Category Archives: This Modern Life

Incoming Geekery

Posted by

0

With summer comes a teacher’s vanity. Educators are vouchsafed 10 weeks to rest, recharge, and remember all the other things in their lives. I have never known those 10 weeks but they burned by while you got maybe half of what you wanted to get done actually delivered. It’s a function of our mechanized world: maintenance takes up as much time as production.

Nevertheless, I feel the need to dedicate myself to a few projects for this summer. Books, mostly, and a long-considered re-working of Riposte Publishing’s web site into something more functional. GoDaddy, maybe. I’m good at overlooking bad marketing campaigns.

There’s a long post in utero, something I’ve had on me mind for some time, and finally resolved to express. It’s not important, even in a small scheme of things (that phrase should work. It’s alliterative. But it sounds wrong). But it my free up some headspace on the commute, which is where I do most of my thinking.

See?

And there was where I had to abandon using the BlogNow! app I’d gotten for my iPad. Simply loading that picture was too complicated. There’s a whole separate feature for adding pictures to blogpost with the app, and I didn’t feel like wrestling with it. So I pulled out old trusty laptop and got the link from my Tumblr (Instagram doesn’t let just any fool copypasta with pictures, for which they are to be commended, I suppose. Even when it’s my own picture).

Anyway, big meaty geeky rant forthcoming. For the nonce, enjoy this lanky Kiwi/Brit getting off on Prime Americana while rocking like 1965 just woke up in 2013 and decided to split the difference and party like it was 1995. Via Third Man Records, because Jack White’s taste just seems to get better as he ages:

Profitable Exhaustion

Posted by

0

Was out of town for a wedding this weekend, which was nice: a little break-up of the routine, a chance to put on my summer suit. Left Darling Daughter with the Mother-in-Law and spent the night at a hotel. The ceremony and reception were on a converted manor, with trees and a creek. A lovelier spot to have a wedding couldn’t be imagined.

Slept in late at the hotel, which always seems to happen — the bed, after all, is what you’re really paying for. But there’s that checkout time to be contended with: leave at 10:58 and you’re in the clear, but 11:02 means another night. We got dressed with an old Law & Order keeping time for us. When the lawyers show up, you know you’re at the bottom of the hour. We sailed out before McCoy got to grill the guilty SOB.

I tend to believe in benevolent neglect as far as lawn care goes. My father-in-law, who is retired USDA, reinforces this, telling me that the grass will be healthier if I don’t cut it too short. But yesterday the seeds were starting to stick up, so when we got back from Pennsylvania I threw on shorts and a hoodie (it was brisk, but I don’t like to get grass on my pants) and mowed front and back. Then an afternoon of grading with Deadwood on Blu-ray. It gets better with repeated viewings.

This morning I was up early, out the door early, planned my day early, and feel very satisfied with myself. Really quite tired, but profitably so, like there’s earned repose to look forward to.

What Raging Rebecca Martinson Should Have Written

Posted by

2

Like a majority of college students, I didn’t belong to a frat or sorority. And like a majority of those, I had attitudes and prejudices about those that did. They weren’t terribly original, and I won’t recount them. I don’t have them anymore. Looking back with a bit of wisdom, Greek Life has a certain logic to it. It provides an extended family, with pertaining duties and obligations, to those who have just stepped away from their original family. It provides a social calendar and the support of one’s peers, at a time when those things are handy. A well-run frat or sorority provides leadership opportunities, academic standards, and service to the community.

But for people who never went Greek, a lot of the inside-baseball, hyperdramatic hysteria of Greek life – rushing, pledging, judging, competing — seems exactly that. Which may explain why Rebecca Martinson’s email rant to her sorority sisters has gone viral (scroll down to read the full text of the email). It’s the towering rage, with expletives used as punctuation, juxtaposed with the insignificance of the subject — her sisters failing to show adequate Sorority Spirit – that prompts hilarious reposting and now, even dramatic readings by actors.

Embarassments like this only have one kind of ending, and today Martinson resigned from her sorority. I likewise hope that Martinson learns from this, and that we all find someone else to abuse now that she’s paid the price for Internet notoriety. But when I read the email, I find myself wondering, did she have a point? Was there something, however trivial, that her sisters should have been doing, that they were not? And could she have found a way to express that which would have a) made clear how serious she took it, b) gotten the email’s recipients to respond in a way she thought positive, and c) NOT prompted anyone to make it public?

Well, let’s imagine that world. Let’s imagine that Martinson had angrily typed out her rant in, say, Microsoft Word, rather than an email browser, and then let it sit for a day, and then came back to it, and then revised her thoughts to something professional.

It may have looked like this:

Continue reading →

Where the Hell I Have Been, or 70 is a Suffusion of Yello

Posted by

0

(Dirk Gently reference.)

Periods of time come when the thought of adding content to a blog puzzles the will. The evergreen political nonsense saps the spirit. Repeating the same arguments to the same applause sounds agonizingly dull.

Besides, it’s springtime outside. The human animal was not meant to remain inside shut up with People Being Wrong on the Internet when the trees bloom and the thermometer finally creeps above the magical number of 70.

And besides that, I’ve found an entirely new way to express myself.

Youtube posits this as the “Official video” of “Oh Yeah” the tune by Swiss electronica duo Yello. The track hit #51 on Billboard in the spring of ’87, and appeared in Ferris Bueller, Secret of My Success, and any other scene where the director wanted a montage expressing a character’s sudden overpowering desire. ‘Cording to Wikipedia, they had a whole slew of albums and such, and had regular hits on the UK charts and the US Hot Dance Club/Club Play Singles chart. Still most of us know them from this, if we know them at all.

Well they’ve put out an app that will make you a DJ.

Yellofier video tutorial from Yello on Vimeo.

Downloaded it on a whim, spent a few days playing with it. It’s genius: intuitive and idiot-simple.You can record any sound and turn it into a not-bad-sounding electronica song in a few minutes. I have done so, the results are silly.

Yellow Boom from Andrew Patrick on Vimeo.

That’s the first thing I made on the first day I messed with it. Nothing to it: theme and variation. The one’s I’ve done since are better, better enough that I download them to my iTunes and like them on repeated listens. I’ll post them somehow later: on Soundcloud, maybe. “Duke Bike Rider” is my phony rock-n’-roller stage name. We all wear different hats.

This is spring: your ears perk up and you try something new. Your life renews.

My Interactions with @REALBROTHER0003 and the Banality of Twitter

Posted by

0

A few days ago I tossed off a rather unremarkable post called “Self-Hating Honkies and the War on Easter“. Not much to it, really. In the post, I linked Stacy McCain, who gave me a shout-out on Twitter, as befits a gentleman and scholar.

This must have coincided with an ongoing spar with one @REALBROTHER003, voice of what he calls the Real Brother Radio Show, about which, I must admit, I know little more than nothing. I say that because I was visited with this:

Now, the first part of this tweet is correct, if someone pedantically so. Ethnicity and religion aren’t identical. But is intolerance for a different religion really so different from intolerance for a different race? Are not both essentially based on fear and dehumanization of Teh Other? But whatever, score him the point. The second part is probably what drew me in. It’s almost hilarious in it’s rush-to-judgement, a too-perfect expression of “RAAAAACISM!” I had to read through the man’s tweets to make sure he wasn’t being ironic.

So I engaged:

This earned me a counter-thrust, complete with ALLCAPS capstone:

Ah. The cri-de-couer of the Reality-Based Community. How authoritative. I probably should have taken my cue and left things be at this point, but somehow, I plunged on, determined to see if I could get past the rhetorical armor:

I thought my hashtag would provoke a different line of attack, but he just doubled-down:

We now have an entirely Manichean worldview: the Land of Reality, and Bizzarro World, presumably filled with Racists. I have been judged and landed in the second place. Which is not really telling me anything new, so at this point, I got bored.

I suppose I had one last hope that my refusal to jump to his bait and moan “But I’m not a racist! Honest-to-gosh! And I don’t live in Bizzarro World either!” would at least give him pause. But @REALBROTHER003 has no truck with my contempt, and returned it full-force:

You have to give the man points for on-message consistency. And since I scored not one but two ALLCAPS explostions, I suppose I was getting under his skin that little bit. At this point that I summoned the interest to discover what TKCAL was all about: it seems to be an anagram for @REALBROTHER003′s name, Theron K. Cal. He’s also an independent filmmaker, with his own IMDB page.

Incidentally, the Urban Dictionary has three definitions for TKCAL, all of them referencing Theron, and none of them complementary (one of them is by “Real Brother’s Worst Nightmare,” which doesn’t sound terribly objective. This was the first link on the Yahoo search engine, as a matter of fact. So I’m guessing he puts that in all his tweets; reclaiming the name and all of that.

Anyway, I sent one more shot across the transom:

And that was that.

It’s not the worst conversation I’ve ever had on Twitter. I once got blocked by someone calling herself “Jezebel” (not @jezebel) because I wouldn’t let her give Bill Maher a pass during the Limbaugh-Fluke kerfuffle without calling her on it. Her tweets were hysterical in every sense of the word, and the block came when I told her that she had no idea how funny she was. @REALBROTHER003 was dignified by comparison.

But still, what a waste of time: a diary of two people not talking to each other. He shouts cliched insults, I sneer and condescend. He makes assumptions about me on nothing, I make assumptions based on little more. And that’s what we had: two assumptions with @-signs blabbing. What did we learn? Nothing, not even about each other.

And this is the media that delivered the last election? That sounds about right.

St. Patrick Knows Us Not.

Posted by

1

I thought I’d poke my head up and remind myself and a few others that I am not, in fact, dead (although signing off with a quotation from the Inferno last week did push the morbidity. It was on my mind). It’s just that time of year, and I’ve just got no time to even think about what I might want to blog about. My headspace is used up.

Nora was a Baby Once from Andrew Patrick on Vimeo.

Downloaded a Vimeo app for my iPad, and noticed it had a video editor function. So I sat around this morning playing with it. Nothing but videos of Darling Daughter from the summertime, when she was just testing the waters of mobility. The song is “Teenager” by a band called Apache Dropout, it was taken from a list of songs Vimeo has available for people to download and use in their videos. I think it’s pretty good, in a mid-60′s early-psychedlic “I’m a Man” kind of way.

Found the app very intuitive; I just tapped around and figured it out. Audio and video tracks synced up easily. One exception: the title cards. For some reason putting text at the end was beyond the capacity of the app to understand. I created a little title card that said “slapped together on my iPad” or some such, and it would let me drag it to about the halfway point, and no farther. And it wasn’t like my fingers simply weren’t gripping the object: it would let me drag it over to the end, and then it would slide back, like I had done something utterly preposterous, like put the title card in the audio track slot. There was no discernible logic to it, which provoked much yelling and the fleeting desire to fling my iPad across the room, as only things with no discernible logic provoke in me. However, I found that if I added more title cards, I could move them. That’s why there’s a ridiculous copyright declaration at the very end (A Giggles Worth Productions does not exist except when I feel like making a video).

I have not pub-crawled on St. Patrick’s Day in years, partially because I’ve had enough years of doing it, and partially because I’ve realized how inane it is. I don’t bounce back from getting ripping drunk like I used to: the recovery that required a ham sandwhich, a glass of milk, and a few episodes of I, Claudius when I was 20 now requires a full day’s nap on the couch mainlining Gatorade and bemoaning my body’s advancing decrepitude. Been there, done that, pitted out the “Kiss Me, I’m Irish” T-shirt to the point where it’s useful only as a paint rag.

Everything about St. Patrick’s Day seems a calculated insult to the entire Irish nation: a people who spent centuries as the bleeding ulcer of the British Empire has their culture reduced to leprechauns, food coloring, and vomit. I’ve got enough Irish in me to qualify for the hyphen, but I’m also carrying Scottish, English, German, Austrian, and the Lord knows what else. The nationalities of Europe matter in Europe; here my diversity of ancestry can be summed up as “white.” Celebrating one part of my heritage with all the intellectual heft of a Lucky Charms box no longer interests me. This is a good day to read Yeats, consider the political intent of the Corn Laws, or savor the taste of some Red Breast on the rocks (preferably all three). It’s not a day to pretend that I’m an uneducated mill worker from Hell’s Kitchen whooping it up and thumbing his nose at the WASPS who grumble at my people’s penchant for spreading Popery and syphilis (just in case you ever wondered why the Parade goes down 5th Avenue). I might as well dress up like a cavalryman and act out Fort Apache in my backyard. It would be as accurate a tribute to my ancestors.

The actual St. Patrick was a heroic figure, an escaped slave and missionary who accomplished what the Roman Empire had never dared: bringing Ireland into the fold of Western Civilization. And he did it with a Book and prayers – the first foreigner the Irish did not send back into the sea and the last one who came without a sword in his hand. He would be utterly flummoxed to see what we do in his name.

I bind unto myself today
The strong Name of the Trinity,
By invocation of the same,
The Three in One and One in Three.

I bind this day to me for ever.
By power of faith, Christ’s incarnation;
His baptism in the Jordan river;
His death on Cross for my salvation;
His bursting from the spicèd tomb;
His riding up the heavenly way;
His coming at the day of doom;
I bind unto myself today….

-The Breastplate of St. Patrick

How the Weather Induced Me to Learn About the Bauhaus Movement

Posted by

0

Having been charged with the sole care of Darling Daughter whilst Wifey is compounding tech week and Opening Night into one day for a one-minute play festival, I resolved to get us both out into the sunshine. Daughter was game, despite describing the environs as “co” (cold) when we finally ventured out. We lasted but a few minutes in that biting wind before I resolved upon a hasty retreat. A few minutes outside is better than none, I suppose.

Safely indoors, I snapped a picture on the iPhone and posted it to the Tumblr:

Modesty demands that I do not speculate on where she got the ability to entertain herself with a book.

And, as I often do when I post something to the Tumblr, I scan back over previous posts to see what I’ve had on my mind of late that I considered worth posting to Tumblr, in the hope that I might figure out why on earth I have a Tumblr. It was pretty much an impulse app download when I got my iPhone, and I mostly use it when I want to express a thought or take a picture and I don’t have my computer handy. A kind of online mental diary, if you will (I think I just figured it out. One less thing on the to-do list).

Anyway, I scanned down and found that I had posted this…

Continue reading →

How Facebook Saved the Superbowl

Posted by

0

Every technological advance contains cost; functionality does not always transfer. Some time over the holidays, after wrestling with Verizon FiOS, I finally pulled the plug on the cable. Verizon still provides my internet and phone, but I watch TV on the Roku box. Between Netflix, Hulu Plus, and Amazon Prime Instant Video, I had everything I needed as far as content for the idiot screen.

Until I had to watch the Super Bowl. The game was on CBS, and live streaming at cbsports.com, but the Roku does not live stream. So that means that I needed to supplement my up-to-the-minute tech with a throwback to my pre-digital youth: a set of rabbit ears for an HDTV.

Remember me? Remember how I required a series of movements and rituals to function properly? Remember how I would stop working anyway? HAHAHAHAHA!

So after church, mother, baby and I rolled into Target, seeking the digital equivalent of the old signal-diviners I used to scan UHF channels back in the 80′s. There are several models, all of which use a coaxial jack, which information prompted an arduous attempt by both of us to remember if our TV even has a coaxial jack. We conclude that it must, because we used to have cable. We then rummage around the store to collect items for our Target co-pay (it is not possible to get out of Target for under $50. That’s what the security guard is really checking for). Since we’re watching the game, we I want football-watching-type food: high-fat, high-calorie, high-chance-of-morning-regret little bits of fried yumminess. Also, some sheets.

And we take all this swag into the house, and we feed the baby, and we the missus futzes with the wall mount to get the coaxial plugged in, and . . . we get FOX. We fart around with the antennae. We get FOX and PBS. We try some more. We get FOX, PBS, and ABC. We give up and watch a few episodes of Parks and Recreation while Nora naps. We try some more. We get nothing. I complain on Facebook:

  Andrew J. Patrick

21 hours ago via mobile
So I buys a digital antenna so’s I can watch the game, having no cable as I do. And we have to futz with the mount on our TV to install it. And we get Fox, UPN, and PBS. Lame.

This prompts my aunt to come to my rescue, as she lives around the corner and has the game on hi-def, big screen. We head on over, pick up the family platter from Famous Daves right before kickoff. The rest, you know.


My favorite commercial.

And then, the lights went out, and for 34 minutes on Facebook, we all became wits:

Even electricity thinks this game is over.

Is FEMA running the super bowl?

Previously on superbowl

If I were in the Superdome right now, I’d be on the lookout for Bane.

Buffalo Wild Wings strikes again

Lots of things in New Orleans are half lit…what’s the big deal?!

Yeah we all needed to lose another 34 minutes of sleep before a Monday morning of work, right?

Some of those are mine, most aren’t. And then there were the visuals:

Needs no explanation, unless you’re an uncultured whippersnapper.

And this social media outlet saved me from having to emit to my host and hostess my usual whine about football commentators being the dumbest form of fauna in our ecosystem.

So when the game started again, I had to say:

I hope the Ravens win, because if the 49ers come back and win after all that, the City of Baltimore will be complaining about it until the end of time.

There are men of a certain age who still remember the Colts sneaking out of the city in the dead of night without warning, and can speak of it only with bitterness. My hope was that the current crop of Ravens fans would be spared that. But as it turns out, the 49ers belonged in the Super Bowl, and my prophecy nearly came true. But only nearly. As it turns out, the Ravens’ defense had just enough backbone to keep Kaepernick et al. from taking the lead. And that may be the first time I’ve ever seen a team deliberately give the other team points.

So what have we learned?

That Facebook Save My Super Bowl twice. Once by allowing me to watch it, and once by giving me something to do when it stopped.

Yes, Your Childlessness is a Valid Choice. Have You Considered Shutting Up About It?

Posted by

12

Dear sweet merciful God, but I am tired of the periodic Rebellion of the Childless. I never failed to find their screeds juvenile, even before I became a father. Now that I am one, I have less time to care. So I’ll take No One of Any Import’s summation of this year’s Barren-and-Loving-It boomlet as accurate, and address these words that follow to no one in particular.

Having kids changes you emotionally, whether you are man or woman. That’s what people mean when they say Kids Change Everything. It’s not just that you have to arrange your day around caring for the infant who becomes the toddler who becomes the grade-school child, etc. It’s that your basic core values are tested and laid bare. I’ll give you an example:

When I was 21, my favorite movie was Trainspotting. I’ve never done heroin, or even wanted to, and I’ve never much cared for the club scene, but there was something brutally truthful in that movie’s worldview that appealed to me:

There’s something there, even now, about the powerful vapidity of pop modernity that strikes me even now, but when I was 21 I watched this movie every chance I could get. It made me a Ewan McGregor fan to the point where I even sat through Velvet Goldmine with my housemates. It brims with contemptuous rage and righteousness, far more of a drug to the young than heroin will ever be. And after wearing out a VHS copy, I asked for and got a Blue-Ray edition for Christmas last year, eight days after my daughter was born. Full of excitement, I popped it in when mother and baby were asleep.

That did not end well.

If you haven’t seen it, there’s a scene in which an infant dies from her junkie parents’ neglect, and the audience is treated to a lingering shot of her cold corpse. When I was 21, this scene testified to the movie’s courageous refusal to flinch from the Truth. It was Cool, because it was Messed Up. Last year, I had to look away. I damn near cried. I cannot even think of it now without horror, not just the oh-that’s-sad, what-song-is-this way, but utter existential dread. Believe it or not, I actually felt sorry for Sick Boy, the baby’s putative father, because he cries at seeing her dead in the crib, and he sinks down deep into villainy thereafter. Now, I feel pity only for the baby, and if Sick Boy were on fire, I would not piss on him to put it out.

I told my wife she is not allowed to watch Trainspotting, and I never intend to watch it again.

Parenthood does that to you. The weltschmerz of our extenuated adolescence becomes instantly pitiable and small when the child of your body, your own flesh and blood, looks up at you with new eyes, confused and curious. I would not trade the joys my daughter has given me for the world. The world could never belong to me anyway.

And that’s the reason I became a father; the realization that the world is not mine, and I cannot, by any act of will, hang on to it, even if I were to conquer it whole. I am just passing through here, womb to tomb. This life of mine, this staggering muddle of impulse and reason, joy and sorrow, was a gift from powers that I do not control or even understand. I cannot claim such a gift; I can only pay it forward.

Now, not everyone is meant for parenthood. Some have different paths. This is not a fault, and we should always be just and charitable towards the lives of others. More to the point, I don’t need to know why someone else is not having kids. It’s not any of my business. If you are satisfied that your decision to remain childless stems from a just diagnosis of your vocation in life, and not merely a self-defeating attempt to cling to your youth, then that’s good enough for me.

But when I read people treating parenthood as an insuperable burden, I take exception, because it is no such thing. It is a joyful burden, a life-affirming pain in the ass.

Having kids is making a decision to live a life with strollers, diaper bags, breast pumps, sleep deprivation, and the withering looks from strangers like me, who wonder why you thought it was a good idea to bring your toddler to a Victorian painting exhibit.

Oh, get the hell over yourself. None of those things last forever. On the second day of my daughter’s life, I thought I would never sleep again. I was wrong. They sleep through the night eventually. No, really, they do. They eventually learn to walk, diminishing the need for a stroller. They learn to use toilets, sparing the diaper bag. The breast pumps vanish soon after the teeth appear. Crying can be soothed, naps can be regimented, and poop washes off (it’s just poop, not nuclear waste).

As to the withering looks when some filthy breeder invades your clubhouse with her spawn, somebody’s going to have to expose the young to Victorian painting, or any kind of painting, if it’s going to survive. The alternative is Idiocracy, which I assume you’re helping to prevent in some other way. If you can’t be bothered to create the next generation of artists, thinkers, scholars (or the people who, at the very least, will be paying your Social Security), you can at least spare some that precious, self-satisfied disdain towards those of us who are.

I don’t think I can quite quantify how irretrievably immature some people sound when they try to justify their life choices to others. This spastic fear of the unremarkable (Strollers and Diapers and Breast-Pumps, oh my!) fairly screams “But I wanna go to the PAAARTYYYY!” to my ears. And no doubt, the return volleys of We Offended Parents will inevitably sound to them like the Cold Voice of Authority, bellowing “Thou Shalt Do Thy Fruitful Duty! Physical Exhaustion Builds Character!” So probably, I should keep my word and not make such judgements.

Remaining childless is a choice, with costs and benefits. If you are willing to pay the costs, and the benefits make you happy, then huzzah for you. Grant me the same, and we have a society fairly bursting with pluralism and tolerance, wherein you can pursue new dreams and I can make new people, who in 20 years or so can help them come true.

Exciting Toys and Tumblr Follies

Posted by

0

A new man for a new year.

My Birthday came and went, as birthdays are wont to do. My most exciting gift I expected least; a shiny new iPhone 4. Why the 4? Because it was free with my Verizon upgrade. And when the 6 comes out, maybe I’ll get the 5. I am well content to follow in the slipstream of the early adopters (aka My Personal Beta-Testing Team).

Beyond that, I got a tie, a bottle of expensive bourbon, and an afternoon off to check out the new hole-in-the-wall record store in Bel Air, Coda Records. It’s a tiny basement shop below the Bail Bonds on Main Street, and perfect for fans of that aesthetic. I was all set to buy Bitches Brew and the first Dead Boys Album (yes, there was a second Dead Boys album), when I caught this in the New Releases pile:

We come in peace.

That’s the new Brian Jonestown Massacre release, Aufheben, which I have not yet had a chance to listen to, due to thanksgiving, baby care, and whatnot. Been a big fan of My Bloody Underground, looking for an opportunity to listen to it on headphones, mayhaps with a small glass of expensive bourbon. While wearing my new tie. Around my head.

If I like it, I’ll be forced to add it to my short list of Double Albums that are Not Wretchedly Self-Indulgent Messes. So far, the White Album, Exile on Main Street, and The Wall are the only residents. In any case, I got it for less than it currently costs on Amazon. Small Store Justified!

Now the best part of getting a smart phone or tablet is loading it with apps. For reasons which were remarkably clear a few hours ago, I downloaded Tumblr, and set up the blog. I had thought, for some reason, that posting pics and video to Tumblr would make it easier to post and share to other places, but apparently not. So in all likelihood this will vanish shortly, unless I can figure out what James Lileks does with his.

Enjoy the shopping weekend.