This website turns 10
December 7, 2005 -- The Mark Fleischmann: Writer website is now 10 years old. To celebrate I'm splurging a little. For the first time ever this site has a proper URL: mfwriter.com.
MF:W made its debut as a personal webpage on AOL's member server though it now lives on Road Runner's member server. In those days most of my time was occupied in launching etown.com, another web venture that was grand, collaborative, and ultimately futile. MF:W, in contrast, has always been small, solitary, and successful in its modest ambition to serve as an online presence for my identity as a writer. It actually hit the net a few weeks before etown.
The first five years saw slow changes including the current amber-on-black color scheme, inspired by nostalgia for the amber monitor I once used with my DOS PC. Around the time of etown's messy demise in early 2001 I expanded MF:W into the current format with this monthly-updated news page, a bio page that operates like a conventional resume in reverse, a publications page with links to published work, a books page celebrating my page-turners, and a contact page to enable readers to get in touch. MF:W is separate from (though interlinked with) quietriverpress.com, the properly domain-hosted site for my book company.
Home Theater unveils new website
November 1, 2005 -- Whoops, I've inadvertently joined the blogosphere. My former client and new employer, Home Theater magazine, has revamped its website and I'll be making (more or less) weekly contributions. The most significant part is the Audio Diablog, where I'll be delivering wisdom on my little fiefdom within the magazine. It's written in a challenging format wherein I split myself into two parts, a questioner and an answerer, and basically stage arguments with myself. In the process I hope to illuminate parts of my subject and my work without making my editors too nervous. Except for reviews that will occasionally alternate in that space, the content will be unmediated -- I write it, I upload it, you read it, readers react. If I do it right and don't take it too seriously, this could be fun.
Chi-chan, 1995-2005
October 1, 2005 -- Chi-chan, my feisty 10-year-old black cat, died yesterday. Chan is a Japanese term of endearment and I never figured out what Chi means. He was black, all black, right down to the pads on his paws, a bit portly, and his soft gleaming fur was always immaculately groomed. I adopted him two and a half years ago from a Japanese woman who was suffering from cancer. She gave up her cat and her apartment and went back to her native country. When she died a year later, Chi-chan seemed to know, and was inconsolable for days. In time, he forgave me for not being a Japanese woman, meowing in the morning for his daily brushing and jumping into bed at night to purr me to sleep. Chi-chan's emotions were always close to the surface -- he was quick to hiss and quick to purr -- and I lived with him for months before realizing just how intelligent, sensitive, and beautiful he was.
Practical Home Theater turns 5
September 26, 2005 -- My home theater book has moved into its fifth edition. The latest version of Practical Home Theater -- with the cool green cover -- will be sold between October 2005 and October '06. This edition has 16 pages of new content, including a detailed section on how to recognize different types of video noise and what each of them means. The ultimate answer book, it tells you everything you need to know when shopping for HDTV and surround gear -- including how to read a spec sheet, how to separate fact from hype, and how to get good value for your money. It remains the only book on the subject to receive annual updates, largely because I'm the only author nutty enough to punch in hundreds of small changes every year.
Home Theater appoints an audio editor
August 22, 2005 -- Effective today, I am the Audio Editor of Home Theater magazine. Let the feeding frenzy begin.
My relationship with the magazine began in 2001. That was an eventful year -- my web company died, I wrote my first book, and re-established my writing career.
I started with reviews and features. When the magazine was redesigned last year, I began writing the monthly AV Newswire column, taking on the title of News Editor. As Audio Editor, I'll continue to write Newswire while taking on more regular reviewing duties. My cat will be thrilled -- more cartons to sniff.
I'm excited too. Many thanks to Editor-in-Chief Maureen Jenson for giving me a chance to do this job. I'll be working with some of the best editors and writers in the business. For an audio/video buff, this is like dying and going to heaven, except without the inconvenient dying part.
What do writers eat?
July 30, 2005 -- My army of fans and admirers often asks what I have for dinner. I am, after all, the author of a restaurant guide. But as an inkstained wretch, I can't afford to eat out every night.
Like most poor people, I live on starch. One of my favorite recipes is a can of Bush's vegetarian baked beans smeared with Kosciusko spicy mustard. The resemblance to the president's name is purely concidental. However, my masterpiece is a variation of Kraft's macaroni & cheese. I will now share the secret recipe with you.
First of all, you have to buy the cheapest version of it, the one that comes with a packet of orange cheese powder plus the macaroni. Do not buy the step-up version with orange cheese goo, which is full of hydrogenated oils. You want the powder, not the goo. If your supermarket has a generic version of the Kraft product, that's fine (and even cheaper). I usually pay about 50 cents per box and each box is good for two meals.
Ignore the instructions on the box.
If you're cooking for two, boil some water and add the dried macaroni. Wait a minute. Then, in a second pot, dump in the powder, plus a few tablespoons of dried nonfat milk (I'm not big on measuring) and stir the orange and white powders together.
Add a few tablespoons of water plus a few tablespoons of regular olive oil. This is a substitute for the margarine called for in Kraft's official instructions (ugh). Don't use margarine, and don't use extra virgin olive oil -- it contains compounds that turn bitter when cooked.
Boil the sauce under moderate heat while stirring continuously until all the ingredients are blended. Then turn it off. When the macaroni is almost done (it's thin and doesn't take long) throw in some frozen peas. When everything's done, drain the macaroni and peas, dump them into the sauce pot, and stir. Then put the mixture on plates.
Your bright orange delight is almost ready for serving -- but first, spice each plate heavily with black pepper. Then ladle on liberal amounts of grated romano cheese. Don't be stingy. The dish should appear not orange but off-white with little bits of orange and green peeking through. It will taste much better if you use fresh-ground pepper and (very important) fresh-ground cheese.
That's the secret of my secret recipe -- this mac & cheese actually has cheese. Real cheese. As much cheese as you want. Mmmmmm....
Summer (fall, winter, and spring) reading
June 20, 2005 -- As a relentlessly self-promoting author, I discuss authors I admire all too rarely. Yet they're a major part of my life. Anyone who writes knows that it's impossible to spend all day pouring out words unless you refill the well at night. So please indulge me as I pimp my reads.
The most ambitious thing I've read in the last year is the Baroque Cycle trilogy by Neal Stephenson. Imagine the dawn of western science written as a potboiler with Sir Isaac Newton, no less, as a major character. Stephenson makes history come alive and he's far from stuffy about it -- he throws in plenty of Rabelaisian humor and swashbuckling as well. The three volumes include Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World. Be nice to yourself and buy the hardcover editions. They don't cost much more and you'll probably want to reread them eventually -- I know I will. Strongly recommended for high-school kids living in the last moments of the enlightenment and the first moments of the new dark ages.
While Stephenson celebrates the birth of technology, J.G. Ballard explores its dark side in Super-Cannes. Ballard dives into a European silicon valley in the south of France and finds a futuristic nightmare. What I love about this book is that the poetic language and caustic skepticism clothe the skeleton of an old-fashioned suspense novel.
Speaking of which, I've also been reading through the complete works of Patricia Highsmith, who had a talent for probing into the minds of criminal psychopaths, and attracted the approval of Gore Vidal. Her first novel, Strangers on a Train, became one of Hitchcock's better films -- that's nothing if not an auspicious start. She devoted five books to her sociopathic antihero Tom Ripley and the first of these, The Talented Mr. Ripley, was filmed with Matt Damon a few years after her death in 1995. The one I love best is the second one, Ripley Under Ground, in which the entrepreneurial Tom masterminds an art-forgery ring -- so get the Everyman's Library omnibus of the first three Ripley novels before you go on to the last two.
The column reborn as the blog
April 30, 2005 -- Blogs are the new media phenomenon. But from where I sit, weblogs are actually the rebirth of a format that's almost as old as journalism itself: the column.
What makes a column different from, say, a news story or an editorial? It's a mixture of both, of fact and opinion, sort of like a review without the review sample, a personal form of communication that allows the writer to speak in his or her own voice. Until recently I wondered whether it was doomed along with the rest of conventional journalism -- but now the column has been reborn as the blog, and instead of mourning, I'm celebrating.
I'm more than happy to see the rejuvenation of the column because it's my natural element. My column on home theater appeared in Audio Video Interiors for 15 years, making it the longest-running one on the subject. At etown.com I used the column format to connect audio and video, my main subjects, with the outside world and the life of the reader. Having written that one circa 1999-2000, I suppose I must be a blogging pioneer!
That column has re-emerged at DesignTechnica.com where I share the TalkBack section with the capable and insightful Rob Enderle and our job is to prompt reader response. I also look for an excuse to post something in this space once a month. In the print world, I write the AV Newswire column for Home Theater Magazine. The accent there is more on reporting though I still manage to put my spin on things.
A healthy crop of columns -- and the willingness of courageous editors to let columnists write them -- distinguishes good websites, magazines, and newspapers from mediocre ones. Columnists are the proverbial canaries in coalmines: A publication that kills its columns is a publication in its death throes.
IBM UltraNav keyboard is ultracool
March 31, 2005 -- I am sitting in my home/office with my feet up on the desk. I'm also typing, pointing, and clicking. An ordinary person would have to twist into a pretzel to accomplish this. As it happens, I am an ordinary person -- but I own an IBM UltraNav keyboard.
It's something I'd been seeking for years -- a desktop-PC keyboard with a trackpad built in. It looks and feels just like an IBM ThinkPad keyboard and also includes a trackpoint, a little red button nestling among the G, H, and B keys. Below the spacebar are mouse buttons associated with the trackpoint. More mouse buttons for the trackpad are located below the pad. Now I can control the cursor in three ways: trackpad, trackpoint, and mouse.
Yup, I've still got a mouse hooked up too, an optical model that came with the IBM ThinkCentre PC I purchased in December. It's nice not having to disassemble the mouse every three months to tweeze hairs off the rollers. I'm a lefthanded mouse user, a decision that dates back to the time when I bought my first computer. I figured that if I wanted to keep the phone to the right of the keyboard, where I was comfortable using it, the mouse should go on the left, so I developed leftie mouse dexterity. It's a decision I've never regretted.
When I'm tired of using the mouse with my left hand -- it's usually the shoulder and back that bother me, not the wrist -- I switch to righthanded trackpad operation. I've set up my trackpad so that it not only moves the cursor but also clicks on objects with a light tap. The trackpoint gets little use, but the buttons below it get used a lot more, usually in a two-handed operation when I'm selecting text with the trackpad. This might not be exactly what the designers intended, but hey, it's all about having options, right?
Of course the coolest thing of all is that liberating myself from the mouse also means not having to sit up straight like an obedient computing slave. No, I can sit back, pull the UltraNav onto my lap, and surf to my heart's content. I spend hours of my working day in this position. It works beautifully.
IBM, I salute you, and my back salutes you too. Why would anyone buy a computer from any other brand? Oh, and when are you inviting me to China?
Nick Drake still casts a spell
February 28, 2005 -- I bought Nick Drake's Pink Moon on vinyl (in other words, a long time ago). When I got it back to my dorm room, I played side one, then side two, then did something I haven't done before or since -- went back to side one and played it again. His resonant voice, inward-looking lyrics, and distinctive acoustic guitar work left me shocked and sensitized.
In those days I assumed I'd never meet another Nick Drake fan. My copy of that amazingly stark album was British vinyl because the American LP release was out of print (then). Later I was overjoyed to meet some people who love Nick as much as I do and they remain among my closest friends.
Nick has become more than a cult figure since then thanks to a Volkswagen car ad that featured the title track of the album that captured my imagination. His death in 1974 at age 24 has limited his discography to three well-considered studio recordings and various compilations. However, the recent awakening of interest in his work has prompted two new releases, both worthy of attention.
One is Made to Love Magic, a rare-bits collection that includes one previously unheard song from Nick's final session: "Tow the Line." The previously released "Time of No Reply" and "Magic" get newly recorded string arrangements by Nick's longtime collaborator Robert Kirby. There's also a spare version of "River Man," arguably Nick's greatest song, recorded in a Cambridge University dorm room. All of these will be precious to fans and might even impress new listeners.
If you've got an SACD player, you'll want to add Nick Drake: A Treasury to your collection because it includes the first multichannel mixes of Nick Drake songs.
If you haven't already collected the three albums Nick recorded during his lifetime, they include the lushly orchestrated Five Leaves Left -- the remarkably mature work of an 18-year-old recording artist -- and the poppier Bryter Layter as well as the vibrant fever dream of Pink Moon, recorded with only voice and guitar.
After all these years, he still casts a spell.
Green tea is the new wonder drug
January 14, 2005 -- American tea consumption has multiplied a dozen-fold in the past decade. My parents have been tea drinkers all their lives and have lived to a ripe old age. Now I follow in their footsteps, having reluctantly given up my beloved Papua New Guinea coffee three years ago because it was aggravating my insomnia. Drinking coffee is like smoking crack, whereas the caffeine in tea operates on a gentler slope. So now I'm an avid blender and drinker of various non-black teas. I make them in large batches, refrigerate them, and drink them cold. They don't mess with my sleeping patterns at all, as long as I limit myself to three mugs a day and drink them no later than dinnertime. Green, white, and oolong teas are less processed than conventional black teas and therefore have less caffeine and more of the antioxidants that have been proven to minimize cancer, LDL cholesterol, and blood sugar. The picture above is an oolong tea garden.
So when the Salada Tea Company invited me to a lecture by James Norwood Pratt, the noted tea expert and author of The Tea Lover's Treasury, I jumped at the chance. Pratt is a droll and erudite San Franciscan and native North Carolinian whose passion for tea followed an earlier career track as a wine critic. He would have you drink tea not merely for its health benefits but for the sheer pleasure of it. His book is a history of tea, its origins in the far east, its infiltration into the west, and how various teas are made -- all from the Camellia Sinesis plant. But the highlight of the book is a chapter of vivid descriptions of individual teas, each an adventure waiting to be pursued by readers and our palates. Pratt's enthusiasm, especially for Chinese teas handmade by traditional methods, is infectious. For instance, Lung Ching (Dragon Well) is "a tea to write poetry by."
Salada gave me a tin containing its rather impressive selection of green teabags, including Mandarin Delight, with citrus and clove; Earl Green, a green variation of the popular Earl Grey, characterized by its addition of floral bergamot; White Tea with Green Tea Blend, a combination I often mix in my own kitchen; Decaffeinated Green Tea with Lemon, actually lemongrass; Decaffeinated Green Tea, which I'm drinking at this very moment, and it's delicious; and Original Antioxidant Green Tea, with ginseng, vitamins, and citrus flavoring. It's a fine introduction to the pleasures of green-tea drinking and you can buy it for a quite reasonable $7 from the Salada website. By the way, I buy most of my tea from Porto Rico, which maintains two stores in New York's Greenwich Village and also does mail order.
News 2004