I just got word that my friend Liza passed away from complications from treatment for Leukemia.
She was a great person, a wonderful dancer and had a really sparkly personality. Quick-witted, sharp mind and I really dug her.
Meh.
I hadn’t had an e-mail from her in a while, and just got the news.
She’s in DIY or DIE. I’ll upload her extras segment today.
MWD
Thurs, 25 Oct 2007
YUP! IT’S BEEN ONE YEAR TODAY!
EPISODE 55
976-BeckyChat! (3)
Michael W. Dean and Debra Jean Dean have a chat with our special little friend, Becky Haycox. (Part 3 of 4)
Checking out womens’ racks over your wife’s shoulder, sexism, ominsexual people, San Francisco, how to deal with your boyfriend working at a strip club, feminist strippers, couples who like the same pornography, taking your girlfriend on a date to see the strippers, why women like romance in their sex, other ways that women differ from men, why these chicks hate male bashing, sleeping with more than one person without being a slut, how to get rid of a panhandler, why there’s no such thing as spare change, seeing the Sex Pistols in San Antonio on January 8, 1978 at Randy’s Rodeo, Pink Floyd never murdered anyone, Syd Barrett rocks, and how to freak out the youth of today.
Photos of the day here.
Entire episode recorded on location on the street in Ventura, California on the Zoom H2 portable handy recorder.
My dad just sent me another cool thing connected with John Eddy being flim-flammed in the oil scam. It’s a letter that John wrote from a mental hospital in Los Angeles to his sister Ida (my great aunt, who lived with us when I was a little kid.)
My dad said John was shell shocked from WW I, and ended up in the sanatarium. The letter is rather paranoid, talking about the different times someone tried to poison him to get his land.
I don’t think the letter was ever mailed, it was in this envelope (note three-cent stamp.)
The envelope is pre-addressed to one of the companies that was ripping him off. (It was probably a pre-paid envelope to make his monthly “land development” payments with.)
By the way, I talked to my buddy John Murphey at the New Mexico historical society today, he’s going to be the Los Angeles area this weekend and may be able to come over to get the papers and have dinner. Yay!
Here’s the letter:
Instead of bragging all the time about how cool it is to be a privileged White-boy in Red China, this kid quit teaching English and took a job here in a local barbershop. Why? He wanted to see for himself what the lives of the Chinese people are really like. Bravo! I now step down from my yellowed ivory tower to present:
BEN, a Midwesterner in the middle Kingdom. http://www.benross.net/wordpress/?p=56
He crunches some numbers and makes some interesting comparisons:
Teaching English in China: 919 hours per year (230 work days)
American job: 1936 hours per year (242 work days)
Job in Chinese barbershop: 3542 hours per year (322 work days)
So there you have it. My job in the barbershop requires me to put in almost twice the hours I would put in had I been working in the US and nearly 4 times the amount of hours I would have put in as an English teacher in China, not to mention that it also requires nearly 100 more work days per year as well.
If I were to work at the barbershop for one year, making 600 RMB per month and accounting for the first month going unpaid, my hourly rate would be 1.86 RMB per hour. That comes out to a walloping 24.47 cents per hour.
http://www.benross.net/wordpress/?p=56
Song for my sweet, departed daughter.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqZNMO3oIdc
Song I sang for my daughter, Amelia Laine Worth shortly after her death from Leukemia last year. Haven’t been able to listen to this song I sang it in memory of my daughter, Amelia Laine Worth shortly after her death from Leukemia last year.
Finally listened to it again yesterday. And today I went up on a hill, recorded another track of vocals. Wife held the camera, I edited the video. I like it a lot. Made me cry, and that made me feel better.
JESUS, I miss my daughter.
—-
Song: “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen.
Arrangement: Jeff Buckley.
Arrangement: Michael W. Dean.
Vocal: Michael W. Dean.
Drums, guitar, bass and organ: Cliff Truesdell.
Pedal steel guitar: Charlie Kramer.
For those of you in China, or who just want a better-looking encode than the YouTube, here’s the 85-meg file. (right click to save.)
A couple years ago my gave dad me the deed to two parcels of land in Kenna, New Mexico (Roosevelt County). This land is fairly worthless in a monetary sense. It’s assessed at a total of 1200 bucks. I pay 7 dollars a year tax on it. I’ve never been there.
But the story behind the land is priceless.
The two lots belonged to my deceased great uncle, John Eddy, of Jamestown, New York (where I went to college.) John died in the 60s. He got the land in some oil scam that ended up taking a lot of money from him.
I knew John’s sister, my Aunt Ida, who was sweet and senile when she stayed with us, when she was very very old and I was very very young. I clearly remember her putting envelopes in the freezer, thinking she was mailing letters to her dead brother.
She influenced me in a way. She was often very “spacey” (her words), and made me feel that it was OK to think and say strange things.
Anyway, a company called The Dalies Oil Company sold land and stock to war vets (among others) like my uncle. Then they milked the “investors” for their money in frequent requests for continuing payments to “develop the land and drill for oil.”
My dad also gave me about ten pounds of wonderful papers connected with this land, stock certificates, newspaper clippings, maps, and much of the correspondence between John Eddy and this Los Angeles-based scam company.
Among the papers are hand-typed postcards that the company sent each month to the “investors”, talking about how well the oil search was going, how many feet down they’d drilled, what new equipment they needed to purchase, the frequent snags they ran into, how much more money they needed to complete the important work, and of course, how they were still absolutely positive they were going to make everyone rich.
The notes are so over the top that I doubt any actual drilling was ever done.
I don’t know what I’m ever going to do with the land, and have had no plans for the huge pile of musty documents. I’ve thought about writing a sort of docu-drama movie and using my great uncle’s misfortune at the beginning of the oil boom as a parallel for what’s happening now as the oil starts to run out. But probably not.
My wife and I did write a cartoon script (called “The Plump Buffet”) that will most likely never be produced, that takes place on the land. It’s about a sex cult run by cats.
When I phoned up the Roosevelt County clerk to find out how to transfer the title from my dad to me, she seemed to think it was hilarious that a father in New York was giving this worthless New Mexico land to a son in Los Angles. I think she figured us both for city slickers. I had several calls with her and she always seemed pretty jolly about the whole situation.
I asked her what I’d have to do to build out there. She said, “Well, first you’ll need to scrape the land with a backhoe to get rid of the rattlesnakes.” I asked her what permits I’d need. She laughed and replied, “You don’t need permits. You can do whatever you want out there. If the neighbors don’t like it, they’ll just shoot you.”
The population of Kenna proper is “estimated at less than 25 people.”
(Google satellite image of Kenna)
John Eddy also owned oil-scam land in Valencia county, New Mexico that actually ended being sold for a lot of money to build a mall. Unfortunately, the lazy bank my dad put in charge of paying the taxes defaulted and my family lost that land.
This oil scheme bilked John Eddy out of a lot of money, a few bucks at a time, over a decade.
No oil was ever found. The whole thing reminds me of a Nigerian e-mail scam, but from the 1950s. And John Eddy ended up in a mental hospital.
My brother James pointed out “These people were able to continue this scam, simply because in those pre-commercial airplane days, no one went there to check on it.”
OK….Here’s the really fun part. I got an e-mail the other day from an old friend named John Murphey. Cool cat, we played music together in the Bay Area right before I formed Bomb. He found me after 20 years, while searching info on the H2 digital audio recorder. He plans to get one to use for recording interviews on his job, which just happens to be as a state historian for New Mexico.
John Murphey wrote:
I startled when you mentioned John Eddy; I thought you were related to THE JOHN EDDY, the big-shot cattle baron who once owned half of SE New Mexico. Your life may have been a little different if your great uncle was cattleman, John Eddy. Land/oil scams were big in the 1930-50s. You are actually the second person of our age to tell me they own worthless land in Kenna. Yeah, I’ve been there and helped the community write a history on the sole surviving commercial building - the grand Midway Service Station. An extract of that narrative appears on the State Historian’s web site:
http://www.newmexicohistory.org/filedetails_docs.php?fileID=21168
Do you have the exact coordinates or lat/longs for the land? Does it have an access easement? Can I camp there? Send me the screenplay.
Attached are some pics I took of Kenna’s Hi-Lonesome landscape.
I wrote him back:
I forgot to tell you the best thing in the collection of John Eddy papers that I have. A big fold-out map of the ground plan for Kenna, with lot numbers, and street names like “Oak” and “Elm”. It looks like a map of an existing town, which may be what they were telling people on both coasts as they sold them the dry swampland.
Also, THE John Eddy (rich cattle dude) was no relation, but my dad says my great-grandfather invented the cattle chute, and some neighbor stole the idea under him and patented it.
—-
I have wondered what I’m going to do with the two lots. I registered the domain name TimeShareFromHell.com two years ago, but let it expire this year.
Maybe I’ll just content myself with being a proud member of the landed gentry, keep mailing in my seven dollars a year in tax, and know that when California starts falling into the sea, me and the wife will have a place we can go camp.
—-
So the upshot is that John Murphey asked if the State of New Mexico could have my John Eddy papers. As nifty as the collection is for me to have, I’m probably going to donate it, as it’s a lot more useful in the hands of a state historical society than in a box the back of my closet.
Link to a bunch of photos and scans from the John Eddy file.
(And now, a word from our sponsors. US!)
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I do get a little free time if you enter DEAN
However, I would not endorse a company I didn’t use and love.
(This is a response to “…Living on Chinese ROCK! [pt 4 on “Skip Lunch on/in China”]“), but I thought I’d start a new stink, as I’m sort of splitting this into a different stinky direction:
Stephen Deng Says:
“…..Oh, Stinkfight! so does mr.Cheetah makes sound prescription (Why you #3). To constitute funny happy blog can try your best on “life style” exactly, e.g. gear, self-promotion, BDDSSM…..”
—-
Michael W. Dean replies:
I love this passage, Deng. Your north-of-the-border yankee chinglish makes for some unintentionally poetic and random beauty. (Sometimes I wonder if you, and maybe also Mr. Denisson, are not in reality Boston-born PHDs laughing while running drunken ramblings through “AltaVista - Babel Fish Translation” into Chinese [or Greek] and back to English again, just to pull my leg.)
Yet your words contain more truth than those of many who were razed hear. You see, I make a lot of “Notes to myself for things to do in the future.” Some end up as books, songs, films, software programs, TV shows, photos or blogs loved by thousands. Many others end up in my trash.
But last night I grabbed a napkin and wrote a quick yet important outline, one that will be realized and affect the world in a big way: “Mission statement for the Dean Foundation“, ideas for the non-profit I will start with my millions near the end of my life. The main focuses of this tax-free organization will be:
Mission statement for the Dean Foundation:
1. Preserve and spread all the art of Michael W. Dean (which may or may not include the PodBot)
2. Help people who rescue, care for and spay/neuter cats.
3. Help young starving artists by giving them one-time grants to pay their rent for three to twelve months.
4. Help spread understanding for compassionate/healthy BDSM.
See, Deng, you got Dean figured to a “T”!
Keep on stinkin’ on.
–Xenophobically yours,
Michael W. Dean (Master of cats, electrical gear, art, BDSM, and self-promotion.)
(Helios checks his e-mail. Photo by Michael Dean)
I wrote a song this week called “Alien Symptom.” It’s very much in (my interpretation) of the style of my friend/hero/influence Helios Creed. Helios heavily influenced Ministry, Butthole Surfers and Flaming Lips, among others.)
I played drum loops, bass guitar, keyboards, and sang. Charlie Kramer played the guitar (over the Internet, and e-mailed me the files.) Mix is still a little rough, but I like the song and the singing.
I’ve never really tried to write / play / sing / produce in someone else’s style, but this came very naturally, and I like the results.
I’m especially proud of the lyrics. And they’re are about being scared late at night and contemplating my own mortality, something I tend to do occasionally between, oh, 2 AM and 6 AM or so, especially when the wife’s asleep and the cats are being crazy and it’s very very quiet.
(Video we made for the song is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InugVk1bxxM )
Here’s the lyrics:
Alien symptom -
feed the parasite
alien symptom -
complete the path tonight.
Feed the little parasite
complete all the paths all right.
Neuro-illogical restructuring
dressing room Mabuhay gardens
we shared a glass of sleep.
Alien symptom -
spaces between the light.
alien symptom -
Forgive the fortune of the night.
Access interrupted for
authentication protocol
speak to me
in silent terr0r-bytes.
File is offline
attribute missing
isolation modules in
synaptic silicon.
Feedback loop of
late-night protocol
crystal membrane landscapes tell the truth
in forgotten pentathol.
So to further convince y’all that the PRC is way happening, I’d like to tell more about the local music scene here in Beijing, China. Besides shamelessly plugging my own punk band, Y0u MeI Y0u, and my Surf group The CLAMPS!,.. today’s offering include ALL the links you need to get a taste of this New Music Mecca. [second only to Berlin] Here goes:
http://www.myspace.com/chinamusicnetwork
Industrial music pioneer Martin Atkins of PIL, PIGFACE etc.. came a ’scouting and snapped up SNAPLINE, who play darkish electro-punk. See him making a new PIGFACE record in Beijing, and also see these Chinese kids recording with him in Chicago.
http://www.myspace.com/beijinghangonthebox
The cutest girl punk band ever! They were on the cover of Newsweek magazine [the one with Chairman Mao], unfortunately their use of swear words got their Visas revoked and they were unable to tour….just when they were gonna break. However, NPR just played them yesterday. Podcast @ http://www.npr.org/programs/asc/
Be sure to check out the US tour video..at the singers myspace. http://www.myspace.com/giagia
http://www.myspace.com/rebuildingtherightsofstatues
One of my post-punk favorites ever. I first saw them at a Joy Division tribute show, and their set was truly Sp00ky. They nailed it. The Chinese JD, for sure.
http://www.myspace.com/carsickcars
This 19 year old kid started a Beijing NO WAVE movement, emulating the late 70’s NY avant-garde scene and ENO produced record “No New York”. Soon after this, he was flown to NYC to play with Glenn Branca and Elliot Sharp. They just got back from touring with Sonic Youth. I mean how cool is that? His pure noise side project [Produced by Blixa of Einsturzende Neubauten] is here:
http://www.myspace.com/whitebeijing
D-22 Club is the CBGB’s of Beijing , really. Lots of bands play 5 nights a week, the music is incredibly diverse, and the place just drips with the BUZZ.
Here are some good articles about the D-22 scene from the soundman at the
club: http://www.myspace.com/lveus
My Band The CLAMPS! played there once, and we cant wait to do it again. Check us out :
part of episode one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QKy-_jVvRA
——-
All of episode two (four segments, starts here):
I’ve actually gotten a number of fan letters bemoaning me “shutting down” kittyfeet.com, the sprawling pop culture / Michael W. Dean ego site I’ve run since 1996.
The site actually has over 1400 pages and 6245 files on it now, most of them hand-crafted by me. Kittyfeet has no central navigation scheme, and no site map. The best description I’ve heard of it is some blogger who said “Kittyfeet.com is the Winchester Mystery House of the Internet.”
The passing of Kittyfeet.com isn’t a bad thing, it’s a natural thing, like tossing out a beloved T-shirt that has served you well. In fact, I tossed out my favorite red shirt (pictured in better times, above) today. I was a little sad to do so, but the shirt was nothing but holes, had served me well, and was beyond sewing any more. And unlike the shirt, Kittyfeet.com is archived. It’s all still there. I’ve just moved on to other things (like this blog, like my podcasts, like live appearances, and my books and films. And like whatever I come up with next. Stay tuned, kids.)
Below is an e-mail from a guy who got hooked on Kittyfeet.com when I was temping in the cubicle next to him in San Francisco in the Web 1.0 boom, around 1998. I’ve gotten a bunch of mail like this.
MWD
=======
Michael,
I’d be amazed if you remember me, but I wanted to drop you a quick note to say I am saddened to see kittyfeet.com go away. I realize we all must grow and change and evolve–and if this is what you choose do, it’s a great thing. As many people surely do, I’ve checked in on your life through the website from time to time—and always loved it–probably for no reason other than that it was unique, like you–and that gave me an occasional weird sense of comfort in all this life madness.
I hope you’re well. Good luck in you endeavors!!
Dave Bratton
(Worked with you a brief while many, many years ago while you temped at the SFCVB)
I’m curious……does the Coriolis Effect apply to slam dance pits, as well as water rotation?
Every slam pit I’ve ever seen in my travels (which only include North America and Europe) has gone counterclockwise. I wonder…..Do slam pits go clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere?
MWD
I get mentioned in George Earth’s new Cheep Comix number 3. (page 23.
I love this comic, even though all its characters are in serious need of psychotherapy.
It’s that time again…….
So, kitties……More from our new series, “Dirty, filthy blues quote of the week.”
Each week around Sunday night (the longest period before more church, lol…) I’ll post a new quote from my friend Debra DeSalvo’s book, The Language of the Blues: From Alcorub to Zuzu.
I love this book.
The quotes won’t always be dirty and filthy (though sometimes they will), but they’ll always be great. And they’ll always be dirty and filthy in spirit, because it is, after all, the blues
Here’s this week’s quote:
—————-
Blues (part one, including “coolness”)
The most popular version of the musical structure known as “the blues” follows a twelve-bar, I-IV-V chord progression, and typically repeats a lyric line twice at the beginning of each verse. The blues form is described in European musical terms as based on a major scale with the third and dominant seventh notes flattened, or as a twelve-bar sequence of tonic, subdominant, and dominant seventh chords. “Such a definition,” LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) argued in Blues People, “is like putting the cart before the horse…. The fact is that [these] are attempts to explain one musical system in terms of another, to describe a nondiatonic music in diatonic terms.” The blues cannot be defined in strictly African terms either, however. The best way to define the blues may be to say that blues music is an American music that reflects African musical devices and aesthetics.
Even though their native languages and music were forcibly suppressed, African slaves in the American colonies managed to hold onto the aesthetic values of African music~~and these profoundly influenced the development of American popular music. Blues, jazz, and rock reflect not only African musical and vocal techniques, but also African principles regarding musical improvisation and such aesthetic values as “coolness.” In Yoruba culture, the ability to connect with one’s inner divinity is described as (itutu) or “coolness.” From this we get the American ideal of the cool or soulful musician. Interestingly, the color most often used to symbolize this quality in African art is blue.
“The blues” stems from the 17th-century English expression, “the blue devils,” which described the intense visual hallucinations of delirium tremens, the trembling and psychosis associated with alcohol withdrawal. Shortened over time to “the blues,” the phrase came to mean a state of emotional agitation or depression. Although there are happy, uptempo blues songs (sometimes called “jump blues”), most blues songs mine a melancholic vein, and express feelings of loss and emotional turmoil.
For white Americans, “blue” meant “drunk” as early as the 1800s. Among African Americans, an intimate couples dance called the slow drag that involved plastering as much of one’s torso to one’s partner’s as possible and grinding the hips together very slowly and sexily was also called “the blues.” A rural juke joint at the turn of the century would be jammed on a Saturday night with couples getting their drink on and doing the precoital shuffle to the accompaniment of a bluesman on guitar, stomping the beat out on the floor with his foot.
Although no one knows for sure, it seems probable that “blue,” meaning drunk, led to a dance called “the blues” that got hotter and sexier the drunker the dancers became. In turn, the slow sensual music that accompanied the dance became known as the blues.
The link between “blue” and drinking and dancing is also indicated by “blue laws” that still prohibit the sale of alcohol and the operating of saloons on Sundays in some states. The term “blue law” was first used by the English Reverend Samuel Peters in his 1781 book General History of Connecticut, which caused a stir when it appeared in London during the American Revolution. Peters described ludicrously punitive Sabbath observance laws purportedly enacted by the Puritan governors of Connecticut. Peters also convincingly described the “march of the frogs of Windham” and claimed that the Puritans were called “pumpkin-heads” in their new homeland. Peters’ work was eventually discredited as a hoax, and he is believed to have made up the blue laws to poke fun at the colonies, which he had been forced to leave during the Revolution. Nonetheless, laws on the books prohibiting certain business and entertainment activities on Sundays are still referred to as blue laws.
(Excerpted from The Language of the Blues: From Alcorub to Zuzu
by Debra DeSalvo. Published 2006 by Billboard Books, an imprint of Watson-Guptill Publications, a division of VNU Business Media. Reprinted with permission. ISBN: 0823083896)
just got it.
It’s “podcast” spelled backwards. I’m rolling it over to CTH until I figure out what to do with it.
(Thank you Mike Kelley for the phonics. When most people leave crazy shit on my answering machine late at night, I ignore it. When Mike does it, I register it. )
MWD
A friend just wrote me and told me that he purchased an item on eBay called “Film School Low Budget eBook Guide” from a scumbag seller with the user ID: cr3ativo
The eBook turned out to be a bootleg of my “$30 Film School.” And this seller says they have “99 available.”
This user appears to be based in Australia. Anyone know who it is? He’s also selling a bunch of bootleg eBooks under fake names and covers.
I don’t mind so much if people give away copies of my stuff, but I think the idea of someone making money of it AND duping the users is icky. They made up this fake name and a fake cover (with a picture of an Academy Award, which is TOTALLY antithetical to the mission statement of my book.)
And then they used my own ad copy:
“You don’t need big bucks to make great stuff. Computers have made it possible to make great films on very little money. They say that whatever effects the big studios have are four years away from the desktop, that is, four years away from your computer desktop. Big effects at low prices are here now. But great effects aren’t what make a great movie. Neither is money…..”
from my book in their fake pitch.
I turned them in to eBay as selling bogus stuff.
=====-
FOLLOW UP ON OCTOBER 3rd:
eBay has removed the listing:
But not the user. User is still on there, apparently ripping off other authors and buyers.
But the guy who notified me about this scam, who got scammed by buying the book, has posted a comment about it on the seller’s feedback page:
And you can’t get those removed without going through eBay to do it.
DOWNLOAD Episode 0053 (54 megs, 60 minutes)
Michael W. Dean and Debra Jean Dean have a chat with our new little friend, Becky Haycox. (Part 2 of 4) (And yes guys, she is cute and single!)
They all drive around Ventura, California, go have dinner together, talk about sexy sailors, polyamory with guys who look great in a skirt, drugs of the nasal variety, Kathy Griffin and the Catholic Church, meth-takin’ bike-ridin’ Christians, pinking up, Danny Plotnick, getting clean vs. dying, traveling Europe with your film, Miles Montalbano, commemorative tattoos for dead relatives, kinderwhore punklettes, dealing with a death in the family, make love not war, The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, “Pants a gangsta day”,
Episode is from Michael W. Dean’s podcast that remembers when sex was safe and music was dangerous. (Free, and no iPod is needed to listen.)
http://www.clonethehomeless.com
Entire episode recorded on the Zoom H2 portable handy recorder.
Below. Photo by Becky of the “Give peace a chance” girls we encountered.
I just came into my office, and that’s what it said on my screen. “fdrecccccccccccc32wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwvcfdcr.”
I didn’t type it, DJ didn’t type it. I’m guessing a cat typed it.
That reminds me of something I saw years ago: PawSense. It’s a total “If someone can program it, someone will” software program. PawSense detects “cat-like typing” (any three adjacent keys typed simultaneously) and sounds a LOUD alarm through your speakers to “train” the cat. It also disables the keyboard from being seen by any programs until you type the word “human.”
I dunno….I find cat herding impossible for me, I doubt software can do better. (And my cats can probably type the word “human.”) But I still love the idea of PawSense. And hell, it’s only 20 bucks.
(I love that the image on their site, above, is called “Peanut on keyboard”, because it looks like our cat named Peanut.)
Last night in our hotel room, I was talking to my wife about penguins. I was gesticulating wildly while pacing around (I like penguins, a LOT) and was eating peanuts at the same time.
I started choking. I choked for more than a minute, worse than I’ve ever choked. Debra Jean was about to do the Heimlich, but I motioned her away (the Heimlich is for when you cannot breathe at all, I was still taking in tiny gasps of air.) Finally, my airway cleared, I stopped turning pink, and went back to my penguin story.
It all made me think, and made me appreciate life more. Today is me and Debra Jean’s FIRST WEDDING ANNIVERSARY (YAY!) and I’m 43, and want to live to be at LEAST twice that (86).
I think it would be damn ironic after years of being a junkie, and a drunk who probably could have easily been beaten to death in a bar, and deserved it, for me to be felled by a peanut. But at least I’d go out doing what I love most, telling a good story.
If you know me you know that when I was 14 I signed a deal with the devil in blood whereby I got to “make great music, travel the globe and sleep with any woman I could make laugh” (mission accomplished.) I was to die when I was 43 (I am now 43) and the devil would get my soul. After I did all this at 14, I got freaked out and confessed this to a Catholic priest, and he burned the contract and said if I believed in Jesus, the contract was annulled. I believed for a while, and put it out of my mind.
I think I angered the powers yesterday by having a cool podcasting Catholic priest bless my H2 (and me).
Or more likely, I would have died and didn’t because the priest blessed me.
—–
Oh yeah, the peanut is still lodged in my windpipe, but I am resting comfortably and can breathe. It will wiggle its way out, hopefully not while I’m speaking on a panel to a few hundred podcasters in two hours.
MWD interviewing Grammar Girl:
Howdy! Me and DJ are at the Podcast and New Media Expo in Ontario, California. It’s a multi-purpose trip for us. We wanted to go, and also, I’m speaking here on a panel on Saturday. And Saturday is also our one-year wedding anniversary (yay!). And it’s also a working vacation for me, as I’m covering the event in words, audio and photos for the O’Reilly Digital Media site.
Debra Jean and I got here yesterday. A friend is watching our house (and our squittens!) and we came up two days early. The actual expo starts tomorrow (Friday), but we got in yesterday (Wednesday), recovered from the drive, relaxed, had some hotel lovin’, and walked around meeting people.
Tonight there was a reception for the speakers. We attended that, and I got some of the “work” out of the way early. Interviewed a bunch of “rock star level” podcasters about trends and such, and did some ambient recording for kicks.
The hotel is not only next to the airport, it’s also next to a railroad track. We actually have double-layer windows, to block out the noise. I opened the windows and recorded this short (two minutes) MP3 of the train passing by our hotel room tonight. And here is a 30-second MP3 of the speakers’ reception, which one could certainly use for a party when that need arises in some audio production.
I’ll post more later, on the O’Reilly site, probably next week, but I just wanted to check in and let you know I didn’t fall down a woodchuck hole.
MEW!
– Michael W. Dean
“Podcasting for Dummies” co-author, Tee Morris getting interviewed in MWD’s room:
Howdy! This Saturday is me and Debra Jean Dean’s first wedding anniversary. Yay!
We’re celebrating by going to the Podcast Expo (Sept 28-30) in beautiful sunny downtown Ontario, California. I’m hella psyched.
I’m also speaking on a panel on Saturday, called Veterans of the Yahoo! Podcasting Board: What We’ve Learned These Past Two Years With Stephen Eley (bio) of Escape Pod, Matthew Wayne Selznick (bio) of MWS Media, Evo Terra (co-author of “Podcasting for Dummies” bio) of Podiobooks.com.
Debra Jean and I went last year, the day after we got married. While there, I said to her, “Hell, I’ll be speaking at this thing next year”, and like most pronouncements of mine, it came to pass.
I’m also speaking, with Debra Jean, at PodCamp, which happens Thursday, the day before the Expo really starts.
See you there!
MWD
I just finished reading Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe by Bill Bryson. I love the book. Bill Bryson makes me laugh out loud, and makes me think, which is a good combination.
The wife was reading another Bryson book, “Mother Tongue” (or “English and How It Got That Way”) while I was reading “Neither Here Nor There.” We spent this last week of evenings lying in bed next to each other, giggling and reading various passages out loud to each other.
Here are three quotes from “Neither Here Nor There” that I especially like:
“Isn’t it strange how wealth is always wasted on the rich?”
“I sat on the toilet, watching the (rusty) water run, thinking about what an odd thing tourism is. You fly off to a strange land, eagerly abandoning the comforts of home, and then expend vast quantities of time and money in a futile effort to recapture the comforts that you wouldn’t have lost if you hadn’t left home in the first place.”
“This was 1990, the year that communism died in Europe, and it seemed strange to me that in all the words that were written about the fall of the Iron Curtain, nobody lamented that it was the end of a noble experiment. I know that communism never worked, and I would have disliked living under it myself, but nonetheless it seemed there was a kind of sadness in the thought that the only economic system that appeared to work was the one based on self-interest and greed.”
I highly recommend ANYTHING by Bryson, especially this book. I really dug this one, because it’s a travelogue of many places I’ve been myself. I never thought I’d like a “travel writer” book, but this kinda transcends all that.
I give it nine thumbs up.
– Michael W. Dean
It’s that time again…….
So, kitties……More from our new series, “Dirty, filthy blues quote of the week.”
Each week around Sunday night (the longest period before more church, lol…) I’ll post a new quote from my friend Debra DeSalvo’s book, The Language of the Blues: From Alcorub to Zuzu.
I love this book.
The quotes won’t always be dirty and filthy (though sometimes they will), but they’ll always be great. And they’ll always be dirty and filthy in spirit, because it is, after all, the blues
Here’s this week’s quote:
—————-
alcorub
The drink of last resort for desperate alcoholics is alcorub, which is isopropyl or rubbing alcohol. In 1989 Kitty Dukakis, the wife of former Massachusetts governor and presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, was rushed unconscious to the hospital in Boston after sucking down some rubbing alcohol while battling alcoholism and depression. If she had been hanging out with certain blues singers during Prohibition, she might have learned to sniff alcorub, or she could have resorted to the marginally less lethal canned heat.
Canned heat is obtained by extracting the alcohol from Sterno “Canned Heat” Cooking Fuel. During Prohibition, impoverished alcoholics also distilled alcohol from shoe polish by straining it through bread, drank Jake (a patent medicine), and sniffed alcorub to stave off the DTs.
Prohibition began creeping across the United States in 1913. By 1916 the manufacture, transportation, import, export, sale, and purchase of alcohol was illegal in 26 of the 48 states. On January 16, 1920, alcohol was outlawed across the nation by the 18th Amendment, which was ratified on January 16, 1919 and mandated that:
:After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.
:Prohibition quickly created a profitable black market as huge quantities of booze were smuggled in from Canada and various Caribbean islands. This smuggling operation provided work and training to a new generation of ambitious young men, as one of them recalled:
:“So I went to work for a friend of the family [in West Palm Beach]. He had two speedboats to go to the Bahamas and bring in bootleg whiskey. Those days the whole country was dry. I would go over to the Bahamas with a black man, Jack, that he had working for him. We would load the boat with fifty or sixty cases of whisky and start back at night. The man would bring the boat into the spot we had picked out by following the stars in the sky. We made at least three trips for Al Capone. He would have his cars at the spot where we would come in at and load the cars. Then they would go off to Chicago.[i]
“We had to run the boat without lights. One night on our trip after loading the boat, [we were spotted] so we threw all the whiskey overboard. Without the whiskey there was no evidence. The Coast Guard did come up to us and told us to stop. We did. They searched the boat and did not find anything. They asked us where we were coming from.
We told him we had been to the Bahamas to see some girls and have a drink of some good whiskey. I know he did not believe us but it was the best story we could think of. They took the number of the boat, the name, and let us go. We had to tell our boss right away, then we had to go to the spot where the people were waiting for us to come in to tell them what happened. Those days it was understood that if we lost the load of whiskey, they had to pay for it regardless. But on the next load, we would not charge them any profit for us.”[ii]
The cost of enforcing Prohibition was initially estimated at six million dollars, but once the Coast Guard had to begin patrolling the oceans at night for smugglers, the cost skyrocketed. Smugglers bribed officials to look the other way, corrupting entire law-enforcement agencies while Capone and other bootleggers used their Prohibition profits to build organized and well-entrenched criminal empires. The cost of attempting to enforce Prohibition spiraled out of control. Meanwhile, the government was losing some $500 million annually in alcohol-related tax revenue.
In 1933, Congress caved in and passed the 21st Amendment to repeal the 18th Amendment. To appease the more rabidly Prohibitionist states, however, Congress added Section 2 of the 21st Amendment, which mandated that:
The transportation or importation into any State, Territory, or possession of the United States for delivery or use therein of intoxicating liquors, in violation of the laws thereof, is hereby prohibited.
This put control of alcohol into the hands of the states, which over time ceded that power to cities and counties. It is invoked to this day whenever officials are looking for an excuse to yank the liquor licenses of unwelcome establishments.
Although people with money could get all the alcohol they wanted during Prohibition, from 1920 to 1933 affordable booze was hard to come by for itinerant alcoholics, hence the abuse of canned heat, and, as a very last resort, alcorub. As Tommy Johnson sang in “Canned Heat Blues” in 1929:
Crying canned heat Mama sure Lord killing me
Takes alcorub to take these canned heat blues
Tommy Johnson was just one of many musicians who have had their difficulties with alcohol (and drugs). Bonnie Raitt recalled that when she took time off from college in the early 1970s to go on the road with some artists that Dick Waterman managed, it was her job to keep track of who was drinking what. Of Son House, for example, Raitt recalled, “If he had a couple shots he could remember all his songs and if he had more than a couple he couldn’t remember them. But if he had none, he usually didn’t want to play.
“You get old guys who’ve been farmers and Pullman porters for twenty-five years and suddenly everybody wants to give them everything in any quantity,” said Raitt, who fought her own battle with alcoholism and got sober in the mid-1980s. “It did a lot of them in,” she added somberly.[iii]
Songs:
:“Canned Heat Blues”~~Tommy Johnson
“Jig Head Blues”~~Willard Thomas
“Ramblin’”~~Willard Thomas
[i]From an unpublished autobiography; source wishes to remain anonymous.
[ii]Ibid.
[iii]From an interview with Bonnie Raitt by Debra DeSalvo.
(Excerpted from The Language of the Blues: From Alcorub to Zuzu
Get “Clone The Homeless” episode 0051-a
Fri, 21 Sept 2007
I am so brilliant!
Michael W. Dean answers interview questions over the Internet with Christian Holmes. Christian runs www.criticalmassmedia.tv and is a $30 Film School fan. He’s a cool guy, and is helping Michael get Stink Fight Radio on TV shown in Hawaii.
Debra Jean Dean asks Michael the questions that Christian sent. Michael records it, edits, adds in Christian’s intros and outros, and uploads both here and to Christian for his Critical Mass Media podcast.
This groovy interview covers a lot of ground. Dig it!:
Questions: In your blog post “How to Work in Web 2.0″ you mention a sleeping habit of waking up at 2 PM in the afternoon and falling asleep at 6 AM the next morning. Is this your true sleeping pattern? If so, what are your reasons or the benefits of having it?
According to Amazon.com, your book “$30 Film School” was written in 2003. What kind of feedback have you received? What seems to be your default demographic?
Your book focuses on Low and No-budget video productions. It features many useful tips and tricks from the weekend video-hobbiest or DIY diehard. Where is the main source for your insights (are they things you learned or taught yourself along the way, are they primarily tricks that were passed down to you from a teacher or mentor?)
Your current blog as I understand it to be is StinkFight.com, where did the name “Stink Fight” come from?
Many new digital media producers turn to blogging (and/or podcasting), what are the rewards or benefits you have found to blogging as an independent artist?
You have written other books besides “$30 Film School” (as a quick author search will tell you), have any of your other books met or exceeded the success of “$30 Film School”?
As your blog states, you were just recently hired at the O’Reilly network! What will this position entail and how will this new exciting job change your lifestyle as it has been recently?
What was (before O’Reilly) your main source of income?
Have you ever experimented with streaming live media online? If so, did you enjoy live-online streaming as a medium?
Obviously, readers should read your book for a copious amount of tips, tricks, and workflows for video production. What singular piece of advice would you offer to a producer just starting out in digital media production?
What is the source of the inspiration behind your art?
And some stuff about SEO, blogs, O’Reilly, how Google may end up running the world, tips for artists who want to make a living at art, and why you shouldn’t always follow your dream.
I love free speech, but “It’s not free speech if you steal it.”
If someone who is as much of a jackass as Andrew Meyer
http://youtube.com/watch?v=HgrFSHZfD1o
interrupted me while I was speaking, I’d taser him myself.
–
Update later: Article that says Andrew brought his own camera to the event, handed to a girl to hold so he’d be sure to get his actions on camera, and then egged the cops on before the part of the clip he uploaded to YouTube. And he has a history of jackassery and of uploading his exploits to YouTube for attention. (But then again, who doesn’t, these days?)
SO….I have a lot of time on my hands, and I also work a lot….on a lot of different projects. I spend many hours a day parked in front of a computer. I turn my laptop on at 2 PM when I wake up and it’s on until 6 AM when I go to sleep. And I’m pretty much on it, on and off, all my waking hours.
It’s sometimes hard to tell which of this time is work, what part of it is just fun, what’s promotion for previous projects and what’s research for future projects. Sometimes it all kinda blends together. I mean who can say that surfing links for three hours on Wikipedia or posting on some blog isn’t work, isn’t part of my job? It’s all good, it’s all learning, and everything I do helps everything else I’ll ever do in the future.
I recently posted some comments on the O’Reilly Digital Media site on David Battino’s post about the new H2 Recorder. (I have an H2 and love it.) David followed some of my links, liked some of my writing on Stink Fight and elsewhere, and contacted me with an offer of work.
I had no idea David was the editor of that site or that they were looking to hire one good, experienced writer with an extensive knowledge of digital audio, digital video and digital still photography, but I guess I fit the bill.
I signed the contract today, and I am now a writer for O’Reilly. The ironic thing is I’ve done work for them before. I edited DV Filmmaking Start To Finish, contributed to Digital Video Hacks and wrote an article for Make Magazine. I also did a presentation at Maker Faire in 2006. And David didn’t know any of this this when he decided to hire me. (O’Reilly is a big company, and there’s far too much going on for everyone to know everyone who’s ever done work for them.)
I really like working for O’Reilly and am psyched about this. They pay well, are respectful of their writers, and have a hip audience. I dig that.
One of the cool perks is that checks from O’Reilly have an etching of a tarsier on them. (Photo of a tarsier below, and also at the top of this post.)
So I guess the way you get a job in Web 2.o is be really good at what you do, but don’t look for a job. Mess around a lot on the Internet, post your thoughts freely, and be at the right place at the right time.
The term “Web 2.0“ was invented by Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media. –Do’h! See comments below)
I used to be a volunteer kitty foster parent for the SPCA when I lived in San Francisco.
I’d get a kitten or two or three and take them home and love them and socialize them for a month, bring them back, and get new ones. (It’s easier if you don’t name them. I called them all “kitty”).
From 1997-1999 I had over 50 kittens in my home, a few at a time. Socizlizing them makes them adoptable. If you don’t do it, they become mean and no one takes them and they get put to sleep. Contact your local SPCA if you want to do this.
Click this link and down for links to several hundred photos of the kitties I have fostered
Many of those pages have links at the bottom to even more of my cat photo pages.
I’m really looking forward to moving to Beijing this weekend. Why? I’m gonna get me a sidecar motorbike! Not to be confused with a popular brandy cocktail of the same name.. (hic!)
Don’t be jealous, You can get one too… Check this out.
The Chang Jiang 750, is popular transport for young trendy Chinese and expat motorbike enthusiasts of all ages. Recalling the on-screen action of WWII in late 1960s and 1970s films such as Where Eagles Dare (1968) and The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) the sidecar motorbike has rough and ready appeal that clearly defines the real meaning of COOL.
The most important fact about the sidecar motorbike is that its easy to buy in Beijing and it can only be found secondhand - it was last made in 1997 and retails, after reconditioning, for around 1000 bucks.
I am S0 getting one!
Michael W. Dean and Debra Jean Dean have a chat with our new little friend, Becky Haycox. (Part 1 of 4) (And yes guys, she is cute and single!)
They all drive around Ventura, California, go have dinner together, talk about the redneck hipsters they see, hipster street homeless junkies, art, the Men’s Movement, the H2 digital recorder, how to get writing jobs in Web 2.0, O’Reilly publishing, Danny Plotnick, Thai Coffee, Crackheads in famous bands, mother/daughter boob flashing, and more.
“Clone The Homeless” episode 0051 on Michael W. Dean’s podcast that remembers when sex was safe and music was dangerous. (Free, and no iPod is needed to listen.)
http://www.clonethehomeless.com
I was in Zanzibar a few years ago for work and met this wild cat. He was pretty cool. Here is an snippet from my book in the making “I put the freq in Africa”:
A wild cat has decided that he wants to be my friend. He is orange and looks like a little cheetah. He meows at me incessantly. I give him some beer and it calms him down. He won’t leave me alone and we talk for a little while. Wild cats are everywhere in Zanzibar. Everywhere. This is the first one that would let me pet him. I dig cats on beaches. Just something extra cool about them. I want to take pictures of him with the setting sun behind him but every time I pose him and back up for the pic he comes towards me. I tell him to stay but he doesn’t listen or he doesn’t understand English and my Swahili is rusty. I now have 20 pictures of his face right in the camera. I give him some more beer and sit down on the beach. He hops into my lap and starts grooming himself. Now I finally get some nice pics of us together. I am happy for the company and the chance to give and receive some affection. The sun is almost all the way down and it is time for us to get moving towards the hotel. I pick up my new friend who I am now calling “Kimba” and go back to my group. We sit at the table while everyone is finishing their drinks. Kimba realizes that we are leaving and that he is not going with us. He gives me a little nip and we dissolve our friendship. No more sitting on my lap. He didn’t draw blood but I realize that it is pretty stupid to be playing with wild animals in a third world country regardless of how bad I miss mine back home.
More pics can be seen here:
Fever Dream Fever. Collaborative effort with Scott Ligon, myself and Debra Jean Dean.
FEVER DREAM THEATER is an animated series based on the bad dreams of Michael W. Dean. Staring Michael W. Dean and a whole bunch of monsters, human and otherwise.
Drawing, sound effects and editing: Scott Ligon.
Writing and voices: Michael W. Dean and Debra Jean Dean. Music: Michael W. Dean.
OK, I know that Led Zeppelin is doing some sort of reunion soon, but who cares about those tired old men? This is better:
http://www.hitsofacid.com/SexKissCage/sex_kiss_cage.html
Jay Crawford found a cassette tape of Bomb in the back o
