Every Life Should Have a Soundtrack

That’s the reason I can usually be found walking around with a Walkman on. I am so consumed by my love of music that I want it to surround me as often as possible. When I walk around, listening to music keeps my imagination engaged, and prevents me from becoming a walking vegetable as I commute.

I find it difficult to restrict my listening habits to just one or two genres. Every nuance of my moods can have a different sort of music that suits it best. If you just look at the list on the right, you’ll see that the evidence speaks for itself.

Unfortunately, as I’ve become an overworked old fart, my concert attendance has dropped off considerably. For one thing, I’ve lost my patience for seeing bands in any kind of stadium or other large venue. They lack any kind of intimacy that allows me to feel really involved in the show. At the same time, I have fallen into a vicious cycle where I stopped seeing shows as often because I wasn’t too thrilled with the indie music scene in Boston my last couple of years there, and now I’ve gotten so out of touch with local music both there and here in New York, that I never know what will be a good show to see, so I don’t go.

To top it off, New York seems to have an inexplicably crappy radio market, so I don’t hear much that way. Thes days I depend on recommendations from friends and what exposure I get through TV and my frequent forays to sample the listening booths at the Virgin Megastore in Times Square. (Sending me into Virgin is like waving an open bottle of gin in front of an alcoholic — so dangerous.)

The Good vs. The Bad and the Ugly

Good Lo-Tech

Bad Hi-Tech
Datebooks, Address Books, etc.
Immediate access as long as you have the presence of mind to keep them with you		 Databases and Electronic Calendars
Vulnerable to power outages and and disk crashes; it takes a long time for your computer to start up just to get a friend’s
number for a thirty-second call to an answering machine
Nice, Solid Wood Furniture
Easily repaired and looks better with age		 Any Furniture from Ikea
Sure it looks sleek, but it’s often wobbly after a while, and that formica-covered pressed wood is awful to the touch
Stationery and a Nice Pen
Nothing says “I care” like a handwritten letter		 Word Processors
A note to a friend should never look like a memo from the boss
A Screwdriver, a Pair of Pliers, and Gaffer’s Tape
Can be used to fix almost anything with a little imagination		 Telephone Tech Support
Punching buttons to get through a complex maze only to wait and then have someone condescend to second-guess everything you’ve already tried
Incandescent Lamps and Candles
Warm and soothing		 Flourescent Light Fixtures
“My, what an attractive complexion you have;” Flickers just enough to be annoying
SLR Cameras
The crappiest 35mm camera from the Salvation Army can still produce a picture with rich color and good detail as long as you hold it pretty steady		 Any Affordable Digital Camera
One-tenth the quality at four times the price. Don’t even get me started
Leather, Silk, Cotton Naugahyde, Acetate, Nylon
Goosedown Fiber-Fill
Reality
Touch it, smell it, taste it, do it now		 Virtual reality
Wait for it, pay for it

I’m a Bad Geek

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a big nerd. I was a little slow to give myself over to the world of electronics — I never played video games very much, and I never used a word processor until I was a sophomore in college — but I sure as hell made up for lost time. At this point I can work a computer like it’s an extension of my hands. Technical glitches are generally little more than a series of logically connected hurdles to me, and I’ve got good intuition for technical matters that helps me make a few bold leaps along the way. Software makes sense to me, and I love the speedy efficiency of digital technology. I have no fear of it.

This level of comfort with modern technology extends far beyond the workaday world of computers. Let’s be realistic: even though I may take to computers more easily than others, if I didn’t have some degree of comfort with them I wouldn’t really be able to hold down a job at this point, would I? No, I really like almost all things electronic. I like having an alarm clock that I can set by pushing a couple of buttons while I’m half asleep. I like having voice-mail and managing it without the use of clunky machines and crappy Radio Shack tapes. My six-disk CD player is like having a shrine to music inside my apartment. I pride myself on having not spoken to a bank teller in six years except to open an account or purchase foreign currency. And don’t even get me started on how much e-mail has kept my family and friends together as we’ve scattered across the globe.

A friend once told me that he thought I’d be happiest if I could manage my life while strapped to my computer all day being fed Skittles through a pneumatic tube. This is not true, and not just because the Skittles would send my blood sugar level soaring out of control.

I’m very critical of the media trend —spearheaded by technology pundits,
the advertising efforts of hi-tech companies, and everyone connected to
Wired magazine —that would have us believe that a better world awaits us in which we can fuse the Internet to our television programming, solve problems at work from the beach, and satisfy all our consumer needs without ever leaving home. I like leaving home and think people should get out more often. You don’t have to live in a cramped New York studio to know that there’s plenty more going on in the outside world to amuse people.

I worry about the death of printed matter that techno-doomsayers keep threatening. I worry about becoming more isolated from people on a daily basis than I already am. I worry about homogenization of the things I touch and the things I see and the things I read. While I support technology and the convenience, efficiency, and new opportunities it can offer our culture, I worry about what it’s doing to our critical standards and our self-reliance.

I’m a bad geek, because I also believe in lo-tech.

Continue reading “I’m a Bad Geek”

Is That Really Natural Gas?

Odor-ama numbers
Odor-ama art

Oh, the sad and sorry life of Francine Fishpaw! But the pungently sweet glories of having my very own Odorama card! Carefully preserved since a 1988 showing of “Polyester” at Cinema Village in New York, I only take this out once every couple of years or so in order to let someone or another have their very own sniff of this holy relic.

This card became even more important to me during college, when I went to a double bill of Hairspray and Polyester at the Somerville Theater, hoping to get my hands on another card or two. I was anxious because the show was billed as having the last load of Odorama cards in existence, and sure enough, I arrived five minutes after the last ones had been dispersed.

I’ve heard that New Line Cinema manufactured more cards to be packaged with the laserdisc of the movie, but apparently they were not able to perfectly duplicate all the original smells.

What Made Me into the Nerd I Am Today

One of my primary reasons for starting the print version of Rumpus
Room back in 1994 was that I had a burning, frustrated passion for graphic design.

I had gotten it stuck in my head at an early age that I wanted to be a “graphic artist” (I term I now use in reference to printmakers and draughtsmen) — at the time I suppose I thought of it as a more practical goal than my original desire to draw comic books for a living. As time went on, my interest in traditional forms of art never wavered, but I was thinking of graphic design as my vocation.

Working as the graphics editor for The Owl, the school paper at Regis, had whetted my appetite for working with type and illustration, and offered me some of the tools needed to produce Kumquat Popsicle, the one-shot zine that my friend Neil and I produced our senior year. I really loved the kind of visual assemblage that was required to put a zine together, and also got a real charge from having the final creative say in the end product. I bucked the running trend of my college-prep high school and headed off to art school at B.U. on a full scholarship, and put my design work on hold for the first two years while I studied painting, drawing, sculpture, and art history.

I really flowered, though, once I started the design program as a junior. I had already started hanging around the department the year before, since my enthusiasm was too big for me to keep in check, and was anxious to get started. Once I started dealing with honest-to-goodness graphic design issues, I realized that the “secondary” career choice of my youth was probably the best thing I ever pursued. To me, solving the problems and issues involved in graphic design seemed to be the perfect synthesis of my desire and aptitude for art, math, writing, and being anal-retentive. I came to realize that graphic design could be as much a vehicle for self-expression as any traditional forms of art, it just involved different processes and problems. And I could get paid to do it for a living, to boot.

I took it very seriously — I was a total nerd. By the time I graduated, I didn’t think that I had learned all I really felt I ought to, especially about typography, but I was happily free-lancing at a design studio in Chestnut Hill, and figured I would learn along the way. After that gig petered out, I snapped at a chance to take a job as a typesetter for the B.U. Office of Publications, thinking of it as an opportunity to do an apprenticeship of sorts and just focus on the minutiae of type for a while.

Well, that “while” turned into two-and-a-half years of the best education that I ever got in my life, but it was leaving me feeling pretty creatively stifled. All day long fine-tuned my typographic and technological skills, but was usually unable to exercise much creative judgement at all, expected to assist other designers in their work.

I made a brief attempt to take advantage of B.U.’s employee tuition remission program and I started the Graduate Graphic Design program. Big mistake. I was basically wasting time in a class of foreign students with little to no design background, and I spent the whole time repeating work I had done during my last two years as an undergrad. I lasted a semester-and-a-half. By the time I quit grad school, I was incredibly frustrated with my lack of outlets for real design work — especially work that would allow me some degree of expression — so I decided to pursue a self-education. I basically had a good idea of what I wanted to learn, and I would be better off seeking the answers myself. I figured grad school might be a good idea in the future if I felt like I’d hit a roadblock and need some external guidance, but I was to be my own “sensei” for a little while.

So on my return from a trip to visit my oldest pal Eddie in California, I decided to muster whatever motivation I could and turn my experiences from the trip into a zine. Finally, I had some material that I felt strongly about, a creative focus, a particular set of design problems I wanted to tackle, and the available cash to pull it off. It went well and was extremely satisfying, and the mood carried me through to a second issue, which also went well, and for which I set myself a different set of design problems to tackle.

I was sidetracked for a while after that by a few very long-overdue romantic involvements and various other occupations, and then the urge hit me again to take a big step forward with my creative self-improvement program. So I quit the job I then had as a typesetter/techie for Candlewick Press, a children’s book publisher in Cambridge, and free-lanced back at B.U. long enough to save up the money to move back to New York (money which I actually blew on a trip to China, but that’s another story altogether). The point of that was to team up with my other best pal Mark to devote ourselves to an ongoing lifestyle of constructive creative ambition. We’re doing okay with all the side projects, but I’m very happy to report that my career as a designer has finally blossomed now that I’m out of Boston. After a couple of lean weeks down here, I landed a free-lance gig at Thirteen/WNET, New York’s PBS television station, which which lasted for eight moths and still rears its ugly head now and then. I’m also staring down the mouth of a lucrative and intriguing position with the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, which holds some promise for interesting challenges and good perks. I’m finally able to channel all that creative energy into my professional life, which has helped me to become a MUCH better designer than I once was, and that has also given me a renewed vigor once it comes to my personal work.

So wish me luck on a continuing life as a stuck-up, pretentious, arty bastard who’s able to do for a living exactly what he would do for fun if he had to pay the rent by working as a short-order fry cook.

I have HAD It!

One of the recurring themes of my sad, sorry life is my inability to find that ideal sidekick who’s just the right combination of brainiac, goofball, sidekick, hipster, nerd, sexual dynamo, little kid, and muse. Granted, I’m pretty fussy, but I can’t be the only fag in the world whose criteria are so inconveniently eclectic, can I?

Are you wondering if you’re the kind of fella I might like? Browsing around here in the RumpWeb will certainly give you some idea of the kinds of things that capture my interest. Of course, you probably wouldn’t even be considering all this nonsense if the things here didn’t strike a chord with you already. As far as the looks and style issue is concerned, see if you fit the bill by checking out the next page for some visual references.

NOTE TO THE OLD-FASHIONED: If you don’t want to think about this sort of thing, DON’T GO LOOKING AT IT! I’m not saying there’s anything smutty
ahead — there’s definitely not — but there is some pretty strong imagery best left to the eyes of those who care for it, and I don’t want to hear any clucks of
disapproval because you’ve got a hopelessly fifties attitude about my penchant
for other guys.

Continue reading “I have HAD It!”

The Rumpus Room Manifesto

Originally written in February 1994.

I tend to feel disenfranchised, outcast, eccentric. I’ve got feminist sensibilities that make me feel guilty because I’m a man. I feel like my manhood is skewed because I’m not a straight man, so I can’t buy into the whole straight, white male cultural elite mindset. I feel alienated from the gay community because I can’t fathom or play the social/power games I see all over it, I bristle at a lot of its affectations, and can’t understand its rituals and customs. I feel separated from my friends for being too weird or not weird enough. I have no lover, so I don’t feel like I belong to a cozy twosome. At work I feel too young or too powerless and impatient.

My vision of the Rumpus Room . . . is to define my place, my sensibilities, my ideas. Ideally, others will respond, but this project is too personal for me to make concessions for the sake of popularity. I want to use Rumpus Room to explore my philosophy, my humor, my politics, my aesthetic, my abilities.

My vision for the magazine (my marketing vision, my conceptual vision) is to give other people a chance to respond to what’s in Rumpus Room, not allow it to become so half-assed that it becomes accessible to the lowest common denominator.

The rumpus room is a place to gossip, to gab, to argue, to tell jokes, to watch TV, and to play cards and stuff. It’s the rec room, the family room, the living room.

Imagine you’re hearing a low wolf whistle

If you’ve come this far, you should know right off the bat that I’m not holding out for some unearthly hunk that’s so far out of my league that I may as well be playing another sport altogether. Attraction is a delicate balancing act of looks, personality, wit, style, and all that other junk. It’s too hard (and it would be too misleading) for a simple guy like me to try and come up with a bulleted list of stuff that makes me all hot and bothered and sappy and mushy. Of course, I also know what will make me lose track of what I’m thinking if I see it walking down the street. So to give you some idea of what sets my hormones a-raging (as far as purely external qualities go), here are a few quick things to look at.