Bad bio, great music

OK, I'm vowing (again) to do something constructive with this blog. My original desire was to make this a place for relatively short posts, expanding on things I wrote on Twitter or Facebook. Let's try that one more time.

I finished a biography of Stevie Wonder yesterday, "Signed, Sealed and Delivered: The Soulful Journey of Stevie Wonder" by Mark Ribowsky. It was not a good book. He seems to have spoken to perhaps three people who know or knew Wonder; most of his info about Wonder's life is from magazine articles and interviews. He does an OK job discussing the music, but even there, analysis is given short shrift. The one interesting story he digs up has to do with how Wonder used and discarded Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff, synthesizer whiz kids and the producers of most of his greatest albums (including Talking Book and Innervisions).

I wish books like this were honestly marketed, as being not really biography--you come away from this with no real sense of what Wonder the person is like--but music journalism. Had the author focused more narrowly on the music, I might recommend this, but I can't. However, the book has sent me back to the music; I popped Innvervisions in my car CD player today, and I've got Talking Book and Songs in the Key of Life ready for the next few days.

Saturday night at the Ohio Theatre

I haven't posted here in a while, I guess because I haven't been doing much worth noting. But last night, we went downtown to the Ohio Theatre with our friends Sarah and Joe. The Ohio Theatre is a grand old movie palace (built in 1928) which, after some years of neglect in the 60's, was restored, most fabulously so, and is now Columbus's premiere showplace for plays, concerts, ballets, and in the summertime, classic movies. The Summer Movie series is in its 40th year and, though we used to make a habit of going downtown to see at least 5 or 6 of the movies each season, lately it's been difficult to get our assess off the couch to go see movies we've seen umpteen times, and in most cases, actually own on DVD. This summer, we're making more of an effort; in the season's first week, we've been to three of the four events: Rear Window, a double feature of the 1931 Frankenstein and the 1941 Wolf Man, and, last night, Singin' in the Rain.

The theater has a large ground floor and a huge balcony area, with a front loge, mezzanine, and upper balcony, with a capacity of 2700. The movies generally attract a nice-sized crowd--I estimated the Frankenstein/Wolf Man crowd in the balcony alone to be over 250, with more downstairs. Last night was about the same. If the movie we're seeing is a visual treat, we get there early enough to sit in the front row of the loge, an ideal place to have the movie image fill your view. But because of the acoustics of the building, the dialogue, especially with older movies, can be hard to make out in the loge, so sometimes we sit in the upper balcony--the screen looks much smaller, but the sound is perfect. Below, my three companions in their last row balcony seats:

The Ohio is a beautiful building and getting there early just to gaze at the ornate decorations on the walls and ceiling is great fun. Below, the chandelier:

A view of the stage from the balcony:

A view of the boxes (which were never used for seating, only for looks) along the side of the auditorium:

The architecture includes many interesting features that the casual viewer may not catch the first time. My measly digital camera can't capture the rather rococo features on the walls and above the stage, but below is one of many faces at the top of many columns:

The outside marquee:

And finally, Clark Wilson, the organist who plays one of the few still-functioning theater organs in the country for a half-hour before each movie, rising from the orchestra pit:


When we go again, I'll post more pictures.

An afternoon walk

As my duties at the library have changed (reference alone, then ref and cataloging, then cataloging alone, then back to both, now back to cataloging), there has been one constant: my two 15-minute breaks are spent talking a quick walk with a colleague or two around the library neighborhood. This gives me exercise, allows a chance for debates about movies or TV shows (or the exchange of choice gossip), and once in a while, takes us past the Donut Kitchen for coffee or sweets. The other afternoon, I thought to take my camera along to document spring in the neighborhood. I am not a person of a horticultural bent so I have no idea what these trees, bushes and plants are called, I just know a lovely scene when I see one, so without further ado, our afternoon walk:

This last one relies on both the natural color of the tree and flowers, but also on the color of the dwelling behind:

Delicate spring morning

It's been much warmer than usual for early spring here in Central Ohio--a record-setting 83 degrees yesterday, same predicted for today--and as I like warm weather, I'm cherishing every warm morning because I know it will eventually go back to normal (tomorrow, rain and 50 degrees, so they say). On the way into work, I was struck by the lovely delicate blossoms of (what I'm told are) the flowering pear trees that line Cambridge Blvd. Realizing that with the storms coming in tonight, this sight might be gone tomorrow, I snapped a cell phone photo of the street as I was driving. It doesn't do justice to the reality of the trees, viewed at sunrise, but it'll have to do.

What I do

I guess I assume that when I say "I'm a library cataloger," everyone knows what that means. Then I remember, "Oh, yeah, six years ago when I was teaching college English, I didn't even know the occupation existed, let alone what a cataloger did." I make sure that every item in the library can be looked up in the catalog, so a patron can see a full bibliographic record that describes that item in detail. Remember the old card catalog cards that us Boomers grew up with? Basically, I make sure the information that used to be on those cards but is now accessed via computer (title, author, publication date, page numbers, subject headings, etc.) is correct and retrievable. [The image below is from OCLC (Online Computer Library Center)]

I catalog all of our library's non-fiction books, juvenile and teen books, and DVD's, so this also means handling every such item, checking for the cataloging info. For books, this is fairly straightforward, though I do have to flip through each book checking to see if things like indexes, bibliographical references, or plates ("primarily illustrative" pages which are not numbered--usually the glossy photo pages in the middle of many non-fiction books) are present. For DVD's, this means I have to sort out the cast members and other important credits, plot summaries, MPAA ratings, aspect ratio, and so on. Most of this is available via the disc container, but I often check IMDb or even pop the disc in a portable DVD player (for example, if there is conflicting information about the language tracks or subtitles on the disc).

Below is the bottom panel of the back of the container for Psycho. What I have to pay attention to: the studio and/or production companies credited, the stars, the producers, the writers, the directors, the spoken languages, the subtitle languages, the aspect ratio (whether it's full-screen or letterboxed widescreen), the sound format (Dolby Digital 5.1, or stereo, or mono, etc.). I also must note the special features, the original release year of the film, and the release year of the disc.

For most of the items I do, I get the basic cataloging info from a number of sources, usually copying and editing records from the Library of Congress or other libraries. Below is a record I worked on for a book called Reality Hunger; I have to make sure that the first few lines, coded with letters and numbers, correspond to various aspects of the book (pub date, format, presence of illustrations or index, etc.). Lines from 100 and below consist of fairly straightforward information.

After the bib record is complete, I have to attach item records to represent each individual copy. Below is the way that record looks to the patron searching our catalog:

Every so often, I have to do an original record for some godforsaken book or DVD that no other library in the world owns. Though we catalogers love to complain about doing this, truth to tell, it actually can be challenging and fun. I recently had to create an original for a DVD that was donated to our collection. It wasn't even a movie, it was a compilation of features about a sculptor named Fredrick Hart. That record, below, was created from scratch by me, based on having the disc in front of me (though it had less information on the container than most DVD's) and on scouring the net to confirm some of the information:

That took a good half-hour of work which was frustrating but kind of fun, for an item that will probably never get checked out of the small suburban library for which I work--it was a donation which was in good shape, so we kept it. Below is one day's worth of DVD cataloging I did recently, mostly oddities and older titles that were re-ordered or donated:

The rating labels and the call numbers on the non-fiction DVD's are also put on by me; I'm not just a cataloger, but a processor as well ;-) More about this endlessly fascinating topic (it really is to me, though I know it's not to you) as the mood hits me--and as I find fun things to pictures of.

Spring has sprung

According to the U.S. Naval Observatory, the vernal equinox occurred yesterday afternoon, probably around the time that Don & I were walking to Starbucks for an after-lunch treat (he, an iced tea which he forgot to ask for unshaken, and me, a cinnamon dolce latte). I was blithely unaware that it was officially spring, but frankly ever since the snow stopped, right around March 1st (Central Ohio had measurable snow every damned day in February), it's felt like spring to me, and we have had a remarkably mild March so far. In the early evening, still not knowing about the equinox, I went outside and everything was so pleasant, I was moved to take a few pictures. As it turned out, I was capturing the arrival of spring. First, the pretty yellow flowers near our front porch--daffodils, I'm told--that survived the foot or so of snow beneath which their sprouts were buried:

For contrast, the ugly lump of ice/snow still left in the parking lot, despite several 60-degree days in a row. Of course, just a few weeks ago, this lump was a pile taller than a person, which went up far past the top of the brick wall behind it. (Kinda looks like The Blob, doesn't it?):

Finally, the gorgeous sunset, to which my little digital Kodak camera couldn't really do justice:

As I was snapping these pix, I was thinking, "If I didn't know better, I'd swear it had been a lovely spring day!" Now I come to find out, it was!

Stephen Colbert and I have coffee

Not really, but as a Colbert fan, I was excited, first thing this morning, while I still had half-a-cup of coffee left, to be able to catalog the "graphic novel" collection of his comic strip alter ego Tek Jansen: