The No. 3 Pencil

I am completely flummoxed by the No. 3 pencil. I have one -- goodness knows how it even found its way into my life -- sitting in the pretty, orange Fiesta juice cup I bought at an antique store to hold pens and pencils on my desk.

It is a FaberCastell "Mongol" 482. Aside from its vaguely mysterious ethnic and historic ambiance--did Genghis use this pencil line to efficiently tick off the names of the towns his horde would next destroy-- it has a cool ferrule. But it is a hard, scratchy bastard in actual use and produces a super-light graphite mark on the page. Why would I want that? I am not an engineer. I am not a draftsman. I am not an 18th century Italian artist. I want a pencil that shows up. I want a pencil that is far less likely to be brandished as a defensive weapon. I want a No. 2 pencil. Full stop.

My idea of a stunning No. 2 pencil, should you be wondering, is the gorgeous and effective Koh-I-Noor "Mephisto" 465. Ahhhh. This is the pencil of choice for National Geographic Board meetings. This is a pencil deserving of the allusion to a diamond of great worth. It is a devilishly good tool. I have a cherished box of twelve (only 10 remain!) given to me with appropriate solemnity by a colleague at the Society as a bequeath upon his departure. I felt honored and genuinely touched and a little geeky that the gift mattered so much, not just personally but acquisitively -- I wanted my own stash. (I am not sure Koh-I-Noor even makes the Mephisto any longer except as a mechanical pencil.)

In conclusion, the No. 3 pencil: why? Just woeful. I'll keep the FaberCastell just in case Damien Hirst needs it, but I doubt I'll ever use the damn thing. That is all.

PS - If you are very good, sometime later I will bore you with my feelings that the Cristal clear Bic ballpoint pen -- blue ink cartridge -- is the supreme writing instrument and one of the pinacles of Western civilization. A man needs two items to write, period: the classic Bic pen and the Koh-I-Noor pencil. Oh, and another indispensable thing is "You I Want" by Tegan-and-Sara-sounding Jesse Thomas; now playing on iTunes.

Excellent Quotes: Ender's Game

My new doctor randomly recommended to me that I read Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, famous adoptive son of Greensboro, NC. It wasn't quite as random as, "Stay off that foot, read Ender's Game, and call me in the morning," but we got to her interest in SciFi pretty quickly. To be fully transparent, I was probably carting around The Windup Girl at the time (you know, on the off chance that I would sit for just a brief minute in the Kaiser Permanente waiting room).

In any case, as the loyal reader knows, if I read it, woefully for you, I inflict it on you. So, prepare yourself for a quote from the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novella cum novel:

"It was a hot summer afternoon in Florida when they landed. Ender had been so long without sunlight that the light nearly blinded him. He squinted and sneezed and wanted to get back indoors. Everything was far away and flat; the ground, lacking the upward curve of the Battle School floors, seemed instead to fall away, so that on level ground Ender felt as though he were on a pinnacle. The pull of real gravity felt different and he scuffed his feet when he walked. He hated it. He wanted to go back home, back to the Battle School, the only place in the universe where he belonged."

- Card, Orson Scott. Ender's Game. New York (NY): Tor (Tom Doherty Associates), 1991. P. 158.

PS - I read the 1991 "Author's Definitive Edition" complete with a very engaging introduction that acknowledged its obvious debt to Asimov and explicated some of its intent and meaning for Card and for some young readers. Plus it scored points for self-deprecating humor: "It makes me a little uncomfortable, writing an introduction to Ender's Game. After all, the book has been in print for six years now, and in all that time, nobody has ever written me to say, 'You know, Ender's Game was a pretty good book, but you know what it really needs? An introduction!'" Oh, and speaking of science fiction, Ron Glass (playing space preacher Shepherd Book) is the unusual black man with a pony tail. And rapper Freedom Williams was a black man with a pony tail. And his '90s hit with C+C Music Factory, "Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)" deserves its own authors' definitive edition; now playing on iTunes.

Excellent Quotes: The Bourne Supremacy

Okay, I had spaced on the fact that all Robert Ludlum books--including The Bourne Supremacy--are woefully deficient in almost every category I look for in a novel. The movies, however, are so awesome that one tends to forget the defects of the source material. And since I spend a LOT of time on planes these days in desperation at a used book store I snagged Supremacy out of a discount bin and began what I can only refer to as a sort of personal literary Bataan death march. (I have real trouble stopping a book--I need to get over that grad school era commitment.)

In any case, and woefully for you, having read the damn thing and having survived it I am posting an illustrative if execrable quote:

"'This is Bourne. Put my wife on the line.'

'As you wish.'

'David?'

'Are you all right?' shouted Webb on the edge of hysteria.

'Yes, just tired, that's all, my darling. Are you all right--'

'Have they hurt you--have they touched you?'

'No, David, they've been quite kind, actually. But you know how tired I get sometimes. Remember that week in Zurich when you wanted to see the Fraumunster and the museums and go out sailing on the Limmat, and I said I just wasn't up to it?'

There'd been no week in Zurich. Only the nightmare of a single night when both of them nearly lost their lives. He running the gauntlet of his would-be executioners in the Steppdeckstrasse, she nearly raped, sentenced to death on a deserted riverfront in the Guisan Quai. What was she trying to tell him?

'Yes, I remember.'"

-Ludlum, Robert. The Bourne Supremacy. New York (NY): Bantam Dell, 1987. P. 145.

Can you feel the pain? Oh, the horror. The horror. Six hundred and forty-six pages of inappropriate italic emphases in the wrong places and for inner monologues. The monologues! He had forgotten the monologues. The visions of them came back to him in a half-remembered rushing blur. The book. The book, sucked.

PS - I want my $4.50 back. Oh, but while Ludlum is a best-left-behind relic of the '80s, you will still enjoy this thing called rap when you rock out to "The Power" by German uber-group Snap; now playing on iTunes.

Do It: Le Clown Triste de la Vie

What could be better than Star Wars? Star Wars co-written by George Lucas and Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre, perhaps?

Could there have been a collaboration? Well, the movie was released in 1977 and the famous existentialist did not die until 1980. So it is possible. And the Internet is nothing if not a haven for the possible; naturally, someone out there has tried to give us a glimpse of the imaginary.

Do it: Watch The Existential Star Wars.

PS - If the sad, nihilistic, nauseating live death of existentialism had a soundtrack it might include a song by Bjork. Oh, and her "Army of Me" is like a woeful requiem knitting together the dreams of the troubled sleep of a respectful prostitute; now playing on iTunes.

Excellent Quotes: To Hate Like This

I am reading Will Blythe's classic sports memoir, To Hate Like This is to Be Happy Forever, about the Tar Heel-Blue Devils basketball rivalry, on the iPad. It is recursively Southern storytelling and filled with references to games and places I recall in various states of clarity. It is sad and wistful. It is reflective and thoughtful. It is about more than basketball. It is also quite often plain old funny as all get out. Witness this exchange between the author and his girlfriend's nine-year-old son, Harry, in NYC:

"Harry, who had been watching me watch the game, asked, 'Why do you get so mad?' Normally, he would have delighted in an adult's swearing. But now he was edging backward across the room, the way people will when you have a gun pointed at them. His eyes were wide.

'Because I hate Duke,' I explained.

'Why do you hate them?' he asked.

Here I hesitated. A young boy had asked me a guileless question, and he needed an adult response.

'Well, that's an interesting question,' I told him, channeling Mister Rogers, 'and it deserves an honest answer.' I paused for a moment, as I had seen his mother do when addressing an earnest inquiry by her son. Children are our future. We must teach them well, even when it is hard.

'The truth is they are terrible people,' I told him."

-Blythe, Will. To Hate Like This is to be Happy Forever: A Thoroughly Obsessive, Intermittently Uplifting, and Occasionally Unbiased Account of the Duke-North Carolina Basketball Rivalry. New York (NY): Harper Collins e-books, 2006. P. 33 of 684.

PS - Woefully, I worked at Duke briefly, although I rarely admit it. Living in D.C. after graduate school and desperate for a job--I was temping at law firms and sleeping on a single bed that had been stuffed into a glorified walk-in closet in a group house with my best friends who all had solid employment--I was offered a position at Duke THREE times before I accepted my fate. The job was not even really a Duke job; it was just affiliated with the University and Coach K had nothing to do with it. Yet, I was deeply conflicted. That was when I knew that basketball might be creeping too far into my world view. Oh, and "Down By The Water" by The Decembrists is something else to be obsessive about; now playing on iTunes.

5-4-Fri: Kickstarter

My pal, Jean, is a Jim Bianco friend and fan. So she recommended to me that I help Jimbo bootstrap his next album. Huh?

Turns out there is a site called Kickstarter. It bills itself as "a new way to fund and follow creativity." According to the site:

Kickstarter is the largest funding platform for creative projects in the world. Every month, tens of thousands of amazing people pledge millions of dollars to projects from the worlds of music, film, art, technology, design, food, publishing and other creative fields.

Herz how it works. I went onto Kickstarter and, lo and behold, Jim Bianco was indeed asking for money from average folks like me to produce his new album. He'd retain all rights and, in exchange, I'd get a copy of the album. If I gave more, he'd give me bonus songs, a personal note, a phone call, a private concert, officiate at my wedding, etc. I decided that--as awesome as a houseparty after my wedding featuring Jim and the band would be--I should stick to the somewhat less stratospheric $35 contribution. Even if I had not already planned to give money to support Jean's support of a new social media tool for supporting art, the hee-larious launch video would have absolutely compelled me to give.

Well, today a package arrived from Team Bianco with five things packed into it along with a bunch of gold glitter:

1. Loudmouth - the new album. Nice work, all. I am glad that my reward for contributing was a good CD and not just a good feeling. I'll load it onto iTunes, where it will keep Jim's "Well Within Reason" digital company.

2. Free Download of Bonus Song - This didn't really work and the song, which I was to download from Jim's Web site, only made it halfway to my computer.

3. Live at the Hotel Cafe - a live version of the album plus some other tunes. A welcome addition.

4. Sticker - In case I want to be one of those guys with more than one bumper sticker on their car. It's a nice sticker, but it's no producer credit, knowwhatImsayinJim?

5. "Sinner" Button - For me to wear to church during Lent. Nice touch.

All this came with a personal note from Jim that said, and I quote, "Dear iClipse--You rock. Hard." Whch shows you how nice Jim is. And how little he actually knows about my own chubby middle manager, mid-life crisis, singer song-writer, indie-style music or the decidedly unrocking (2 Acoustic Guitars + a Bass) = (WALL OF FOLK) formula produced by my band, B-minus.

In the end Jim raised $31,500 from 346 people. Kind of amazing. I am really glad I did it. (But I could have done without the glitter, which is taking forever to clean up.)

PS - Jim sometimes has a kind of Tom Waits growl. He also wears hats. But, I like this album more than some of Tom's. Oh, and you'll like "But I Still Want You" by Jim Bianco; now playing on iTunes.

Excellent Quotes: Anthony Bourdain

I read Entertainment Weekly weekly. Don't judge. A fellow needs his vices. I busted a gut reading a welcome but unexpected brand bashing in last week's edition. EW asked celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain about "the five most terrifying meals he's ever encountered." After naming rotten shark and three-day-old warthog, he winds up, reaches back, and - POW! - completely beyotch-slaps Olive Garden:

"Anybody who makes fake Italian food--I become so angry. Italian food to me is such a beautiful, simple thing that most Italian grandmothers can make at least well, and any American with a few dollars and five minutes in the supermarket can make in 20 minutes. I'm apoplectic when I see pasta or Mexican food abused."

-- Anthony Bourdain. "Seriously Scary Meals." Interview with Archana Ram. Entertainment Weekly #1145 (March 11, 2011): p. 68.

Oh, no, he didn't!

PS - I feel exactly like Bourdain whenever fate steers me to that woeful excuse for a restaurant, Don Pablo's. Who can do that to Mexican, I ask you? Turns out that the once iconic South Austin Grill can, that's who. SAG used to be my favorite restaurant ever, but I have had to change my mind and leave behind a once-a-week commitment that stretches back for more than a decade. More on this soon. Oh, and "If I Can't Change Your Mind" by Sugar is anything but tasteless; now playing on iTunes.