Author: nell-boeschenstein

We at C-VILLE like to give our little birds that have flown props when those little birds land, as they sometimes do, on wire worth noting. Former C-VILLE music writer and online editor John Ruscher, also the founder of Nailgun Media, flew the coop after spending over more than a year writing nerdy-but-still-cool reviews, columns, news and features of the local pop music scene that seemed to make everyone say, “Yeah, man, right on,” as they perused the reviews column while also nursing something strong from Café Cubano.
 
Like a proper young’un with pop cultural aspirations, John has landed in the music mecca of Bushwick, Brooklyn. Bushwick, for those of you who don’t know, is the new Williamsburg, which was the new Lower East Side, which was the new blah blah blah. My point is that John has a website and that website is about, yes, Brooklyn music; so, if you are missing John from the pages of C-VILLE, look no further than the Internet.
 
The site itself is still finding its footing and developing a voice and figuring things out. That, however, is what is interesting about it from a Charlottesville perspective. Since John is new to Brooklyn, we back at the nest can follow him online and discover the ins and outs, the in-crowd, the dungeons and dragons dorks, the so-overs, the next-big-things, the when- will-you-give-ups, and the prodigies that populate that scene just as John is discovering them for himself. I have no doubt that this site is prepped to be a site of discovery, and that the more comfortable John gets in his adopted home, the more traction his site will have as a place for music news and reviews and quirks. Go forth and prosper, Ruscher. You have my blessing. I know you were asking for it.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll say right now that while I am not in the habit of plugging my friends’ websites (if my memory serves me correctly, in all the years I’ve been writing these 300 words per week, I have never done so), I’m going to break with tradition here and make an exception for my friend Montana Wojczuk’s recently launched site, Books That Saved My Life. She launched it September 27 in honor of the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week, but specifically in response to Sarah Palin’s “rhetorical” interest in banning books and to the news that, when mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, Palin looked into the possibility of having a few volumes taken off the shelves of the local library.

There are a lot of slippery slopes out there, waiting for us to land flat and hard on our asses. Whether Palin’s inquiries constitute banning books is not the issue; the issue is that, once those questions are uttered by politicians, we have taken a step down a slope that is precipitous, icy, deadly. Wojczuk collects essays and musings on her site about, well, books that have saved people’s lives. There are satirical fan letters to Judy Blume (the 13th most challenged author of the decade) and an essay about Christian conservatives boycotting Philip Pullman (the author of The Golden Compass, number four in 2007’s list of challenged books), and Wojczuk is putting out the call for more essays, thoughts, odes, pleas, well-argued screeds.

I, myself, am planning a little ode to the children’s book Miss Rumphius because, in my opinion, there are so many books out there that do, so quietly and so beautifully, between their covers, exactly what Miss Rumphius says every human being should do: make the world more beautiful.

So, apparently some nerds at the University of Nottingham convinced someone out there to give them a grant to make YouTube videos about the Periodic Table called Periodic Videos—one YouTube video about each element on the Periodic Table. The results, let me tell you, are grant money gone to excellent use.

Picture this: An older British man with crazy, Einsteinian white hair, thick glasses, and clad in a series of dress shirts (long-sleeved and, yes, short-sleeved) that, while probably technically “clean,” happen to look as if he has owned them since 1974, sits behind a desk that has piles of paper on it, some of which are clearly yellowing with age, and says things like “So, element 111 was the first or only element on the Periodic Table where I had to look up what the symbol stood for, and it is called Roentgenium, named after the German chemist Roentgen, or physicist, I suppose, who was the first person to discover x-rays…As you can see, it’s almost unpronounceable. You swallow half the words in your mouth.” A star is born: This man is adorable.

His supporting cast is no less “I-Want-To-Hug-You” worthy. Most notably, the guy in plastic lab glasses and a green lab jacket who lives in what appears to be his parents’ garage with his bald, buff, silent assistant who holds balloons and blow torches for him, and the obligatory Hot Camera Guy who you don’t see except for a photograph of him with his camera equipment on the site’s homepage. While it’s true that Hot Camera Guy is attractive, his camera work is also the work of a genius: wobbly and excitedly zooming in and zooming out on things when you least expect it. I could watch this stuff all day and appreciate it more and more with each video. Bravo. Four stars. Two thumbs up. Encore.

So, there’s no question that people have begun freaking out. I was talking to my dad on the phone the other day and when I asked him how he was doing, he answered my question by saying simply, “I’m worried about Obama, Nell.” I tried to cheer him up by saying that there’s still time—that there are still debates to be debated, and that the Internet is still Obama country. I tried to boost his spirits with a forward I had received of a photograph of Obama looking calm, cool and confident, with text above him that says, in all caps, “EVERYONE NEEDS TO CHILL THE FUCK OUT…” and then, in all caps below him, “I GOT THIS.” But the more I tried to convince my father, the more pathetic and naïve I sounded to myself. And then I went to Pollster.

For those unfamiliar, Pollster is a website for the OCD politicos, for the numbers people, the people with a penchant for primary colors. The website obsessively takes the temperature of the voting public and posts in which political direction the country is leaning from day to day. As everyone probably knows by now, one brief glance at Pollster—even by an untrained eye—reveals that the country is teetering on that line between red and blue, which is obviously dismaying given the wave Obama had been riding so well until so recently.
 
Nonetheless, while it effectively muzzled the Pollyanna in me, that Pollyanna deserved to be muzzled: She wasn’t living in the real world. Pollster—while it has faults and glitches and holes like all polling does—lives in the real world. And it’s in the real world that this election is going to be won or lost. And in order to know where the battles lie, polls need to be monitored. Obsessively.

There’s nothing like some good house porn. Flipping through the pages of Dwell or Cottage Living or scrolling through DesignSponge or Apartment Therapy is just as fantasy-inducing as I’ve heard the other more controversial forms of porn can be. I had begun to believe that I had exhausted the house porn world library in terms of websites to visit or magazines to read but, silly rabbit that I am, I should have known that was impossible.

A friend recently pointed me in the direction of the website for a film and TV location scouting website, Proper Production, and a whole new world opened up to me, filled with dream houses: country estates, little cottages, modern mansions, horse farms, townhouses, sophisticated condos, too-cool-for-school lofts. And better yet, the photos feature simply the homes, offering no unnecessary nods to the people who live in them (and who, when pictured in their houses, turn a magazine or website into nothing more than a glorified society page, in my opinion. Harumph!).

If you’re at all like me, as you click through the images of the houses, your mind will conjure not only cinematic scenes from Jane Austen, Woody Allen or F. Scott Fitzgerald, but inevitably you will find yourself filming the movie of your own dream life. If you’re asking, or even if you’re not, I wouldn’t mind filming my dream life either at Country House 10 (log cabin heaven!) or Townhouse 9 (classic yet modern!). Ideally though, I suppose, my dream life would be filmed at both locations, since of course my dream life would be bi-housal.

For me and, I am sure, for millions out there like me, Woody Allen’s movies have long served as confirmation that the neurotic thoughts running through our minds like a ticker at the bottom of a TV screen are not a lonely affliction—that they are not associated with a private screening, but rather with some basic cable channel. Watching an Allen movie, I inevitably find myself thinking, “Why isn’t there more confirmation that neurotic is just another a state of normal?”

Then, the other day, I got an e-mail from a friend that said simply, “I thought you would appreciate this,” and a link to the website “I Am Neurotic.” I clicked and found myself transported to a land of kindred spirits. It’s not a fancy site, but with a simple design and short posts, it gets straight to the point. “I Am Neurotic” is basically a repository for people’s ticks, paranoias, phobias, compulsions or fears, e-mailed to the gnomes that run the site, who then duly post the missives they receive. (Like Post Secret, only not as artsy).

Just a sampling: “If I go into a store and I don’t find what I am looking for, I have to buy something small so the employees don’t think I stole something and walked out.” Or, “Whenever I pass a cyclist on the road, I always check in the rearview mirror after passing them to make sure I haven’t bumped into [them] or run them over.” Or, my personal favorite: “I arrange my roommates’ and mine’s toothbrushes to the mood we are currently in. If we are angry, the brushes will not face each other. If we’re happy they will face each other as if we are dancing and laughing.”

Ah, I have found my people! They are out there; they are everywhere.

The public debate that pitted the suits against the street kids in an argument about whether or not graffiti art is, well, “art,” has long since been settled—it is, deal with it—but the recent unmasking of the graffiti-artist-to-the-stars, bona fide celebrity and truly talented Banksy has brought graffiti art back into the headlines for a hot moment. Thus, I thought I’d dovetail off current events and point out that if you’re still wandering around Charlottesville scratching your head and wondering where all this good graffiti is the kids keep talking about, just go home, get on your old computer and check out Oddwall.

The site, run by a man named Steve Ensminger, is basically an homage to San Francisco street art, with thousands of images cross-referenced according to neighborhood, theme, artist and style; each cross referenced grouping is akin to a curated exhibition of street art, and the curator has impeccable taste. His stunning photographs of stirring art feature pieces ranging in simplistic description from beautiful to whimsical to political to frightening to funny. I tend to gravitate towards cutouts when it comes to my street art fancy, and there is plenty here that makes my jaw drop, particularly a piece that depicts an elephant carrying a knight and a geisha, running with her head bent against a strong wind.

Although I have no doubt that the Bay Area is lovely, I’ve never been one of those people who itches for San Francisco. (I have a theory that it’s an entire American subculture.) Yet Oddwall makes me think that the city is a place I would go to—not randomly, but as an art tourist, the way one might go to Marfa, Texas, Art Basel or the Venice Biennale.

Self-help is no new idea. God knows, the self-help section at Barnes & Noble is bigger than the poetry section and, about 30 percent of both mine and half my friends’ conversations begin with the phrase (go ahead, roll your eyes), “So, I was talking to my therapist about this the other day and she said…” Yet while I admit to therapy, I haven’t been brave enough yet to show my face in the self-help section of a bookstore. There’s more of a stigma there in my head that probably stems from the idea that “self-help is not real literature. I would only ever go to a bookstore to investigate real literature! Harumph!” Thus, since I am not truly above self-help literature (only in theory!), I ventured online where the self-helping could be researched in secret, or privacy (aren’t they often the same thing, really?).

I would say that the Dumb Little Man blog qualifies as self-help. But self-help in the most practical, non-touchy-feely sense, which earns the site major points. It’s all about the “how tos,” the tips, and the reasons to do something; it’s about inspiring its readers to start doing something about whatever it is they have been loudly complaining about to their friends, boyfriends, parents, therapists, bosses, baristas, whatever, be those complaints about their fat office asses (“5 Reasons to Write Down Everything You Eat for a Week”), bringing work home with them (“How to Shut Off Your Job for a Weekend [or a vacation]”), or time management (“7 Steps to Completing Your Projects on Time”).
   
The site also goes further than personal development. It also covers do-it-yourself décor projects, technology hints and financial planning help. If you looked long enough, it could probably give you “7 Ways to Become an Elf.”

It should come as no news to anyone that people are crazy about their pets, and that such craziness often manifests itself in hilarious and adorable ways on the Internet. Keep in mind that in this context I intend the word “crazy” to be a good thing—an endearing quality all humans should exhibit when it comes to the subject of pet-love. (Not in the sense of the word that entails unfocused eyes and incoherent ramblings about the end of the world.) Case in point: “Disapproving Rabbits.” I mean, even the name is adorably hilarious! And self-explanatory! Visit the site and you will immediately be face-to-face with all variety of rabbits with looks in their eyes that say everything from “Ew! Stop picking that disgusting scab!” to “Well, it’s not the nicest thing I’ve ever smelt” to “If this is the way it must be, then this is the way it must be.”

The basic premise is simple: People send in photographs of their adored pet rabbits and the website posts the pictures and gives them captions. The formula has been so successful that a mini-franchise is in the making. If you so desire, you can now order Disapproving Rabbit mugs and t-shirts. For the true Disapproving Rabbit fans, there are autographed Disapproving Rabbit books available for sale as well. But really, no outside reading is required to enjoy the site, the subhed of the blog says it all: “All disapproval, all the time.” In other words, it’s like your parents, only less oppressive!

Maybe I’ve been watching too much TV lately, but all those JC Penney commercials have me itching for some back-to-school basics. (Please keep in mind that I have not fallen into the JC Penney back-to-school marketing demographic for over 10 years.) Plus, a little fall shopping is good for the soul; it keeps you young and in tune with the trends. Because the Internet is so wide-open when it comes to online shopping, I’m going to focus on shoes at the moment because my summer Birkenstocks are about to disintegrate, and a good pair of fall shoes is something around which you can build an entire wardrobe if you choose carefully.

Now, first thing is first: I love Scarpa (shout out to Amy Gardner, whose store wins another Best Of blue ribbon this year!), but sometimes—just sometimes—fall shopping calls and you can’t leave your cubicle. These are the moments for Piperlime, an online shoe store with a nice variety of brands and styles, but not too much variety, as is the case with Zappos. The site gives you everything from ye olde Birkenstock to Marc Jacobs to Lily Pulitzer. Old, young, funky, conservative, classy, sassy, flashy—Piperlime has a shoe for your style without making you scroll through thousands and thousands of pairs of crap you don’t want. For example, with just three clicks, I came across the perfect pair of Frye boots for the fall. It would match my pants, my skirts, my shirts, my pajamas, and my underwear! Sigh. Now where’s that paycheck when I need it?