Copious Free Time

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This came from The Comics Reporter (linked from bOINGbOING). Reading it, I was struck by how much overlap there was between the writer's tastes and my collection. At the end, the writer had the idea of making a meme of the list, bolding what one has, leaving unbolded the ones one doesn't have, italicizing the ones we don't have enough of, and underlining the ones that maybe shouldn't be on the list.

1. Something From The ACME Novelty Library
2. A Complete Run Of Arcade
3. Any Number Of Mini-Comics
4. At Least One Pogo Book From The 1950s
5. A Barnaby Collection
6. Binky Brown and the Holy Virgin Mary
7. As Many Issues of RAW as You Can Place Your Hands On
8. A Little Stack of Archie Comics
9. A Suite of Modern Literary Graphic Novels
10. Several Tintin Albums
11. A Smattering Of Treasury Editions Or Similarly Oversized Books
12. Several Significant Runs of Alternative Comic Book Series
13. A Few Early Comic Strip Collections To Your Taste
14. Several "Indy Comics" From Their Heyday
15. At Least One Comic Book From When You First Started Reading Comic Books
16. At Least One Comic That Failed to Finish The Way It Planned To
17. Some Osamu Tezuka
18. The Entire Run Of At Least One Manga Series
19. One Or Two 1970s Doonesbury Collections
20. At Least One Saul Steinberg Hardcover
21. One Run of A Comic Strip That You Yourself Have Clipped
22. A Selection of Comics That Interest You That You Can't Explain To Anyone Else
23. At Least One Woodcut Novel
24. As Much Peanuts As You Can Stand
25. Maus
26. A Significant Sample of R. Crumb's Sketchbooks
27. The original edition of Sick, Sick, Sick. (What I have is an early but not original edition paperback. I think he's just bragging.)
28. The Smithsonian Collection Of Newspaper Comics
29. Several copies of MAD
30. A stack of Jack Kirby 1970s Comic Books
31. More than a few Stan Lee/Jack Kirby 1960s Marvel Comic Books
32. A You're-Too-High-To-Tell Amount of Underground Comix
33. Some Calvin and Hobbes
34. Some Love and Rockets
35. The Marvel Benefit Issue Of Coober Skeber
36. A Few Comics Not In Your Native Tongue
37. A Nice Stack of Jack Chick Comics
38. A Stack of Comics You Can Hand To Anybody's Kid
39. At Least A Few Alan Moore Comics
40. A Comic You Made Yourself (the comics I did in junior high are all gone, but I've done more since)
41. A Few Comics About Comics
42. A Run Of Yummy Fur
43. Some Frank Miller Comics
44. Several Lee/Ditko/Romita Amazing Spider-Man Comic Books
45. A Few Great Comics Short Stories
46. A Tijuana Bible
47. Some Weirdo
48. An Array Of Comics In Various Non-Superhero Genres
49. An Editorial Cartoonist's Collection or Two
50. A Few Collections From New Yorker Cartoonists

Of course, anything I don't have doesn't belong on any serious list. Haf-kaff. He offered to let people make suggestions for things they'd put on there, as long as they take one off for each one they add. That gives me about six, except I'll say that two of them are probably my own fault and just suggest four. I'll say "anything by Harvey Kurtzman" and show Executive's Comic Book for the visual. And I'll throw in VIZ, the rude, vulgar British comic magazine which embodies the logical culmination of over a century of dysfunctional characters -- all monomaniacs who live pointless lives surmounted by unrelated puns in the last panel. And my visual example would be a "Billy the Fish" strip to be named later... or maybe "Zip O'Lightning," one of the most cruelly hilarious one-shot strips ever. T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents is a case unto itself, a self-standing series (and a couple of spinoffs) about all-too-human agents who punch a time clock and go risk their lives using devices they don't understand themselves. Collections of 1950s panel gags from magazines are full of great stuff (including many appearances by artists who would soon become legends of comic strips, like Mort Walker and Johnny Hart) -- I'd probably illustrate this with one of those collections from "True, the Man's Magazine" that brought so many great VIP cartoons to my attention. He should have had Herbie in there, too, a comic whose neatly drafted buttoned-down artwork by Ogden Whitney only made it even more dadaistic. That's five. Deal with it.

Of course, I'll think of other things I should have said, but I'm going to stop. Now.

Wait a second. Hang on.

There. Now I'm stopping.
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I've been seeing the meme about how many comments different users have put on my LJ. It lays it all out in graphic form. I went and deciphered the cryptic instructions and got the results and pasted them here, and you know what? They were too bleeding depressing. I've made over 300 more comments in my own LJ than the next person in line. Some of my best friends turn out to have only found me worthy of comment once or twice in over a year of posting here. The evidence indicates I am of interest to very few, and not very much of that. I'm not so sure any more that this is the best use of my time.

I must think about this.
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What's on my iPod? Don't have one. I bought something that does a lot of the same stuff for less in a slightly less keen package. It's an RCA Lyra, with which I have had humorous mishaps (traumas seen in retrospect), but which is pretty good when it works. So let's ask the question again, only say "What's on my mp3 player?" instead.

Glad I asked. This is what makes talking to myself such a pleasure.

It's a pretty big player, storage-wise, so I'll just talk about a little of it. Lately I've been shoring up some of my LP material. This wave started with my procuring a copy of Anthony Newman's "Organ Orgy" LP, which doesn't seem to have been reissued. This record is an all-Wagner outing on the pipe organ at St. John the Divine in NYC, and includes the best version of "Ride of the Valkyries" I've found so far. I bought two other CDs that had different versions of this arrangement on it, and this one still beats the rest, maybe because Newman had assistants playing extra notes and changing registrations and holding down pedals (he credits them on the liner). This led to my also transferring other great organ recordings, the Calvin Hampton arrangement of Franck's d-minor Symphony, a concert by Virgil Fox on the Mighty Wanamaker organ (there's some Wagner in it), and some arrangments for violin and organ that includes a lush treatment of Wieniawski's "Romance" from the violin concerto and several good Kreisler tidbits.

About this time, I started hankering for more music box pieces as well. Early on, I converted a tape of music box opera selections, and I decided to bite the bullet and go back to the disks for better and possibly more complete recordings, since I wasn't trying to fit them all on a tape now, so I could include multiple versions of the same pieces. There were a lot of different music boxes, so this isn't as redundant as it sounds. Some played from disks almost two feet wide. Some had organ pipes, drums, or tweeting birds. This naturally led into exploration of other automatic instruments, like the Violinola, the Orchestrion, or other mechanical combos.

So I'm big into this stuff at the moment. (At the moment. I've had the LPs for decades.) It's so vigorous, and oblivious. The pieces were programmed, not played. Some of the cruder instruments, I almost think they made the rolls by hammering nails into a rolling pin or something -- well, it sounds like it. Over the decades, too, the instruments have gotten a wee bit askew, perhaps, and don't sound quite like they did when they first thrilled the crowned heads of Europe. The violinola playing "Indian Love Call" is a bit unearthly. The drums that punctuate some of the instruments sound more like coffee cans (just think how hard it would be to get all that just right in something that has to keep playing on and on and on), and I suspect a few notes have vanished somewhere along the way.

Maybe the format is backwards. Maybe I should always write long-winded screeds about the music I'm listening to, and then afterwards check off a box that tells what's on my mind. "Politics." "Entertainment." "What I ate." "Something Sarah said." "Quiet hissing sound."
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