Another journal

Sometimes, when I’m drinking or just being a jackass, I tell people “I gave the American steampunks* the monoggle.” Which isn’t necessarily true, though it’s probably at least a little bit close to what is truth (there were fancy-ass ones being made in Europe, that stupid word wasn’t being used so much though the design was, etc.).

A lot of cameras go through our house and not all of them leave. I really like taking things apart and how lenses work fascinate me.

I would use cold connections to make ridiculous eye wear out of bits of lens and camera that I’d reclaimed after hours of patiently taking apart something. So many broken twin lens reflexes have been dismantled by my hands.

Then one day I used papier mâché to make an eye cup, for some damned reason used “steampunk” as a tag and then the internet shat itself into my Flickr.

So I made a DIY.

Mind you, some nice things happened and I made some nice friends and got to write a mostly-ignored-but-enjoyed-by-people-I-like article about the use of papier mâché in the Victorian era for SteamPunk magazine.

But pretty much the whole thing (and the steampunks) were sort of a boner killer for the optics and lens stuff I’d been playing with. Which sucked because I loved doing it, but doing it made me feel kind of gross. I’d told myself something along the lines of “when people stop giving a shit about it, I’ll go back to it.”

I think it’s been long enough. So September’s focus month is optics and I’ve already got started and it’s funny how much I’d missed it. Useless things to put on your eyeballs, guyz. Pretty fucking fun to make.  Aiming for four finished pieces by the end of the month. We’ll see how it goes.

*There’s the folk who follow/do SteamPunk and there’s the steampunks. So.

Mirrored from Journal of a Something or Other.

I’ve been doing stuff and things, but it is far more important for you to hear this insane message left on our answering machine:

It’s from some sort of hell

We get faxes to our phone a lot (we’ve a landline) but this is beyond that.

Mirrored from Journal of a Something or Other.

And, as power surged to the stage from black-clad hears, we knew that truly, God Hates Us All.

When you live in the rural suburbs, music is your idol. You sift through the detritus of junk shops masquerading as antique stores for records, paw through clattering suitcases of cassettes from when your parents were young and cool, saving up for trips into the city to buy new music—fingers crossed at a place that isn’t scared of “explicit lyrics or content”.

The internet makes it easier. It’s all there, without waiting for your older brother to discover grunge, or a stray chance introducing you to an album that blows your former Sousa-loving mind. But the internet doesn’t bring concerts to the middle of fucking nowhere. You still have to go to the city for that.

When Slayer and Megadeth were booked at the Washington County Fairgrounds, well outside the teeming urban environs of the city, it was like a gift directly from the gods of metal to the scattered farming and bedroom communities on the western rim of the Portland Metropolitan area. Where thunder eggs and amber had dully gleamed just weeks before at the annual gem show, perfected screams would vibrate the air.

The primary paper for these far edges of Washington County, the Forest Grove News Times, was ready to herald the event as “Slayborday Weekend”, a refreshing change from the rote new-school-year staples and heart-warming, if repetitive, events that make up the bulk of rural suburban news. They secured their press passes and entry to what was, frankly, one of the awesomest events to hit the area for years.

But the News Times, one of (if not the) best performing papers in the community newspapers group that includes the Portland Tribune, didn’t reckon on one thing. It turns out that at a second glance their coverage was considered absolutely not worthy of consideration by Mike Thrasher, the man who is presenting Slayer and Megadeath to the Washington County Fairgrounds and who, apparently, gave out too many press passes.

In the face of this overwhelming quagmire, the day before the show Thrasher revoked the two passes given to the Forest Grove News Times. After extensive emailing by the News Times’ photo editor, who’d been looking forward to shooting the show, Thrasher relented to issuing press credentials—but not the passes. If they wanted to cover the biggest show in their county, the News Times would have to purchase their own tickets to get in. In short, Thrasher was cool with the event being covered, but he wanted to make more money, too.

The photo editor’s off-record reply is unpublishable.

Whatever Thrasher’s reasons for cock-blocking the Forest Grove News Times from covering the event, the end result is a hole in next week’s paper, both design-wise and in information. As great as the free alt weeklies in Portland are, they are not necessarily where the board members of the fairgrounds get their news. If a fantastic chance like this concert comes up again, there will be only the most basic paragraph—if that—detailing how Thrasher’s Slayer concert was received. The News Times could dig into their empty pockets to scrape up the money for last minute tickets, but it would be giving publicity and promotion to a man who has proved himself to be unworthy of basic consideration.

Disclosure: I was set to go as the writer for the News Times, to work up an extended caption/mini story to accompany Chase’s pictures. I’m really fucking pissed.

Mirrored from Journal of a Something or Other.

Mirrored from Journal of a Something or Other.

The VS Miraculous™ Push-up, blogged here.

The state of the periodical archives in a five year old, 50 million dollar university library.

Mirrored from Journal of a Something or Other.

I really need to learn to stop telling people that I’m Palestinian. It invariably creates questions and conversations at times when I’d much rather just be reading while waiting for the bus or train. Do real Jewish people get asked by strangers with unsettling regularity for confirmation of their stereotypical genetic markers?

I have never had someone react quite the way a woman at my morning bus stop did last Monday, however. Here, let me set it up:

Every workday I walk from home in the old residential area of town to one our more ridiculous bus stops. Situated in front of a Plaid Pantry, the area’s answer to the 7-11, this stop sees the passage of innumerable drunks, commuting children, people getting off graveyard shifts and so on. There’s a coffee kiosk behind it, run by Wayne, one of the more endearing Canadian-Americans I know. He’ll be putting out a-board signs with the day’s specials as I walk up, or shortly after, and we always wish each other good morning. I meander a couple of yards past the bus shelter so I can finish my cigarette and start in on the day’s read while keeping a clear view of the road through the cherry trees.

It’s nice. It is routine. I won’t be home for another ten or eleven hours and I like my handful of minutes sitting there, enjoying the morning. I will give people cigarettes and lights and talk about the weather with Wayne, but I fiercely treasure those moments of quiet where it is just me and my book and a raucous group of birds across the street.

But Monday. Monday when I walk up to the stop I hear Wayne interacting with an overly cheerful lady. Being a crazy ray of sunshine himself he barely falters as she learns his northern origins and shouts “God Bless Canada!”

I start in on my book, the back of my neck tracking the cheerful woman’s movements. When you are antisocial, talkative people inspire cold-war levels of paranoia and preparation against learning far too many facts about their pets and their children and their Jesus. I believe I flinched when she called “Morning!” from the shelter of one of the town’s monstrous sequoias. Assuming that I was not her intended target, since I was clearly reading, I ignored her. Totally in vain. “Morning!” she called again.

Against every inner will, politeness took over and I turned, painfully, to regard her. I gave her a “Good morning,” and returned to my book. Taking my words as an invitation to make friends, the woman wandered over to where I sat and began talking at me. I tried my best to look very interested in my book, eyes returning to the page during every pause in her rambling speech.

I couldn’t really tell if she was intoxicated or naturally unaware of social signals. She was engulfed in a red sweatshirt, her hair looking like it had been done the morning before and not touched since, half-matted and the straw blonde of a woman in her forties still trying to overcome mousey brown at home. There was a feather stuck at a wilting angle in her hair, which clashed a little with the crushed orange plastic lei.

When she asked me about the book I was reading I told her it was science fiction. This launched a weird anecdote on her part about Scientology and some gathering in the city her nine year-old daughter had seen. “And she told me she liked what they were talking about, and here’s this little girl who doesn’t know anything and what does that show us?”

A handful of completely inappropriate answers ran through my brain, but I just shrugged. She became more animated.

“It shows that we should be able to pick whatever we want to believe in and nobody should be able to stop us.” Which, okay, I totally agree, but it didn’t really parse in context. Her small comments and conversation continued, to my dismay, hitting on several themes before she asked my name.

“Oh, that is a lovely name,” her level of sincerity was absolute and I wondered what the rest of her hair was doing, since only half of it looked to be in the braid. “It’s from?”

“It’s Irish.” I smiled with my eyes and tried to go back to my book. But she had to tell me how nice it was, the name and so on. Somewhere in there I told her I was a warehouse manager and her soliloquies became tinged with feminism, since I guess that is a job I had to wrest from the hands of some guy.

“So you’re Irish and—what else? You look Jewish.”

I sighed. “I’m Palestinian.” Which is a heavy simplification, but honestly—when you’re evenly mixed ethnically and culturally, it’s easier to just pick what people think you look like. And telling people I’m a kind of Arab tends to make them leave me alone, which was rather not so in this case.

I’d barely finished the last syllable when her eyes welled up, pooling above expertly applied black liner. Her face contorted with pain and I felt myself on the edge of utter confusion.

Mirrored from Journal of a Something or Other.