a month left here at the company and today something happened that drives me bananas. during a company meeting some recent quarterly numbers were given out, revenue, costs etc., and "we" gave a round of applause to marketing (what is left of marketing since the thinning out) for spending less money while we earned comparitively more money than "before". this same announcement came at a quarterly results meeting 1/2 a year + ago; hurray, we trimmed the fat and got more for our dollar!

of course creative is much more difficult for the spreadsheet crew to quantify, but just like the first time i heard this logic i thought, "they are being congratulated for NOTdoing stupid stuff??" wtf. and then it happens again today!!
i have no beef with marketing as an idea, but you can't throw a rock without hitting ridiculous, stupid, unimaginative or condescending "ideas" by bean-counting excel jockeys. i'm very tired of being insulted by junk like this. why not avoid the waste in the first place??

so tonight i'm digging through a paper nytimes from the 19th of march when i come upon an article on the new "station wagons" that have appeared at recent auto shows. reactions from a fear that the SUV market is running out of gas, these new wagons are all hybrid'ed out - not quite a car, not quite a minivan, not really an SUV, but rated like a light truck, maybe having two rows of "captain's chairs" and then a bench seat. with the article is an image of chrysler's pacifica and the caption reads: "a concept version of the chrysler pacifica, which has the looks of a station wagon, power of a small S.U.V. and the comforts of a luxury sedan."

(note the description that sounds exactly like the way most music is casually descibed today. must be something to do with products, is there simply NO WAY to describe anything anymore except as a list of references/ingredients?)

so within the article i get these gems:

" 'Station wagon' has a negative connotation," said Christopher Cedergren, an industry analyst with Nextrend Inc. of Thousand Oaks...DaimlerChrysler has called them 'sport tourers.' They are also being called "tall wagons," "luxury crossover vehicles," "sport utility wagons," or "sport wagons."

wait, what did you just say?

"We refer to this as a luxury crossover," said Kelly Cusinato, a spokeswoman for Cadillac. "It's not a wagon." Ford is developing its own entry, tentatively called the Crosstrainer, after the athletic shoe - "running shoes that do more than one job for multiple purposes," said Dan Bedore, a Ford spokesman, The company is trying to convey that the Crosstrainer is more versitle than, say, the Taurus station wagon. "It's for those people who are sedan or wagon people and not interested in, or ready to plunge into, the full-blown S.U.V.," Mr. Bedore added, "It does it all in a more fuel-efficient package."

i hope to Odin they call it the crosstrainer. stupid bean-counters.

good bean counters? yes, got my taxes done today. dude crunched the numbers, e-filed, the paperwerk is already boxed up in the garage.

sheesh. tracy emin puts up 'lost cat' posters and they get ganked as artwork/investments. d.'s crew. (via boingboing)

yet another example of natural selection, here. (via obscurestore)

i don't give an f, some of these u2 songs are good.

also on the staalplatten tonight: dylan's 'slow train coming', beach boys box, jeff beck group 'truth' and van halen's 'diver down'

webcam. am looking forward to a trip to louisville (weather lookin' bleak - thanks j.) at the end of next month so i occasionally look at webcams of the center of the universe hoping that the weather is warming up, it ain't.
i did happen to find some other webcams though, here is one looking at the mount wilson observatory which looks down upon me sitting here at the shop in pasadena. beautiful.

congratulations to dusty and "chuck"! this pic is disappearing from yahoo!'s entertainment pics a little too quickly for my taste. if it ain't of cute animals, tech, war gear, something gross or chicks, the geeks that send pics and thus generate the 'most popular' pics, couldn't care less. feh.


click
ZZ Tops Dusty Hill, right, is shown with his new bride, the former Charleen "Chuck" McCrory, following their marriage ceremony on March 23, 2002, in Houston. The couple plan to honeymoon in New York City. (AP Photo/ZZ Top, Richard Carson)

just added a link to the left; a song for you. i don't think i have tons of space available via pacbell, so i'll post one mp3 at a time. will try to change it out, and let you know when i do. no promises.

so this first one is "Busy Doin' Nuthin' " by brian wilson. its from the record 'friends' and was recorded in 1968.

"Ron Howard is a completely adequate and, I feel, aggressively nongenius director. His choices are deeply, unapologetically pedestrian. He possesses lots of clunky homegrown skill and absolutely no lightning bolts of wild inspiration, which is why that script was a brilliant choice for him; John Nash (and, by extension, Russell Crowe) makes up for all the primal soul-fire Ron Howard, kindly proto-honky, utterly lacks. "A Beautiful Mind" was a Good Film. Not a brilliant film. If Peter Jackson had directed it, it might have been a revelation.

But Ronnie is nothing if not the original Company Boy. He has been tenured into the marrow of the system; he is Hollywood's dearest, most faithful mediocre son, and last night they gave him the party they've been tacitly promising him since 1978.

So that was it. The Hobbits and the Africans were simultaneously lauded and robbed, and the Academy tried to hypnotize us into passive acceptance by acting earthy. They seemed to be saying: See? We're just regular folks.

Yeah, they're regular all right, those famous multimillionaires who never go to the post office or the DMV or sort receipts for taxes or fly coach or pay to see movies or get older or worry about the rent or medical insurance or college tuitions. They're just like you and me, only with fucking everything, and they don't want us around while they're having it, but we're allowed to watch them have it, once a year, on TV. So we'd better enjoy it. Or they'll sic Tom Cruise on us again, and, God, we don't want that." from salon.

seeing as how the weekend started off with a delivery from Drawn & Quarterly, here is a little heartwarmer via the obscurestore.

“He said he wanted to blow up the place or burn it down,” McPartland said. “If he couldn’t have his comic books, nobody could.”

on a much calmer note, my copies of 'louis riel', 'optic nerve' and 'berlin' (where can i find the second ish??) arrived safely and were read in the park during a saturday picnic.

you. thanks to mike.

hah! picked up this blog that was "of note" over on blogger - a nice entry on a visit to disneyworld - yuk, no thanks. good pics of plenty of heavy white people. i appreciate the added salt:

"In the meantime, I paid $3.25 for this massive hot dog that was as big (and tasteless) as my forearm. In a marketing screwup, the Toonland Hotdog girl doesn't sell beverages. For that, you're supposed to wait on another line. Fuck that. I did without a $2.25 can of soda."

spending a bit of today listening to the 'special bonus disc' included in the beach boys 'good vibrations' boxed set that arrived yesterday. (impending layoffs nonetheless, i think this will be my last ebay purchase for a while - i never think of the questions to ask and this last time, when the money charged for postage was actually used on sending the product, and it was well wrapped and was indeed new, it turns out that the product is a record club edition! the collector in me cringes. others say, 'the contents are the same no?' and of course they are right...but again, there is, more often than not, SOMETHING i'm not quite happy with with my purchases - i guess i just wasn't made for ebay.)

for someone who spends so much time reading interviews and background info on my favorite artists, i love this peek into the studio disc. are the songs better, no, but its interesting to me to get some kind of idea about the work that goes into creating something like 'good vibrations' as all i have ever seen is a black plastic platter. *poof* there it is.

that said,

at the same time i'm suspicious of the 'behind the music'-ness, that records, and i think i'm talking about new, single records here, have to be constantly contextualized. its bad enough that no one can even describe a record without comparing them to several other artists. then again, i can't tell you how much i'd love to see the mr. roboto segments of the styx 'behind the music'.

but the boxed set seems like the perfect place for just that, lay some stuff out for context - its kinda like a monograph. plus, disc club or no (grrr) cd's are perfect for storing a pant-load of info, and here is a good long review of the dang thing.

yer crew. sent in by gabe.

interview with gary gygax! ------------------>click. (via slashdot)

been html-guide-booking my way through cleaning up the pics from vegas. actually to make a picture section more scaleable, actually, scaleable at all.

from the central valley? well, nosefinger is playing tonight at the roxy, 8:30. get out of the house and let me know if it was a good show. my friend hE. may be there, can't remember if he was planning on attending this local show or the one up at pizzaland.

men's room dj this morning: xtc's 'generals and majors' :

Generals and Majors ah ah
they're never too far
from battlefields so glorious
out in a world of their own
They'll never come down
till once again victorious

Generals and Majors always
seem so unhappy 'less they got a war

Generals and Majors ah ah
like never before are tired of being actionless.

Calling
Generals and Majors everywhere
Calling
your World War III is drawing near

Generals and Majors ah ah
They're never too far
away from men who made the grade
out in a world of their own
They'll never come down
until the battle's lost or made

Generals and Majors ah ah
like never before, are tired of being in the shade.

i think i'm gonna listen to that ware interview again because i don't think it was very satisfying.

yesterday evening i was still feeling kinda low but my new Acme Novelty Library arrived in the mail. after dinner out and shagging a few golf balls down at the local par-3, i settled back for some reading.
i don't recall hearing anything about how bleak his stories are; interviewers ask about him, his upbringing, the drawing style, influences and he plays pretty much everything down, but jesus, the stories are ruthless.

f.


lost the first post.
nice.

here is a link to a d. clowes article at salon and jason kottke has a link to a chris ware audio interview.
i feel cheated out of time as this weekends beautiful dinner turned to disaster hours later - thank you food poisoning.

always good to have a few days of laying around feeling stretched, ached and irritable, either wanting people to go away or chasing them away with stupid attitude.
how i spent my day? cheating during an AIM game of 'name those lyrics'.

jerk.

streaming prog! this brought to attention by r. thank you!

apparently the fools in florida have allowed the dude to keep his plate, dig it. i'm just passing on news from the obscurestore, but i like to think that when this kind of wak reaches people all over the country (world?), via the international network, that the morons end up hearing about it, calls to the office, emails and whatnot, more than they would if the local paper was not inter-webed.

i heard on the aim's that the mayor in po-dunk florida ('natch) that banned satan gets phone calls all day long asking if satan is there. bust.

g. is back in town with her man from sveirge! i need to mess with the layout of this page a bit and its tgiF.

jumpin' jesus. i was gettin' so impatient with the blogger site...having trouble posting throughout the day and after a while i start wondering if it is just MY computer because the 'most recently updated blogs' keep changing. whatevs. not complaing, just hooked i guess. also i wanted to post the link in the previous.

a few days ago i started reading some of the articles in Salon about how FM radio, specifically Clear Channel, is run these days. i found out about these articles from dogdson's site (thank you) and as i've been reading i've thought a little about some of the songs i miss hearing on the radio. it seems to me that when i was younger i'd hear all kinds of goofball semi-proggy rock on the radio, or on mtv or whatnot, songs that have now pretty much dissappeared since there is no money to made with 'em i reckon. but i think songs like 'children of the sun' are the kind of whacked out stuff that just gets excluded from 'classic rock'. stupid.

a few friends of mine and i would play records for each other, and i was often the one bringing the occasional low-brow 'rockers' to the mix, sometimes with mind-blowing timing! examples being zebra's 'whose behind the door' and 'odyssey' from kiss' 'music from 'the elder'' (quoted enough?).

anyway. there is the billy thorpe song. bust it.

also: f florida. via obscurestore. is it just a bais with the site, or is there constantly mindless redneck crap coming from that place, or both? oh yeah, almost forgot about this part. more florida mouth-breathing.

finally! this one is for pete and hack but you can d/l it too.

whoa, there's a new supergroup in town. also, was wondering what ever happened to Terminator X, so there is this from the official P.E. page, and then there was another link/bio that mentioned he broke both his legs in a motorcycle misshap right before his second album came out. poor bastard. i like the part about the ostrich farm.

why not a slipknot/p.e. double-bill? hell, i'd go.

brought to attention: oolong.

waiting for a job to end is brutal werk; energy draining, stale office environment, lack of enthusiasm, it is all here.
so last night some of us met at lucky's for a few drinks to combat. a special thank you to my good friends at Sentrall, a record label based in L.A., for the wonderful single. i must note that the vinyl is nice and heavy, not 180 gram, but no cheap chit.

so we had some drinks and some food and then i decided to walk home. a mere three miles but i've never done it before. i had taken the wheels into the shop to have the 'front-end' done, so it was either walk or catch a ride; seemed like time to walk.

it was a beautiful night, yet another reminder of how much i love it here. in addition to this, walking let's you in on all the stuff around you can't see when yer wrasslin' an old car down the road. various bets were made but g. won, being the closest at 55 minutes when the total time was 52. congrats.

here is something to bust.

so i wrote to tony millionaire and was very suprised to get a response, not only that, but within the same day. folks tell me that he lives out here, over in silverlake or so. here is a page with a few interviews and reviews and what not of his werk.

downtown l.a. raining eve.

the creator of Maakies, which runs locally in the LA Weekly has a comic book as well, Sock Monkey. There is artwork for sale on his website, which in addition lets you read a few of the issues that i've been unable to find by themselves or bound in a collection. the story about the baby bird worked my mellon, so i sent him some fan mail.
i spent a chunk of the weekend working for s. as an extra pair of hands/truck driver on a shoot - when the film gets developed i'll have some pics from 33 floors above LA. bought more comic books and then ordered still more.

still waiting for the shop to close up. other than that, this morning is another beautiful one and the car is in the shop gettin' its front-end peeped.

brought to attention: the hal transcripts

whoa. here's an interesting page on color blindness and how it relates to interweb-page design; pick text color and diagnosis and pow.

on a slippery slope right next to a money pit these days in that i've become re-acquainted with comix again. chattin' with a few friends leads me to believe that i'm a day late and a dollar short on some of these authors, meaning they've blown up already. drawn and quarterly has adrian tomine and chester brown and jason lutes while fantagraphics has dan clowes and los bros hernandez. not sure what brought this revisitation on; could be the fact that i'm just not sold on the dk2 mini-series. the first time around it got me reading all kinds of titles when i was in undergrad - the first love & rockets, flaming carrot among others. perhaps that is what it is best at doing!

i do know that s. and i went out for zankou chicken and there was a comix shop right next door so we stopped in to take a peak and i stumbled onto lutes 'berlin' series. lord knows i'll take a look at anything berlin. 'nuff said. this weekend will bring a trip to Meltdown in hollywood, recommended over golden apple.

las vegas. here are some pics from a recent trip. a crew of fools from ye olde citysearche scrambled a trip together. we stayed at squeezer's palace which was fine since we got the hook. i think i've had enough of the strip for now. the next time 'round i'll prob'ly stay downtown at the gold nugget or whatnot, binion's western wear, i don't care. two other friends, e. and j. were fortunate enough to stay out of the way of the lomo.

hello, installing blogger today. reckon it'll be a while before this page looks like 'maybe there's something interesting to be found.'
links would help, maybe some music. perhaps if i got out of the house...