Götterdämmerung

So, on my way home from the pathetic (SERIOUSLYGUYZ) Blazer's loss, my boy and I took the Green line home. Except...it broke. It had a door failure 3 stops after we got on. Of course it took 15 minutes of sitting there to let us know that too. Thanks Tri-Met, glad our new trains are so reliable :)

Hey kiddies! We're having another British TeeVee Night at the Low Brow Lounge in Old Town.

1036 NW Hoyt, just up the street from Powell's and accessible by Streetcar, so you PSU drunks and can come out, too.

Tues Jan 12th, 6pm til 9:30ish. It's a Happy Hour event, so load up on the cheap drinks whilst ye may.

We'll be showing at least Part 1 of the last David Tennant Doctor Who story, 'The End of Time', along with our usual mix of funny bits and intergalactic stomping about. Might show Part 2 as well if we get enough votes for it.

If you have anything you'd like to show, burn it to dvdr and bring it. The event is free and open to all. Bring your friends, roommates, cute indie chick cousin, etc.

Free raffle prizes, too.

FB event link

Award winning war correspondent Michael Yon was detained and handcuffed at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport Yesterday by Transportation Security Administration (TSA) personnel.

Yon was returning to the United States from Hong Kong to visit family when TSA officials stopped him during a routine security checkpoint. “Officials asked me what was in my bag—nothing wrong with this question,” Yon said in an interview with BigGovernment.com. “I told them it was normal stuff, clothes and toothbrushes.”

At this point the TSA officials escorted Yon to a designated screening area where they examined the contents of his bag. “Then they asked me how much money I make,” Yon said. Yon suggested to the TSA officials that the question was inappropriate and unrelated to transportation security. The award-winning blogger noted another TSA officer approached Yon: “he asked who do I work for.” ”I did not answer the question which clearly was upsetting to the TSA officers.”

Yon was escorted to a room elsewhere in the airport where he said he remained silent during much of the questioning. According to Yon, “they handcuffed me for failing to cooperate. They said I was impeding their ability to do their job.”

Making porn for profit. Let's talk about it.

How does anyone make money when it seems almost impossible that material wouldn't be leaked and easily available for free? If it wasn't free, there's so much free stuff out there that why would someone bother subscribing to some site? Is the solution partnering with a place like xtube? With free content alongside snippets of stuff you can buy cheap and single-serving?

I imagine even then, that there's a go-between service. In fact I'm fairly certain there is, just given the names and styles of the various pay stuff on that site in particular.

Anyhow, share your thoughts/experience with the labrynth that is the business side of internet porn.

I'm doing a little roundup of print-and-paper today, because it's something I'm fond of, in a retro-sentimental sort of way. I'm particularly interested in print's Unique Sales Proposition in the digital age; what it has to offer post-internet, or alongside-but-distinct-from-internet... if anything? When I "make myself scarce" by ending this blog on February 10th 2010, for instance, will I "graduate" from free to paid, purchasable, print-only writing?



That's what Momo Nonaka (right, above) seems to have done. Momo is an old friend, and from the 90s to the mid-noughties her blog Tigerlily made her one of Japan's best-known culture-bloggers. Now Momo is concentrating on print, and specifically zines. Tigerlily has become a paper magazine called Lilimag. Momo is using the internet to distribute , and blog about distributing, her mags, but the products themselves are made of pure post-internet paper.

My alongside-internet, print-only novel The Book of Jokes gets an interesting review in the January edition of American literary review The Believer. Although The Believer is primarily a print publication, you can read Justin Taylor's review online. The reviews editor has tried an interesting "read-without-prejudice" experiment, sending Taylor my book without its cover or title pages, its spine blacked-out with a sharpie, and a ban on all googling. The result is a review I'm tempted to call "disorienteered", but also a satisfyingly context-free take on a wedge of paper, which is what a book finally is. This review doesn't rewrite the press release, but simply lets the unfolding text lead the reviewer through revulsion, amusement, disorientation, and trains of personal association. It's something I tried myself recently when I wrote a Playground column describing step-by-step my real-time discovery of a band called Hecuba. Taylor links my Book of Jokes to Lynne Tillman, a writer I met a couple of times in London in the 80s, via mutual friends, and who's apparently also written a book based on jokes (1999's No Lease on Life).

Turning to newspapers, the Israeli daily Haaretz mentions me today. Swiss "pop literature" writer Christian Kracht, in an interview with the paper, quotes the whole lyric to my song Germania, which, as I recall, was an attempt to channel a Germanic sensibility I'd found in art by Anselm Kiefer and Joseph Beuys, and imagery from the poems of Paul Celan and Rainer Maria Rilke. Kracht is one of my most important print mentors -- he published my debut short story 7 Lies About Holger Hiller in literary review Der Freud in 2004, and he's the executive editor of the German edition of The Book of Jokes, which will appear this autumn on the Blumenbar / Buenos Aires imprint. More paper!

There's less paper in the world thanks to the official closure last month of ID magazine, the American design magazine to which I contributed regularly. I even managed to get a young Norwegian graphic design collective called Yokoland onto the cover. ID was great to write for, because they paid a dollar a word. This time last year I managed to live for about three months on their fees for three or four easy-to-write articles. The magazine's closure seems to reflect the axiom that anything the internet can do better than print, it will do better than print. Designers are well-served now by design blogs, which they expect to read free online.



Japanese magazines are still my favourite form of print (and since I can't read them, that must mean that print has some sort of talismanic-fetishistic quality for me). In the photo above (Tsutaya's "recommended titles" shelf) you can see the camera jyoshi mags called Phat and Snap. A camera jyoshi is a young woman who's obsessed with cameras and photography. She's about 22, possibly an art student. She usually has an elegant retro model of camera (she prefers film to digital) which may or may not be covered with stickers (as Ume Kayo's is). The only thing she likes more than photography is sitting in old cafes eating the tasty lunch set and leafing through old magazines, or traveling in other Asian countries. Hisae -- essentially a camera jyoshi herself (her photos grace the current edition of Apartamento magazine) -- flipped enviously through Phat and Snap and told me that there weren't all these titles for camera jyoshis when she was in her early 20s. Magazines must be doing something right if they're diversifying titles about obscure dead-tech hobbies.

I showed Maggie from street fashion / interview blog Broad&Market a Japanese mag called Tokyo Graffiti, and we both went into raptures over its current edition. "This is the perfect magazine for me," said Maggie, leafing through pages showing people stopped on the street to talk about what they're wearing, or holding up Gillian-Wearingesque signs stating their worries about the world, or sitting in their bedrooms describing their decoration preferences. Tokyo Graffiti -- which features almost no advertising, though it may be doing some subtle product placement, for all I know -- is the ultimate vox pop magazine, and so far no blog can provide enough research, content, context and detail to endanger it. But after flipping through the whole of Tokyo Graffiti in the act of intellectual shoplifting called tachiyomi ("standing and reading"), Maggie and I -- blogger pirates both -- replaced the mag on the recommended shelf unbought, took a snap of the cover, and resolved to blog about it. Paper is doomed.

( Need help finding a home for this pup (temp/foster)...Thanks for looking!! )

Um yes please? Thanks America finally!

Hey DeePs! The annual Adidas Shamrock Run/Walk is on Sunday, March 14th this year and sign-ups are now open. The reg fee is $30 and you get a t-shirt....but I have registered a "large team" this year, which gets you a discounted reg fee of $25.

You can register for any event you like (5, 8 or 15k or 3.5 mile walk), so don't worry, you don't have to hang out with me or the other team members (unless you want to!). You also get to skip heading to Adidas to pick up your bib/shirt/race chip or waiting in line on race morning...instead you get them from me!

If you are interested, you can e-mail me at trente33trois at gmail dot com (I promise not to send you sparkly, patriotic e-mail forwards or porn) or at our Facebook group. See there really is a FB group for everything these days!

http://www.shamrockrunportland.com/

I have no kids nor a need to baby proof my house, but my friend asked on FB if anyone knew how to baby-proof door handles(not door knobs) and specifically without using those plastic things they sell for door handles. She apparently has tried them and hates them. and  all her doors have handles not knobs....It just got me wondering how would you baby proof those? Obviously you could put a latch on one side of the door high up...but that can be troublesome. So DP.... did you every baby proof door handles? how did you do it? or did you say f-it I survived with out any baby proofing so will my kid?

The best possible thing just happened.

We had a breakup music post earlier. Now let's talk wedding music. Reply to this post with (1) the most obnoxiously cliché wedding reception song you can think of and (2) the most hilariously awesome song you've never heard at a wedding reception. I'll start!

1. "Butterfly Kisses" by Bob Carlisle. Really. I have never heard this song while NOT at a wedding. In case you need to hear it:



2. "What's It Gonna Be?" by Mike O'Connell with dr ken. Why aren't there more funny songs of the internet at weddings?

Can't get the embed to work ...

but here's a story and video showing some dude being flying-kicked into the path of the train.

Does anyone know where to find Mary Jane's Relaxing Soda in Portland?

bjenright and I were out walking the mean streets last night and took a few photos. Enjoy if you're into that sorta thing.
( photos within )

Mother of nine sterilized without consent.

love ya, babe.

Freaking Penguin Windows scammonsters came and banged on my door at 8 o'clock last night and then magically managed to come back JUST AT NAPTIME today. I called up Heather in marketing (for real, their marketing person is for real named Heather) at the corporate office and yelled at her but since they're a BIG SCAM I can't imagine they care. I wish they were illegal enough to call the cops. I dunno, coming by twice in less than 24 hours is harassish. And the cops around here have nooooothing to do, it would be nice of me to give them something to occupy themselves.