A Thousand Times No

 

 Bigfoot Love Triangle [43:32m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Clocks have March-ed ahead, and we’ve passed the Vernal equinox, so it’s time to think spring. To usher in the season, here’s a medley of live performance highlights from the March 23, 2007 “Jonathan Coulton meets Paul and Storm” show at Milkboy Coffeehouse in Ardmore, PA.

“Bigfoot Love Triangle” (known to friends as “BLT”) takes its name from the fact that the elusive woodland creature was mentioned onstage in a pairing with Abraham Lincoln…and then in a different pairing with Leonard Nimoy. Coincidence, or classic amorous rivalry? You be the judge.

As with the Skullcrusher Pirate Hotdish, I’ve freely reordered songs from the show’s two sets, mixing and matching the performers. Everything in this medley is farm fresh, made up entirely of new songs not heard in the previous live show mix.

The set list for this virtual concert:

The Easter Song (P&S)
The Town Crotch (JoCo w/P&S)
Tom Cruise Crazy (JoCo w/P&S)
Randy Newman Movie Theme Songs: (P&S)
~~ Lord of the Rings
~~ The Passion of the Christ
A Talk with George (JoCo)
Under The Pines (JoCo) ~ live performance premiere!
My Fantastic Plastic Girl (P&S)
The Ballad of Eddie Praeger (P&S)
First of May (JoCo w/P&S)

Please note: All songs appear with permission from the artists, and no bunnies, hobbits, mannequins, space travelers, or movie stars were harmed during the making of this mix.

Remember, the year is young — you still have lots of opportunities to catch Paul and Storm with Jonathan Coulton LIVE in 2007.

P.S. That cheer at the end? Greek to me, literally. Check out our interview with Jonathan Coulton for a tip on the Bryn Mawr-May Day connection.

Growing up amid the deep winters of Minnesota, I saw just about every variety of snow you could name. Oddly enough, from the time I set foot in kindergarten until the day I graduated from high school, I experienced only a single weather-related school closing — and it wasn’t for snow. Whether the snow came by the inch or by the yard, the roads were cleared by morning and the buses always ran. What finally brought the world to a halt? Ice.

Cold in the Land of 10,000 Lakes is a decisive thing. It strips every cloud from the broad, open skies, leaving the pellucid winter light to rebound over vast expanses of fallen snow. While summer brings thunderstorms, tornadoes, and the occasional bouts of hail, winter sleet is a rarity there, its hesitant equivocation short-lived.

Not so in Philadelphia. On Wednesday, the temperature here nearly reached 80ºF (26ºC), but by early Friday morning, the sleet began falling, continuing steadily throughout the day and well into the evening. The white noise of tiny pellets ricocheting off every exposed surface — sidewalks, windows, jackets, cars — became the soundtrack of the day. Things turned uncommonly quiet after nightfall, the city muted by emptied streets and a chaser of snow.

When I stepped outside this morning, the stairs to my building were covered with a deep, slippery coating of ice and snow. I tackled the ice removal with a gardening shovel that my landlord leaves in the building for emergencies. More than twelve hours of continuous sleeting had deposited a layer of ice that was nearly two inches (5cm) thick, set under several more inches of snow.

After much hacking with the flat end of the shovel, the snow and ice broke away from the steps in huge chunks. I cleared my fair share of snow as a kid, but today brought a truly unusual sight. When I tossed the heavy, icy slabs over the stair railing, they didn’t sink into the bank of unbroken snow sitting at the foot of my building. The snow was so densely packed that the hurled slabs failed to even dint the cool white surface rising up off the sidewalk.

I think the official term for this type of precipitation is Stop-A-Minnesota-Schoolbus snow. If the Inuits don’t have a single word for it, then the Germans certainly must. What would the locals call it? Probably something that begins with the letter “F” (or “PH”) and gets mucked up — like the roads today, or anyone who began drinking green beer before noon this morning.

Ah well, one way or another, everybody out there is getting plowed.

This site had a surprise visitor the other day. Surprising to me, at least, because of their locale: Iran. As my head filled with visions of “Reading Lolita in Tehran,” I wondered what might have brought that person to this particular blog. My previous mention of halal foods, Islamic garb, or a major Shi’a holiday, perhaps? A desire to listen to people talking about universal themes of music, art, poetry, and love?

Nope. Somebody landed here all the way from Chahar Mahall va Bakhtiari (yes, that’s the “Bactrian” in Bactrian camels) because they were looking for pictures of a certain foul-mouthed blonde American hotel-chain heiress.

Sorry, she doesn’t live here, we only make very oblique hand gestures in her general direction.

The humps of others aside, it’s an interesting lesson in the uses of celebrity in today’s world. Weary, stale, and flat, perhaps — but certainly not unprofitable. Especially when you have global brand equity.

One of the things I’ve always loved about living in the heart of the city the walkability of my immediate neighborhood. It’s not simply a matter of things being close enough to reach on foot, but the fact that I always run into friends and acquaintances as I walk from place to place during an afternoon of errands. I venerate the Parking Goddess, I truly do, but it’s tough to top a nice stroll on a sunny day with a slice of serendipity on the side.

This weekend was no exception. Yesterday afternoon, I ran into four separate people I used to sing with in the Choral Arts Society of Philadelphia. The funny thing was that none of them live in Center City Philadelphia (that’s “downtown” to all of “youse” not familiar with this area), but everyone was here for various weekend shows and events. A few of them were people I hadn’t seen in many years; it seems as if their sweet and charming children grew old enough join choirs themselves in the just blink of an eye.

Today, as I waited to catch a bus in the far suburbs, another singer I knew happened to drive past me on the road, doubling back to pick me up and give me a lift. We hadn’t sung together in almost two years, so we caught up a bit and planned to get together in the near future.

After a season of late snows and a spell of icy, heads-down weather, people seem to be budding up everywhere on the sidewalks, just in time to march ahead with the early change of the clocks. “If winter comes, can spring be far behind?”

This week was something of an endurance test. On Monday, my work group learned that our boss’s mother had suddenly passed away over the weekend. Fortunately, our boss happened to have flown out to see her mother that weekend, and so they were together at the end. However, our boss was away from the office for the rest of the week, and we’ve heard nothing directly from her since we last saw her.

On Tuesday morning, I attended the funeral of the mother of one of our clients, a solemn occasion turned all the more dismal by the pastor’s cheerfully generic homily and his open admission that he did not actually know the deceased.

Wednesday evening, I left my purse sitting in a seat after a movie screening, but the hosts held it for me until I returned several minutes later. (A grateful shoutout to Mike Dennis and all the great volunteers at Reelblack!)

Come Thursday, my runaway glove made yet another break for the circus, and has remained unseen since. That same day, I bought a salad at a convenience store for lunch…and left it on the counter.

I closed out the week Friday by paying for the same book — twice. Many months ago, I borrowed a copy Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto from the library, only to leave it tucked in a seat-back pocket during a plane trip. So on Friday morning, I paid the library for all the fees associated with absent-mindedly feeding literature to a jumbo jet. Later in the day, I found myself in a used bookstore, where I came across a secondhand paperback copy of Bel Canto. I quickly snapped it up to avoid paying any more fines, and to eventually get to the end of the story.

There at the used bookstore, I suffered a setback of a different sort. While standing near the architecture shelves, I saw a man pulling down an oversized, cloth-bound book with a geometric pattern embossed across its cover. He said that he was an architect himself, and we chatted for a few moments about the latest book from Alain de Botton (The Architecture of Happiness), the Getty, and Gerhard Richter. I overheard him speaking on his cell phone to someone about a nearby movie being sold out; he confessed with a hint of sheepishness that he had been trying to get tickets for “300,” despite near-universal critical agreement about the mediocrity of its dialogue and plot. He was talk, dark, and built-like-a-lumberjack handsome.

Alas, dear reader, I failed. I failed, completely and utterly, to make so much as a half-hearted play to try to see him again, even though I lingered like a bad cold while my friends patiently shuffled around the cash register, buying a book to kill time while waiting on me. I forgot that I’m still going to be making entries to this blog while cashing out my retirement annuity if I don’t start asking for a bit more and picking up rejection at a faster rate. Really, I do promise to try harder next time, to step up to the plate and swing.

But there you have it: That was the week that was.

 

 Journalist Alfred Lubrano [54:44m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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The geographic span between Bensonhurst, Brooklyn and New York’s Columbia University is relatively modest, but for award-winning journalist Alfred Lubrano, the psychic distance he needed to travel as the first member of his family to attend college was far greater. Lubrano discusses the unique conflicts and challenges faced by “Straddlers” like himself — people brought up in the working class, transformed through the educations they pursued, and now leading middle-class lives.

We touch on numerous topics in this episode, including:

Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams (Wiley, 2003)
F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway
Columbia University
GQ Magazine
New York Daily News
Caroline Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory
Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class
Michael Hout, UC Berkeley
Pierre Bourdieu
Dana Gioia, The National Endowment for the Arts
Stanford University
Harvard University
Phillips Exeter Academy
Fulbright scholarship
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique
W.E.B. DuBois
Amazon.com
Slate.com and Dear Prudence
Tom Wolfe

Come listen to a very different kind of story about choosing to step away from bricks and mortar.

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The Free Library of Philadelphia has been computerizing their circulation procedures over the past decade. Through their much-touted web interface, patrons can renew their materials, place requests for holds and transfers, and search through the Library system’s catalog. So what do I think of this new web system?

It stinks.

I’m sure I’ll sound like an ingrate, given the tremendous extension of convenience that the web system delivers directly to me as a user. But the Free Library’s website is woefully ill-conceived. For starters, an online system is only as good as the hours it keeps. If you read the login error message on the Free Library’s website, you’ll discover that the Library website keeps bankers’ hours in the 24/7 world of Internet time:

The Free Library catalog is not available Saturday evenings from 5:00 pm to 7:00 pm.

The “My Account” functions are not available during the following times:

Monday through Thursday	9:00 pm to 11:00 pm
Friday	6:00 pm to 8:00 pm
Saturday	5:00 pm to 7:00 pm

The catalog may not be available at other times for maintenance purposes.

These hours will display onscreen only as an error message if your login fails. Despite the six hours (!) of planned weekly downtime for a system that still experiences significant unscheduled outages two or three times each month, a timetable for the availability of online functions doesn’t seem to be permanently posted anywhere on the site.

Maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps the information is buried in there — somewhere. Good luck finding it; the Free Library’s website has some of the most monstrous navigation I have ever encountered online. Think I exaggerate? Then take up a challenge from The Usability Fairy.

I will send a Starbuck’s gift card to the first person who can correctly perform the following two tasks using the Free Library of Philadelphia website:

1. Tell me the total fines I would owe if I returned the following set of items to the Free Library:

• One DVD that is 3 days overdue
• One hardback book that is 5 days overdue
• One paperback book that is 30 days overdue
  (The winner will receive a gift card for this total amount.)

2. Tell me the click-by-click navigational path for locating the official list of fine rates, starting from the Free Library of Philadelphia homepage. I’m looking for a drill-down path that does not use a search tool. (Trust me, if you break down and resort to using the Search tool on the site, you’re in for a whole new set of adventures.)

Gentle readers, what are you waiting for? Mouses away!