Austin Kleon – Page 567

WHERE’S THE WHISKEY ON THIS ISLAND?

Tuesday, August 15, 2006

I hate mobs, I hate overpriced food, and I hate festivals. But if I have to be at one, I like to camp out with a sketchbook and steal a couple portraits.

Somebody told me that the island used to be a slum for immigrants that just came off the boat from Lake Erie, and that during prohibition the Canadians used to smuggle booze across the lake and move it here (hence the name). Then somebody told me it’s not even an island, it’s a peninsula.

One thing I know: there were some weird-looking Joes around there.

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My Powerbook is in worse shape than before. We took it apart yesterday and replaced the hard drive, but midway through, I pulled the power socket out of the logic board. (Turns out, this is a common problem.) So the hard drive is fine now, but you can’t turn the stupid thing on, because the cable that runs from the power button to the power supply is disconnected! So now I have to find a tiny soldering iron to get in there and fix it… (if anybody in the Cleveland area is reading this and has done such a thing…let me know!)

I’m begging you: if you bought a Mac recently, before your one-year warranty runs out, GET THE APPLECARE. It will be worth it! (That reminds me of this YouTube video of the Animals’ “San Francisco Nights”: “It’s an American Dream / includes Indians, too!”)

And if you’re ever dumb enough to attempt a repair like this, I really suggest getting a guide from this site.

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I have such a love/hate relationship with the Magnetic Fields. Meg and I love their music so much, but when we went to see them live, I wasn’t expecting Stephin Merritt to be such an asshole. Reading Daniel Handler’s liner notes to 69 LOVE SONGS makes me feel a little bit better about the whole thing: he’s obviously a workhorse of a songwriter.

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Other things: David Heatley is posting some of his new work at his blog. Rbally has a Specials show up. Se4n talks interactive fiction. Gerry quotes Vonnegut on oil depletion. Meg reports that going green is getting easier. (Check out Vonnegut’s “Pre-Bush Blueprint for the American Dream.”) And a Western alum has a long, personal eulogy for our alma mater.

IS WAL-MART GOOD FOR CIRCLEVILLE?

Friday, August 11, 2006

My old Cambridge buddy Rob reminded me this morning in an e-mail about a PBS FRONTLINE program called “Is Wal-Mart Good For America?” in which my hometown is profiled. You can watch it online for free.

In Circleville, Ohio, population 13,000, the local RCA television-manufacturing plant was once a source of good jobs with good pay and benefits. But in late 2003, RCA’s owner, Thomson Consumer Electronics, lost a sizeable portion of its production orders and six months later shut the plant down, throwing 1,000 people out of work. Thomson’s jobs have moved to China, where cheap labor manufactures what the American consumer desires — from clothing to electronics — and can buy at “everyday low prices” at the local Wal-Mart…

Steve Ratcliff, a long-time worker at the Thomson plant puts it simply: “If you want these low prices, then you go buy your products from Wal-Mart. But what does that actually do for this country? It’s putting people out of work. And it’s lowering our standard of living. That’s the bottom line.”

Ironically, for Ratcliff and his former colleagues, there are new jobs coming to town. In a patch of farmland right next to the vacant Thomson plant, Wal-Mart has broken ground on one of its new Supercenters. But the Wal-Mart jobs will represent a steep cut in pay from the $15 to $16 an hour workers made at Thomson, and a far cry from the pension, health care, and job security benefits that have long been the norm in manufacturing.

A lot of the kids I went to school with grew up in Logan Elm Village, a housing division right behind the Thompson plant, where pretty much everyone’s parents worked. It was kind of the place to go if you were looking to score pot or get in a fight or something. (I don’t know if it’s still like that.) They had this store in the back of the plant, and all the kids whose parents worked there had the cool new electronics, except they’d be refurbished in some way (missing a battery bay door or a remote or something…) My uncle got me a really nice VCR, except the buttons were busted so you had to use a pencil to punch the fast-forward/rewind buttons…

(I always wanted to set a story there, but George Saunders pretty much hits it all with “Sea Oak“: “At Sea Oak there’s no sea and no oak, just a hundred subsidized apartments and a rear view of the FedEx.” As the man says, “You can’t do Hemingway in the Wal-Mart.”)

But anyways, I never understood it, because there wasn’t even a sidewalk where people could walk to work, even though they lived RIGHT BEHIND the stupid plant. So everybody had to get in their cars and drive the .2 miles down Route 23 to get to work. Unbelievable.

Why are all the communities of my past dying? Circleville…Western…everywhere I spent my young life seems to be in dire straits.

The corporatization of America, folks: get used to it.

WESTERN GONE, MIAMI LOSES

Thursday, August 10, 2006

Coming out of darkness over here to post an editorial that ran in the Cincinnati Enquirer today. Ms. Reutter expresses my own suspicions: that the move to squash Western was one of political payback. Check it out.

Miami loses by eliminating school

By Claire Reutter

I am a Miami University graduate from the 1980s grieving the loss of a dear friend who made an indelible impression on my life. My alma mater, the School of Interdisciplinary Studies (or the Western College Program), is slated to close (“Last pitch fails; trustees dissolve Western College,” June 24).

The news came suddenly to the Western community of alumni and students, who were shocked when they got the first word in the spring that this might happen. The outgoing Miami president and his administration overturned a 40-6 University Senate vote that called for a study next year to explore issues such as low enrollment. Instead, the school will be eliminated no later than June 30, 2008.

What’s in it for an outgoing university president to squelch dialogue and rush through closure of this dynamic liberal arts college that Barron’s Buys considers to be one of Miami University’s two stongest programs (the other one being its School of Business)?

Well, Miami’s dining hall and maintenance employees had a strike. Not surprisingly, several faculty members and students in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies – which has always concerned itself with social justice – supported it.

So now it’s payback time, and the outgoing president can make sure that the incoming president has one less thorn in his side, one less dissenting voice that suggests that even the menial laborers deserve a fair share.

I shudder to think where I would be now if it weren’t for my alma mater. Many of my colleagues attended Miami solely because of the Western Program.

One thing is certain: Without an entity that speaks up for what is right, Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, will become more of a monoculture than ever before.

Claire Reutter has moved back to the Cincinnati area after four years in Maui, Hawaii, where she worked as a teacher, a writer, and a public librarian. She now lives in Clifton with two sisters, her husband and their 4-year-old son.

GOING DARK

Thursday, August 10, 2006

Blogging, it turns out, is the CB radio of the Dave Eggers generation.

– from “You’ve Got Blog,” an article on blogging that ran six years ago in the New Yorker

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It’s crunch time. I’ve got a synopsis that needs to come together within the next week, which means I’ve had to renew my relationship with Microsoft Word, which, let me tell you, does not make me happy. Summarizing with words a story told in pictures is NOT my idea of a good time…

But anyways, you probably won’t hear from me next week.

Be good.

SVENONIUS FOR PRESIDENT!

Wednesday, August 9, 2006

Here is the chapter list for Ian Svenonius’s just-released PSYCHIC SOVIET, a “set of nineteen essays and prose pieces” presented “in pocket size for the student’s easy reference in the event of any ethical and/or aesthetic quandaries,” complete with links to excerpts or related articles:

Instructions
The Psychic Soviet
Vampirism & Vampirology
The Blood Latte
Beatles vs Stones
Rock ‘n’ Rolligion
The Responsible Use of R ‘n’ R
Eat the Rocument
Time as Money
Seinfeld Syndrome
Rock ‘n’ Roll As Real Estate
A Warning to Swedish Girls
Scion-tology
Mordor Dearest
Camp Exploitation
The Stilyagi
The Seduction of Paolo Hewitt
The Mix Master Race
You Can’t Always Get No Satisfaction
Person Inscription

I’m a big fan of Ian’s live music and his pseudo-academic-rock-n-roll rants, but you might be wondering, “How seriously should I take this book?” Well, here’s a quote from an interview from TimeOut Chicago:

How seriously do you think people should take the book?
This is something that I deal with a lot. People in America are so binary. They think that if something’s funny that it’s not serious. If you can manage to be funny, that doesn’t mean that things don’t mean anything. I’m sure Thomas Jefferson told some jokes.

Chapters I’m looking forward to? “Beatles vs. Stones” (I’m leaning towards the Stones these days), and “Seinfeld Syndrome,” which is supposedly about how Seinfeld was a ploy to market New York to the upper-class (did you know you can catch reruns every night at both 7:30 and 11?)

Ian is also on tour, and on Myspace, where he posts a blog. (And where there’s also a hilarious Weird War promotion.)

“The light has been switched to the ON position!” I’m rooting for you, Ian. And us! Here’s some YouTube from the Make-Up days: