Speaking of podcasts, good news for the Mallory Ortberg fans among us: the Dear Prudence podcast is everything we were hoping the column would be.
I haven't listened to a podcast yet.
Me neither. They're just, like, recordings of people talking?
Basically. With music between bits.
Rees just explained (in the one I'm listening to now) that "Wittengstein is the kind of guy who would play in a high school band and make the singer read off a list a names and say 'I hate you'" (something rees apparently did), and then went off on a tangent about Paul Wittgenstein. It's basically amusing because it's a well-produced weird conversation where one of the participants is David Rees. And who wouldn't like that?
I don't know how to get my phone to play music except if I play Angry Birds or something
I also don't know who David Rees is.
And all I know about Wittengstein I learned from a thread back when Emerson was here and that I contributed to by making bestiality jokes.
I also don't know who David Rees is.
:O
He started as an anti-war webcartoonist and went on to have a successful career as an artisanal pencil-sharpener.
There's like a dozen of them, so please be more specific.
Wikipedia read. I honestly can't tell if he's horrible or great but I'm confident it's one or the other.
I'm going to have trouble working past the pencil thing.
Not to VTSOOBC or anything, but I did just say in an off-blog communication that "david rees is proof that all is not for naught".
16: his book on pencil-sharpening is charming. And his tv show about how to do equally banal-seeming things was also charming.
What, urlshorteningservicefortwitter.com got bought by Swedish hat floggers? I guess I can't be sure that Rees didn't do it on purpose, but man, I liked that one.
Relationshapes was great too. Also his annual best-of lists.
He also used to do a thing where he'd rate amateur cover tunes he found on youtube and it was wonderful because it was very sincere, funny, and enthusiastic, but almost all the links are now dead.
17: Just because you say it off-blog doesn't mean it's true!
I bought his pencil sharpening book and another book about the history of the vocoder from Melville House when they had a 50% off sale. But they only sent me the other book. Sneaky! The other book was great though.
Is it better to listen to the podcast from the beginning? I enjoyed episode 16 for a while, but then it got repetitive (reasonable election ranting interspersed with the election-futures stuff that I guess is the special theme) and I quit 18 minutes in, with 30+ remaining.
David Rees isn't even the first suggested search I get when I search for David Rees. Instead, the top suggestion is David Reese.
I quit 18 minutes in, with 30+ remaining.
Before they thanked the donors?! There's a lot of drama in the donor-thanking sections (recorded rants from donors, donors being banned, etc.). Anyway, I haven't been listening either in order or from the beginning, so beats me.
To me the best parts are the (frequent) tangents and Rees's weird off-topic rambling, which I don't think you would have gotten to, really, since the rant takes up so much time in the beginning of the most recent episode.
These things are like an hour long? That seems like a long time to listen to a conversation, even with someone as interesting as David Rees.
It was clear he had some talent for entertaining rambling (the little song about Comey). If that's more representative I may revisit.
I have a limited tolerance for hipster twee. Not sure if it's worth figuring out how to play a podcast.
Because life is short I will assume that anyone who wrote a book about pencil-sharpening deserves a Trump administration, and blithely ignore all your testimony.
Because life is short I will assume that anyone who wrote a book about pencil-sharpening deserves a Trump administration, and blithely ignore all your testimony.
I admittedly haven't paid close attention to him since he stopped doing the comic, but it was genuinely great, and a comfort during a very dark time for this country.
A thing I fear I have said repeatedly is that his web comic, Get Your War On, along with Molly Ivins and that one Susan Sontag piece in the New Yorker, were the things that made me feel slightly less like I had lost my mind in the [some period of time, I don't know] after 9/11.
The comic was good. I have gone back and reread the first few a couple of times.
Rees has had a podcast for three months and I didn't know about it? WTF John Hodgman? I rely on you to keep me up to date on David Rees's cultural output.
Apparently the mixtape is pretty good.
Operation Enduring Freedom is in the house!
I'm sort of with Moby on this one. I always found Rees rather shallow and data-light, and annoyingly smug. "Twee" is not a bad word for it. The pencil-sharpening service was like something Charlie Brooker would dream up.
David Rees has shown up on various Max Fun podcasts on occasion--I don't recall if it was Jordan, Jesse, Go or Judge John Hodgman, but I think he's friends with the hosts of both--but he seemed delightfully intense. Seconding 36.
Podcasts are great. They're radio without the annoyance of having to listen at a set time and hence the cultural biases built into drive-time radio. I probably listen to 15-20 hours of them per week, to varying degree of attention. How much you get out of them probably depends on how well you can do you work while parsing secondary linguistic streams, and how much time you spend in your commute. Same with audio books.
39; I wouldn't describe "Get Your War On" as smug.
GYWO was fantastic, though.
Things like the pencil sharpening service... I get annoyed if they're self-consciously cute. From someone who's genuinely strange enough to be doing that sort of thing for internal reasons other than self-conscious cuteness, I'm kind of fascinated. And if their deadpan is good enough that I can't tell, I'm still fascinated.
Rees specifically, I haven't paid any attention to since GYWO.
That was me. New job, new computer.
Things like the pencil sharpening service... I get annoyed if they're self-consciously cute. From someone who's genuinely strange enough to be doing that sort of thing for internal reasons other than self-conscious cuteness, I'm kind of fascinated. And if their deadpan is good enough that I can't tell, I'm still fascinated.
Yeah, and the pencil sharpening deadpan is remarkable. I mean, he knows how ridiculous it is, but at the same time it's entirely earnest. A bit like The Darkness around their first album.
39; I wouldn't describe "Get Your War On" as smug.
On the contrary, it's tone articulate despair.
Whereas my tone is illiterate, apparently.
43: Congratulations on the new computer.
Well, new to me, rather than new in any absolute sense.
I will say that moving from the defensive to the affirmative side of the office is a definite upgrade. More plentiful office supplies, and the closet isn't kept locked. I always suspected that mom liked the affirmative side best, and now I know.
(Still no coffee, but that's working in government for you.)
You're now a profit center, not a cost center. Also congrats.
I'm still playing defense myself, mostly, but I'm doing it in an affirmative bureau.
"I dreamed I was a successful litigator in my affirmative bureau."
I am a litigator with my pocket alligator.
And congratulations on the new job!
51: *Presses button to make low-fi electronic alligator lawyer noises*
alligator lawyer noises
The technical term is "alligations".
I kind of feel like GYWO is the essential document of the post-9/11 era, but suspect it would be utterly bewildering to anyone not an adult at the time.
I'm still playing defense myself, mostly, but I'm doing it in an affirmative bureau.
I hope you like being surrounded by yes men.
This is great. Some Conservative knuckledragger has brought in a bill calling for the BBC to start playing "God Save The Queen" at the end of each night's broadcasting, just like they used to. And this is what Newsnight did:
https://www.facebook.com/bbcnewsnight/?hc_ref=NEWSFEED&fref=nf
Why limit it to the broadcast portion of the BBC? They could have it play when you close their website.
"data-light"?! I don't even understand how that makes sense as an allegation to level.
The pencil-sharpening service, and book, and spinoff tv show, are all extremely earnest. He's clearly really into it while also being a goofy person by nature. This is not bad; this likewise:
"I feel like How To Sharpen Pencils and, now, Going Deep wouldn't work if they weren't honest-to-God, how-to instructionals," he says. "The book has a lot of goofy stuff in it, but if you read it you will get better at sharpening pencils and you will (hopefully) come to appreciate how amazing pencils are--they represent 500 years of innovation, materials science, marketing strategies, the politics of resource depletion, etc. etc. Pencils are incredibly efficient and elegant communication tools! And I wanted to celebrate that. Same with Going Deep: There are NO fake facts in our show. The humor comes from my interactions with the experts, who have all been incredibly good-natured and (sometimes) silly without compromising the integrity of the information they're sharing with me. That's important to us, because we really do want this show to be a celebration of everything that's right under our noses--and for that mission to succeed, we need to honor the topics by not bullshitting our way through them."
I mean, I guess I can see how that could come off twee. But, in practice, it isn't.
But then, I basically feel about Rees as ogged felt about Aishwarya Rai: a representative of some other, more perfect, planet.
57: I can't listen to that now, but I'm guessing they played the Sex Pistols version? Am I right???
Usually it has more horns and is played a bit more slowly.
Maybe comprise and use that version with a horn section.
LB congratulations on the new job!
re: 48 a friend recently interviewed at the white collar division of doj in LA and said their rather grungy and cramped offices contrast interestingly with the much more impressive offices of the run of the mill crim division. unsurprising on reflection re: prosecutorial priorities.
Re:42.2, the spouse of a co-worker inherited her father's typewrite, and took it to the local typewriter repair shop (maybe the last one in the inner bay area?*) to get ribbons and have it tuned up so that she could use it to send some notes to family. She was chatting with the proprietor when she went to pick up the machine and all was quite congenial until she asked if he'd ever seen these very clever cufflinks made from old typewriter letters. His face shut with a slam.
*we got the kid his typewriter there for Christmas when he was ~8 or so. going through a stash of old playbills from his performances, pictures and other bits and bobs i found the first thing he ever typed on it, on Christmas day, an ecstatic ode to his glorious new beast, lots of "I LOVE you"s. also, a picture of him in Halloween costume the year he was a French sailor. ridiculously cute.
until she asked if he'd ever seen these very clever cufflinks made from old typewriter letters
I had a similar experience, but it was cups made from skulls.
Turns out the bone merchants are very particular about what you do with the bones.
So I ran out of time to listen to it chronologically after about four episodes and jumped to the end. Boy was that tonal shift jarring. It goes from mostly breezy market cynicism (while occasionally acknowledging the sheer horror of the Trump candidacy), to just full-throated electoral terror.
Meanwhile, Election Profit Makers mixtape.