It’s a Mad, Mad, Madhatter World.
One of the things I love about reading Adam’s ongoing series of music recollections is the sheer avalanche of quick-hit memories and images and emotions they trigger.
His latest entry, on Cowboy Junkies’ “Sweet Jane,” for instance, includes this bit:
I remember discovering the The Trinity Session wasn’t their first album when I stumbled upon Whites Off Earth Now!! on vinyl at Madhatter Music Co. (another independent music store now gone) in downtown Bowling Green.
Now, it’s entirely possible that I knew Madhatter was gone, but the last time Adam and I visited our old college town, it was still there. According to its Myspace page -
Madhatter Music Co. was founded in 1988 by Billy Hanway and Ed Cratty. Its first customer was a madman by the name of Jim Cummer, who became manager and eventually bought the store. For 18 years, Madhatter has stood for good music, flying under the radar of a diseased popular culture, communing with fellow like-minded freaks and lifers, and rocking out at all costs.
In October 2006, PB Army drummer and local music journalist/heart patient Keith Bergman took the torch and attempted to lead Madhatter from its recalcitrant teenage years into the murky waters of young adulthood. Sadly, he’s packed his bags and inventory, never to return. The store is officially closed.
Now, I remember Billy Hanway. At least inasmuch as he was “that guy Billy” who owned Madhatter.
And while I’ve lost track of which CDs of mine may have come from Madhatter – They Might Be Giants Flood, I’m pretty sure is one, though - I know for certain that I have two flawless LPs I got there when I still had my first stereo system, since it still included a turntable. One is Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, which I have still never owned in any other format, and the other is The Police, Synchronicity, which I picked up to replace my cassette. I think I payed maybe three bucks each for these.
But what really socked me while reading that blurb was that Madhatter was founded in 1988, meaning that when we started our freshman year at BG in the fall of ‘89, the store was only a year or so old. The thing is, it felt like the sort of place that had existed for decades, sandwiched in that dingy little building between bars and gas stations and alleys. Frankly, I figured Madhatter had in all likelihood, been there since the one year my Dad attended BG back in the late 1960s. I would have at least figured the place dated back to the ’70s, but man, I’m telling you: It felt like it could have.
I mean, if you’re what, older than 30, you know this kind of store. You walk in, and there’s a rack of local music rags and a wall that’s been tacked over with countless layers of band flyers and bar show announcements. And there’s one glass case layered with stuff like “Corporate Rock Sucks” patches and anarchy logo buttons and bumper stickers, and another case filled with CDs from Europe and rare reissues and B-side collections and concert bootlegs. The walls are covered in posters and lined with racks of CDs and LP records – and one sadly-neglected bin of cassette tapes is over in a corner – and you go in and start flipping through stuff that you’ve seen before, but maybe something new is out this week, or maybe someone traded in a collection you’re looking for.
Odds are the place smells like someone’s basement that you know – like an old couch and a candle and patchouli and a bit of mustiness that never quite congeals into “rank,” but still kind of encloses you a little bit claustrophobically. It’s not anything you’d call a pleasant smell, but recalling it, by association, puts me in a mood of remembering an important and special time in my life.
Suck it, iTunes. Bite me, Amazon. Yeah, you’re convenient and wondrous and I can’t live without you, but you’ll never be my Madhatter, you hear me?
Dammit.
Wookiee Whiteout
As of roughly 5:45 a.m. EST, that little bump is the only visible clue to Giant Vintage Kenner Chewbacca’s whereabouts
"Ha! That stupid probe droid'll NEVER find me now..."
So, yeah, holy shit, we got a lot of snow last night.
Chewie’s back on duty.
Galactically-recognized Giant Vintage Chewie Snow Scale
Giant vintage Kenner Chewbacca reported to his post at approximately 9 p.m. EST Fri. Feb. 5, when the snowfall had reached the point pictured. For the record, his monitoring position was devoid of snow earlier in the day.
He has been instructed to radio Echo Base immediately if Mr. Tumnus shows up.
"Send Rogues 10 and 11 to Station 38 with some Turkish Delight."
Neil Gaiman, Arthur, and Geekdom
Image: PBSkids.org
Edit 2/5/10 – I wrote something. Neil Gaiman said he loved it. That’s kind of crazyawesome.
Kelsey and I have been fans of PBS’ Arthur pretty much since she was old enough to focus her eyes on the television. We quote lines from the show just the way we do with Star Wars or Fringe or Help!
It’s hard to say which of us is more excited that Neil Gaiman’s going to be on the show, but the news inspired me to write this post for GeekDad.
100 Stories for Haiti
Check out the 100 Stories for Haiti anthology project, sparked and organized by writer Greg McQueen in Denmark, and all sales of which will benefit the Red Cross and its relief efforts in Haiti. Nick Harkaway, who wrote The Gone-Away World, contributed a story and the introduction (and no, nobody’s getting paid for this – the stories are all donated); Smashwords is producing the e-book version, and Unbound Press will handle the paperback. (On Facebook? Here’s the project’s page – spread the word!)
I read about the effort on John Scalzi’s blog the same day as the initial submission deadline and managed to get a story in under the wire. Pretty much forgot about it over the weekend, but Monday’s email brought me word that my piece was selected!
The entire 100-story list is here, and it’s a crazy-global roster, from Harkaway to The White Road and Other Stories author Tania Hershman to Botswana writer Lauri Kubuitsile. And Alasdair Stuart, the host of Pseudopod is on there, too. (Edited to reflect the fact that Alasdair popped in to confirm that’s him.)
With so many voices and styles, it should be an interesting read, which, yes, I realize is hardly the point here, but I’m awfully excited about playing even a small part in a project which has the potential to do a lot of good.
My Concerns with Ohio’s New Passenger Rail
I’m a huge fan of mass transit and public transportation and the funding required to keep it up and running. Couple this with the fact that air travel – which I used to love – has become something I now only tolerate when it’s absolutely necessary, and you’ve got someone who was really excited about Ohio’s new passenger rail system.
Now that the plans are out there, I could hardly be more disappointed.
See, I live in envy of the transportation options of friends and family who live in the New York and Northern Virginia areas. When we visit, I absolutely dig the subways and metro trains and buses. And during the four years I spent commuting 57 miles one-way from North Canton to Cleveland, I would have gladly spent more than the equivalent of my gas money for the option of getting on a train at, say, the Akron-Canton Airport and riding downtown to Tower City.
So here’s why the new passenger rail feels like a gut punch: From my admittedly Northeast Ohio-biased perspective, our corner of the state really gets shafted. (To say nothing of Toledo – which is exactly what the new system does.) But more than me taking it personally, the plan essentially ignores a vast portion of the state’s most populous region.
Look at the map of the route accompanying that Plain Dealer story. You’re talking six total stops: two each in Cleveland and Cincinnati, one apiece in Dayton and Columbus. The number of stops isn’t really my issue, though – it’s their placement.
For example: Dayton and Columbus are 70-some miles apart, but the new passenger rail avoids the shortest route from Columbus to Cincinnati so that Dayton can be on the line. This connects Dayton with both of its bigger neighbors and could, it seems, easily accommodate the schedules of commuters to and from those two larger cities. Hypothetically, Cincinnati and Columbus get to keep their income tax from workers in their limits, while Dayton and its suburbs get to keep their residents and property taxes.
Now look at the Northeast corner. The rail runs from Cleveland’s west side down through the largely rural north central part of the state, completely avoiding the populous corridor stretching south along I-77 through Akron and Canton. In other words, anyone south of Cleveland will actually have to drive a fair piece away from Columbus in order to pick up the train that runs to Columbus. Furthermore, a close examination of the state’s geography reveals that an alarming number of people do live south of Cleveland because the city’s northern border is a Great Freaking Lake.
Realizing these are the very early days of this project and there is room for develpment and change and schedule tweaking, I just don’t see right now where the regular travelers are for this line.
As the Plain Dealer points out, working in one of the Three C’s and living in another isn’t suddenly going to become a viable option. That leaves tourism. And while there is recreation business to be had, given the travel time involved and then the added costs of transportation in and around your destination, I’m not seeing much incentive to take the train when driving I-71 can get you from Columbus to Cincinnati in four hours or so. Who in Youngstown or Canton is going to drive an hour and a half or two hours to the west side of Cleveland so they can get on a train to Columbus? Akronites already have a pretty decent deal, since I-71 runs just to the west of the city thorugh Medina County and offers a straight freeway shot to the state’s capital.
So from a practicality standpoint, all of this seems to make the new rail virtually useless to a huge portion of the most populous corner of the state. The whole ”if you build it they will come” approach seems foolish to me. Why not put the rail where “they” already are?
Look at this U.S. Census Bureau population density map from 2000:
Ohio Population Density, 2000 census
See that big well-shaded area in the upper right corner right? There are 10 counties there with a population greater than 100,000 according to this map of 2006 population estimates. (And an eleventh, Geauga county, was at 95,676.) How many of these counties are touched by this rail? Two: Lorain and Cuyahoga, which occupy the northwestern-most points of the region.
In fact, look at that 2006 list again, with the numbers handily compiled into this chart from US-Places.com:
Graph: US-Places.com
It’s topped by nine Ohio counties with populations greater than 300,000 people. Leading the way, of course, are those which are home to the three C’s: Cuyahoga (Cleveland), Franklin (Columbus) and Hamilton (Cincinnati).
Fourth on the list is Summit County, with a population of 545,931 and anchored by Akron – utterly untouched by the new rail line.
Fifth is Montgomery County, where you’ll find Dayton, with its own proposed rail stop.
Sixth is Lucas County, home to Toledo,which as I’ve noted, falls far outside the plan. In my estimation, though, its situation is different from the Northeast region in that it’s surrounded by a lot of farmland, and no other county in the region has a population above 125,000. (In fact, only two other counties in my 21-county ballparking of Northwest Ohio even reach past the 100,000-person mark.
Seventh on the list is Stark County, where I live, and its major city of Canton, which anchors the south end of that I-77 corridor I mentioned earlier. Again – no connection to the new rail system whatsoever.
Butler County just north of Cincinnati, and Lorain County, already mentioned, occupy spots eight and nine on the population list, and both are directly touched by the rail.
I think it’s also worth noting that counties 10, 11 and 12 on the list are three of the remaining four in Ohio with populations greater than 200,000. They are Mahoning (Youngstown), Trumbull (Warren) and Lake counties, all three of them in the northeast, and once more, all untouched by the new rail.
Number 13? Warren County, right along the Dayton-Cincinnati route.
While some say this project isn’t about commuters, that’s fine, but then don’t tell me it’s about getting congestion off the freeways, because I think those are two totally different things to address.
The thing is, for all of these doubts, I really want this to succeed. I want it to draw passengers and bring in cash so maybe it can be expanded and hey, maybe even spark the development of high-speed rail. I want it to lead to a day when I can go visit my Columbus and Cincinnati friends by train and be back to work on Monday, or maybe a day when my brothers and I can go catch a Browns game without driving out of our own county.
In other words, I desperately want to be wrong about all of this.
But right now, I just don’t see these rails leading to any of those destinations.
X-Files, Glass Robots and Star Wars.
I finally introduced Kelsey to The X-Files last weekend, and it was so much fun I wrote about it over at GeekDad , so why not take a few minutes to check it out and revisit Mulder and Scully and our stretchy friend Eugene Victor Tooms?
And speaking of GeekDad, an interview I did last week with Oregon artist Eric Bailey about his flameworked glass robots got linked and quoted yesterday by Cory Freaking Doctorow over at BoingBoing, which is, um, awfully neat. No, seriously.
Last thing for this morning: One day in, My Quest for 1,000 Star Wars Fans is approximately 1/250th of the way there, so many, many thanks to those who ordered Collect All 21! and for everyone’s continued support through sharing, blogging Twittering and ReTweeting.
Wanted: 1,000 Star Wars Fans and Friends
I don’t even know how to start this, really, so here’s what’s going on: Remember that sort-of-funny little story about my wife’s car conking out? Well, as it turns out, we have absolutely NOT reached the day where we can laugh about it, because as I sit here, staying up late unable to sleep, there are two possibilities. Either Jenn’s car is shot beyond repair, or it can be fixed – for an amount surpassing that of one of our monthly mortgage payments.
I realize in the life-encompassing gigantic picture of things, this matters exactly squat, but in the here-and-now small picture of things, it sucks awfully hard, especially coming on the heels of Jenn unable to work for two weeks because she had pneumonia.
Even though I’ve been building a pretty decent freelance career which I love, the truth is we’ve been playing a pretty hardscrabble game of catch-up ever since I lost my job last March, and seeing 2010 off to such a largely cruddy start in terms of things I can’t control – say, pneumonia and timing chains – is exceedingly disheartening.
I thought quite awhile about whether or not to write this post, because you know, in the face of all that can go wrong in a world and a life, our current struggles seem insignificant in comparison to so many others. But as a friend of mine put it when I was venting and simultaneously wrestling with this notion of feeling guilty about venting, “Yes, they’re relatively small problems. But that doesn’t mean they’re not real.” And you know what? It’s more important to me to try and do what’s necessary to take care of my home and family than to worry about whether or not someone on the internet thinks I’m whiny.
The super-frustrating thing is how relatively little it would take to set things on track. And here’s what I’ve realized: If I could somehow sell just a thousand copies of Collect All 21! Memoirs of a Star Wars Geek – The First 30 Years through Lulu – print or download(PDF download = Just Five Bucks), it doesn’t matter – it would go an awfully long way toward making things a lot more OK than they are at the moment.
I mean, one thousand, right? Heck, even reaching out to people in just the United States, all I’d have to do would be to convince 20 people per state – less than TWO DOZEN people in each; less than ONE PERSON for every THREE COUNTIES in the country! – there are my 1,000 Star Wars fans right freaking there. And I know there are more than a couple outside these borders.
And yes, I know that some people prefer Amazon or Barnes & Noble, and I’m insanely grateful for every one of those distributed sales, too, but they bring in a significant chunk less than the Lulu direct sales, and at any rate, those take a few months to get reported anyway, while Lulu pays out monthly. And to be perfectly honest, things are desperate now and looking for a boost in April just doesn’t spark my hopes at the moment. (In fact, if you really don’t want to deal with Lulu and would settle for an electronic version of the book – I don’t have many physical copies on hand right now – shoot me an email and I’ll sell you the PDF directly.)
I am, of course, fully aware that this makes me sound like a chump, because I know damn well that a thousand is no small number – unless you’re talking about the internet.
My hope is this: Many of my awesomely supportive friends and acquaintances have, well, other friends and acquaintances, who, I’d bet, also know still more people. There is, in fact, no people shortage. And from the miracles of generosity I’ve seen accomplished online,and with the sheer numbers of people all willing to do something small that adds up to something heart-shatteringly incredible, I know that the right Tweet or ReTweet, the casual Facebook mention, the quick blog link or post in the right corners of the web are all it takes to just make amazing things happen.
To my fellow first-generation Star Wars fans, parents, and former kids of the 1980s who have already bought the book, you remain incredibly fantastic and endlessly encouraging people, and I humbly hope you’ll continue spreading the word about it somehow.
I’m not asking for amazing – I’d just like to be able to tell my wife that everything is fine, and I’d really, really like to believe it myself.
Building blocks.
Update: Fellow GeekDad writer Jonathan Liu says these look an awful lot like Wechsler Blocks, which I’d never heard of, but are (were?) apparently used in psychological testing. Interesting.
I can’t recall a time when these blocks were not among my toys.
Just a couple of blocks, about one-and- 9/16 inches square on a side.
When I go back in memory, they’re there, in the wooden toy box – the one with the hinged, great-potential-for-finger-smashing lid - in the space where I played next to the kitchen of our house in Lima, Ohio, the first place I remember living.
And even when I’d outgrown them, they stayed part of the “box of blocks” that expanded through two more Booth boys and eventually filled about two-thirds of the original mailbox from the North Canton house where we all grew up.
Somewhere in my adult years, I got hold of two of these blocks and kept them around because they reminded me of being a little kid and how fascinated I was with the number of patterns it was possible to create in diamonds and triangles and stripes and zig-zags.
"Triangle Man, Triangle Man..."
Within the last few months, I found three more (I don’t remember how many were in the set originally – maybe eight) drifting around the bottom of the toy box that mom keeps at her house for all her grandkids, and I reunited them with the pair I had.
A side note which I like: The tiny embossed copyright on each block reads GMFGI, which stands for General Mills Fun Group, Inc. and is also present on several of my earliest Star Wars figures.
Adding the trio of new blocks pretty quickly reawakened the memory of those patterns I made when I was little, but I’ve also found myself messing around with new arrangements, using the corners and angled views as opposed to the sort of flat, mosaic designs that use just one set of faces.
You know what would be cool? Someone with time and patience and more talent than me could do some awfully nifty stuff with a couple hundred – or thousand – of these. I wouldn’t mind having a couple more myself, but honestly, I’ve never seen another set, and I haven’t been able to find them online.
It’s probably for the best – I do have work to do.
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