Andrew Looks for Signs

Another Trip Down this Road

2008-03-11T20:49:17Z

My computer caught a little cold. It seems to be better now, fingers crossed. Jessica implied it's because I've been slumming it on the myspace again. She's probably right. (Typically I avoid a lot of trouble those times when I decide she's probably right.)

I'm inspired to do something totally different, like write a letter. I don't care if stamps have shot up just like the price of gas. No one ever got a computer virus through snail mail... just bombs and anthrax. I promise I will never send anyone bombs or anthrax... however I cannot promise the same about computer colds when I, as my friend J. Marsh put it, "myspace you as a verb." So, enough of that nonsense.

Knight Rider!

2008-02-18T03:24:54Z

Knight Rider!

-CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS- (again... still)

2008-01-26T17:36:30Z

"BONY LANDMARKS" is seeking non-fiction, comics, and miscellaneous imagery that looks good in glorious black and white for the fourth issue of our occasionally lauded and often overlooked small press zine.

Please direct submissions and inquiries to the Look for Signage Collective, PO Box 42181, Tucson, AZ 85733

look_for_signage@yahoo.com

Hmm...

2008-01-25T03:41:34Z

About a week ago I found this setting that for "adult concepts" on the LJ. I thought I'd give it a whirl, not because I'm worried about scandalizing unwitting minors, but, because I work with kids and I don't want them stumbling upon the LJ of the substitute who simultaneously reminds them of Harry Potter and Napoleon Dynamite.

I also don't want to make all my posts 'friends only'.

Going for the "adult concepts" limitation seemed like it might be a nice way to automagically filter out middle school age internet harassers. But I guess what it really does is bring up a check box that makes you promise you're over 14 in order to read whatever stupidness I've put up lately.

I was really hoping for something automagic, and not a scandal button.

Concerning my friends on the Dark Continent...

2008-01-21T22:24:50Z

One of my real life friends is actually on his way to a country in Africa. I asked my penpal, Barrister Belo Isa, if he might be willing to conduct our business in person with my friend as my proxy. Belo didn't seem too keen on the idea:

belo isa <belo_isa2@yahoo.fr> wrote:

Andrew Coltrin,

I will advice you not to reveal this secret to anybody please and lets be fast in what we are doing,

Regards

Barrister Belo Isa

My response:

Barrister Belo Isa,

It's a little late. My buddy's at the airport right now. He's going to that side of the ocean, and I just thought it would be faster, you know. You can just cut him a check and he'll be out of there. You could do it over a cup of coffee. He's a good guy, I've known him since high school. Is there any way you could meet up with him in Maun, Botswana?

Cheers,

Andrew

I'm expecting that Belo will be way too busy to meet my friend in a city that's not on his itinerary. But if he agrees, I'll make some stuff up and switch cities a few times. I might even use location names that are several centuries of of date. Or perhaps I will ask if he can meet up somewhere "such as the Iraq..."

Regarding stuff I haven't bothered to pay for (or steal) yet

2008-01-05T18:35:01Z

I still haven't jumped on the whole MP3 ride. I figure I'm like the record guys who held onto their vinyl long after everyone else had gone to CDs. Except I'm the guy cruising the used CDs that people have sold to the resale places after they've ripped all the tracks they want to put on their iPods.

The whole digital media thing mystifies me. I keep having the feeling that there's no 'artifact' there. There's a lot of creative energy that gets invested in things that don't have any tangibility, and that's the beauty of performance.

Somehow, in the age of audio and visual recording, performance became the product of an industry. As David Byrne put it in his recent article in Wired, "the system... evolved over the past century to market the product, which is to say the container — vinyl, tape, or disc — that carried the music. (Calling the product music is like selling a shopping cart and calling it groceries.)"

And now, the way these recordings can become easily transported digital files, they've lost the 'thingness' quality they used to have.

You can sell a ticket to a concert and you can sell a plastic container full of prerecorded media, but when you try to sell the media, stripped of the container, so many people cry fowl: "Why are you charging me money for a thing that's not a thing?" And are these some of the same people who complain about the commercials on the broadcast radio, or the pledge drives on the public and community radio stations?

Personally, I think it's nice when artists can get paid for doing what they do. And I think it's gross that an exploitive industry full of overpaid jerks has grown up around the largely outdated necessities of prerecorded media distribution.

But, still, money has to get in there somehow for the system to keep going. As a culture we've figured out away to make advertising irrelevant and omnipresent at the same time. Advertisers don't know what part of the media to put their money into, so they play to the lowest common denominator. The cost structures of mass production and distribution are fluctuating all over the place. Radio play and record sales are numbers that have less and less relevance as more people find alternatives to listening to the radio or buying records (physical or digital).

The music industry, as an industry, has no idea what to do. They know they are struggling. And the digital music services, catching wind of the way the world is changing, are stepping in to places to make money where the music industry never has before. The various digital media outlets, of varying legality, are like the Germanic tribes on the outskirts of the Roman Empire, at times allies, at times competitors, ready to take advantage of a deteriorating power structure that hasn't adapted to significant changes in the world.

I still don't have an MP3 player. I've got iTunes on my computer, but I never use it. I don't download things from people I don't know. I pick up CDs from a resale store I have a good relationship with, but who knows how long that is going to last.

The only thing I really know is that someday soon the Visigoths are going to sack Rome. And when they do, who's to say that MP3 player I never bought will still be worth a damn.

The kitten is lonely?

2008-01-02T22:13:45Z

Either the kitten misses Sasha, or the kitten doesn't believe we should be sleeping at night. I think I slept between 10pm and 1am and again from 4am to 6am. That's not a good night's sleep. It's two naps with a bunch of grumbling about how the little creature won't let us sleep. Spent most of the night in the living room so Jessica could try to sleep. Got cold around 3am and woke Jessica and Blackie up getting a blanket. Back to the couch. I don't know if Jessica got back to sleep.

The thing is, when I'm in the living room reading, Blackie either looks out the window (looking for Sasha?) or she curls up and goes to sleep. When I lie down in the bed, she jumps on me and on Jessica and on everything else when she's not otherwise busy finding noisy things to play with.

It's almost like having an infant.

On a lighter note

2007-12-30T04:29:04Z

We're trying to be more funny more regularly on the Blog from the Sea of Cortez. (That turn of phrase is funny in and of itself because it's a Steinbeck joke. Now laugh.) At some point we're supposed to make some short flims. Mostly we just sit around and snipe at each other for being unproductive. Maybe we'll make a flim about that.

Goodbye Sasha

2007-12-23T01:05:04Z

Our older cat died last night. I was a bit worried when she didn't come in at bedtime, like she's been doing lately. Then this morning I found her on the porch.

It looks like she got hit by a car and had just enough strength to make it up to our porch.

Today is a day of morning.

Lord of the Flies

2007-12-20T16:32:14Z

After a couple days at a certain southside middle school, I'm beginning to wonder if William Golding ever subbed there.

There are moments when I feel like climbing up on a table and shouting, "All right, now! Come on, people! Who took Piggie's glasses?"

Which would be ignored and I would resort to screaming, "I've got the conch! I've got the conch!"

That's because I'm a wizard

2007-12-16T20:35:25Z

On Friday, one of the fifth graders in the class I was subbing in said I looked like Harry Potter. I said, "that's because I'm a wizard."

The kids loved this. They asked if I had a wand. I said I did, but I couldn't remember where I put it. "It's probably in the shed somewhere."

"I want to buy the world a Coke."

2007-12-03T00:46:23Z

The father-in-law and his partner stopped by today as part of their visit to the Western provinces. It was okay, with no tears shed. At one point, however, the father-in-law began to go off on how 'Islam is evil.' It's not a pretty conversation to get into. With lots of references made by me to point out all the different kinds of fundamentalism that is scary: X-ian, Aryan, Serbian, Maoist... to no avail.

After he left, I thought that I really should have brought up the evils of Capitalist Fundamentalism. Maybe next time.

He's following me

2007-12-01T05:07:21Z

This morning, when I was subbing for two periods of middle school orchestra I saw him there backstage. Up high on the wall backstage was a giant poster of John Coltrane.

I've also noticed that, if there's a kid named Cody in a class, he's probably going to be trouble.

Public television and me

2007-11-22T03:14:38Z

The news crew from the local PBS news show caught me and Star on tape while we were picking up our vegetables. It's a bit embarrassing for me to watch myself, but Star is a super cool kid on the TV. We're making pies out of that pumpkin tomorrow.

"A Love Supreme"

2007-11-10T04:51:14Z

So yesterday a kid, a band kid by the looks of the case he was lugging around with him, saw my name on the white board and said, "hey, that's like a musician, right? Like a jazz musician?"

I had no idea the weird substitute/John Coltrane name association was a two way thing. Twenty years ago it was the trying too hard to be hip subs asking me if I was any relation. And now that I'm the sub, it's band geeks asking me.

High School English!

2007-11-07T23:01:57Z

Today I subbed at the High School I was scared of when I was in high school. I got to fill in for an 11th grade English teacher. They were studying Poe. Finally, I get to use all that college book learning for something besides alphabetizing!

The school really wasn't that scary. In one class a girl had a copy of Frank Post's book King Dork. I was so excited. I said I'd read the book also and that is was what made me decide to become a teacher. Of course now I feel like I should have told her why. I mean the teachers in the book are terrible examples of human beings. My inspiration lay in me thinking "this doesn't seem to far from the truth. Kids deserve better teachers than that." I hope she didn't interpret my inspiration as "I want a job where I can be an abusive asshole all day."

Substitution Solution

2007-11-06T03:19:14Z

I subbed for a middle school science class today. It was exactly what you'd expect. Six hours in a monkey cage.

I haven't come home from work so energized in about two years. It was awesome. I've got gigs lined up for the rest of this week.

Parting Words from the Speedway Calendar Supervisor

2007-11-02T03:05:53Z

I've worked at Bookmans longer than at any other job I've had. It's bittersweet to go. I'll miss a lot of people. But the truth is that the cast of Bookmans characters is constantly changing anyway. Some people I've already missed. Some that I've missed have come back. Some I still see from time to time. And there are those that will always be with me even if I never do see them again.

I'm getting a little maudlin, which really wasn't where I was trying to go with this. So I'll stop it. What I really want to get into are some of the reasons I've stayed at Bookmans so long.

First of all, it's a really cool job. Bookmans is one of those rare employers that actually doesn't ask you to compromise who you are in order to work here. And that's a good thing because most of us are absolutely looney. It's not that we couldn't make it on the outside. It's that, as a whole, we're really not into the kind of vests they usually make you wear when you work at places like Wal-Mart.

Also, you get to spend a lot of time with these amazing people, your beautiful lunatic co-workers.
There is a certain spark of inner brilliance I've found again and again in the people who work here. Sometimes it can be hard to find, but it's usually there in those of us who can hack it in the Bookmans world for more than one summer. You have to be crazy smart to do this job. You have to be able to see the shifting patterns in the stock on the sales floor and in the incoming merchandise. You have do develop a kind of battlefield clairvoyance tuned to what's going to be the next big thing in the books and entertainment world: always on the lookout for the next 'Sea Biscuit,' ready to shelf check every damn Danielle Steel book because maybe, just maybe, we actually need a hardcover copy of 'Message from Nam' today (we probably don't).

This inner brilliance in my co-workers has kept me coming back every day for a little over four years now. I have cherished the countless conversations and arguments (who would win in a fight, Wolverine or Garfield?). Of course the most exciting conversations for me have been with people who, like myself, are are struggling with the question of what there place is, and what they feel it should be, in this messed up world we're in. These conversations light me on fire and make me feel that maybe, if I apply myself in the right direction, I could make a difference. I could help other people figure out how we can change the world. (That's a big part of why I want to go into teaching.)

There are a lot of us here who have been kind of hiding out at Bookmans, tending to our wounds and finding some shelter because the rest of this messed up world has driven us crazy. Corporate jobs and public institutions have left us with the bitter resolve that we are not going to wear another on of those polyesther vests embroidered with a company logo. We know that the poyesther vest is how they (the 'man' and his golf buddies) kill our spirits and steal our mojo. (Another part of why I want to teach is so I can show kids how they can live free of the polyesther vest.)

For a lot of us Bookmans is how we pay the rent while we're working on what we really do with our lives. We're in bands, we make movies, we write, we go to school, we have families. Bookmans is that rare thing, a full-time job that's stimulating and engaging, but doesn't follow you home at night. You need to be smart to do the job, but you don't usually lose sleep planning and strategizing how you're going to approach the trade counter the next day (unless you're Katy). you can save that energy to plan and strategize toward your own projects and goals (comedy dominance, for example).

Although I'm moving on to my damn fool crusade to make the world safe for kids who don't want to wear polyesther, I won't be a stranger. Star won't let me. Besides, I'd really hate to see calendar sales slip this year. I'm going to be checking in on that. Regularly.

One less tooth, 50% less neck pain!

2007-10-06T05:42:16Z

I got the impacted left lower wisdom tooth removed from my mouth today. I got real drugged up and didn't go to work. Awesome! I didn't call in, but I told everybody remotely managerial about it last week and again yesterday, including Katy (yes, that Katy) who was opening MOD today. I think it's covered.

In the waiting room before hand Jessica said "what if getting that tooth out helps your neck pain?"

What neck pain, you ask? Oh, only that chronic neck pain that has plagued me since 1995 and required a constant rotation all kinds of pillows including Target, Astronaut, and Hippie varieites, in order to be able to sleep at night.

And what do you know, the left side of my neck feels awesome. It hasn't felt this awesome since Jessica threw a little bit of her high-powered, recently reiki-attuned mojo on it about five years ago.

Now I wonder if I should get the other wisdom tooth, the one the dentist said not to worry about, extracted and see if the right side of my neck follows suit.

unHiatus

2007-09-29T05:49:40Z

I'm back. I'm really into my Educational Psychology class. That having been said, I am still procrastinating on the course work. But the idea of teaching is really getting me excited. Jessica walked my application to be a substitute to the right office at TUSD headquarters. If all goes according to plan I could be in the thick of surly teens in their unnatural environment in a matter of weeks.

Also, I've gotten myself involved in a damned fool ploy for comedy dominance in the Bookmans Community Room. That's right. NBOJUS is going down. The downside is that I am now associated with a MySpace page again. I figure it's different than before because being in a nascent Comedy Troupe is like being in a band, which is really the only excusable reason to have a MySpace page.

Having said all that, if you're on MySpace, make friends with the Sea of Cortez!

Hiatus

2007-09-20T17:38:44Z

Hey every internet body that matters. I'm taking a hiatus after getting too worked up over something stupid that happened. And my lovely recycled paper notebook has been much neglected. I'm taking a break from the "series of tubes" until my next class starts on Monday (or I have to look up something important).

See you when I get back!

Arizona Educational Proficiency Exam

2007-09-08T17:02:19Z

I started studying for this test I'm going to talk next week. By passing it I will be fulfilling the subject knowledge part of the No Child Left Behind Act's requirement for English Teachers.

I'll still have to take a bunch of classes and do the Professional Knowledge test, as well as student teaching. But this test was something that was kind of daunting me. Until I looked at the Study Guide

Is this test too easy? Or has four years in the Book Dept. done nothing but prepare me for this very thing? It's hard to tell. One thing's for sure, it's definitely easier than the GRE that willowtree is studying for.

And then yesterday a woman came into the store looking for a study guide to this very test. And I was like, "Oh, hey, yeah! I'm going to take that test. We never get in study guides for it, but there's one for free on their website."

She looked at me like I was speaking Martian. So I directed her to the study guides and wished her luck.

Maybe the test isn't too easy after all.

My Nemesisesisses

2007-09-06T20:20:09Z

Okay. Nemesis one: The timeclock web application made me change my password again. I can't remember my new password. The admin is out this week. I get to write my hours down until she gets back and can tell me what my password is. I should have chosen a cuss-word again.

Nemesis two: myself. There's all kinds of reasons I'm my own nemesis. I just put this in so I could butcher the plural (nemeses?).

Nemesis three: paint fumes. There are guys refinishing all the doors and jambs at work. This might have something to do with my inability to remember my password.

Nemesis four: weekly celebrity tragedy magazines. Just because.

Call for submissions

2007-08-26T23:49:29Z

-CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS-

BONY LANDMARKS

a zine of true adventure and cultural artifacts

is seeking non-fiction, comics,

and miscellaneous imagery that looks good in glorious B/W

for the fourth (and possibly fifth) issue

of our occasionally lauded

and often overlooked

small press

mag

Themes for upcoming issues include:

-Tales of international travel and life abroad

-The job that ate my soul

-Dangerous weather

-What the hell is that thing I found at Grandma’s house?

(Compelling submissions on other themes will also be considered)

The deadline for issue 4 is March 21, 2008

Address submissions to: the Look for Signage Art Collective

PO Box 42181

Tucson, AZ 85733-2181

or look_for_signage@yahoo.com

Accepted submissions will be compensated in contributor copies and eternal gratitude. For a sample copy, send $3 (well concealed cash or paypal). For a less expensive way to get the gist, read the web article “Looking for Signs."

What would Morrissey do?

2007-08-19T16:28:48Z

When my family's out of town I crank up the Morrissey and feel sorry for my sad and lonely self... but in a smug and self-satisfied kind of way. I mean, I hardly ever get a chance to listen to Morrissey when they're around.

Actually, the CD I'm listening to was one I picked up at the Powells warehouse back in the day. They had this deal going on where Amazon would sell them their book returns at a super deep discount. Powells would turn around and sell the books as "Specials" at a price somewhere between their used and new pricepoints. It was one of Powells' several sources of second-hand, or almost second-hand merchandise.

At some point one of the Amazon shipments was screwed up and there were a couple boxes of CDs in it. At the time the bosses were at a loss for what to do with them. The boxes sat around for a couple weeks and were eventually sifted through by employess who couldn't dodge temptation any more.

I picked out "My Early Burglary Years" because back in Tucson I had worked in a small, hot kitchen with a couple guys who were into the Smiths, and another guy, one of the baristas, who was too obsessed with Morrissey entirely. No less then five tattoos. And he eventually quit the coffee shop and got a gig dumping airplane toilets for American Airlines so he could use his employee perks to follow Morrissey on tour. I think he ended up going as far as Brazil to catch a show.

Anyway, this kind of weird devotion on my old co-worker's part and my growing appreciation of the self-conscious lyrics made me pick up the CD... for listening use at work, of course.

I listened to it a lot because I was a new guy in a rainy town and Jessica, newly pregnant, was finishing her study abroad year in Germany. Something about listening to Morrissey while I pulled internet orders from the lonely basement and fourth floor of the Hoyt Warehouse seemed to really fit.

Somehow I still have the CD.

And now I will try to save a little bit of my music scene cred (right!) by saying I prefer the Smiths to Morrissey's solo efforts.