Compilation Champs 2007

Compilation Champs 45

Every year I’ve attended SXSW, I’ve put together a compilation CD to give away to people I know, and this year is no different. The playlist is finalized, the liner notes are almost complete, and I’ve started burning the discs, but I’d like to know how many to burn. I usually give away about 30 each year, but if you’re coming to Austin, and haven’t received one before, and would like one, please comment.

I won’t be leaking the playlist, but if you like Chinese reggae, Uruguayan punk, or Bollywood novelty songs, you should be happy with this year’s disc.

March 8, 2007: I’ve now posted the playlist for all those who are curious.

Wine-ing on the Web

I posted the following entry last June on my company’s blog:

Early last year, I pointed to the excellent Cellar Tracker web site, where the hardcore wine geek (or aficionado, if you please) could keep track of everything in her cellar and even connect with a community to share tasting notes. Despite the overall thoroughness and wealth of features, though, the design is a bit spare, and the site is clearly aimed at people with large cellars.

Now, along come not one but two new sites offering to bring the benefits of online cellar management to the masses. Both WineLog and Cork’d have launched recently, and are in a desperate battle to sign up new users who will share their wine tasting notes and recommendations. I’m happy to see that these sites make use of some newer web technology like tagging to make classifying (and more importantly, finding) wines easier and more intuitive.

Though both sites are evolving rapidly, I’d have to give the edge at the moment to Cork’d, whose playful graphic design really invites users to jump right in. I also like the community features (though calling it “Drinking Buddies” might strike the wrong note with some people) and look forward to using this as a resource in the months to come.

But I won’t be abandoning Cellar Tracker, whose powerful features are just too useful. If we could just get them talking to the folks at Cork’d…

I have to admit that since then, the underdog WineLog seems to have closed the gap considerably, and maybe even pushed ahead. While Cork’d attracted a lot of the web design/blog crowd who enjoyed the work of designers/programmers Dan Cederholm and Dan Benjamin, there seem to be fewer, well, wine people there, and I find the site harder to actually use, especially when searching for wines. I still think the biggest challenge involved in making sites like these useful is formatting the information consistently and weeding out redundancies. Which is why I still generally use Cellar Tracker over the upstarts. But it’s fun to keep track of how these projects are developing.

Jesus Land

It seems that I’ve been immersing myself in stories about toxic Christianity lately. Julia Scheeres’ memoir of growing up with her adopted black brother David in a hellish “Christian” home hasn’t made me feel any better about the evangelical subculture. In fact, I am beginning to wonder if Christianity itself might be broken beyond repair. Though a harrowing read, the book is a beautiful testament to the power of hope and love (and the corrosive power of twisted faith). Scheeres and I are around the same age (and even attended the same college), and I found myself nodding in recognition of some of the trappings of Christian life in the 1980s: Keith Green, Sandi Patti, Petra, the mistrust of anything “secular”, the obsession of our youth leaders with sexual immorality and especially abortion. The difference is that I spent my teens in a safe, happy place, and Julia spent hers in a tyrannical Christian reform school in the Dominican Republic. Julia and David cling to each other during this time and her descriptions of both the horrors of the school’s “Program” and her rare moments of freedom with her beloved brother are written in the immediacy of the present-tense, like a teenager’s diary. This is powerful stuff, and by the end, I was amazed at her and her brother’s resilience. With the traditional safe places of family and church twisted into abusive prisons, her relationship with David is a lifeline for both of them.

At times I was shaking my head in disbelief, but on her website, she includes supporting documents from Escuela Caribe, the reform school she was sent to by her parents after a little too much teenaged rebellion. And she links to a site for “survivors” of the school’s regime, which may bring some much-needed catharis and hopefully shut Escuela Caribe down and other places like it. Yes, incredibly, the school is still operating. I’m happy and amazed that Julia has been able to make a life for herself as a writer, and a good one. She is happily married and has just had a baby girl, and though her faith has been completely shattered, I know that her daughter will receive a far more “Christian” upbringing than she ever did. In these days when the rise of the Christian Right seems to have caught us all by surprise, it’s good to see that these dark undercurrents have been there all along.

In more happy fun religion news, next month’s Doc Soup screening will be Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple. Another story of religious madness in the Caribbean jungle. Can’t wait.
😉

Consolation Champ!

Buy Consolation Champ - The Invitational

In a bizarre case of art imitating life imitating art, or something, there is now actually a BAND called Consolation Champ! I wonder if they left off the “s” since they couldn’t get this domain name? Most of you know that the name of this site was one of a number of hypothetical band names I tossed around for most of the 80s and 90s, and so I’m actually sort of proud that there is now a bunch of guys out there (in Minneapolis, actually) who are making music under the (slightly-different) name. Rock on, guys and good luck! Go and check out their CD.

I realize that some of you poor typists might have already found this out, actually.

UPDATE: I just checked their MySpace page and it appears that they might be playing SXSW this year. WEIRD! If they are, I think I might just NEED to see them. So strange.