Less than a week remains in the 20-day sprint to fund my radio series Special Relativity. You can on the chart over there on the right that we’re way behind the $2500 goal for the 20 days.
A lot of people ask why I need so much money for a project that only uses one of the five senses (and not even one of the top three). While studio time, data storage, and a parade of specially trained hippos wired to Marshall stacks all cost money, by far the biggest expense for Special Relativity is the one that sets it apart from most other indie media projects: paying the artists who work on it.
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In honor of The Simpsons 500th episode, here’s an excerpt of a bio I wrote for a fellowship application last year. (I didn’t get it.)
“In 1993, as a freshman at NYU film school, Seth was taking a break from being the next Martin Scorsese, when The Simpsons came on his dorm room’s 13-inch TV. Man, Seth hated that show. But he only got three channels, and the other two were even worse, so he gave it a chance. He watched Mr. Burns try to convince the power plant workers’ union to drop their dental plan in exchange for a keg of beer at their meetings. Homer likes beer, but Lisa needs braces. Homer strains to birth a thought, hearing over and over in his mind, “Dental plan. Lisa needs braces. Dental plan. Lisa needs braces.” Homer almost grasps it… then Lenny drops a pencil down his butt crack. Seth laughed. He kept watching. A wide receiver trips over the shallow grave of the last union president. Seth laughed even harder. In that moment, Seth realized that he loved laughing. Seth loved the way TV invited itself into your house and then made you happy. He figured out what he wanted to do.”
Thanks to everybody’s who worked on The Simpsons over the last 19 years for helping me get my life in order.
A while back I said I’d keep you updated as I work my way through In the Shadow of Sherlock Holmes, a collection of little-known detective fiction contemporary with Arthur Conan Doyle’s work. I haven’t, because so far the stories have been largely bland and unimaginative. That all changed last night when I slogged through an 1895 landmark of ineptitude called “The Stone of the Edmundsbury Monks” by M.P. Shiel. It should be impossible for a 13-page mystery to be a slog, but Shiel somehow blundered into writing kind of an anti-mystery that manages to be both severely underwritten and so maniacally overwritten that one wonders why it isn’t on display alongside the paintings by the criminally insane in the Collection de l’Art Brut.
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As today’s incentive to get you to donate to Special Relativity’s sprint to raise $125 a day for the next 20 18 days, I’m giving you a gift of my favorite radio show ever, which also happens to be one of the most important works of art of the 20th century. (I know that the way these pledge drives usually work is that I give you the gift after you donate, but we’re all family here, and if I had any business acumen I wouldn’t have driven six miles yesterday to save $1 on a box of Fruity Pebbles.)
The show isn’t comedy, but it is science fiction. It’s the Mercury Theatre’s adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, first broadcast on CBS Radio October 30, 1938, produced/directed by and starring Orson Welles. You can stream or download the entire hour-long broadcast after the jump, though you’re obligated to read through my explanation of why you should think it’s great.1
Listen to the show…
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Freddie Mac, America’s taxpayer-funded mortgage guarantor, decided it would be a good idea to bet against American homeowners. The agency invested in “reverse floaters,” which basically means it made billions of dollars if Americans couldn’t refinance their mortgages to lower interest rates.
Even better, the agency’s head dipshit (i.e. acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency) Edward DeMarco says that he’s super cool with that and totes doesn’t get why everybody’s all going all psycho about it. I’m assuming Mr. DeMarco’s reading this, so I’ll give him a few reasons why some of us are a little annoyed:
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It’s taken me three weeks to complete the final step of Project Mouth Slime because I’ve been sick for most of the last 10 days, and because in this crazy modern world it’s getting as if a work-a-day man doesn’t have eight hours to spend homebrewing saliva cocktails. Nevertheless, the deed is done and the results are in.
As promised, I tried mixing together saliva and Listerine Total Care Zero and leaving them in a near-inner-mouth temperature, 100-degree oven for several hours. All part of my usual Wednesday afternoon routine, yes, but I also was trying to determine if the culprit behind morning mouth slime is the combination of saliva and the propylene glycol in non-alcoholic nighttime oral rinse.
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For those of you have been asking me to somehow relaunch the old The-N.com game Slasher!, which as I’ve said I have neither the authority nor technology to do, here’s some good advice from a couple of former The N users, Autumnforte and Lillian Noe:
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Maybe it’s just been my spending a couple of years unemployed, but I’ve noticed a subtle, glacial shift in the assholism of our culture. It feels like sometime not too long ago we crossed an invisible line on this side of which it’s ever so slightly more probable that people will act like assholes than not.
We choose to just be a tiny bit lazier and not return that email. We decide to spend just a little bit more time on our own stuff instead of doing that thing we promised to do for someone else. We quickly jump on Twitter to badmouth other people instead of spending just one moment to stop and think about whether or not we should, let alone an additional moment to judge ourselves. And we all seem to have finally agreed that it’s probably okay to screw someone else over a little bit if it’s not personal, just business.
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ScoutMob’s half-off coupon for Skylight Books gave me the chance to go to a bookstore and shop for an actual new book, a treat as rare to me lately as Fabergé egg fondling. I chose In the Shadow of Sherlock Holmes, one of the first fiction collections from IDW, a comics publisher that manages to put out some good stuff despite most of their cash flowing in from adaptations of Transformers, GI Joe, and for fuck’s sake CSI.1
In the Shadow of Sherlock Holmes collects 20 detective stories contemporaneous to Arthur Conan Doyle’s work2 but mostly forgotten now. The back-cover blurb claims the tales “match or beat” some of Conan Doyle’s, which if you’re comparing them to, oh, The Valley of Fear isn’t saying much. But browsing the comics aisle and coming across actual Victorian mysteries with titles like “The Stone of the Edmundsbury Monks,” “The Assyrian Rejuvenator,” and “The Case of the Laker, Absconded” is pretty much opening your Domino’s box and finding a pane frattau from Otto. Even better, the collection is edited and annotated by Leslie S. Klinger, the Sherlockian academic whose The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes I rub against my privates when I’m feeling amorous.
I’ll report back as I work my way through the stories, which I’ll begin right after I finish Benjamin Black’s Christine Falls. (I’m on page 158.)
Oh and endless admiration to anyone who can source the title of this post.
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Here’s a particularly didactic quiz I created years ago in the heyday of Facebook’s Quizzes application.
Click here to take the quiz
