Entries by Ian Evans

Katie and I spent Thanksgiving in Paris, taking in the museums, visiting Veronica, being visited by Katie's British friend Micky, and hanging out at the apartment we rented in the Latin Quarter near the Jardin du Luxembourg.

Bill Hicks asked that anybody in his audience who was in marketing to please kill themselves. I have friends who work in marketing and quasi-marketing jobs, so I'd reserve this particular piece of advice to the assholes who came up with this bit of viral marketing from Starbucks.

I can't tell what's most depressing about this whole scenario. The fact that most people who commented on the Flickr post and at the San Francisco Chronicle's Culture Blog, including some people who were actually had by the stunt, seemed to find it "clever," and to blame themselves for being tricked into an extremely modest bit of concern for one's fellow human? The fact that the "punchline" to the stunt is an ur-cynical "Happy Holidays from Starbucks," the form, but not the content of basic, non-cynical well wishing (like they really just wanted to get people's attention to wish them well during the holiday season)? That the whole irony-steeped mess is causing complicated internal feelings of both complete cynicism and self-righteous anger wholly out of proportion to what is, at its core, a stunt likely to be discarded to the dust bin of history in short order?

I don't like to put myself in the same camp as the cultural conservatives, but I also can't help but mourn an age when interactions between random people on the street weren't informed by poisonous corporate marketing bullshit. It's not news to me that businesses have been captializing on both the holidays and our non-commercial goodwill for a long time. But still.

I don't find it funny. I don't find it clever. If there were any justice in the world, every time someone holds back from helping another person to avoid being a chump, the marketing department at Starbucks who approved this campaign would get sucker punched.

At Bay to Breakers, Claudia and I dressed up as little kids, with huge lollypops and a big wheel. I also wore a propeller-head beanie. Claudia had a wig and a little girl dress. We met up with some kickball friends dressed as the runaway bride's maids and their groomsmen. The big wheel was a big hit on the second half of the race (after the Hayes hill).

Veronica's birthday was over memorial day, which we mostly spent on the beach at Tahoe. Only Jay and Chuck actually braved the water, which was, uh, refreshing.

This is a Joan Miro aquatint, Hammer Without a Master, that was a gift from my parents. It's been quite a saga getting it reframed, but now that it's up on the wall I'm really happy with it.

Here's a Salon interview with Rev. John Paris, professor of bioethics at Boston College, on the Christian right's legal dance macabre.

I have a log analyzer on my web server that has an interesting feature which parses referrer URLs for search strings from the major search engines. While most of the search strings make some sort of sense, some leave me completely bewildered. I can't figure out why my site came up as a hit. Here are some of my favorites:

• angry ducks and video


• underwater girls photos


• a real photo of girls wearing condom


• gang symbols


• loitering


• emotional retardation

Interpol in a nutshell, from Salon Audiophile column:

It's not deadpan -- almost the opposite, really -- it's so intense, so stylized, and so inhumanly consistent that the effect is numbing, a blank. It's a nifty trick: using an excess of emotion to project none at all.

Is there any other band that embodies the city experience more than Interpol?

I've made it a point recently to finish reading some of the books I've borrowed from friends, something I'm kind of bad at, considering I've always got five or six books started at any one time.

Jim lent me Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, a funny, imaginative novel about Foer's Ukrainian Jewish ancestors and his search for a woman who saved his grandfather from execution by the German army during World War II. The novel is essentially an epistolary in three parts, with a character named Jonathan Safran Foer sending chapters from his novel about Foer's ancestors and their shtetl near the Poland/Ukraine border on to his Ukrainian translator after his trip, the translator's letters back to Foer, and the translator's narrative of the events that happened during Foer's visit. Foer's exuberant reimagining of his family's history keep the disparate threads of the plot together, and he conveys real pathos for characters that may or may not have existed. But Foer's effervescent prose often can't handle the weight of the subject matter: collective guilt, genocide, willful historical lacunae. Some character's moods swing from quirky indifference to suicide with no intermediary steps and little explanation, and the effect on the reader is jarring. When the plot subsequenty collapses under these strains, the sudden seriousness feels forced, and I felt the characters and this reader hadn't earned the catharsis expected by the writer. There aren't many shades on Foer's pallet between acryilic orange & electric blue on one side, and the the darkest crimson & ink black on the other, but the authentic experience of tragedy comes from the slow, inevitable darkening of the middle tones.

James Dickey's Deliverance—the basis for the notorious movie from the '70s starring Jon Voight and Burt Reynolds—is a completely opposite work: it is all middle tones. Dickey, a former business executive who became a poet in middle age, is comfortably in charge of the pace and feel of the book, which mimics the river the characters canoe down. The gathering menace experienced by the characters was surprisingly muted, but this didn't diminish the malevolence of the antagonists or the horror of the protagonists. Although I still haven't seen the movie, I essentially knew the plot, as has I suspect anybody who has heard of the movie. I nonetheless was genuinely riveted by the book. My only real complaint was that only two of the characters (the narrator, Ed, and his Kit-Carson-by-way-of-Friedrich-Nietzsche friend Lewis) were fully developed and three dimensional.

From the L.A. Times:

"My concept of death for a long time," he told McKeen, "was to come down that mountain road [in Kentucky] at a hundred and twenty and just keep going straight right there, burst out through the barrier and hang out above all that � and there I'd be sitting in the front seat, stark naked, with a case of whiskey next to me, and a case of dynamite in the trunk � honking the horn, and the lights on, and just sit there in space for an instant, a human bomb, and fall down into that mess of steel mills. It'd be a tremendous goddamn explosion. No pain. No one would get hurt."

I suppose it's instructive that this bit of morbid theater didn't happen, and instead Hunter S. Thompson's self-inflicted end was a gunshot wound to the head, indoors, inside a Colorado cabin in late winter, with his son in the next room. That he was a great writer is undeniable, but I think the fact that his writing was so incisive and exceptional and even coherent depite the mayhem of his personality (and the mayhem fueled it all) demonstrates his true genius.

I've got a new work blog, thanks to Sun's new found emphasis on employee-community interaction.

Not much there right now, but I like the design.

So, I'm a little late with this, but Jon Stewart's appearance on Crossfire is pretty extraordinary for a number of reasons, not the least of which was Stewart calling Tucker Carlson a dick on national television. His basic point was that the 24 hour news channels and their sundry debate shows (like Crossfire) are political theater, and have little to do with honest political debate. More to the point, they are just another tool for the political parties to spread the party line, uncritically, despite all the shouting.

In an interview in 2003 with Bill Moyers, it's pretty clear that Stewart has been annoyed for quite some time with the state of the mainstream media's political reporting, or lack thereof.

Toward the end of the video, notice a deflated Jon Stewart realizing that his appearance is subject to the same trivial theatrics he was trying to point out. The hosts keep trying to get him to do a funny man schtick (the questions about Bill O'Reilly and vibrators, the doctored naked pictures of the Supreme Court justices from his book) or off on tangents (whether the election results will help or hurt his writers when coming up with material for the show).

"Why can't we just talk -- please, I beg of you guys, please."

When we arrived in Malta after a fairly rough crossing on a catamaran ferry from Sicily the weather was changing from the balmy warmth we had thus far in the trip. Dark clouds, wind, and cool temperatures were paving the way for thunderstorms and rain. This was the view from the deck of our hotel in Xaghrah toward Victoria. You can see the silhouette of Victoria's citadel on the left.


At Oleander, where we celebrated Kari's Birthday, Observed, there was an inexplicable stuffed chicken keeping an eye on the diners from a barred alcove high on the wall.


Our final day on Gozo, the smaller of Malta's two islands, was spent snorkeling at Dwejra, on the west coast. There's a sea arch here known as the Azure Window.


Dwejra Bay is a collapsed sea cave that opens to the Mediterranean on either side of Fungus Rock, so named due to an odd parasitic plant (Cynomorium coccineus) that lives on it's surface. It has no leaves, and was thus mistaken for a fungus. The plant was used medicinally by the Saracens and the Knights of St. John, who built a tower to protect Fungus Rock, as it is the only location in Europe where Cynomorium coccineus is found, and therefore commanded a high price on the open market. Fungus Rock is the large rock towards the right of the picture.





Valletta was built by the Knights after the Turkish siege of the late 16th century, and was the first planned city in Europe. The buildings were tall and the streets narrow to help keep the city shaded, and a sewer system was built that was flushed with sea water twice a day. The Knights also mandated that the residents put statues of saints at every corner.


This isn't that great of a picture ultimately, but I wanted to get the weird colors of this plant in the upper Barraka gardens against the ochre walls, and happily got the form of a pigeon flying away.


The night view from our hotel room across Grand Harbour to Fort St. Angelo.


Another view from our hotel room, this one up Triq San Gwann. The church on the right was having a wedding at the time.


This one should be of interest to anybody who has read Thomas Pynchon's V. This is Strada Stretta, or Straight Street, or (properly) Triq id-Dejqa. I'm the blur in the center-left of the photo, wearing a horizontally striped shirt and khakis, and Kari is the black blur to my right. We're holding hands and running down toward Fort St. Elmo at the end of the peninsula, and the Mediterranean beyond. A silly lark on my part.


This is Hagar Qim, one of the better preserved megalithic sites on Malta/Gozo. It's from roughly 3600-3000 BCE, predating the pyramids of Egypt by a half millenium. They've found female statues here that suggest that the island's culture was matriarchal.


Another sea window on the southeast coast looking toward the uninhabited island of Fifla. Our guidebook spoke of a path leading from Hagar Qim and Mnajdra to the harbor at Wied iz-Zurrieq, which we thought we found. Unfortunately, it went through hunting grounds before ending high above the narrow harbor, with no way of crossing. We had to hike all the way back to the temples, scrambling over rocks and through dense, dry, prickly macchia.

My ever popular fender installation how-to has been updated. I added a new section on mounting SKS bicycle fenders with zip ties.

On to Sicily.

Erice is a small town that sits high above Trapani in western Sicily. The streets are winding, and the houses and courtyards are quite pretty. The old church clings to the side of a cliff.


The Doric temple at Segesta is remarkably well preserved, probably due to it never having a roof. After seeing the temple, we walked a few kilometers to the top of the hill to see the Acropolis and the theater. The hike up was rather surreal due to the sun-baked snail shells covering most of the dry shrubs of the macchia. Thousands upon thousands of snails clearly met their demise after being lured out, and I can only guess that a sudden heat wave followed a damp period.


We then headed to the south coast, and the Greek temples at Selinunte. The temple above is Temple E, reconstructed in 1958 and mostly complete. Selinunte is situated on a low bluff overlooking the Mediterranean, and there are over a dozen ruins and temples in the complex.


The Vallei di Templi just outside Agrigento is another impressive ancient Greek site, and includes the Temple of Concord pictured here.



The mosaics at the Roman villa at Casale are incredible, and delightfully perverse. I especially enjoyed the depictions of the animals, including a parody of the villa's mosaic scene of Rome's Circus Maximus, with small boys piloting chariots driven by ducks and other fowl.



At Siracusa, there's a enormous Greek amphitheater, and an enormous man-made cave in the shape of a human ear called the Ear of Dionisios, so named due to a legend that it was built by the eponymous tyrant (not the god) to surreptitiously listen in on the prisoners working in the quarry nearby. The Lonely Planet guide suggests it was more likely some sort of sounding station for the amphitheater.

Continuing from the previous post, here's some context on the Sardinia photos.

There are many ancient nuraghic sites on Sardinia, including this one at Nur Albucciu, and the following picture shows Coddu Vecchiu.




We rented a boat and cruised the Golfo di Orosei from Santa Maria Navarese to near Cala Gonone, snorkeling, swimming, and sunbathing at various spots along the way.




After Santa Maria Navarese, we headed to Cagliari, and there are a bunch of pictures of the large citadel there.




On a wall to the side of the Regio Arsenale was this graffito.




I've always found logos and packaging depicting a food product consuming itself or it's own kind amusing, and I discovered my new favorite, Hausbrandt's logo. Hausbrandt is a coffee roaster from Trieste. I'm going to have to try to find some espresso cups like these for myself.




The Sardinian flag and coat of arms depicts four Moors who are either blindfolded or wearing a headband. The traditional rendition has the Moors blindfolded, a warning to the Saracens from days gone by. I'd say about 30-40% of all the flags/symbols had the Moors blindfolded. It's quite similar to the Corsican flag, with a single Moor wearing a headband. Corsica moved away from the blindfolded Moor a long time ago, and have largely identified themselves with the Moor head. According to my Lonely Planet, General Ghjuvan Petru Gaffori was the first person to make the bandana a headband, which he did before attacking the Genoese at Bastia in 1745. Gaffori and Corsica's hero Pascal Paoli found the Moor's newfound ability to see as symbolic of Corsica's independence.