people who wind up on the receiving end of callers' wrath after listening to some unrelated advertisement.

This goes on the list of signs of the apocalypse, along with advertisements on the floors of supermarkets, on little TV screens in hotel elevators, and in the corner of TV screens while you're trying to watch the ballgame.

technorati: advertising

Adventures in book publicity

Hey look, it's my friend Sara on the NPR home page, doing a "This I Believe" shot to promote her book Take This Bread. I interviewed Sara in 2006 when she was completing the book; this interview with the SF Gate.com website is much better. Among other places, you can see her work on salon.com. Her book caught the attention of the Episcopal church's presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, who quoted it in a 2007 commencement address at an Episcopal seminary. Others who loved the book include Anne Lamott. Sara's previous book was about the relationship between Web 1.0-era entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and the Al Gore campaign, but this piece she wrote in the New York Times in 1999 -- the same year she began going to church -- already reflects her questions about whose responsibility it is to make sure people are fed. (By the way, this Sara Miles is a completely different one than the one with the autistic kid who's gone on the Snow White ride at Disney World 2084 times, and whom I blogged about yesterday without mentioning the mother's name.)

technorati: Sara Miles

What does a technical writer do?

A year or two ago I met a fellow writer who was interested when I told him that one can make a good living doing technical writing. He asked me for information, and I went home and found a job description, which I annotated with notes. I sent him the following long screed.

You should only read this if you are interested at all in what a technical writer does. I'm sure that does not include most of my regular readers, but someone looking online for the information might find it helpful.

I found this job description from a job posting someone sent me a couple years ago. It provides a pretty good summary of what a technical writer at a high-tech company does. I will annotate it with numbers like this (1) and give some more details.

Outline (1) and write (2) user guides (3) for our software products, with a focus on concise language and meeting audience needs (4). Write detailed software installation instructions (5), including hardware and software requirements (6) and impact analyses (7). Convert (8) user manuals to online help, editing content as needed (9) to meet the standards of this documentation model. Quickly (10) deliver shorter documents, such as knowledgebase articles (11) and compatibility fact sheets (12), to support internal clients (13) like the Technical Support and Sales departments. Edit and proofread material written by other Documentation team members. (14) Work with Analysis and Design team (15) to examine and understand new product features. Work with Education (16) & Services (17) in the development and production of training materials.

1. Some tech pubs managers want you to produce an outline of your manual before you write it. It can be a useful step to make sure you know what you're doing. Fortunately, the outlines of most software manuals are the same: (I.) How to install the software. (II.) How to configure the software, and how to configure your existing environment to work with it. (III.) How to use it. (IV.) Reference section.

2. Writing -- or "authoring" as people sometimes say -- is usually done in FrameMaker, though some companies use other tools. If you don't know FrameMaker going in, they'll ask if you have done complicated publishing stuff with other software, and this is where you'd mention your expertise in Quark Xpress or PageMaker or something. Writing means filling out the outline you wrote in (1).

3. User Guides. Depending on the size of the product, there are sometimes separate installation manuals, performance guides, troubleshooting guides, etc. etc. People who are just learning the tech writing trade are often given either Installation Guides or Release Notes to do before they let you dig into the other stuff. Release Notes are the "read Me" file that you're supposed to read before anything else. It often contains a lit of "known issues," i.e. bugs they couldn't fix before they ship the software.

4. Meeting audience needs is an important concept in technical writing. You always think about things from the perspective of the audience, i.e. the reader of the manual and the user of the product, and *not* from the perspective of the engineer who gave you the dope on how everything works. In fact, this is really the main thing a technical writer does: translate what the engineer said into something regular people can understand.

5. Installation instructions -- I talked about this already, but I wanted to mention that this sometimes means writing the same instructions several different ways, depending on how many "platforms" (or different combinations of hardware and software operating systems) the company says its software runs on. For example, installing the same software on a Windows system and a Unix system is almost always significantly different.

6. Requirements -- This also gets at the point I just made about platforms. Your manual might tell the customer "You must have installed the 1.5_11 JDK before installing this on your AIX system." See also no. 12 below.

7. Impact analysis -- I'm sort of guessing here -- This probably refers to the "cost," in terms of "overhead," of installing the software or various components of it. For example, let's say you installed Google Desktop on your laptop. You probably know that it uses a certain amount of processing overhead to index everything on your laptop's hard drive. Therefore it has an impact on the performance of your computer.

8. Most companies take a manual authored (there's that verb again) in FrameMaker and use another tool to convert it to another format for online help. The tool commonly used for this is something called Quadralay WebWorks, though there is another tool called RoboHelp that I've never used, but which you see a lot of companies using. The important concept here is "single sourcing," which means that the PDF of your manual and the HTML files of the online help come from the same source, your FrameMaker files. And you can see why this is important -- if you had the same thing documented in two places, that's one too many to try to keep in sync. So tech writing departments try to "single source" as much of their stuff as possible. On the other hand, this is sometimes more of an ideal than a practical goal.

9. Editing content as needed -- This might refer to copyediting, or it might refer to the fact that sometimes the automatic Frame-to-HTML conversion tool is not enough, and you need to tweak the HTML help files to make them look right.

10. Depending on how long it takes the engineers to develop a new product -- or a new version of an old product -- you might update a manual only once every 18 months. On the other hand, sometimes other departments want something lickety split, such as the two things mentioned next.

11. Knowledgebase articles. This is a generic term for "the technical information not found in a manual that is sometimes put online for everybody to read, and sometimes made available only internally, to help customers figure out how to do something." The reason a particular fact or procedure might be found in one of these articles and not in a regular manual is that these articles often document rather obscure behavior of the product that you don't want everyone who reads the manual to know about.

12. Compatibility fact sheets are the things, usually in several tables, that tell you that product A works with operating systems X, Y and Z, but only on Windows XP; and on systems X and Z if it's UNIX running a certain flavor of .... you get the idea. With large enterprise software products this gets very arcane and complex.

13. Internal clients, such as the aforementioned Customer Service, and Technical Support and Sales, mentioned here, are also readers of your work.

14. Other team members. Large companies sometimes have whole teams of writers. I work on a team of eight people plus a manager, and we're documenting the products of one division of a company that sells literally hundreds of products. There are, I think, more than 300 tech writers in the company of 35,000 people.

15. By the Analysis and Design team I suppose they mean Engineering, or maybe the people who give the requirements to Engineering -- in other words, the people who decide what the customer wants in the next version of the product.

16. Education. Large companies, and even small ones, have training classes in their products, and sometimes the tech writers contribute to the training materials -- which are totally separate from the manuals they usually work on. Only in the smallest companies -- like the one I worked at for the last two years that had just fifteen people -- are the writers expected to also write the training courses.

17. Services. Companies have "professional services" departments full of people who go to customers and install and configure the products *for* them, because no matter how simple and clear you make your manuals, the product is often too complicated to install and make work the way the customer wants it to.

Whew. If you got this far without wanting to jab pencils into your eyes, you may have the aptitude to be a technical writer. The next question is, how to get the skills. Since it's hard to gain experience doing things like converting FrameMaker books to HTML help without already being a technical writer, the main way you could make yourself interesting to a manager who might give you a shot is to gain experience doing analogous things. For example, if you've ever done a newsletter for a nonprofit group, a school, a community center or whatever, that involves several important analogous skills, even if you weren't using FrameMaker. If you've ever taught someone how to do a fairly technical thing, that counts for something. Look for opportunities to do the equivalent of creating a technical how-to manual. For example, does the school near your house need a simple how-to guide for its staff on using the email system? If you can find *anything* like this to do, it gives you a writing sample, which is probably the single most important thing you can bring to someone who wants to interview you.

OK, enough already. Best of luck.

That's what I sent the poor fellow. It might have been enough to make him run screaming from the idea of ever being a technical writer. But somebody has to do it.

technorati: technical writing

Austistic child takes Disney ride > 2000 times

An autistic child responds only to a certain ride at Disney World -- so his family moved to Orlando so he could go on the ride as much as possible. So far he's done it over 2000 times.

I don't know what's more horrifying about this story -- the living hell that his parents must be going through (even if they take turns accompanying the child, imagine having to do anything over a thousand times), or the fact that only an expensive, compelling commercial fiction can raise the child out of his own living hell.

I suppose there are worse things -- say, being a prisoner in Abu Gharib, perhaps... Hmm, that would be an interesting test. Take a guy from Abu Gharib and put him on that ride 2000 times and see how long it takes before he begs to be returned to prison.

It's Bad Behavior Saturday™!

The first spam message was sent 30 years ago today.

A British comedian known for "his normal bitter and emasculated, pissed-up state" molested an unwilling audience member on stage.

Two odd stories from Colorado Springs:

• Woman scalped by bus in freak accident
• Real estate agent jailed after sending teens to take revenge on client

In New York Ashley Dupré, the bête noire of Elliott Spitzer, celebrated her Best Year Evar by partying at a New York nightspot. She "couldn't seem to make up her mind about wanting attention -- alternately hiding behind her hoodie and getting up on the back of her banquette and waving her arms."

A man jumped from a 14th floor room at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim. According to the story, he was sharing the room with "an associate" -- yes, being forced to double up on a business trip would make you want to commit suicide.

Shots in the dark

It happened again last night -- a series of shots a block or two away, coming from the direction of the public housing project. It's close enough to hear but not close enough to be able to call the cops and tell them exactly where it happened. We hear the shots, and then sometimes a car getting away fast. I go outside and down to the corner to make sure it didn't happen right close by; last night, there was no sign of anything, so I went inside. Then, after a few minutes, sirens. The next day, a story like this in the paper: S.F. Man Shot to Death Sitting In Car In the Mission. Feh.

Urbanity

Lots of media coverage lately about city plans to create a new downtown, or maybe just an extension to the present downtown, in San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood. [map] The neighborhood has been many things, but most people who live in SF now think of it as a light-industrial zone with housing mixed in, with a leather queen zone along Folsom St. between 4th and 13th, and lots of new condos along Harrison and in what has recently been dubbed the South Beach district.

Some people think more urban density is a good thing. I wouldn't mind having lots of six or eight story buildings, instead of the two or three story buildings that represent most of the older housing South of Market. (The area burned entirely in the 1906 fire, so all of them date from after that, though there are many examples of post-Victorian apartment flats on the side alleys.) I've always liked the eight or ten story apartment buildings you see around town, in the Mission for example -- like the ones near 25th and Valencia (such as the one on the left side of this photo). That would be a good kind of urban density. But I have the feeling that's not what they're planning.

technorati: San Francisco, urbanism, South of Market

End of the old garages

Since we moved into our house in 1995, there were some ramshackle garages on Harrison St., on the other side of the block. It was an ancient wooden building with a corrugated metal roof on which the feral cats of the block used to sun themselves.

Several months ago we got a notice from the Planning Dept. that someone was going to tear them down and put up a condo building. I almost forgot about it, but this morning I noticed a big claw machine tearing into the garages. I took a couple pictures from our back window, and more from Harrison St. in front of the site.

 

Out my office window

I got to move to a cube here by the window several weeks ago. This is my view -- the easternmost shoulder of Mount San Bruno, just across US 101.

The sliver of mountain visible in the picture is actually part of a state park that covers much of the mountain, so the view should stay this way.

It'd be nice to get rid of the billboard, though. It's been the exact same billboard for three years or so. I thought the company might have simply forgotten about it, but then a couple of months ago I saw it had been tagged up, and then then next day it had been restored. So clearly the software company that rents it is still paying the bills.

Birthday post

Yo, it's my birthday. I'm at work at my job as a technical writer for a big software company, just doing usual things. An ordinary Monday, really.

I had a super-duper birthday two years ago, and since we just had a 50th birthday party for Cris's sister we're not really up for another party. Tonight her sister is coming over, coincidentally, and we'll watch a documentary she worked on and eat some Thai food. And maybe the last of the cake from last weekend. That's all right.

A lot of times I look back on my birthday, but since it's pretty much a sure thing that, at age 52, I'm closer to dying than being born, it seems like less work to look ahead. This year I'm going to finish another draft --the final one, I hope -- of my novel about the American girl who goes to Bangalore to help open a customer service call center. And when I'm done with that, I'll try another shot at the book I wrote for Cleis Press last sumer and fall. I'm doing a reading on May 16  May 17, of what I'm not yet sure, and I hope I'll do more readings later in the year. If I do all that, and manage to keep my job, I'll be more than satisfied.

From my notes

Here are the notes I wrote today as I try to figure out how to rewrite my Bangalore novel. There's 150 pages of this stuff, going babck to November 2004 when I started the book.

I looked a little bit at my notes from late 2005, when I was trying to figure out what to do with the half a book I had written to that point. I realize now I have gone about this all wrong. I tried writing a novel off the top of my head, and while that got me a great start, it did not stand me in a good stead for the second two-thirds of the book. On the other hand, "Knock Yourself Out," which I already have a few thousand words for, does not have a good start, but a tortured, slow, feeling, which is the way I write when I'm doing nothing more than feeling my way. I supposedly know what KYO is all about, in terms of most of the plot and the theme. I started "Bangalored" (the fourth title the book has had, by the way, after "The Moony Trail of Starry Shine," "Dear Prudence," and "Mango Rain") with a notion, a flavor, a voice -- but no idea what the book was really about. I really must work to integrate the two.

On the third hand, I started "Make Nice" with much less of an idea of either. I just had the two characters of Bobby and Gene. But that was perhaps the best way to start, with a strong character who could simply live.

Perhaps that's the real lesson I have to learn from this experience -- start with characters, not a plot, a setting, a theme, or a feeling. Or if you start with those things, don't go any farther until you really know who the characters are.

Anyway, I have to make something of this damn thing, for the third or fourth time. (Actually the last completed draft was draft 6, for some reason.) I have to remind myself that I'm further along than I was a month ago -- even if I'm little farther along than I was three years ago, judging by the degree to which I really know the characters.

I'm going to try to start notes without looking at any previous notes. I know these have gotten repetitive this month, but I feel like I have to constantly refresh and reinforce my conception of the characters, their development, and how the plot reflects that. (In real life, people -- characters -- react to events. In novels, the author must secretly shape events to help the characters develop. But not too much, or it won't be believable.)

... thinking ...

Perhaps one of the fulcrums is Doug's state of mind at the moment he arrives in Bangalore. He is carrying three, no four, loads of psychic baggage:

• His history with Betsy and with Stella
  
• His former career and fame as a journalist, and his career as a professor and how that career ended
  
• His intentions to save his career and write a book about Bangalore and the depredations of globalization
  
• His intentions to have a closer relationship with Stella as a way of somehow salvaging his self-regard as a man, having fucked up his relationships in general with women and having just fucked up his career as an academic

I think most of those have been clear up to now except the last one. I haven't understood what he wants, much less fleshed out notes on it, much less written it into the novel. That's why he seems so passive and listless and indeed unrelated to Stella. Good! Let's unpack that, as theoreticians say. There are actually several parts to it -- his relationships with women, how they have affected his family, and how they have affected his career.

Q.	What are his relationships with women like as a young man?
A.	He is attractive and intelligent, and growing up in the 60s and 70s (he was 25 in 1977) he had lots of sex with lots of women. As a creature of his time, he only learned a little about feminist attitudes toward sex second-hand, i.e. from the women he was fucking or working with (often the same people); he learned how to continue to get sex in that period without really adopting any enlightened attitudes toward women and sex. When Stella was born (1978), he had a sentimental conversion to feminism, because he wanted her to be liberated, but he didn't really change what were by then pretty hidebound attitudes. Perhaps most importantly, when it came to settling down with Betsy as a family, he never even considered it. They weren't living together in the US when they were fucking and Betsy became pregnant; when Betsy returned to the US to give birth to Stella, he didn't come back with her. He stayed in Central America, only coming back to New York from time to time. Maybe he would see Betsy and Stella twice a year, at the most, though he did send child support with regularity. Thus they never married, never lived together in the US.
Q.	When it came time for Doug to return to the US (1984), did they consider living together as a family then?
A.	No, because he had a job offer at Cornell (which has a well-known journalism school) and Betsy was ensconced at a TV station in Chicago.
Q.	Was there ever a time when Doug "left" them?
A.	No. That doesn't mean Betsy didn't feel vaguely abandoned.
Q.	What were Betsy's attitudes?
A.	By becoming a war correspondent and then a TV reporter, she was rebelling against her family's Midwestern expectations; she bolstered her ambition with simple 70s feminist principles that a woman doesn't need a man, etc. But because she was a child of the Midwestern middle class, she had deep-seated feelings about family and home, and she finds reasons to resent Doug that fit into her feminist principles (he was childish, didn't take responsibility, was selfish) but which have their foundation in an unconscious feeling that he should be home with her and her child. She will only admit to feelings that fit in with the ideology, so Stella grows up sensing Betsy's resentment of Doug without understanding it.
Q.	What are Doug's attitudes toward Betsy and Stella?
A.	When Betsy gets pregnant, he really is selfish -- he assumes that anyone with sufficient ambition would not let a pregnancy stand in the way of her career and that she'll get an abortion and their relationship will be exactly the same as it was before she got pregnant. But when she decides she wants to bear the child, he shrugs: he thinks of it as her decision and something that no longer has anything to do with him. (I remember this clearly from the mid-70s, even though I was a bit younger. Since any decisions about what happens to a pregnancy were supposed, by the feminism of the day, to be entirely up to the woman, a man who gets a woman pregnant was absolved of responsibility -- an unintended consequence of feminism and one that has caused some refinement of the dictum "My body, my choice.")
Q.	But still, she is resentful.
A.	Yes, for reasons she doesn't quite understand: her unconscious belief, which she can't square with her ideological analysis, that the father of a child should be part of the child's family.
Q.	How does this affect Doug?
A.	He is annoyed at her expectations, however unconsciously she holds them. Because he understands exactly how she feels -- he knows, without admitting it to himself (much less ever discussing it with her) that she feels he should be close by and support her in some greater way than he ever does.
Q.	Don't they ever talk about it?
A.	No doubt they argue about it when Stella is a child, but they never resolve it.
Q.	So how does that affect the way Doug views Stella?
A.	It creates some guilt, and causes him to compensate for the way he treated Betsy by treating Stella extremely well. In fact, Stella gets a hundred times more time and attention from Doug than Betsy ever did, because Stella lives with Doug during the summers from 1985-1992 (she is ages 7-14, he is ages 34-41).
Q.	All right, what about his time as a professor (1985-2007, ages 34-56)? What are his attitudes toward women then?
A.	On campus, all the girls are feminists, except for the cheerleader types. And a good number of the faculty (though not so much in the J school -- I suppose I could check that, but it's not a fact I really need to know) are women. So when he starts at the university, he has to re-work his attitudes, at least on the surface. He becomes supportive of equality for women professionally. This is also reinforced by his having a daughter.
Q.	What about his sexual attitudes?
A.	These are also influenced by the campus attitude, which at that time is pretty unfettered. The girls, all embracing sexual freedom, are fucking right and left. Of course, it's also the time of the sex wars, the Take Back the Night marches, and the time when, if you were a real feminist, you'd be a lesbian (at least Until Graduation) and there's a lot of suspicion of men. Therefore, the students who fuck their professors fall into a few types, all very much minorities: the fucked-up ones who use sex to prove to themselves they're attractive, the cynical ones who consider it a quid pro quo to get grades, and the intelligent, independent but naive ones who use it to experiment with what they think are adult relationships. Stella herself fits into this category when she has an affair with a professor. So when we get right down to it, the students who fuck Doug are much like his own daughter.
Q.	That seems like something to examine much more closely.
A.	Yeah.... yikes. I had already had that idea but it was more an intuition, I never thought it through to quite that extent.

technorati: writing novels, notes, characters

With an internet like this, who needs family?

Like the Earth, the Web is a less appealing place than it used to be. If I want attitude and arguing and meanness and profanity and wrong information screamed at me as gospel, I'll get in a time machine and spend Christmas with my family in 1977.

-- writer J.R. Moehringer

And from a profile of Gay Talese in the LA Times' book blog comes this related factoid: The "first thing" he learned from his editor at the New York Times -- where, in the 1950s, telephones were "new technology" -- was "never use them" (the phones). Talese's anecdote is not elaborated, but I guess his old editor meant, never use the telephone when you can report in person.

It's Bad Behavior Friday™! -- kill yourself edition

In Japan, a 14-year-old girl committed suicide by inhaling hydrogen sulfide gas, losing style points by injuring and inconveniencing dozens of other people in the process. According to the story, "The incident reflects an increase in suicides committed by inhaling hydrogen sulfide, a trend that has been pushed by Web sites explaining how to create the poison gas." Suicide is a craze in Japan's vapid consumer society, where huge media giants and a hidebound sense of social embarrassment stifle freedom of expression, and an unforgiving culture of competition for education and jobs -- despite a plummeting birth rate -- crushes the souls of young and middle-aged people.

Of course, in the US, where we have actual problems, 120 Iraq or Afghan war vets commit suicide every week. (Courtesy Michelle Richmond.)

In Congo, they have different concerns: there are rampant rumors of penis theft. It pretty much works out to the same thing as a suicide craze, except nobody's died yet.

A 29-year-old Indian woman died giving birth outside a hospital that wouldn't admit her because she was from a low caste; the baby also died. The "chief minister" of the state of Uttar Pradesh has ordered the doctors who wouldn't aid her suspended. Somehow I don't think that's going to hurt them in the long run as much them touching her would have.

Police in Los Angeles are looking for a 24-year-old drifter who is accused of firebombing and killing a fortune teller in an "ongoing gypsy dispute" that began with a burglary.

A Maryland man testified in his trial on charges of stalking actress Uma Thurman. Somebody get that guy a copy of the uncut "Kill Bill" -- that's enough Uma for anybody. By the time he finishes watching that, he'll have his fill of "Kill Bill" thrill.

A San Francisco Bay Area chiropractor, accused of drugging and raping two women, surrendered to authorities today. How much of a moron is he?

He took photos of the sexual assault on his camera phone, police said, and went back to the Hold Cardroom and Bar to show the pictures to patrons there.

technorati: bad behavior, suicide, Uma Thurman, penis theft

It's Bad Behavior Wednesday™!

In a shameless bit of online theft, a Chinese publisher took interviews and illustrations from a comix fan's website and packaged them into a $100 coffee table book, even including a CD with digital copies of everything -- "They didn't even bother to change the filenames." And a famous romance author has been caught stealing as well.

In other news from Galleycat, Generation X is now feeling angst about not being the newest, hottest generation anymore. They're "caught between the boomers and the millennials." But the millenials don't have it so good: just look at this epic whine from a Harvard freshman.

technorati: whining, plagiarism, authors, Chinese publishing

Spring wind

It was hot last weekend, and the cool air off the ocean came back on Sunday night -- so far, so good. But then it never stopped, and by yesterday the cold wind was positively howling in. We went to Office Max, and there was a little whirligig of garbage in the parking lot -- very unpleasant. The springtime's like that sometime.

Today it's Cris's sister Shirley's birthday. We're hosting chez nous. Cris has been trying to make flan, and after two spoiled flans she thinks she's going to get it right the third time.

technorati: San Francisco weather

No regrets, Coyote

The other evening, as part of a pledge drive, one of the local public radio stations played a 90-minute program on the career of Joni Mitchell. I only heard the last half, coming in around "Mingus," but I didn't need to hear the first half to know the difference between the soaring, heart-breaking beauty and amazing range of Mitchell's early voice, and the monotonous quality and paltry range of her later years. In a couple of tracks from her last, 2007 album, it's clear she has less than an octave of range and barely enough breath to croak out a short phrase. Even more awful was her speaking voice in interviews over the last ten or fifteen years -- hoarse and scratchy, sounding like every one of her sixty years and then some. Rarely photographed without a cigarette, in a classic case of cutting off one's nose to spite one's face, she smoked two packs a day for fifty years, thus achieving her stated preference that she be not a pop singer but a painter.

I have a friend who was a dancer for many years until an injury put an end to it; but she did not hasten the end of her career by riding in cars without a seatbelt or pursuing a hobby as a downhill ski racer. It seems utterly stupid to do that to yourself, but strangely, it seems even the most brilliant people aren't happy being themselves. Seen as another in a long line of artists whose drug habits destroyed their careers, Mitchell is in good but sad company, and there was no real reason to think that the amazing insight and lyrical talent she demonstrated as a songwriter meant that she was above this type of self-sabotage.

technorati: Joni Mitchell

Things I had to look up: coterie, clique, claque, shill

I wanted to use the word coterie to mean "a small group of like-minded people with a shared interest or goal," but I wasn't sure that was exactly what it meant, so I looked it up. It sort of means that, but it is also a synonym for clique.

Hmm, come to think of it, what is the difference? Clique has more of a sense of exclusivity; the members come together with a sense that non-members are actively excluded. A coterie is less exclusive and more informal, I think.

Then I looked up one of my favorite words, claque. The members of a claque are paid to applaud or cheer; being paid seems an important element. But I thought that's what shill meant. Not quite; a shill is "a decoy who acts as an enthusiastic customer in order to stimulate the participation of others," as in the person who, secretly in league with a three card monte dealer, is allowed to "win" in order to draw others into the game. The word is also used by stage magicians and comedians to refer to confederates planted in the audience.

I'm not sure if there's a better word than coterie for the group of like-minded people who share an interest. We use phrases like "affinity group," but they have a stale, business-consulting taste.

I guess I'll stick with coterie which, by the way, I have been mispronouncing for decades. I thought it was pronounced co-TER-ee-ay as if it were French, but it's just CO-ter-ee.

The first warm day

Here's what it's like on a warm weekend day in San Francisco -- hundreds of people sprawl on the grass in Dolores Park. I've never understood the appeal of sprawling on the grass in the sun, so I wasn't there. In fact, I consider it a success if I manage to avoid going out in the sun at all.

I was home doing nothing much at all besides listening to the ballgame and cleaning, looking forward to going out in the evening. I had a table reserved at an al fresco restaurant on the city's famous Belden Alley on one of the few warm nights of the year. (There are always only a few.) But it was not to be. Cris wasn't feeling up to going out, and neither was the guest of honor, a friend's mother visiting from France. So I canceled the reservation and will stick around the house, where it is quite warm.

Recently I've been reading Joan Didion -- first a few pieces from Slouching Toward Bethlehem, and then the novel The Last Thing He Wanted. And I've been amazed at how much I don't like the writing, because I used to think Slouching Toward Bethlehem was brilliance incarnate. Now it just looks impossibly mannered and almost precious.

This is from one of the most famous pieces in the book, an essay titled "On Morality":
 

At midnight last night, on the road in from Las Vegas to Death Valley Junction, a car hit a shoulder and turned over. The driver, very young and apparently drunk, was killed instantly. His girl was found alive but bleeding internally, deep in shock.	I actually like the casual reference to "his girl." You could say that in the 1960s. The term encompasses all the possibilities without specifically defining the relationship of the "very young" driver and "his girl," but "his girl" she was.
I talked this afternoon to the nurse who had driven the girl to the nearest doctor, 185 miles across the floor of the Valley and three ranges of lethal mountain road. The nurse explained that her husband, a talc miner, had stayed on the highway with the boy's body until the coroner could get over the mountains from Bishop, at dawn today. "You can't just leave a body on the highway," she said. "It's immoral."	There's an odd mixture of vagueness and specificity here. The location of the hospital is not described, but the base of the coroner is. The hospital, wherever it was, was exactly 185 miles away, not 180 or 200, but the scene of the accident was "three hours" from the town of Bishop.
It was one instance in which I did not distrust the word, because she meant something quite specific.	The writer puts herself in the position of going around trusting or mistrusting others' use of words, implying that she is possessed not only of a magisterial quality of wisdom and taste, but that others' misuse of language consistently disappoints her.
She meant that if a body is left alone for even a few minutes on the desert, the coyotes close in and eat the flesh.	Here she is being specific again, as if it were a virtue, but she's really just trying to shock.
Whether or not a corpse is torn apart by coyotes may seem only a sentimental consideration, but of course it is more: one of the promises we make to one another is that we will try to retrieve our casualties, try not to abandon our dead to the coyotes.	She really likes the word "coyotes," and also the pretentious phrase "of course," which she will use a few sentences later. Then there's the tendentious "the promises we make to one another," which sounds like something out of a John Kerry speech.
If we have been taught to keep our promises -- if, in the simplest terms...	Now she's going to suspend the Ivy League phrasing for a moment, because it's actually not useful when you want to say something plainly.
... our upbringing is good enough -- we stay with the body, or we have bad dreams.	Here's the repeated use of the word "we," which is the height of pretension, more than any exalted phrasing or two-dollar words. She doesn't mean the royal "we," she means "we Americans," or at least, "we Americans whose upbringing is good enough." But the more you read, the more you are convinced that no one's upbringing could possibly be good enough when Didion is listening and passing judgment.
I am talking, of course, about the kind of social code...	Oh for Christ's sake, shut up.
... that is sometimes called, usually pejoratively, "wagon-train morality."	Coming from someone who sounds pejorative almost all the time, that's believable.
In fact that is precisely what it is. For better or worse, we are what we learned as children...	No, really, shut up.

When I was in my 20s I loved this piece. I don't know what was wrong with me.

technorati: San Francisco

Guilty pleasure: Kay Hanley and her band Letters to Cleo

One day in the mid-90s, at a Tower Records listening station, I discovered the band Letters to Cleo and their LP Wholesale Meats and Fish. I totally dug the technique of the lead singer, Kay Hanley, her kickass songwriting, and the way the band rocked. They never made it big, exactly, and broke up around 1999. Hanley went on to write songs for, and sing for, Hollywood movies; she and her Letters to Cleo lead guitarist husband were the sound behind Josie and the Pussycats, the lead single from which, "3 Small Words," freaking rocks.

Yesterday she was featured on fishbowlLA.com, with the news that she and hubby have done another Hollywood project -- music for a Care Bears video, believe it or not. Given how great the music for Josie and the Pussycats was, I'd suspend judgement on her music for Care Bears until I hear it.

technorati: Letters to Cleo, Kay Hanley, indie rock

Focus on the fundies: Jesus on her ass

A company in southern Colorado is marketing His Spirit Jeans for teenage girls, with Bible verses printed on the butt. Something akin to reading Playboy for the articles, I think.

And in the UK, a man who is the 67-year-old son of famous British fascists of the 1930s is being exposed for participating in "a depraved Nazi sadomasochistic orgy" with five prostitutes. Even the New York Times has some hilarious details:

In a video the paper posted on the Internet but later removed, two of the women wore black-and-white striped robes in the style of prisoners' uniforms. The video showed Mr. Mosley counting in German -- "Eins! Zwei! Drei! Vier! Funf!" -- as he used a leather strap to lash one of the women. "She needs more of ze punishment!" he cried in German-accented English.

Buried is the fact that the john paid $5000 for five hours with five women -- a sign that the dollar goes farther in the UK than everyone is saying.

The graphic is from a Village Voice review of a documentary about a little-known area of the cinema world: Israeli-made, Hebrew language porn films set in concentration camps. Really.

Things I had to look up: soigné

Soigné -- well-groomed, sleek, elegantly maintained. I was looking for a word the other night, some French word that would capture an attitude of, sort of, luxuriating insouciance. I thought of soigné but that's not right. I thought it was like èlan and had more to do with attitude. Still looking.