39. Stolen Stuff

“Art is theft (a dumb kind that does not generally leave you financially or materially better-off)".

-Pablo Picasso [paraphrase]. Some things I’ve stolen recently or am thinking of stealing:

• The March calendar - detailing the March 1924 ammonium nitrate explosion in Nixon, New Jersey - was my attempted theft of the structure of Chernobyl (HBO miniseries, not power plant). I’ll always love a well-written linear “watch-to-see-how-it-ends” story, but some of my favorite recent serieses have wrung a more organic and evergreen tension out of foregone conclusions: Chernobyl (Chernobyl happens), White House Plumbers (Nixon gets caught), Better Call Saul (wrong guy calls). It’s art that can’t be spoiled! Which means I can tell you that I stole the entire structure (”disaster aftermath” —> “investigation” —> “characters, stakes, warnings” —> “best guess of HOW this happened”) from Chernobyl without spoiling a moment of that series. (please go watch it!)

• I had expected to have more "calendar-making" time once I left 9-5 work, but - very fortunately! (double-triple underline) - nonprofit finance has kept me busy enough that I’ve had less, not more time, at least I work out better calendar management. (Cal Newport please return my voicemails!!) Which is why I haven’t yet been able to realize my greatest dream: the Choose Your Own Adventure calendar.

  • How would this work? Good question. I obviously wouldn’t ask people to jump ahead a few days (i.e. “To attack the wizard, go to May 5th” “To flee, go to May 7th”) because, for better or worse, my overactive imagination desperately needs the rigid constraint of “this needs to be a functioning calendar”. There could theoretically be multiple versions of each day?

  • Alternately, I could just send a calendar with page numbers (1,2,3…) and have the dates be blank, like “___day May ___” for you to fill in yourself?

  • But if I’m going to do that I may as well just send blank calendars and call it a “draw-your-own-day” month and if you think I have too much pride to send something as shiftless and lazy as that and call it “art”: welcome, new Patron, and thank you! I am so glad you’re here!!

• I am quite proud of the April calendar mostly because, with the help of a thermal printer, I wrote and collaged the entire month in a unbroken stream of cough-syrup-fueled consciousness. This allergy season has been a nightmare! Sorry if the results were [more] incoherent [than usual].

  • For a more cohesive piece of single-sitting artwork: the blurb "It's gonna be a L-O-N-G night!" on Goosebumps #27, A Night In Terror Tower alludes to the fact that illustrator Tim Jacobus did the entire cover in a single day, as opposed to the usual 3-4.

• Bits and pieces I’m stealing for the May calendar, which for now is just called Death Ray Hotel right now: this 2007 Nintendo DS game, this underrated hotel in Newcastle, this programming language, this lackluster opera singer’s romantic life.

More confessions to come, probably. Thank you for being here!! I hope your spring allergies have been kinder than mine.

Inman Square: checking the box

Painting of Inman Square in Cambridge, MA. I did a Porter Square painting last spring that I was pretty proud of and since I love geographic series, I thought I might do a series of semi-fantastical interpretations of several Cambridge/Somerville-area squares (Davis, Inman, Union, Central, Kendall, etc).

Inman is the next closest to us and seemed like the logical next choice, but for the life of me, I couldn’t find anything inspiring about it; no creative adaptations or whimsical interpretations of local details came to mind. Among the squares listed above, Inman features the fewest cherished memories or favorite places.

So naturally I started to fixate on it, and it basically turned into a challenge: if I could find inspiration in Inman, I could find inspiration in anything. This resulted in almost a dozen drafts imagining the square as, variously, an old English port; the site of invasion by steampunk monsters; a waterpark; a sunset.

Finally I just needed Inman Square out of my head. It’s not going anywhere. I can always come back to it. The result of this “check-the-box” mentality was, predictably, a pretty “check-the-box” painting. I’m glad it’s done.

THE CORRY WAILS AND LINER NOTES

I have yet to compile a solo record. Since I plan to leave instructions in my will that my heirs make me go multi-platinum, the only posthumous album they’d currently be able to compile are The Corry Wails. I don’t plan on dying any time soon, but just in case, I’d better start working on something with a bit more of my own voice. The Corry Wails are just a series of songs I have recorded based on wails our cat makes.

“Songs”, is, in fact, a pretty charitable description. Most of them are just loops. I have a bunch of much better real songs basically ready to record - a medley of ballads about my Canadian heritage, psychedelic-folk dreampop about Morristown summers, and stomping bluesy wailers about workin’ long days at the local ice rink - and as soon as I come up with the subject, verse, chorus, hook, chords, key, tempo and title for each song, I’ll put them on tape.

Unfortunately, though, I’ve made a lot of enemies, so just in case I don’t get around to recording John, here are some liner notes for the coke-bottle clear vinyl release of the Corry Wails.

Blue Grass

The fact that I titled this Blue Grass in the Jam Looper app suggests that I intended to practice for my bluegrass ensemble but wound up recording a few seconds of my cat being hungry and some creaky floors.

Wail Yogurt

I realize listening to this one that I have to specify that no cats are harmed or even bothered in the making of these songs. Generally though I do have to bribe our cat to perform, which is why this one is called Wail Yogurt. Corry will reliably wail for a fresh tube of meat yogurt.

Corry Wails 1

I wish I had named this one more creatively. I kind of picture this as the backdrop to a mini-boss fight in a knockoff Final Fantasy RPG about kids who command elemental powers. Corry’s wail here, I think, will transfer nicely into MIDI.

The Potato’s Lament

I was always pretty cagey when questioned about the subject of this song, but enough theories are probably circling around that I ought to set the record straight: the “potato” is our cat, Corry.

Oh No (Demo)

This is a work in progress. Please include it as a bonus track for people who are willing to shell out for the Deluxe release. If you need more bonus content for that: take all the photos of Corry out of my phone, print them out, and slip the resulting 6,331-page booklet into the vinyl.

TEXT() is easy and fast and will save you hours

Okay - quickly - one of the best bang-for-your-buck Excel (or Google Sheets) formulas, as in short-to-learn, quick-to-implement, saved-me-roughly-a-zillion-hours-over-the-years, is the TEXT() formula.

You can think of TEXT() like the formula version of re-formatting your data. I’ll get to why you’d want to do that with a formula in a sec, but below are some examples:

It’s a two-parameter formula:

=TEXT(value, format_text)

where “value” = the target cell (A1, $B3, $C$4, whatever)

and “format_text” is where you put the formatting syntax in quotations.

Formatting syntax (the “format_text” piece)

A lot of people avoid TEXT - and custom formatting in general - because at first glance, the formatting syntax looks like absolute gibberish. I promise, though, that if you take 15 minutes to test out some of the above, you’ll start to get the handle of it.

Mess around with it: Type the formula =NOW() in cell A1, type the formula =TEXT(A1,”m/y”) in cell B1, and then start messing around with everything inside the “m/y” quotations. Add m’s, h’s, d’s, slashes, semicolons, commas, dots. Try “mmm” then “mm yy” then “d” “dd” “ddd” “dddd”. See what results.

Fun fact (sort of): the formatting syntax is the same syntax that Excel uses for custom cell formatting. Select any cell, hit Cmd/Ctrl+1, and go to Custom. The syntax you see in that bottom right hand white box is the exact same syntax you can use in the TEXT() formula.

Okay but why

I’m almost always using TEXT to make a set of data more readable.

1. converting raw dates or timestamps into specific date/time formats

   • for instance, if I need a bunch of dates that look like “March 17, 2023” to look like “Mar 23” or “March” or “2023” or "3/17", so I can sum or pivot-table by month or year)

2. converting long-decimal numbers into more readable formats.

3. adding text into formatting, eg converting 8533 to "8.5k" (using the &)

4. there’s a lot of other uses but the above cover 95% of it. Also I guess 2 and 3 are kind of the same.

Okay but again why. why don’t you just directly change the data format?

Good question. If you have a single column of data and you won’t need to update the dataset, it’s usually faster and simpler just to change the format directly (i.e. select the column and choose a format from the ribbon). BUT TEXT() is useful if:

• you need the data to be readily available in multiple formats

  • e.g. you need to do one table that summarizes it by month and another table that summarizes it by year

  • if the data’s in column A, column B can be TEXT(A1,"mmm") and C can be TEXT(A1,"yyyy")

  • note: there is a formulaic way to do this without additional columns but it is a pain.

• you want to reduce large numbers to a more readable format without losing specificity

  • for instance: you want the number 821305.23 to just say "821k" but later on, you’ll still want to know that the underlying number was 821,305

  • having a separate column that is =TEXT(A1,"#")&”k” preserves the initial data set

• the data is dynamic and always comes in the wrong format

  • e.g. every day you’re downloading a new set of Stripe transactions, you need each one tagged by month, but the CSV you get always formats the date as "07/01/2020 03:05:11" .

  • you can set up a single spreadsheet where you paste the data in starting at column C and there’s a column to the left that just says =TEXT(C3,"mmm")

In all of those? Use our friend TEXT().