afrojet

The Celebrity Power 12

To my great satisfaction, I have enlisted into the ranks of lo-fi technologies, the super heavy weight mechanics of the durable Sears Celebrity Power 12 Electric Typewriter into my growing arsenal of old world devices. It helps me get work done around HQ and excites the tactile senses long left dormant from too much time behind the pulsing rays of the PowerBook. The experience of ruminating on the type-setter is one of pure weight. Weight of work and weight of thought. The Power 12 demands a skillful and physical assault when putting down the word. It moves ferociously against you and is unforgiving in it’s placement of type. My first creed looked like the work of a mad writer on a week long bender. My epileptic type rendered odd sentences born from a place without grammar. Which really isn’t any different than what this post your reading might look like, except that I have the benefit of a very passive machine, a delete key, and an application schooled in the ways of Spell Check. What discipline it takes to put together a coherent neat missive that doesn’t look like abstract typeset artwork!?!

The permanence of the typewriter dictates that the weight of your thoughts must force your brain to get it right the first time. I must write over 50 emails a day and engage in myriad other forms of online communication that are typed in a fast and frenetic manner and depend heavily on the help of modern technologies to clean up my sloppy messes. But the typewriter, with its unbending permanent glyphs, reduces me to an illiterate child of the word in minute. My mother gave me a manila envelope when I was in college with some of the papers she had written when she was a nun at Saint Catherine’s College. Each 20 page epic about some esoteric religious movement of the late 1700’s was perfectly typed out on yellowing parchment. She told me that half the paper’s grade was based on how well it was typed. There was no room for personal interpretations of type standards. You either got all the spacing and punctuation right or you were cast down a well and given grades lower in the alphabet. Plus, when you got your rough draft back you had to type the whole thing over again. Damn. However, having spent some time at the machine now I can see what a privilege it must have been for her (right mom?). The trance like machine gun rhythms that crack in the night air call out your friends Mr. Cigarette and Mr. Danials to come join you for a literary adventure – “Where do you want to go boys? Where should we take this mystery machine tonight.” The mechanical rhythmic talkback of the Power 12 actually helps focus the mind. It’s more of a conversation with the typewriter – a conversation you can’t pay only half a mind to. The only problem is that this conversation is a loud one that upsets the neighbors a good deal. It’s hella loud.

The Sears Power 12 also demands the use of a complimentary lo-fi technology that I can’t rave about enough. It’s a little thing called the U.S. Post Office. Ha. What a joy it is to prepare letters and packages containing a days worth of punching at the parchment and deliver it to the hard working men and women who are always happy to take your letters and rap endlessly about new postal technologies, requirements and the newest stamp designs. After a day of grazing through the email and pushing pixels, It’s a good trick to leave the office with something physical in your hands – something that smells like ink and paper – something you can seal with wax and put a piece of yourself into.

On board I’m the captain
OK. Styx. Come Sail Away. I never really appreciated the full epic proportions of that song until today. What an anthem. Dennis De Young singing way too overconfidently about angels, childhood and UFO’s – weird shit. It starts out all mellow and classical and then gets super heavy and then descends into weird electronic psychedelic Who-like pinball wizardry. I have a sneaky suspicion this is another one of those odd “Classic Rock” songs inspired by The Lord of the Rings. But it’s a huge song for the early morning automotive commute.

It’s also a good recession era song. A song for the times. I want to console my work neighbors, this cool boutique architecture shop that’s fallen on hard times and is going to have to give up their sweet office space and move into their Presidents home, with the song. Carry on my friends.

But really. This economy sucks. Can someone please do something. Quick, before Dennis De Young decides that a Styx comeback tour is the key to jump starting it all.

Illuminated Lamb…Holidazzles your lawn
A trip to Menards revealed to me what everyone will be receiving for the holidays. They had other animals to complete your nativity scene but I think just The Lamb will do fine thanks. After receiving his in the mail, The Good Doctor decided that the best way to enjoy his Illuminated Lamb was to, “pack some lunch meat into the light hole of the animal and let the dogs at it in the backyard while documenting the carnage on the Polaroid”. Poor little Illuminated Lamb.

Not in my backyard
Special odd fallacies in the dim light of the morning, make me question the intentions of my neighbors. I rose exceptionally early yesterday, with a hangover and a desire to settle down with black coffee and a copy of Harper’s. Maybe I could repel the morning cold with the tight arguments of the decent gentry. I didn’t own the magazine so I needed to hunt one down. It’s not a far walk to the the local book and periodical pusher, so i decided to hoof it. I had barely breached the front door when I ran into that damn british kid, my neighbor, obnoxiously darting about on our lawn. He was wearing his usual uniform of a Union Jack Football (Soccer) jersey and soccer shorts. Shorts. God Damn Short! It’s 13 degrees outside, I got my thermals on and this joker is fusing about in shorts. People in Minnesota who defiantly wear shorts way too long into the autumn months are subject to be voted off my little island. It’s just foolish. There isn’t even a glimmer of hipness about this fashion blunder.

I thought he was practicing dirty soccer moves on the lawn but it turns out he’s having a Fire Sale. He had moved all his furniture and possessions onto the the street and had erected these flimsy yellow ‘For Sale’ signs that declared ‘everything must go’. Oh if only this means that he must go too. Could it be true? Has he been deported? Evicted? Both? I can only hope so. This is the same guy who leaves hateful kindergarten scratch notes around the apartment and turns the joint into an Israeli nightclub with the worst Jerusalem techno music I have ever heard. Did you know that there is an israeli music version of The Police? Well there is and they suck. And they suck 50% more when I am trying to sleep or cook or do anything in the quiet sanctity of my own dwelling.

So it was that I was giggling gleefully about the Soccer Brit leaving my dwelling when just up the street I noticed a most peculiar sight for eight o’clock Saturday morning. Two grown men, bundled up hovering over a Weber, grilling burgers, beers in hand. On their steps were four turned over empty cases of Budweiser and smattered around the yard were empty lawn chairs laid out in a stonehenge pattern. Everywhere empty cans. Clearly, something no good had occurred here. Was occurring here. What the hell? This was the kind of scene that one expects to find at the trailer park or outside the Metrodome before a Vikings game. But what the heck was it doing in this little neighborhood at eight in the morning? Did the neighbors have to put up with this all night. Scratching my head and continuing on my journey I thought that, it’s really moments like these that I can almost begin to relate to that Soundgarden line “feeling minnesota.”

Too much working
Damn deadlines keeping me from posting proper. Frantically coding to the finish line of another Friday. Listening to the frenetic The Streets “Original Pirate Material“. Great record.

Got all my hair whacked off at the Aveda School today. That place is nuts. 400 white lab coat wearing girls running around spraying each other with product. I almost fell asleep in the chair while getting my hair washed.

Daily design for the avant garde soul
For the budding typographer on your holiday shopping list, might I recommend this sleek calendar designed by Kit Hinrichs. Each month highlights a classic type with a brief description. It’s more of an art piece really then a calendar that you would want to write all over, but that’s what ical is for huh?

A new moma site is featuring the collected works of Howard Gilman’s collection of some seriously utopian (science fiction) architectural drawings. The site is a wonderful flash site with an interesting navigation. Definitely worth checking out is Cedric Price’s vision for a ‘Potteries Thinkbelt’. The Thinkbelt is a system of old trains that operate as transportation in addition to classrooms, that move around in a network connected to a typical university system. Now that would just be straight up dope. Some of the drawings remind me of the elaborate schemas and plans we all made as kids. You remember – the ones we made when we didn’t know anything about zoning laws, building codes, or developer control – the one’s that featured 14 level dream homes connected by a circuit of underground tunnels and Logan’s Run style trams.

Speaking of inventive designs, Brian has alerted me to an amazing new design for a device that is totally 100% piracy proof. It’s black, dusty and has tiny little grooves in it.

Then they came for your libraries.
It looks very real that there is going to be a ’round two’ in the battle over The Children’s Internet Protection Act – the law which sought to impose private filtering software on library computers. The aim of course is to steer young viewers away from sexual content on the internet. But it’s a rotten law that would have terrible results not to mention it’s just plain 100% unconstitutional. But I’m not really sure that argument holds much weight anymore.

I’ve gotten the node from my local representatives that they’ll be fighting the CIPA Act on my behalf, when it comes up again. Although, I did receive one letter back from a representative (who will remain anonymous) that he didn’t know ‘very much’ about the Act and ‘could I send him some materials’. It seemed like a sincere reply so I sent him about 30 links.

When I used to do some computer/tech teaching at the high school level awhile back both students and teachers giggled at the laughable filtering software the school was coned into purchasing. Students were unable to access the Star Tribune site and other “News” sites but were somehow still always able to get to the Cash Money Millionaires website. This always resulted in the printer belching forth pages and pages of Juvenile, C-Murder, and Lil-Kim lyrics. Some lyrics were so disturbing that I made it a point to read them aloud to the class. I remember a fellow teacher asking her students to do a a report on ‘Hate’ and the different types of ‘Hate Crimes’. Her whole class descended on the lab, took their seats, and then proceeded to swear at their computers as they learned that the word ‘hate’ met the qualifications of the filter. The research came to an abrupt stop and the teacher was going to have to reevaluate her choice of research topic. An unfortunate consequence of the dreaded “filter”.

css face lift
OK. Things look a little different over here at Afrojet. You dig? I wanted to create a design that abandoned html and the ubiquitous spacer.gif forever while converting everything to standards compliant css and xhtml. With this new design I have left behind the antiquated Netscape (4.X) and Explorer (4.X) browsers in favor of taking advantage of some of the cool tricks that CSS2 compliant browsers are capable of turning. If you still have one of those browsers and are hard fast in your resolve not to upgrade, fear not, as all of the content is still available to you through those platforms they just wont be graphically formated. That is the beauty of standards compliant xhtml pages. I wanted to beef some of the functionality up a bit too with some dynamic php pages that control what appears on the right as well as giving you the reader the opportunity to pick your own style and type dimensions for how you want this page to look and read. Unfortunately my host is being very slow in installing all the right components on my server and therefore I wasn’t able to implement them at this time. But I plan to just as soon as they get their act together.

Although this page checks out (most of the time) with a xhtml and css validator there are a few known and unknown errors that are being cleaned up by the help. There is a still a minor error that appears on IE 5.5 for Windows (it doesn’t effect the design tho) and the positioning of the daily postings are aligned towards the bottom in IE 6 for Windows. Both of those I will be able to find a workaround to soon. Also of note is that in IE 5.5/6 for Windows the cool little dotted line separators appear as really ugly Frankenstien-like stitch work. Unfortunately, this is a bug of the browser and how it renders css and I can do nothing to right the wrong. These pages looked good (to me) in Mozilla and Netscape for Windows. And they look just damn swell on all the browsers I’ve checked on a Mac. The anti-aliasing with OSX compatible browsers makes me overjoyed.

Anyhoo, slight adjustments will be made over the next couple of days, so if you see anything that looks really out of whack please let me know. Otherwise enjoy.

capsized dancers make jennifer dark and raw
Why do we do this to ourselves? Knowing full well that Bjork’s movie Dancer in the Dark was going to bury both the missis and me in a deep and dark funk-hole, one that we would need to hire an excavating crew to rescue us from, we nevertheless decided that after a nice meal out on the town that we would retire to the cosy crib and have a good cry. Hell, the week has been depressing enough with the amount of money and dignity lost on the elections, why not just keep it up? Pile it on – listen to Morissey and John Lee Hooker records. Get low.

Well Dancer in the Dark was even more than I bargained for. Holy-spending-christmas-alone, is that a sad movie. Damn good. But seriously sad. I couldn’t even begin to predict how sad the movie was going to turn out. I’d be like, “oh this one bad thing is going to happen here”, and then something would happen that was like 20 times worse than I had imagined. I don’t know where Bjork found the inspiration for her galactic performance but frankly I don’t want to know because it was probably something painfully horrible. How do you even recommend a movie like Dancer in the Dark? You really have to get ready to go to “that” place before watching this one. I wonder if Lars Von Trier will ever make a comedy? I remember I was dating this women who, how can I say this, tipped the scales of sensitivity, when Lars Von Trier’s Breaking the Waves came out and she wouldn’t speak to me for a week after we watched the movie. I think that film permanently broke her.

The daydreaming aspect of the movie was something I could relate to well. For me its been coming on stronger as I’ve increased my time behind the wheel again. As scary as that sounds, it’s true. My head just goes to a whole different place when I’m driving. It’s probably one of the reasons that I don’t like to drive very much. I know that I am a terrible danger on the road.

Yesterday I was driving to work and I was busy reading all the signs and advertisements along Lyndale Avenue, when my eyes came upon a new billboard for the restaurant Chino-Latino that simply said, “Think Jennifer Lopez – Only Raw.” Well shit, that was it. Game over. My head was lost until I found myself pulling into my parking place at work. I mean, I’m…still…puzzled! What the hell is that supposed to mean? It’s so irreverent that it’s a kissing cousin of stupid and misogyny. I spent a good amount of head time just imagining the agency sitting around the walnut table coming up with that line and the possible ideas that failed – “Think Anna Nicole Smith – Only Deep Fried” or “Think Kevin Bacon – Only Not as Bacon but Something More Like Tuna”. What an odd world.

cruising salon
I seem to be getting a bounty of emails about this wonderful Garrison Keillor article on Salon about Norm Colman’s vapidness. As salon mentions, it’s “premium content” but it’s worth the price. In the article, Keillor calls Minnesota voters decision to go the Norm “one of those dumb low-rent mistakes”. I love the sentiment and the line. Especially, “low-rent”. What a stinging depression driven heart punch. Low-rent….hmmm…perfect. It reminded me of a similar, sometimes political writer, Hunter S. Thompson, when he wrote, “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’76: Third Rate Romance, Low Rent Rendevous.” for Rolling Stone back in 1976.

Also, poking around Salon this morning, a fine article about Moby attempting to get people to boycott Butterball turkeys this holiday season. Which means Moby is probably talking about it on his own site…lets see here…ok, go here, and click on Moby journal, then “Rotterdamn – Humane”.