A friend of mine who knows how much I like trailers and shipping container housing sent me this. Apparently, it is something of a meme on the Internet, and has even made it onto the Snopes site as an urban myth. The myth is that this is an actual place. Sadly, I must inform you that it is a stage set at an open air theater in the Netherlands. Man, I want this place so badly. I guess I will have to make my own.

Last Night, my friend Michelle and I went to The Blue Plate Restaurant on Mission a few blocks south of Army, er, excuse me, Cesar Chavez. It's a small place set up in classic diner format (counter in front of a grill, with tables all around). The food was definitely a cut above the usual diner fare though, and believe me, I know my diner fare. I had the mac & cheese, which was made with Drunken Goat Cheese instead of cheddar; it was sensational. I also ordered the Chard, which was good, and that's saying something--it is easy to do chard badly and end up with a bitter mess. Michelle had the Halibut, which, judging from the expressions on her face, was also quite good. By the end of the meal I was stuffed, but that didn't stop Michelle from ordering dessert. It was delicious as well, but I don't think I could really appreciate it at that point. Had I known dessert was on the menu, I would have saved more room.

Audibly Dumb

Am I the only person who thinks Audible is stupid? I mean, I like the idea of audio books, and Audible is clearly the leader in this field, but I'm beginning to think that this is only because no one else has really offered them any relevant competition. First off, the whole proprietary .aa (AudCom) file thing has got to go. In spite of Audible's claim that many, many MP3 players work with these files, the real truth is that most of the popular MP3 players out there, aside from the iPods, do not. What's wrong with plain old MP3 files? I asked Audible about this and they said it was to ensure that copyright issues were respected. Since I use a Samsung player (which plays just about every format except Audible's) all this really did was force me to turn a third party piece of software to convert the files into a listenable format--so much for protecting copyright issues! The irony here is that I may, in the future, purchase files from Audible, but only because I can convert the files into a usable format. Had I not found a solution to the problem, I would have immedately cancelled my subscription and asked for my money back.

In the second place, the file I received was separated into two big unwieldy chunks. Using Audacity, I was able to separate the file into chapters but, Jeez, what a hassle. Now maybe this is not an issue with AudCom files on iPods, I do not know, but when will these companies stop working off of business models they borrowed from J. P. Morgan and move into the twenty-first century, and how much longer can we continue this brain-dead idiocy called DRM?

As for the book, I can see where listening to book instead of reading them has certain advantages, but not as many as one may think. Sure, you can listen to a book while driving, but you are missing huge chunks of the narrative everytime you have to negotiate a passing maneuver in heavy traffic. I'd like to see some comparative figures on listening vs. reading retention levels. For me, listening has the advantage of forcing me to pay attention. Since I seem to have a tendency to let my mind run rampant when people are talking to me, audio books are probably a good way to excercise my atrophied listening muscles. Audble is, by no means the only player in this game, and there are several sources for free audio books as well thanks to The Gutenberg Project and the Internet Archive. I can't speak for the quality of these. I suspect it is wildly uneven.

Living in a Bubble

Bubble, the latest film by Steven Soderbergh has garnered a lot of press lately. Unfortunately, most of the press has been about the pros and cons of the simultaneous DVD/Cable/Theater releasing scheme. Even the reviews of the film miss the most important aspect of this movie, which is the film's effective proof that there is no reason to pay Jennifer Lopez millions of dollars for her services. With the right director, a woman who has worked at a KFC for 24 years can turn in an effective and affecting performance. Bubble is the story of three people who work at a doll factory in Belpre, Ohio. The movie explores what happens when their lives intersect. Nothing earth-shattering here, but it is the first time that these people have ever acted. In some cases it shows, but even then it works somehow. In terms of acting, the closest thing I can compare it to is Monte Hellman's superb film, TWO LANE BLACKTOP, which featured singer James Taylor and dead Beach Boy, Dennis Wilson in the leads roles. But even there, Hellman hedged his bets, hiring some talented Hollywood regulars lest the film careen off into disaster. Soderbergh works without a net. The end result is a film that feels like a documentary, and yet we know it is not. A word has to be said here about Soderbergh's cinematography. This film is visually stunning. I'd say kudos to Director of Photography, but Soderbergh did it himself, as he often does, under the name Peter Andrews. If you can, I would recommed seeing this in a theater just because the visual deserve the largest format possible (unless you have a 50' screen at home, in which case, never mind).

It's been a while since the last Pop Void saw the light of day. Now it is back thanks to Blogger. I will probably be updating this site once a week. Perhaps a little more often at first. We shall see....

For those of you who are familiar with Pop Void, expect to see some of the articles from it appearing here in revised versions. For those of you who are new to Pop Void, PV was a journal that I put out back in the eighties. It was devoted to exploring the aspects of pop culture that either go unobserved or are quickly forgotten by the general public. Sometimes these things that may seem really important at the time. I started PV as a response to a phenomenon that I saw all the time. There were so many aspects of our culture that came and went and no one was paying any attention to them. I knew these things were shaping us, and for that reason, they needed to be held up to scrutiny. Often these things were banal (Sillisculpts, Rod McKuen poetry, Keane paintings), mundane (Kraft M&C dinners, chewing gum, McDonald's vs. Burger King), or just plain under the radar (Henry Gregor Felsen novels, nudist magazines, Ed L. Cahn films).

That was before the Internet.

With the advent of the Internet, suddenly the void dispappeared. It is a rare topic that finds no hits in Google. Somewhere, some one has become on expert on every subject imaginable. As near as I can tell, the void is gone. For me, this is a wonderful thing because it frees me up to do what I do best: examine the subtexts of things. For those of you who really know me, I will also be looking back on subjects that I tackled in Incredibly Strange Films. And for those of you who really, really know me, I will also be revisiting some subjects from my Trashola days.

As a request by several people, I will also be placing some ofthe original articles from PV #1, and the previous Pop Void web site up here as well. Some of these articles were written by others, including Barry Alfonso, Mike Wilkins, Boyd Rice, J.C. Garrett, and others. I reserve the right to go off on any tangent I feel like.

Huh?