Pitchfork did a great interview with Turnstile on the eve of their new album release: it’s great to see them repping Baltimore and getting their due. I really hope they are able to keep their feet on the ground and stay connected to their roots—it sounds like it’s working.
I was talking with Finley last night about customizing clothing, something she’s really been into in the last couple of years, and mentioned a jean jacket I had in high school that I customized myself. At the time, most of the burnouts in school sewed a section of a concert T-shirt into the back panel of their jean jacket, or had a talented friend paint the scene on the fabric with acrylic paint: lots of Iron Maiden, Slayer, or Metallica. I was really into Frank Miller comics at that point—a series called Lone Wolf and Cub was popular and he was doing cover art for the western manga reprints. His style for these was very woodblock/pen and ink inspired, and I started researching Ukiyo-e art at the library. The usual masters were always represented, but one artist stood out to me: a late-period artist named Yoshitoshi, whose style clearly influenced Miller and who stood out among his predecessors.
I scoured the libraries in the area and found a book of his prints somewhere locally—then kept renewing it until I had to give it back. I studied all of the prints in the book and whatever I could learn from his style—at that point attempting my own crude woodblock prints with no press, basic inks, and no means of registration. One print stood out among the hundreds, and I chose this to paint on the back of my jacket: Fujiwara no Yasumasa Playing the Flute, a triptych which depicts a musician and his outlaw brother in a scene from a kabuki play. The linework, color, and use of pattern are phenomenal, and I thought it would look good on blue denim. Over a couple of evenings I painted the jacket, and I was pretty happy with the way it turned out.
As the years passed, I lost track of the jacket; I don’t remember what happened to it, but I’d love to have it back, if nothing more than to give to Finley. I bet she’d like it.
In high school, I was fascinated by the movie Road Warrior when it was shown—heavily edited—on TV. I bought a VHS copy and studied the cars and the stunts and imagined what I would do if I was in an apocalyptic wasteland. I settled on riding a motorcycle and traveling solo as my plan, and wrote my own stories about adventures avoiding gangs of bandits on the open road. The lure of post-apocalyptic scenarios has always been fascinating, even as I got older and learned just how bleak and unrealistic that world would be.
History professor and writer Bret Devereaux examines the real-world logistics and strategy behind Road Warrior-style mobile warfare: how realistic is it to have an army of gas-hungry, excessively customized vehicles manned by soldiers armed with bladed weapons? Because he’s a real-life professor, he goes into the nuts and bolts of the supply chain required to move such an army, and how (quite correctly) armies like this need a base of operations to work from. Refining gas, manufacturing bullets and growing crops doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and in order to raid other settlements at this scale you have to have a giant, vulnerable settlement of your own.
His analysis: huge war rigs are inefficient and vulnerable. Motorcycles are too small and don’t carry enough (I disagree). His answer, not surprisingly: Toyota Hilux. He looks at the various messy regional wars in Africa and the Middle East and points out that the Technical is the economical, dependable, and easily repairable common denominator across all regions. He posted the story five days ago and it generated a long and interesting comment thread, which is just as fascinating as the article.
I miss the old Web for stuff like this—20 years ago, conversations like this were everywhere.
(Via Metafilter)
I drove over to my friend Bennett’s house on Saturday morning to give him a hand rebuilding his porch, which we demoed a year and a half ago. He’s run into several roadblocks since then, including sinking concrete posts, a leaking sink drain, and a 40-year-old clematis bush that had rooted under the entire structure, so it’s been slow going. We leveled and secured one of the side rim joists and then joined it to the back rim with an angled section. Then we trimmed and hung several interior joists so that Bennett could continue cutting and installing deck planking.
When I got back home, we all cleaned up and went out to a local Dim Sum restaurant that got a glowing review in Baltimore Magazine this past year. I know nothing about Dim Sum but figured it would be fun to try for our anniversary meal, and the girls agreed. We wound up ordering much more food than we bargained for, but everything we tried was delicious.
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Sunday I drove down to St. Mary’s county to spend the day with Bob, who was already dressed for lunch when I rang the doorbell. I took him out to the local barbecue joint for some brisket and he polished the whole thing off with a look of satisfaction. After stopping to fill his gas jugs, we headed back to the house and I sat on the couch looking over his utility bills while he told me the usual stories. He was a lot more animated this week than he was the last time I was down there, which got to be pretty tiring by the time I had to leave.
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Memorial Day broke sunny and chilly, and Hazel was desperate for a walk, so after we filled up on coffee, Jen and I took her out for the two-mile circuit. Back at home, I sat at my desk keeping watch over Finn while she finished up some homework. I submitted a new COAL story to Curbside Classic, something I’ve been working on for a couple of weeks, comparing both of the CR-Vs—which mainly wound up being a review of the OG. Next I finished up a postcard design I put together to promote T-shirt sales at Nationals in June and sent it out for printing. I shopped around and got a pretty decent price for 100 of them, and I figure that if I wear a couple of the shirts and have the postcards on hand, I might be able to make some sales.
When Finn was done I hustled out to the driveway and got some work done on the Travelall, which I’ll write about on the other site. We grilled some steak and Jen picked some arugula from her garden for dinner, and had a quiet meal at the table together.
For the first time in 11 years, I went on a company retreat with my department outside the office. In years past, we have gathered in the office conference room for six to eight-hour days to talk about strategy and planning, with brief side trips to local restaurants or activity areas. This was the first time we’ve actually gone to a different city as a group.
The planning team chose Charlottesville for its proximity and easy access by train. We made it to our hotel before noon, had some lunch, and gathered for a kickoff, then took a short drive to go to Monticello for our afternoon activity. Splitting up into two groups, I chose to tour the house and was pleasantly surprised to see that Jefferson’s complicated history has not yet been erased by the revisionist white supremacists. It’s still as beautiful and disturbing as it was the last time we were there, and that’s a good thing.
Retreats are always a tough balance between focused strategy sessions and teambuilding, and in years past our group seemed to lead heavily into days of focus and a lot less on teambuilding, which got exhausting quickly. This time the balance was much more in favor of talking to and interacting with people we don’t normally get to see. As our group has gotten more global we have more people on our team living and working remotely, so it was good to meet people from different countries and get to know them.
We spent 2 1/2 days in Charlottesville and I would say it was by far the best retreat focus on my group that I’ve been to since I’ve been at WRI.
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While I was there I had two rolls of 35mm B/W developed from our trip to Portugal. Some of the highlights:
Four years ago, I knew just enough about engines and brakes and car stuff to do basic maintenance without getting myself into trouble. I was comfortable with the basics of a tune-up; I could swap spark plugs and wires and change oil and brake pads and do basic bodywork—mainly skimming Bondo over dents. I’d had enough experience in the repo lot, with my own cars, and with home renovations to know the ins and outs of most the tools and materials. But as the years went by, the guys willing to work on old iron started retiring, and it got harder and harder to source a reliable mechanic.
When I bought Darth Haul I knew I was going to have to take a lot of the work on myself, and that was the point. I’d already taken the welding class so I knew I was in good shape to try more serious bodywork, but the engine stuff—the deeper stuff beyond cleaning out a carburetor—that was the scary part. Over the course of the last two and a half years, between working on Darth, Bob’s Chrysler, and several of my friends’ trucks, I’ve learned a ton about how engines work, how to diagnose more complicated issues, and most importantly, how to not let the fear of breaking something stop me from trying.
A couple of weeks ago, I took the plunge and installed a fuel injection system on Darth. We’re not talking about something as serious as tearing the top of the engine off and getting down to the camshaft, but it was a lot more involved than swapping the plugs. My experience pulling off grotty old carburetors and cleaning them came in handy for bolting down a shiny new unit. Ordeals with clogged, leaking and absent fuel lines was vital for routing a fuel system not designed the way the EFI manufacturer was expecting. After getting everything installed, I was stymied by a weird electrical glitch—but I fixed that by installing a relay, something I’d recently learned how to do when I put an auxiliary fuse panel in. Then I couldn’t get it to start—and used my previous experience working through Bob’s ignition system to diagnose a burnt out condenser in the distributor, a result of me welding on the truck without disconnecting the battery.
Yesterday I swapped a new condenser into the distributor, switched the cameras on, and turned the key: the truck fired right up. She ran like dogshit, because the timing settings are way off, but she started. I’d been having a kind of shitty week up until that point, and that victory, plus a couple of wins at work was enough to turn my mood around.
It feels really good to work towards something and see the light at the end of the tunnel; if I can get the timing sorted out tomorrow and get the truck running smoothly, then I can try to break the clutch free from the flywheel and see if she’ll move.
The ol’ browser is getting clogged up with tabs, so let’s clear some of these out:
- Moby has renewed his catalog of free music tracks for creators to use in their projects; I’ve deliberately shied away from including long stretches of time-lapse footage because I had no good audio to put behind it, and this will be a nice addition to the YouTube tool belt.
- I rarely have the mental time to sit and watch a video of a guy talking about technical software settings, but this is a tutorial on how to fix underexposed nighttime shots in Lightroom.
- The AV Club profiles a couple of new shows to check out, including Duster, a period crime caper created by and featuring some people from Lost (Max), and Murderbot, which is a show about a sentient security android (AppleTV).
I was asked this question on a state application the other day, and thought it was funny. I had no idea this was the official definition of drunkard.
I’ve had Turnstile on heavy repeat in my head this past week. The end of this set from the Hurricane Festival in 2024 covers the highlights; they look like they would be awesome to see live.
Update: They played a show yesterday at Wyman Park here in Baltimore.
In my continuing quest to get current on all of my vaccinations before Bobby Brainworms makes it illegal, I got my shingles vaccine this morning at about 11 o’clock. By 2 o’clock my left arm felt like somebody had hit it with a baseball bat. I can’t tell, but I think I might have a low-grade fever. We’re going to see how this affects me tomorrow and that will tell whether or not I’m going to work. I’ve still got several more to go plus a booster for this and for hepatitis B upcoming. I’m trying to stretch them out every two weeks so that I give my immune system time to bounce back before I dose with something else.
Update: You thought I was wearing my tinfoil hat when I wrote this, but you’d be mistaken.