Music more people should know about: Mark Ettinger

Twice in the past week, I’ve had occasion to share songs by Mark Ettinger with people in totally unrelated contexts, and it occurs to me to write more generally about it.

Backstory: The last social outing I ever had with my ex-spouse J was to go with him and his sister to see the Flying Karamazov Brothers (October 1, 2009) at the Merrimack Rep in Lowell, MA.

I’d seen the FKBs a couple times over the years: I know I saw L’Universe at the Wang Center in Boston back in 2000-2001, and I’m pretty sure there was another in the interim, maybe Life: A Guide for the Perplexed? J, who is a juggler himself, was actually acquainted with one of the guys (Rod, a.k.a. Pavel) from the local juggling shop back in DC. So we had gotten these tickets and, well, despite having just split up, we were certainly still going.

This particular show was called Flings and Eros. It was a riff on Romeo and Juliet (partly a four-man retelling, partly a convoluted and slightly bizarre but charming frame story), and it got some bad press, but I totally loved it. I may have been a little primed for the Shakespearean theme right at that moment. But part of what I dug about it were the songs, which, it turned out, were mostly written by Alexei, a.k.a. Mark, the resident songwriter.

There was a talkback/Q&A after the show, and one of the things I raised my hand to ask was “Are you going to put out the soundtrack?” That got a smile from Mark. “Oh, did you like it? Yeah, we’re totally going to record it… real soon now…”

They never did, of course, but there is some stuff on YouTube courtesy of the Merrimack Rep:

Anyway, so, we ended up hanging around the theater lobby waiting for them all to come out and chat, and among the swag for sale were Mark’s solo CDs. There were two, and Mark himself talked me into taking the newer one, In This World  ( Amazon | CDBaby ).

It’s been on my regular rotation ever since. It’s great. A bit folksy, a bit bluesy, a bit James-Taylor-y, a bit silly in places, pensive or tender in others. Lots of great instrumentation, lots of evocative sound pictures. Terrific road-trip music. I was hooked.

Come to find out, I should have also grabbed the older disc (Songbirds of Tralfamador, a Kurt Vonnegut reference) while I had the chance, because it apparently was never actually “released” as such, and now it can’t be obtained for money nor love. Literally. In 2010 and 2011 the FKBs had a long-term gig in NYC, at the Minetta Lane Theatre in the West Village, and one day while on a spring-break visit to my now-partner T, I treated myself to a ticket and went. (March 26, 2011: that was 4PLAY. It was quite awesome.) I stuck around and chatted with Mark afterwards and told him I’d bought In This World 2.5 years previously and was now keen to buy the other album. “Oh,” he said, “I’ll send it to you! Email me!” But I did (with some fangirly* trepidation) and, of course, he never did.

*Fangirl much? Me? Point of evidence: last spring I finally read Dostoyevsky’s actual, factual The Brothers Karamazov, both for general literary exposure and also, I admit, to get the full effect of the “source material”. I have to say it enhanced the effect to keep mentally mapping the FKB to the written characters. :-) But don’t read the cheapo translation by Constance Garnett, spring for the David Macduff from Penguin Classics. You’re welcome.

Mark is actually based here on the UWS (not exactly right in our neighborhood; the other side of the park, over on the Columbia side toward West End), and while Google stalking research suggests that he’s doing occasional house concerts and the like, his own website is woefully out of date. He’s got a MySpace playlist up with some full-length songs, but no events calendar, no Facebook fan page, no YouTube channel, etc etc. (I apparently need more hobbies, because I’m fighting off the impulse to contact him saying “You need a marketing and social media team! Pick me!”)

In fact, it’s only LinkedIn (of all things) which suggests that he has perhaps ceased touring with the FKB as of last year, and among any other gigs is currently in Seattle through April 14 heading the band The Naked Truth for the Moisture Festival burlesque/variety series. Now there’s something I bet is worth seeing.

Anyway, enough. Go listen. I won’t tell you which 2 tracks are my favorites. — Okay, maybe in comments.

More about ISBNs

After my last post, a friend commented on Facebook to point out, “This doesn’t give you an ISBN, just the ability to print a barcode for any ISBN. You have to pay for prefixes for those things…” Well, yeah, I said. I know that. Therefore it hadn’t even occurred to me that the distinction might bear explaining!

So here’s a little primer on ISBNs.

The ISBN is the identification number which is required for most online sales as well as library systems. It stands for International Standard Book Number. (Note that this means “ISBN number”, which I used to hear all the time from my bookstore colleagues in the early 1990s, ranks up there with “ATM machine” as an instance of RAS syndrome.)

Every distinguishable edition of a book (most often, hardcover and paperback, or 1st edition vs. revised/2nd edition) requires a separate, unique ISBN. Exceptions that can retain the same ISBN include (a) reprinting a book, in the same format as previously, with a new cover but the same interior, or (b) reprinting a book, in the same format as previously, with minor text corrections to individual pages but no substantial revisions or additions.

Now ISBNs, as an international standard, can only be issued by the official ISBN Agency for each country. The authorized U.S. ISBN Agency is a private company called R.R. Bowker, LLC, who also used to publish the multi-volume hardcover catalog of Books In Print, which was completely indispensable back before there was an Amazon.com.

Bowker will issue “a publisher” (whether that’s yourself as a private individual, or a corporate entity) a single ISBN, for a service charge of $125 per book. But for $250, you can apply for a “prefix” and reserve a series block of 10 usable ISBNs. Either way, start with the application link here: http://www.isbn.org/standards/home/isbn/us/application.asp

Why the jump from 1 to 10? Because of the way it’s structured. Modern ISBNs have 13 digits, as follows:

  • 978 = arbitrary 3-digit prefix added in 2007 to convert all formerly 10-digit ISBN strings to 13 digits
  • 0 or 1 = US country code
  • The intervening 8 digits are divided up between the publisher prefix and the title identifier. Large publishers have very short prefixes (3 or even 2 digits), because they could easily have 10,000+ distinct titles/editions in their catalog, so they need to be able to encode 5 figures’ worth of unique digit strings under their prefix. The smallest publishers will have a 7-digit prefix, leaving only 1 digit for their title space: 0 through 9. That’s your block of 10. Single-ISBN reservations simply get issued a string of all 8 digits at once and you’re done—you can’t get another in the same sequence after that.
  • The last digit = a check digit for redundancy. This is like a parity bit in computer programming: it’s calculated based on the preceding 12 (or formerly 9) digits. This is why the ISBN-13 for a given book shows a different check digit from the old ISBN-10.

Bowker will also sell you a bar code for your ISBN, for the modest additional charge of $25 each. You do, in fact, need a bar code to place on the cover—bookstores, online retailers, and libraries all require it. But as I already noted, that’s the part for which there are now free online generators.

Other important cataloging steps have to be addressed separately from ISBN registration if you want to do them:

Further reading for the truly intrigued: Bowker’s ISBN FAQ list.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering: I’m still waiting on the last text corrections from the author before I can send the book project to press, which is why I have time to write all this. :-)

Free Online ISBN Barcode Generator

My dad says I’ve been “pretty quiet lately”, which is perhaps because I’ve been plugging away solidly for the last month trying to get a book project to press. This is a freelance project on which I’ve been working for over two years at this point, but we’ve been in the home stretch since approximately November 2012.

In the home stretch of the project, as all designers know, come all the nitty-gritty details that you’ve pushed off dealing with until “later”. Guess what? It’s later.

So tonight’s task (while I wait for the copyedited index and last few page corrections from the author) is to get the cover files set up. We’re doing a split bind (about 1/3 stamped cloth case with jacket, 2/3 paperback cover), so I have to do them both ways, according to the measurement templates the printers sent me just this morning.

It also means we have two different ISBNs, and guess what else? I need to create bar codes for them. Back in my early publishing days, we didn’t even HAVE barcodes; then we used to order away for them specially. But I figured in this day and age, there was a good likelihood that the Internet could deliver something instantly, and maybe even for free.

Lo and behold, Google found me the answer:
https://www.creativindiecovers.com/free-online-isbn-barcode-generator/

These fine folks wrote a slick little utility that will generate an EPS file of your ISBN barcode, complete with the price code add-on (if you have one).

I am grateful, so I’m sharing the love. :-) They also do really nice work on the design side.

Let’s just remember to test both barcodes before we commit ink to paper, okay? And I promise I’ll tell more about the book itself when it actually launches.

#upgoer5: Putting Things On The Face Book

Some friends were doing an #upgoer5 meme, explaining one’s profession using only the “ten hundred” most-used English words (inspired by xkcd). So I did too.

“I work for a school, putting things that parents and teachers need to know up on the computer so they can find it out. I also take pictures and moving pictures to show parents what fun things their kids do in school, or sometimes I write about things that are going on in the school. Then I share those stories and pictures on the computer, such as on the Face Book. And sometimes I help make pretty paper things that we send out to the houses of parents and friends of the school, so that they will like us and send us money.”

Crossposted from Dreamwidth.

Art Gift Project: The First Folio Panels

Now that I’m back from the holiday visit to my partner T’s family homestead, I can write about what I made him for Christmas. :-)

Earlier this fall, I went with a friend on an art-gallery outing to Chelsea, and one of the exhibits we saw was a display of text panels — letters and book pages and such in large-format colorful frames — which made me go “OMG totally up my alley,” and on very little further reflection, it produced the inspiration for this.

T is a major Shakespeare geek, currently in the final year of pursuing his MFA in Acting at Columbia. We moved in together last fall, and while I have a lot of artwork, he doesn’t really have much. I’ve resisted the impulse to cover the whole apartment in my own stuff, but that mostly means we have a lot of empty walls in the meantime.

So I wanted to create something that would be very personal for both of us.

Jn_F1_0326s_v1There are a handful of online archive facsimile editions of Shakespeare’s First Folio (interestingly, one of them is at Brandeis, my alma mater; the other one I used is hosted at New South Wales). I went through these and picked out 9 sheets with scenes that I associate with T. Most of these are roles he’s had in plays he’s been in; one is a role I had that he came to see me in (Winter’s Tale); some are plays we saw together with lines that we quote a lot (Much Ado) or that particularly touched me (Merchant of Venice).

Jn_F1_0326s_v2aI saved the scanned JPEG images of each target page off the online archives, opened them in Photoshop, converted them to grayscale TIFFs, and messed around with the levels to get the clearest, most high-contrast image out of it I could (producing white text on black background). I also cropped off the page headers (with the titles) to make the pages a little more uniform and, okay, obscure: you have to read and be able to identify the scenes to know what they are!

There are a number of online shops that do custom canvas printing; I found a really good deal on canvasdiscount.com, which had a 10×14″ size that was just the right proportions for these pages (with the headers cropped off).

With my measurements determined, I created an InDesign document to the correct size and margins, and imported a rainbow of color swatches I’d set up for an earlier project. I placed each of the TIFFs on a separate page and applied a different solid color to each one, leaving the text content to reverse out in white. I then exported each page as a high-res color JPEG. (I could have just done all this in Photoshop, too, but I found it easier to work with my margins and desired swatch library in InDesign.) I uploaded all 9 to the canvasdiscount.com site and placed my order!

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The colors are arranged down the palette, from magenta to violet, in chronological order in terms of their relevance to him/us: when he was in them or when we saw them. They could be hung up in any sequence he wants, though. And I figure I can create additional ones in future (probably neutrals: black, grey, taupe) for the plays that are making an appearance in this year’s history, or next year’s.

On receipt, I found that the canvases really are of pretty cheap quality; notably, they’re fairly loose on the frame, so they bag out a bit. But I think for these purposes, they’re effective enough, and the color printing is nice and even.

Lastly, I knew I didn’t want to carry the whole set up to Boston in order to give them as a Christmas gift (much as it would have been really fun to make him unwrap them all individually). So I waited for an afternoon when he was out of the house, hung them all up on the wall where I intended them to go, and took pictures. Then I made a little 5.5×8.5″ booklet including the photographs of the finished canvases in situ as well as the color images of each panel, labeled with what scenes they are. I printed this (imposed with InBooklet), folded and stapled it into a booklet, put it in a 6×9″ red envelope, and that’s what I put under the tree. (But since he left town before me, I hung them all up on the wall before I left, so they’re all up for him to see as soon as he gets home tonight.)

Merry Christmas, love.

P.S.: Note that, ours being an interfaith household, for Chanukah I gave him actual theater tickets… including the Actors’ Shakespeare Project‘s production of Two Gentlemen of Verona, which we were able to catch during our trip to Boston. ;-)

Linkfest

I’ve been wanting for days and days to write some stuff about what’s happening on my interior landscape, but have been too busy churning out actual work (made some updates to my website, though, alongside working on the big book project). So, in lieu of content, you get some of the interesting things that have come up in the past several weeks.

Design & typography

Beautiful and colorful, both from This Is Colossal:
The Chromatic Typewriter: http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2011/12/the-chromatic-typewriter/?src=footer
A Massive Black Field of Cut Steel Plants Hides a Colorful Secret: http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2012/01/a-massive-field-of-cut-steel-plants-reveals-a-colorful-secret/

The Met has a new section on their (recently overhauled) website called “Connections”, a long series of thematic presentations with voiceovers by various Museum personnel and specialists. It’s really nice.
http://www.metmuseum.org/connections/

Of historical interest: a film about Linotype (click to read about/see the trailer if you don’t know what that is) that premiered in NYC this past weekend:

Linotype: The Film

“How to Build a Newsroom Time Machine”: Typesetting and layout the old-fashioned way, or, what “on the pasteboard” really means:

HOW TO BUILD A NEWSROOM TIME MACHINE

Writing

Gotham Writer’s Workshop offers FREE writing classes! (well, one-hour workshops, but it could be fun):
http://www.writingclasses.com/CommunityEvents/index.php

An old one from Neil Gaiman about how to get published and/or how to get an agent:
http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2005/01/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about.asp

Work

Fascinating:
Scaling back consumption in service of happiness:

See also: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/the-case-for-a-21-hour-work-week.html

Useful:
http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/the-100-best-lifehacks-of-2011-the-year-in-review.html
(srsly, read only the ones that you find interesting! Skip the rest!)

Relationships

Unbelievably beautiful:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arjuna-ardagh/goddess-worship_b_660896.html

Insightful:

30 Things to Stop Doing to Yourself


http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifestyle/naming-elephants-10-ways-to-use-radical-honesty-to-improve-your-relationship.html

Not really so insightful, but several people pointed me at it:

Mmm!

Scotch tastings in NYC:
http://nycwhisky.com/events-old

Star Wars

I forget who pointed me at this, but I am totally loving it (and I’m on about page 52 of 600+ and counting — they just got up to Episode IV last month).
Darths & Droids is an “RPG screencap comic” that re-envisions Star Wars: Episode I (The Saga Begins) as a roleplaying campaign. Apparently inspired by DM of the Rings, but funnier in terms of making sense of the weaknesses of the source material.
http://www.darthsanddroids.net/episodes/0001.html

This reminds me that I also wanted to post this link when it first came to my attention several months ago:
Secret History of Star Wars: A Tribute to Marcia Lucas
http://secrethistoryofstarwars.com/marcialucas.html

Jewish

Jewish Sacred Theatre – Its Components and Its Means:
http://www.jewish-theatre.com/visitor/article_display.aspx?articleID=525

A handy nuts-and-bolts link on kashering your kitchen:
http://njop.org/resources/kosher/how-to-keep-kosher/

Geeking out

Sometimes I think I should really just take up programming. I apparently have a much neater sense of code than plenty of the geeks I know.

Earlier this month I had to take an ASP script and re-write it by hand to be a different script. Gah.

Then I took a ColdFusion page and moved all the bits around to be a completely different page. Cut-and-paste programming my specialty.

Today, for completely unrelated work reasons, I registered myself as an Apple Developer. (No, I haven’t in fact developed anything for iOS, whyever do you ask?)

Right now, I’m downloading the Java SE Development Kit by way of the Android SDK so I can fix the memory issues on my phone.

Yeah.

You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

This has stuck with me since a friend shared it to Facebook about 2 weeks ago:

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal, and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
― Ira Glass

From this video segment: http://youtu.be/BI23U7U2aUY
Nicely typeset here, if you can access it: https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/293156_10150290719459626_795709625_7387707_7099296_n.jpg

That said, I think I might sign up for a writing class. Yes, I know you don’t need to pay someone to jump-start your writing process, but I feel like some structured guidance would help me at this point in my creative life, and that’s worth investing in.

Nautical Man (or, T.M.B. Pinafore)

So, as mentioned yesterday, I have been digging through old documents in the process of overhauling/updating my website, and one more thing I turned up was my Fall 2001 Pinafore filk:

Nautical Man (or, T.M.B. Pinafore)
to the tune of “Particle Man” (They Might Be Giants, Flood)

Nautical Man, Nautical Man,
Smartest lad in the Royal “N”.
What’s he like?
A pining tenor,
Nautical Man.
Is he a slave or an Englishman?
Can he dance a hornpipe or lead the band?
Will Josephine marry a foremast hand?
Nobody knows,
Nautical Man.

Triangle Man, Triangle Man,
Triangle Man hates Nautical Man.
They have a fight:
Man overboard,
Triangle Man.

[HORNPIPE BREAK!]

Admiral Man, Admiral Man,
Ego the size of the universe man;
Usually kind to smaller man,
Admiral Man.
Articled clerk turned K.C.B.,
Knew better than to go to sea,
So now he rules the Queen’s Na-vee,
Powerful man,
Admiral Man.

Captain Man, Captain Man
Exchanged at birth with Nautical Man,
Offering up his daughter’s hand,
Captain Man.
Com-for-tably in the bourgeoisie,
Hardly ever gets sick at sea;
But then he uses that big, big D —
Berated man, Captain Man.

Nautical Man, Nautical Man
Suddenly finds he’s Captain Man;
Blissful refrains,
For he remains
An Englishman!

[HORNPIPE BREAK!]