Near the end of 2003, after hearing from my friends about all these great stories in the New Yorker and whining that I really should get around to subscribing, a friend took pity on me and gave me a subscription for my birthday. I was amazed at the sheer amount of text in each issue. At first I didn't read articles that did not address subjects I already knew I was interested in. But eventually I realized that even the articles on topics that I had avoided in the past were usually fascinating. And articles about current events, which I sometimes get tired of keeping up with, would often give me a far better understanding of events in a part of the world than 10 New York Times articles had. Soon I was reading every word. I got to be a faster reader than I'd ever been before, and even then I often stayed up reading later than I should have to keep up with the rapid influx of issues. I renewed my subscription in 2004. But by the end of 2005, I had a large backlog of books I wanted to read, and despite the incredible value that the magazine represented to me I begrudged paying $46 for another year, because I had heard that if I let my subscription lapse for a little while, I would be offered a year at cheaper and cheaper rates. Since then I've enjoyed reading the following books, in rough chronological order (no affiliate stuff going on here, I don't get anything if you buy the books through these links):

• Crime and Punishment
• A Hundred Years of Japanese Film
• Paris To The Moon
• Kafka on the Shore
• Emotions Revealed
• The People's Guide to Mexico
• A People's History of the United States
• Spoken Here (travels among threatened languages)
• Haunted Weather (travelogue and meditations on experimental music)
• Kitchen Science

I've also gotten through about 90% of the complete Sherlock Holmes. That's been my bedside reading, since the book weighs about 10 pounds. Recently I've been studying Spanish. I never did receive those cheaper offers from the New Yorker, perhaps because I wasn't a subscriber for as long as the people from whom I heard the reports of them. This past November, someone again took pity and got me a subscription as a gift for my birthday. A few days ago, I finally got the offer from the New Yorker for a year's subscription at the 'Professional Rate' of $29.95. It didn't specify what profession I am part of that entitles me to the rate; cheap bastard, perhaps?

For a Christmas gift I attempted to make a creatively packaged mix CD, in the style of Adam Kempa's creations. For some reason I fixated on the idea of a cylindrical or spherical package to match the CD's shape; I enjoyed imagining the recipient trying without success to fit it neatly into his CD collection. For a while I drew a blank, but one day the idea of an Oreo cookie with the CD in the middle popped into my head.

The creamy filling is made from a DVD-R spindle case, reduced in height. This means to open the case and remove the CD, you twist the two halves first, much the way some people eat Oreos. I also thought this would be a much more reliable and satisfying mechanism than I would have been able to make myself.

The cookie pieces were made from a material called Last-A-Foam, a rigid polyurethane foam that we've been using at work recently for quick prototype construction. It forms easily and I figured it would have a good cookie texture. After forming the pieces using a bandsaw and router and sanding them, I cut a circular groove in one side for the upper half of the sliding mechanism.

I painted the pieces black and white with Plasti-Kote enamel paint before gluing the creamy filling parts onto the cookie parts with hot melt glue. I applied a label to the CD and also printed out and cut a circular paper tracklist.

The Oreo pattern came from a picture on Flickr, which was actually of a tin made to look like an Oreo, but was by far the best and highest-res image available. (One of the lessons I gleaned from this exercise is that when searching for 'oreo cookie' on Flickr, you get a lot of pictures of two distinct types: black and white cats, and one white person surrounded by two non-white people.) I was slightly disappointed by the contrast in texture between the paper and the foam, but the alternative was hand-painting the pattern, and given my skill set, that seemed unlikely to produce better results.

As difficult as the packaging for me was choosing a tracklist. I'd already made a mix CD for the same person last year, and then lost the tracklist in a computer crash, so I was afraid if I stuck with my old favorites I would inevitably end up choosing some of the same songs as I did last time. But I hardly listened to any new music this year. So I frantically read mp3 blogs, and found a lot to like, with the final list leaning rather heavily on a few blogs' best-of-2006 lists:

1. Peter Bjorn and John - "Young Folks"
2. Phoenix - "Long Distance Call"
3. Arms - "Tiger Tamer"
4. Islands - "Rough Gem"
5. Yo La Tengo - "Mr. Tough"
6. The Panda Band - "Eyelashes"
7. Grizzly Bear - "Easier"
8. Belle and Sebastian - "White Collar Boy"
9. Fred Thomas - "Disappearing"
10. Regina Spektor - "Fidelity"
11. Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks - "Vanessa from Queens"
12. Band of Horses - "The Funeral"
13. Jeremy Enigk - "Been Here Before"

These videos from Buzz Image manage to be some of the clearest demonstrations and explanations I've seen of modern visual effects techniques, and they do it entirely without narration. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is delightful for any fans of that movie. Brokeback Mountain is a good example of effects that the viewer is not intended to notice. In this case I can't help being a bit jaded by the knowledge that some of the amazing natural beauty in the film was not so natural. This one also shows an example of shooting day for night--I never understood how that could end up looking right (according to Wikipedia it is rarely done these days). Raw footage from The Aviator shows the kind of performances that actors are often called upon to make today, like standing in front of a green screen in a sweatshirt and mimicking closely a few gestures and facial expressions from historical footage. The music and sound effects in all of the videos are very nicely done.

The two doormats in use in my building. I like the contrast in tone: cheery sarcasm vs. flat-out hostility.

A nice article at Slate (slashdotted this morning) discusses the unfortunate isolation of music markets, with specific regard to the inability to purchase songs by Japanese bands that are available at the iTunes Music Store of Japan, if you are using a U.S. credit card. It does seem to have reached another level of ridiculousness when it would cost them no shelf space to enable the purchase of these songs. But as many slashdot comments point out, there are reasons. Not good reasons, but business reasons, of distribution deals that are limited to certain territories and such. And it's good to point out that this is not Apple's failing but the music industry's in general. Apple has only failed to revolutionize music distribution in one particular way that most people will probably never notice.

I can vouch for the quality of at least one band mentioned in the article, The Pillows. I discovered them as the performers of the theme song to FLCL, the great (anti-)anime series that Adult Swim introduced to the US a few years ago. Several of their other songs were used on the show too. It's pretty straightforward, heavy but upbeat rock, but something in their riffs and the mixture of Japanese and semi-nonsensical English lyrics is very appealing to me. The emotional associations I had between some of the songs and the show probably helped, but it's good stuff.

I started listening to Tommy February⁶ around the same time after seeing her video on a Japanese pop music tv show that I was watching as part of my language study. It's guilty pleasure 80's-style synth-pop, but again, the melodies and attention to detail raise it above the crowd. At the time I was shocked to find that at an artist signed to Sony had no page on the All Music Guide (maybe they should change their name), and few other references on the web, apart from a fansite or two. Today there is an essentially empty page on AMG, and a respectable page on Wikipedia. Check out the titles of her singles; I wouldn't know how to type the characters in most of them, but they are hilarious.

When I went to Japan in 2004 I visited the Tower Records in Shinjuku and agonized over whether to spend my $30 on a Pillows album or a Tommy February one. I analyzed which selections would give me the most songs per Yen. The Pillows seemed to have an odd system, perhaps common over there, in which at least half the songs on each 'album' were also randomly sprinkled throughout the other albums, as if they were all just different assemblages of the same 40 or so songs. I ended up getting one of those.

For some reason I never went beyond those two artists in exploring Japanese pop and rock (everything else on that J-Pop tv show was crap), but the Slate article has inspired me to do just that.