Fungible Convictions

Favorite images

The wedding gets top billing of course. Lindsay and I still have to go through all our photos to choose prints, but this is still my A+ #1 favorite, the Nuptial Terrorist Fist Jab:

A close second was a photo from my final chemo session back in January:

The most emotional image of the year came from election night. Not Palin in front of slaughtered turkeys, not Jeremiah Wright at the lectern, not even Obama’s speeches—the image of a weeping Jesse Jackson will be my visual definition of the 2008 election:

Immediately after the election, there was a flood of photographs uploaded to the “Message for Obama” pool. This was tops:

Favorite songs (maybe only one or two actually written and released in 2008):

• “Book of Love” by the Magnetic Fields. Lindsay’s and my first dance.
• “The Well Below the Valley” and “Sí Bheag Sí Mhór” by Planxty. Both still haunting.
• “Wonder Worm” by Captain Sky. “Unidentified craaaaawling object!”
• “Young Folks” by Peter Bjorn and John. Tops from my drives to and from Tufts while listening to WERS.
• “Where Is My Love” by Lucinda Williams. One of the top five songwriters working today.
• “Cayman Islands” by Kings of Convenience. Must have felt amazing for them hearing the recorded version the first time. Just a lovely song.
• Anything by the Rev. J. M. Gates from the Anthology of American Folk Music
• “Terraplane Blues” by Robert Johnson. Oldest favorite.
• “Freddie’s Dead” by Curtis Mayfield. A superb song from Superfly, largely lost to history except that it was covered by, of all groups, the Derek Trucks Band.
• “II B.S.” by Charles Mingus. A favorite song every year until I die.

Favorite books:

1. Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
2. The Best American Comics 2008
3. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
4. Reading Comics by Douglas Wolk
5. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely
6. How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative by Allen Raymond
7. Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind by Bruce Watson

Favorite poems:

• “Exxon” by Robert Wrigley
• “Here the Birds’ Journal Ends” by Mahmoud Darwish
• The O’s by Baron Wormser

Favorite moments, aside from my own wedding and the election:

• Commiserating with my wife on the side of the G.W. Parkway as we both got sick after my cousin’s wedding and needed my dad to pull over seven separate times. (Moral: stay away from homemade Romanian liquor.)
• Last year was all about my illness, and though this year featured the end of chemo, it was far more awesome to a) meet my chemo-twin Erica and to spend a long afternoon with her and her husband at the Gulu-Gulu Cafe in Lynn, to b) meet up with paraneoplastic-twin Scott on the Cape, and to c) have dinner with Marc Wein, who’s a sweetheart and presented on my case at a conference.
• Babies! Our friend Katie is ready to burst—the baby “dropped” last week—another friend had their first last month, Nancy (see post below) just announced her pregnancy, and our friends Nada and Alex welcomed the world’s prettiest catcher’s mitt back in January (I kid! She’s beautiful, especially now that she does parlor tricks):

  

Favorite new computer programs (absolutely new or just new to me):

• Twitter/Ping.fm/Brightkite: Twitter and its companions spread faster than lolcats, theinternetisseriousbusiness, and the aforementioned Palin turkey video combined.
• Vidalia and Tor: high-gear, well-maintained, indispensable tools for online privacy.
• FontExplorerX: saves a ton of time when I’m trying to find good typefaces to use, though I overwhelmed it when I installed about 15,000 of them.
• Evernote: replaced Delicious this year, because Evernote also saves entire webpages for offline viewing—not to mention saving images with my built-in iSight camera.

Favorite websites:

• General interest: BoingBoing, as always
• Prurient interest: The Daily Puppy and Cute Overload
• Politics: Talking Points Memo
• Tech: Schneier on Security
• Friends’: The Newtster Prepares Supper and Things
• Work: Center for Future Civic Media
• Design: I Love Typography
• Tutorials: PSDTUTS

Favorite quotes (all of them come from my cousin-in-law Colin, who’s currently recovering from serious surgery on his gut):

• Absolutely belted in a silent cathedral before his epistle reading at my wedding: “GOOD MORNING.”
• Yesterday in his hospital bed, to his mother. “The pain button isn’t working. You’re still here.”
• And to give his mother the last word. “His new girlfriend is nice. They’re always nice. And then they leave.”

Special thanks for helping make 2008 great go out to:

• My wife.
• My family and in-laws, but especially my dad for continuing to come to Boston to take me to doctor’s appointments, particularly the two sleep-deprived EEGs.
• Paddy, Jon, and Alan for a kick-ass bachelor-party weekend in Chicago.
• Sarah Wolozin, Henry Jenkins, William Urrichio, and Ellen Hume of MIT for hiring me for the best job I’ve ever had. And Geoffrey Long for aiding the transition into what had been his old job, and Generoso Fierro for being an incredible resource for understanding the inner-workings of MIT.
• [Snark]Tufts for not really understanding what I did so that I felt compelled to look for another job.[/Snark]
• And a very special thanks to Paul and Hope of the Half Shell restaurant, for feeding me so much food over the last five and a half years and for cracking me up a few months ago by showing me a picture of your new grandson and saying proudly “His name Demetrios! Is Greek name!”

And to all you readers, thanks for a great 2008. Keep in touch for 2009, and my best wishes to you and yours.

…had a very shiny nose. He was about thirteen at the time. Up until then, the nose had been of normal size, shape, and color. But his body had changed a lot in the last year—his nose most awkwardly of all. It was bright red. And if you ever saw him, you would even say it glows.

All of the other reindeer used to laugh and call him names. Lush. Cardinal-diver. Ground control, even. While it was accepted that Rudolph was, and might always be, too immature for their annual flight on the 24th, this red nose thing made him a total outcast. They never let poor Rudolph join in any reindeer games. Not Reindeer Polo, or Reindeer Pétanque. Not even skee-ball.

Then one foggy Christmas Eve, Santa came to say: “Rudolph with your nose so bright…” he cleared his throat for dramatic effect and stared down a particular jerk, Blitzen, “…won’t you guide my sleigh tonight?” This made no sense. Santa was known as a conservative, traditionalist, hard-ass. He’d essentially had the same eight reindeer (by name) for every flight since 1 A.D., trading in older reindeer for similar-looking younger ones every five years or 150,000 miles (like Menudo) and simply changing the nametag on their collars (like Menudo).

The issue this year was that it was 1939. Germany had invaded Poland the previous September, not leaving enough time to sort through the Naughty/Nice paperwork for all 80 million Germans. Santa had no practical choice but to move them all to the Naughty list, but, not wanting to deliver 80 million individual gifts of coal to their countrymen, both Donner and Blitzen went on strike.

Aaaaaand I have no idea how to finish this before dinner….

This is sweet. From page 5 of Charles Nesson’s counterclaim (PDF) against the Recording Industry Association of America:

Imagine a statute which, in the name of deterrence, provides for a $750 fine for each mile-per-hour that a driver exceeds the speed limit, with the fine escalating to $150,000 per mile over the limit if the driver knew he or she was speeding. Imagine that the fines are not publicized, and most drivers do not know they exist. Imagine that enforcement of the fines is put in the hands of a private, self-interested police force, that has no political accountability, that can pursue any defendant it chooses at its own whim, that can accept or reject payoffs in exchange for not prosecuting the tickets, and that pockets for itself all payoffs and fines. Imagine that a significant percentage of these fines were never contested, regardless of whether they had merit, because the individuals being fined have limited financial resources and little idea of whether they can prevail in front of an objective judicial body.

What’s really hard to imagine is the future of the RIAA. It’s been said thousands of times in this context: no industry can thrive by suing its own customers.

One of the best shows I ever saw was Boss Hog at the 9:30 Club in D.C. Must have been 1998 or so. They’re together again for a mini-tour of Europe and then one show at the Bowery in NYC.

Catch it if you can. There’s nothing quite so awesome as watching Jon Spencer have to back up his wife.

In case you aren’t aware of how freaking awesome Serbian food and music is, now’s your chance. Here’s the location, which is pretty easy to get to by the #77 bus from Harvard Sq.

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This run of consistent posting comes to a screeching halt while I head to my bachelor party in Chicago for the weekend. The whole itinerary isn’t in stone, but activities will definitely include:

• Seeing Calamity Manget, a pretty kickass band that features a friend’s girlfriend. They’re playing at Quencher’s on the night of the 4th.
• A beer garden
• Weiners Circle

We might be able to squeeze in a White Sox game as well. Mainly it’s a chance to bring my groomsmen together (best man’s in Chicago, but the other two live in California) plus a couple other friends who happen to be in Chicago at the same time.

Hopefully this New Yorker article will be available online soon–it’s still not linked in the April 28 table of contents, but “The Last Verse” by Burkhard Bilger led me to search out the 6 CD Anthology of American Folk Music. It’s been loaded onto my iPod, ready for a couple weeks of straight listening on the way to and from work. The collection is just amazing (though that’s not news to a lot of people). Not only does it bring together a boggling mix of blues, chants, hymns, and work songs—from 1926 to 1952, at that—but it helps you make connections you otherwise never would have, like seeing just how dirty “Staggalee” originally was, even before Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds recorded “Stagger Lee” in the mid ’90′s.

And then there’s the 1927 recording of “Oh Death, Where Is Thy Sting?” by the Reverend J. M. Gates. It kicked my ass, seeing as how Pascal services were last night (the party at St. Mary’s went past ~3:00 in the morning, as usual), and the phrase “Oh Death, where is thy sting?” is a key line in the traditional sermon read in Orthodox churches for Easter. The line comes from Hosea 13:14 and is repeated in 1 Corinthians 15:55. Here’s how it plays into that sermon, by St. John Chrysostom:

He that was taken by death has annihilated it! He descended into hades and took hades captive! He embittered it when it tasted his flesh! And anticipating this Isaiah exclaimed, “Hades was embittered when it encountered thee in the lower regions.” It was embittered, for it was abolished! It was embittered, for it was mocked! It was embittered, for it was purged! It was embittered, for it was despoiled! It was embittered, for it was bound in chains!

It took a body and, face to face, met God! It took earth and encountered heaven! It took what it saw but crumbled before what it had not seen!

“O death, where is thy sting? O hades, where is thy victory?”

Christ is risen, and you are overthrown!

Christ is risen, and the demons are fallen!

Christ is risen, and the angels rejoice!

Christ is risen, and life reigns!

Christ is risen, and not one dead remains in a tomb!

For Christ, being raised from the dead, has become the First-fruits of them that slept.

To him be glory and might unto ages of ages. Amen.

And then there’s Mark Twain for perspective, written in his notebook in 1894:

Oh Death where is thy sting! It has none. But life has.

Enon at Brandeis (poor, poor Enon)

Originally uploaded by FungibleConvictions.

A friend with Brandeis connections hooked me up to a free concert Enon gave today on the Brandeis campus. Enon’s act was great, under the conditions—a 3 o’clock in the afternoon Sunday show, sponsored by a school known far more for its production of jurists than for its production of, well, enough jurists in one place at the same time to legally constitute an “audience.”

Enon fills up good-sized venues. They deserved better, even if they were (presumably) well-paid for their trouble.

Friends and I, since the mid-90′s, have had this running debate:

True or false: Bad fans make for bad bands.

I had always gone with True, beginning with the Dave Matthews Band, of which I used to be a fan, of which I am not proud.

It’s pretty straightforward. I thought Dave Matthews and Carter Beauford and the rest were good musicians. When they weren’t jam-banding, they recorded good, tight pop songs, and not of the type I otherwise heard. With no older brother to recommend better, more sinister fare and with hip English teachers still battle-ranking the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, Dave Matthews was a pretty inventive guy for me. I . . . liked him.

But then I went to a Dave Matthews Band concert in ’97, and I saw the type of person my fanhood made me. Apparently I wore Abercrombie. And white ballcaps in support of the University of South Carolina (“Go Cocks!”). And I got up on my womenfolk, who didn’t care they were being got up upon. And if I checked lefthand fingertips, I would have found light calluses of those just learning to play guitar—a little “Ants Marching” from the newbies, a little “Satellite” from the more-accomplished, a little “Back to Being Friends” from the especially lascivious. And I pre-partied in the parking lot with my guitar, my dudes, and an illicit case of Beast. Continue reading