This is the home of Joe Clifford Faust, who:
- Is an elder in the Church of Christ,
- makes his living as an advertising copywriter,
- is the author of seven science fiction novels,
- is occasionally known as Mister Faust, an alleged singer-songwriter,
- is the writer and "artist" of The Home World, a hiatused web comic,
- is the guy who used to blog a lot about writing (it's all gone now, sorry),
- is an infrequent haunter of community theater stages,
- and is someone who went to high school in Wyoming, college in Oklahoma, and now lives in Ohio.
If the person you're looking for doesn't meet these criteria, then this isn't the him you're looking for.
Monday, July 23, 2007
There's a moment in Apollo 13 where Tom Hanks is giving a tour of NASA to some visiting dignitaries. He takes them past a room that is filled with the components of a computer. "Look," he says, "this computer now only takes up an entire room!" 1It's a cloying line. It's not the type of thing that would have been said back then. Rather, it was something that the screenwriter put in the mouth of Hanks because he knew it would amuse a modern audience, most of whom probably had more powerful computers sitting atop the engines of their cars, let alone their office desktops. It's a look into the eyes of the audience, winking, and saying, "Look how backwards things were then!" Which brings me to Mad Men, the new series on AMC that I was eagerly awaiting. It had a lot of things going for it, I thought. Naturally, as an ad man myself, I thought the show worth checking out. Involved in the project was an executive producer from The Sopranos, a show I have recently come to admire during its rerun on A & E. Most of all, the decision was made to set the show in 1960 - the golden age of advertising, when Madison Avenue could do no wrong, and the men who wrote copy were gods. And how annoying, then, that the first episode of the show was littered with those winks to the audience to show how backwards and unenlightened we were back in 1960. Start with all of the lines about cigarettes, which were just coming out of a period when four out of five doctors recommended one brand over another. It's a shame, too, because there was one great moment that said everything that needed to be said about cigarettes in 1960. In the scene, the members of the ad agency meet with tobacco company honchos to discuss what to do now that they can no longer say that cigarettes are good for you. The tobacco baron lights up a cigarette, which is immediately followed by a flare of lighters and puffs of smoke that fill the room, making the rounds like a burning fuse, until the air is thick with haze. That was probably the best moment in the program. Similarly, the attitudes toward women were so overdone that the liquid boiled off and the remaining gooey mess stuck to the inside of the pot. We're not so much reminded of the fact that men were all chauvinist pigs as we are bludgeoned. Then there's the moment when the Creative Director is asked if he's decided to take the account of a young presidential candidate who served in the Navy and it turns out to be, ho, ho, Richard Nixon! This would have been a great bit if it had been written a little differently, but I was so tired of the winks at the audience by then that I just rolled my eyes. I guess my big problem is that I had high expectations for the show. I saw a documentary about how it was created and staged, and painstaking attention was spent on getting details right, from hairstyles to the kinds of toys and appliances that appeared in homes. Why, then, wasn't the same attention paid to the writing, which to me was filled with tin-eared references for us denizens of the twenty-first century to point and laugh at. Better to stick with more natural sounding dialogue and let the audience judge the irony of the "complicated machine" that turns out to be an IBM Selectric typewriter. Nyuk, nyuk. I could almost feel the writer jabbing in the ribs on that one. So Mad Men didn't make a real good first impression on me. There were a couple of things they did do right, like the drinking, that wasn't as over the top, and the use of a stripper who was a Marilyn Monroe size 8 as opposed to an anorexic Kate Moss size 0 was a nice detail. I didn't like it that much, but I might be willing to give it another episode or two before writing it off. After all, there's only so many other things from that time period that they can point out for us to laugh at... right? He got a home improvement loan to build a.... FALLOUT SHELTER! Hilarious!Hmmm. Well, maybe not. Listening: "Karn Evil 9" - Emerson, Lake and Palmer ( Return of the Manticore) --- - There's a similar clunker in one of my favorite movies, Almost Famous: "It's called a Mojo. It sends pages by telephone and it ONLY TAKES SEVEN MINUTES A PAGE!" Chortle!
posted 2:56 PM
Friday, July 20, 2007
Search Engine Term of the Day (#1)
posted 8:29 AM
 For those of you who still come to these pages because of some drivel I cranked out in the 80's and 90's, here's a great way for you to support me in my retirement, which is only a couple of decades away: hie thee to this page at CDBaby and buy a copy of my son's first album, Start. That's right... I've always said that my children were my retirement plan, and if you early adopters help make this album a sensation, he'll do more, make tons of money, and in my old age he will be able to support me in the manner to which I have become accustomed. Seriously, I hope you'll at least go to CDBaby and give the album a spin. I think it's great stuff, being "Inventive, witty, and organic piano-and-vocal prerecorded sound product," as my son calls it. I really do like this album, and in the weeks since I've had a copy of the finished album, my son has moved into my Top Ten artists over on my Last.fm account. And it's not just because it is my son. If he had done an album that was like, say, Master of Pupperts, I would have listened to it, smiled, told him it was very nice, and then washed the experience out of my ears with some Stan Ridgway. So check it out. Admittedly, it won't be for everyone, but then music is a subjective experience like that isn't it? Only you won't know until too late if you don't care for it because you'll have already bought the album. Oh, dear. What a shame.
posted 8:03 AM
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Because of my recent increasing involvement with Random Acts of Music (I've been made the director, or another producer, or head writer, or whatever other hat I end up wearing - it’s a small crew), I relented and now have an account on MySpace.. I have absolutely no affection for it, but it allows me to set up something of a network with the musical guests we've had on the show. I posted a demo of one of my songs, Another Year, there, but I don't have it set to play automatically when you go into the page. Maybe I should, but I really hate that aspect of MySpace, and whenever I visit a page, I always head for the player first to shut the music off until I'm ready to hear it. As for the song, it's a demo version, and my vocal sounds more nasal than usual (I have a deviated septum that accounts for part of it) - I seem to recall thinking I was over a period of allergies when I recorded the lead, but listening later I realized I wasn't. Oh, well. It's a demo.  Coming across better is Salad Days, a newer song in which I try to channel Mark Everett of Eels. Recorded on an allergy free day. It is posted on GarageBand, and can be heard by clicking here, or on the handy banner up there on the left. This demo was recorded with one mike, in one take. I've since rewritten the final lines of the lyrics, so what I sing and what is posted differs. Maybe when I record the real version, I'll correct it. Unless I decide to use the demo. I'm thinking now I'm a lo-fi artist, after all. Now I suppose I should load Salad Days onto MySpace as well, but it's just not in me right now. Then I'd feel obligated to set up the random autoplay of the music so I can be a pain in the ear like everyone else. I don't know. It's late. I'll think about it.
posted 12:28 AM
Friday, July 13, 2007
Gorefest, or, How Green Was My Answer
I'm posting this at the left-handed behest of a friend of mine. It's a dream I had, but it was no doubt triggered by a dream he had about me, in which I was married to Nicole Kidman 1. He told me that Ms. Kidman was much nicer than he expected, and I told him of course she was - she was married to me after having had Tom Cruise, after all. Anyway, no doubt filled with confidence because of my celebrity marriage, I somehow got up on the stage at the Al Gore Awareness Concert Live Earth and interrupted Mr. Gore while he was speechifying. I told him I wanted to ask him my Three Questions that I want every Global Warming Alarmist to answer. To my surprise, he agreed. But as I asked the first question, he started dodging the answers, which only made me think of more questions. So the end result was like Monty Python's Spanish Inquisition sketch2: "Okay, now I have SIX questions." Incidentally, I really do have Three Questions for the Alarmists to answer. They are: 1) If man and modern technology are causing Global Warming, then what caused the temperature rise through the 14th century that made England warm enough to cultivate grapes? 2) If man and modern technology are causing the Earth to warm up, what is causing Mars to warm up at roughly the same rate? 3) If man-made Global Warming is scientifically verifiable, why are growing numbers of its supporters calling for censure or punishment for their peers who are skeptical of our guilt ( e.g., the Weather Channel exec who wants to revoke the AMS Certification of doubters, or RFK Jr.'s statement that skepics are traitors)? In the dream they were funnier. So were Gore's answers. Listening: "Torch" - Soft Cell ( Memorabilia - The Singles) --- - I certainly do get around in other people's dreams. Early in our marriage, my wife dreamed that I ran off with Elizabeth Taylor. Not to mention the one I had about Meg Ryan.
- Quite possibly the funniest piece of sketch comedy ever written. I laugh every time I see it. For another piece of Python genius that always gets me, here's their World Hide and Seek Championship sketch. And here's a bit of brilliance from SCTV that you literally will not see on TV due to music licensing issues.
posted 10:16 AM
Thursday, July 12, 2007
*Crackle* Are we still up? Hello?
Well, I think we're back up. Again. No sooner did I get everything flipped over than my web host migrated servers. Some directory names changed, and for a while it looked like the posts and changes I made to the site were disappearing into a black hole. Well, that's all been fixed, so we're up and running again. And there was a little snag in the commenting system (created when I clicked the wrong button in Blogger), and that's all been cleared up, too. There's also a new toy over on the right that you can play with. It's the red controller that says "My Playlist" in the upper right corner, and "JoeIsListening's Playlist" in the center below the play button. This is a collection of songs I picked out just for me you to listen to, many of my favorites among them. You can listen to 30 second samples of individual songs by scrolling through the gray list below the button and clicking on the song you want to hear - or you can listen to random songs from the playlist in their entirety by simply clicking the play button. (You can't choose what to play because then it would no longer be an internet radio station, but play-on-demand, which brings up a whole other set of rights issues.) (I should also note that scrolling only takes you through about 18 of the songs on the list, which has nearly 50. I don't know if there is an issue with the Flash, with the server, or my ISP.) So enjoy, if you're into that sort of thing. I've also started up links to the archives. But outside of that, I don't know of much more that is going to be added. I'm going to try and run this one clean and simple. So no attempts at categories. That became too unwieldy on the old version of the site, and I think that the flip to categories is what, in part, killed off a lot of my search engine referrals. But that doesn't matter anymore, because I'm doing this one for me. Well, and maybe those old friends and internet acquaintances of mine who still find their way here. And maybe a bit for those who are still interested in books I once wrote and may write in the future. And probably those who find their way here because I really am going to start playing out and pushing my music a bit more. And... I think that's it. For now. Listening: "The Island/Come And See/The Landlord's Daughter/You'll Not Feel The Drowning" - The Decemberists ( The Crane Wife)
posted 4:22 PM
Monday, July 2, 2007
Book Review: "God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything" by Christopher Hitchens
This book is nothing more than a collection of old myths and legends propagated by believers in Science. Many reviewers of this book even go so far to claim that there is intelligent design in its writing. I am here to debunk all of that. Everyone knows that books were created when there was an explosion in the shop of a man experimenting with creating an automated printing press. When the smoke had cleared and Johannes Gutenberg was walking through the charred remains of his shop, he found that the explosion had created a perfect hardbound copy of The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. It made sense to him that this happened, as all of the elements were there to create the book... ink, type, paper, even a manuscript for a blueprint. All that was needed was a cataclysmic event to bring everything together. Ever since then, books have been evolving on their own, using natural selection to meet the demands of the market. Hitchens claims to have written God is Not Great..., but there are records showing that early drafts of this book were attributed to, alternately, Sylvia Plath, Jack London, Sydney Sheldon, and Stephen King. In fact, scientific records show that the origins of this book can be traced back to Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens. Thus, this book is nothing more than a cruel hoax that has gotten out of hand. I don't believe for a moment that it was written by Christopher Hitchens. In fact, I don't even believe that Hitchens exists.
posted 9:24 PM
| 
