Miscellany

Did I even spell miscellany right? I am too lazy to spell check it, so let me know if its wrong. It looks right though...

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I didn't post anything yesterday because I was downtown at the Radisson for The Association for Recorded Sound Collections Pre-Conference Workshop on The Assessment, Preservation, and Access of Audio Collections in the Digital Age: an Archival Case Study. Sound exciting? Actually it was pretty neat. There were about fifty people there, probably 70% librarian/archivist-types, 35% geek squad sound engineer types (well, the hyperbolic equalization meter was set at 2.334 instead of 2.335 and it changed the frequency of the......blah blah blah), plus an unexpected 5% rocker quotient (dudes that looked like they came to Austin for SXSW and forgot to go home, so decided to attend an ARSC conference instead). Not to get down on the rockers. Maybe they were rockin librarians or rockin sound engineers.

Most of the presentations focused on the University of MIssouri at Kansas City Voices from World War II: Experiences from the Front and at Home project. The website has some very neat sound clips on it, and it was interesting to hear how they organized it, put it all together, and then assigned metadata so that people could actually find the stuff.

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Two days ago I finished reading Complete Crumb Volume Four: Mr. Sixties, the fourth volume of R. Crumb's collected comics. Josh and I brought this home along with a small stack of other gems from the giant boxes of comics that his dad found in their old basement when he was moving. I am working my way through this stash, which includes several issues of American Splendour, old western and romance comics from the 60s, strange comic book versions of rock star stories (I just read the Nirvana one last week, although it was published before the suicide, so I didn't get to see any drawings of that), and a bunch of others. Josh was pretty sure this Crumb one was his, but if it was his brother's instead, we totally borrowed your Crumb book, Nick.

And, of course, it is very awesome, although I like slightly older Crumb a little better than the sixties stuff. Still an interesting read.

My favorite line from the collection:

"I've been called an evil genius by cities of assholes..." (from "Definitely a Case of Derangement," Zap 1)

There are more asshole cities around than you might expect. Be on the lookout.