In Which I... Gotta Run!

Goodness. Are we back at another Waning Crescent already? I have some excuses for not posting lately, but none of them are very interesting, so I'll spare you. It's been a fun couple of weeks. In fact, it's fair to say that most of my excuses fall into the overall category of The Fun Not Stopping.

Anyway, my old friend Meep flew in today to spend a week. Yay! But this means I probably won't be posting much for the next little while either. So be good while I'm out. And Happy New Year.

In Which I Answer Your Questions About Music and Portland.

[And by "your," I mean "my."]

Q: What on earth is that new, ominous-looking green building on Burnside that bears no slogan but AFSCME?
A: Why, it's the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. Which I think is a labor union for civil servants... but may just be a cover for a robot manufacturer, who knows.

Q: Is the first-ever They Might Be Giants podcast worth the download?
A: If you are really a TMBG fan, yes. Otherwise, not so much.

Q: With all the mp3 blogs out there these days, isn't there one that features really good writing?
A: There is.

Q: What if popular musicians wrote songs which were anagrams of their names?
A: They might sound like the Holy Tango Basement Tapes.

Q: Say I want to take public transportation from my mansion in the West Hills to the AFSCME building, so I can see the robots... er, government employees. What's the easiest way to do that?
A: Use Google's Transit Trip Planner, which is currently in beta, with Portland as a guinea pig. It's keen!

In Which I Don't Say Much About Narnia.

I feel like I should write something about the first Narnia movie, some sort of evaluative remarks, but I'm not ready to yet. I'm still processing it. There's so much there for me to consider... maybe not necessarily inherent in the film, but so many layers of meaning built up over years of reading and re-reading. So I'll just tell you that I watched it with my brother, and that we both really enjoyed it.

I used to read the Chronicles out loud to my siblings long ago -- four of us in all, just like the Pevenseys. My sisters tolerated the reading, that being the best entertainment available in the absence of television, but my brother was the one who really loved it. In a sense he has become part of the story for me, and I for him. So it was most fitting for us to stumble back through the wardrobe together, after all these years.

Ebert's review of the movie ended with the following rhetorical question:

But it's remarkable, isn't it, that the Brits have produced Narnia, the Ring, Hogwarts, Gormenghast, James Bond, Alice and Pooh, and what have we produced for them in return?

To this I can only answer: Earthsea. I know, I know, it was just subjected to a horrible TV adaptation; but now it's in the hands of Studio Ghibli, the people who brought you My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away. Yes, you read that right: anime! It's a weird idea, but I kinda like it. Even though Ged looks suspiciously Caucasian in the movie poster.

In Which I Tidy Up a Bit.

This weekend I've been obsessed with organization. This is not at all normal for me. By nature I'm a piler, not a filer. If only I had these fits of orderliness more regularly, my life would be... well, much more orderly.

This particular fit began yesterday, when I discovered the Noguchi filing system (thanks to Sanguinity). It seems to have been designed expressly for pilers, by encouraging organization without classification. Though it can't replace all my files, it immediately looked like a better option than my current system (which involves periodically sweeping everything off the kitchen table into a box, which is subsequently ignored). So I spent a couple hours today snipping the tops off 9x12 envelopes and stuffing things into them. There are still several piles/boxes left to deal with, but you know what they say about journeys of a thousand miles.

The other thing I've started organizing is my links, or "bookmarks," or "favorites," or whatever you want to call them. I've never really made use of that feature in any browser, because it was limited to a single computer, and, well, I'm not. Instead, I would e-mail them to myself, or to someone else. Finding the link again usually wasn't too difficult... so long as I actually remembered I had it.

Turns out there is a better system, and it's been around for quite a while. You've probably already heard of it; in fact, you may even already use it (I know Allan does!). del.icio.us is, much like the Noguchi system, brilliant in its simplicity. When you see a web page you want to bookmark, you just click a button and del.icio.us remembers it for you. You can also annotate and tag the link for easy reference. Nice, huh? But it gets better. You can send links to other users. You can see how many other people have bookmarked a given page, and how they tagged and annotated it. You can look at what links are popular today, and what's been most recently bookmarked. You can use it to set up a wishlist (one that isn't limited to Amazon!). The list goes on. If you haven't tried it yet, you really should.

I've decided not to post my del.icio.us page to this blog, because it will eventually paint a more detailed portrait of myself than I'm prepared to share with the world at large. No, I'm not hiding anything sensational; I'm just weird like that. However, I'm more than happy to share with anyone who knows me in real life, so if you're curious, drop me a line and I'll send you the URL.

What makes both of these organizing tools so appealing to me is their flexibility. A fixed system of files (whether paper or virtual) requires constant revision in order to keep up with the flow of incoming information -- particularly for anyone whose interests are continually evolving. But the Noguchi system, by avoiding classification altogether, allows for a purely intuitive means of storage and retrieval. And the tags used in del.icio.us (and gmail, and flickr, and an increasing number of web-based resources) provide a highly flexible system of classification that doesn't limit an item to a single primary descriptor. Someday we'll be able to organize files on our hard drives this way! There's an exciting thought.

In Which It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Ear.

I have a confession to make: I hate Christmas music.

How can this be? I love music, and I love Christmas. Something has clearly gone terribly wrong.

It wasn't always this way. I used to love Christmas music unreservedly. Then I only loved some of it. Then I became alarmed by its tendency to spill over into November, when I wasn't ready to hear it yet. Then I vaguely resented all of it, unless I was singing it with other people, which has happened less and less in recent years. This year, as I was gritting my teeth at the grocery store while some canned singer repeatedly reminded me he was simp-ly hav-ing a won-derful Christ-mas-time, I realized that my distaste has finally bloomed into genuine hatred.

I have some theories about how this may have happened. One is that Christmas songs, since we only hear them for a short time, don't have to undergo the same Darwinian struggle for survival that everyday songs do. Bad Christmas music gets recycled year after year, simply by virtue of being holiday-appropriate. Another reason is that Christmas music tends to involve a lot of choirs and big bands, which I generally tend to avoid. A yet more significant factor is commercialization: a little bit of my heart dies every time something I once held sacred is cheapened by mass-media overexposure, in a blatant attempt to separate as many people from their money as possible. (See also: Lord of the Rings.)

In a further ironic twist, my first response to this realization was to listen to a lot of Christmas music, in search of some that doesn't make me cringe. After some thought, I decided my primary criterion for Good Christmas Music was that it had to be good enough to listen to all year round without getting sick of it. (Anything I listened to as a child is disqualified, as I can't address it with any objectivity.)

Unfortunately, I was not able to compile an entire mix CD's worth of songs that met this standard. However, I present to you some highlights of my search.

Here is the best Christmas song I've heard this year. I don't know anything about the artist, other than that she's from Canada, and that she makes this old German melody sound prettier than I would have thought possible:
Feist - Lo, How A Rose E'er Blooming

Several years ago, Sufjan Stevens recorded three Christmas EPs for friends. All of them are now available for free online. I wholeheartedly recommend them; they are gentle acoustic arrangements of carols, hymns, and original songs, with Sufjan's hushed tenor at the forefront. They're reverent without being arrogant, and sweet without being precious. You can download all three (zipped files) here:
http://www.chattablogs.com/quintus/archives/019581.html

Finally, if you're going to record obnoxious Christmas songs, you might as well be as obnoxious about it as possible. Last year on MetaFilter, one gentleman noted:

I like to sing Jingle Bell Rock, but using only the words "bell", "rock", and "jingle".... Drives my wife nuts. I'd record an MP3 of me doing it if someone could find me a karaoke track.

Someone could, and he did. As far as I'm concerned, this is now the definitive version of Jingle Bell Rock:
http://quasistoic.org/PinkStainlessTail - jinglerockbell.mp3

Which Is Largely Hit And Miss.

Last night was the first time I picked up a bow in about two months. Turns out it was actually the last open shoot night of the year at the community center, too, so I'm glad I braved the cold. It was good to catch up with my friend the archery gnome, whom I can't resist referring to here as Fletcher (not his real name, but his real occupation). It was good to use those muscles and those parts of my brain that I've been neglecting. It was good to look the target in the eye and say: Oh son. You're goin' down.

Actually, the target got the last laugh; I am totally out of shape. I tried to just focus on form without worrying too much about where the arrows ended up. So if you were an unfortunate beetle wandering around the target, you would have been quite safe on that center X.

Also, I was glad that the other people were shooting compound bows. A recurve archer like myself will typically fire off 3 arrows within a minute or less. But it's a lot easier to hold a compound bow at full draw, so compound archers take their time aiming. Lots and lots of time. I normally get impatient waiting for them to just fire the darn thing already so I can go pull my arrows, but this time I was grateful for the interval to stretch and breathe.

So that brings me up to 7 out of 10 fun things on my post-November rewards list. Still to come are 7) the broadband internet connection (for reasons already described), 8) the visit to the comic book store (because I just haven't got around to it yet), and 10) the blogging. Which I suspect will pick up after #7 straightens itself out.

Oh, hey, you know what? I'm not going to that Andrew Bird/Nickel Creek show after all. It's all Karen's fault. She gave me a 30% off GAP coupon that was good through last weekend. So I took a shopping buddy to the GAP outlet, and we both left with armloads of incredible deals! Whee! But, um, we sort of spent a lot of money in the process. So when I was buying my ticket for the show, and I realized there were going to be more (dis)service charges than I anticipated, and I thought about all the Christmas shopping I have yet to do, my enthusiasm faded before I could enter my credit card number.

I would normally consider excellent music to be more essential than new clothes. But every time I put on my new coat and go out in that biting wind, I think I have chosen wisely.

In Which We Party Like Writers.

This year, regional word counts were one of the features added to the NaNoWriMo website. Portland ranked 11th in the world, ahead of NYC, Boston, and San Francisco, with a collective total of 3,756,412 words.

Last night was Portland's TGIO, the party celebrating the end of NaNo. There were heaps of things to eat, oodles of interesting people, and lively conversations in every corner. We had shared a remarkable experience, even if we hadn't actually all been together or even met before, and now we shared the buzz of triumph. It was pretty great.

But the best part of the evening was when people took turns reading excerpts from their novels. What an incredible diversity of imagination, tone, style, and personality! They covered the gamut from hilarity to heartbreak, with narratives of bad dates, battlefields, bandits, road trips, drug trips, dockside brawls, people with wings and people with tentacles. It was hugely entertaining. And there was something so satisfying, on such a primal level, about a group of people just sitting around telling each other stories.

Thinking of that now, I also recall that phone conversation I had with my songwriter friend the other week (he needs an alias; let's call him Bombadil). I was giving Bombadil an overview of my novel, and he interrupted me to exclaim, "You're telling me a story! This is so cool! ...And we're adults!"

What is wrong with us, that this sort of experience is so unusual? Because I have a strong sense that it is something we were meant to be doing.

In Which A Herring... Doesn't.... Whistle!

Last night I saw a movie for the first time in ages and ages (okay, a month). I thought I'd long since missed my chance to see Mirrormask, but I caught it on what I think was really its last night in town.

I'm generally interested in anything Mr. Gaiman (the screenwriter) is involved in, partly because he's done some remarkable things, and partly because he's just such a nice guy. Considering the mixed reviews it got, though, I wasn't expecting to be impressed by this one. Oh, but I was.

Sure, it was uneven, parts were boring and/or confusing, and it could have been cut a lot shorter without losing much. But it also offered a fascinating metaphorical examination of what it's like to be a girl at the edge of adolescence.

Helena, the pre-adolescent heroine, gets lost in a dream-city that seems to have been inspired by her own drawings. The windows of the buildings in this city look into her own bedroom, from the walls where her drawings hang. Peering through these windows, Helena sees a dark doppelganger of herself taking over her world: wearing punk clothes and heavy makeup, acting hateful toward her father, kissing a boy (gross!), and gleefully destroying things that are precious to Helena. When the child-Helena shouted in vain from a drawing, "Dad, don't listen to her! That's not me!" I got that weird déjà vu feeling.

When we left the theater, we discovered a huge old mobile stairway-thing right in the middle of the walkway. It was unmanned; apparently whoever was changing the marquee had decided it was time for a break. So, of course, I climbed it. The marquee letters were brittle and hard to move, so I didn't actually get to help out with the sign-changing. But the view sure was nice from up there.