As you might expect from a group of people that have to hang out in a tiny office together for long periods of time, The Squelch staff tends to go through a lot of music. One could even say that the Squelch has its own music history. Former editors like to recall how wherever they went and whatever they were doing, somehow the topic of Belle & Sebastian would come up. Bad 80’s pop has also long been a favorite (when I took over the office there were more copies of Duran Duran in there than there were backup discs).

This is all a very roundabout way of saying I’ve become obsessed with something. Get Away from Me, the 2004 debut album from Nellie McKay.

Let’s recap the reasons to dislike Nellie McKay since you probably don’t know them. She’s 24 yet constantly lies about her age, she was born in England, stayed there for only one year, grew up in New York, and moved to Washington, yet she switches between English and German accents in many of her songs. She’s written songs in support of PETA protests and a love song to Ralph Nader. She’s friends with KD Lang. Her music videos are pretentious camera shots of her drinking tea in fast motion, and she titled her debut album around an uninteresting joke making fun of a Macy Gray album. Also, she switches between rap and jazz with piano played underneath both. She once demanded an album be released on two CDs because she wanted people to have to change discs ala a record player.

Despite all this, she’s insanely fantastic. Her album is wonderful. It’s got 18 fucking songs on it. Many of them are great, all of them are listenable, and some are actually genuinely funny. I could definitely imagine someone finding it all very pretentious and over-produced. In fact, most reviews I’ve read seem to fall into the category of "Blah blah she’s cute but blah blah where’s the depth and blah blah this is nice but…" Really though, the album is just good fun. It’s got songs for every mood, and several of the goofy rap songs create an excellent environment for fast-paced comedy writing.

Apparently she does have a follow-up album but it’s been delayed for two years because she refused to release it with anything short of 23(!!) tracks and the record label refused to budge from 16. A girl to watch, most certainly. 

Well, my senior year is zooming towards me at a frightful pace. I have to admit a great deal of melancholy towards it. Beware, here comes the dreaded PERSONAL POST! My girlfriend Anna has long complained that my blog contains no personal posts about my feelings or my life. I’ve told her quite plainly that this is because I’m not “a girl or a ***.”

Girls make blogs that are all about their feelings and emotions. This is not necessarily bad, it’s just different. They’re like online diaries. On a normal blog, some vague event is necessary to trigger the post. You post about SOMETHING. On a girl blog, the mere act of feeling anything is justification for a post. This is one of those posts:

Unlike many college folk, I’ve known what I wanted to do "when I grow up" for quite a while now. With only two classes left till I can technically graduate, it’s strange to have to think about waiting another full year before actually getting down to the struggling to get a career phase of my life. I mean I know I should cherish this time while I have it, but I feel pretty mixed about it.

Over the summer I wrote a screenplay with my writing partner Aaron. It’s not very good, and I certainly don’t think one screenplay qualifies as a career, but it was a really great experience. Even though I know how flawed it is and that there are many drafts to go, there is something very special about being able to hold 105 pages in your hand and say "This is mine." I’ve struggled again and again to get into a creative writing course in Berkeley, but because I’m not a Film major or an English major, it’s been essentially impossible. I’m making one last go at it this semester, but if I don’t get into anything (and the English department already rejected me) then college presents an unfortunate dilemma: I’m not studying what I want to do. I’m studying things related to what I do (film courses and courses about novels and whatnot), but I’m not actually studying the craft I want to live by.

My only real study experience for the world of writing is my position as Editor of the Heuristic Squelch. Now I love the Squelch. It more than anything has shaped my relationship to humor and it definitely took me from “thinking about writing” to “writing 20 fucking pages by Tuesday because fuck we forgot the issue was due.”

But burnout is a big factor. Aaron and I were Editors-in-Chief all last year. We were “Deputy Creative Editors” the year before that. And now we’ve got another year ahead of us, with frankly, few obvious candidates to pass the magazine onto. If you’re a young Squelcher for some reason reading this, don’t take that as an insult. Running the magazine isn’t about being funny necessarily, it’s about devoting a huge amount of time to the magazine and ideally a senior should be doing it because they should theoretically have more time than a junior. The Editor-in-Chief has to do fun things like email egg donor advertisers to see if they’ll run ads in the Squelch and other embarrassing, tiring minutiae like mailing out subscriptions in bulk and getting reimbursed later. I’m told that this “always works out” and that people always show up to take over the magazine, but when a quarter of the people who write for the magazine are alums, another quarter are sophomores/freshmen, and the last half is me, Aaron, and John, it feels less than certain.

Plenty of former Editors have had to run the magazine for more than one year, but it’s definitely a grinding experience. I’m not saying “oh, pity poor Aaron and Simon,” I’m just saying that you eventually find yourself looking at it less and less like something neat and more and more like a job you don’t get paid for. I think this is a natural part of getting older. Suddenly you think you should get paid for things. And staying up to 5 AM on a Wednesday to photoshop that last bit of vomit into an image no longer feels like a badge of honor.

The risk is saying “Fuck it!” and not doing a good job. Not that you stop caring (I suspect I’ll care for quite some time, if the former Squelchers who still haunt us with their presence years later are any sort of indicator). It’s just that after 2 or 3 years of writing 400 words articles like What If Quentin Tarantino Directed the Bible or Top Ten Signs Your Professor has a Ferret Down His Pants, you really start to get punchy. I spent the whole summer struggling to write a film, and it’s a very strange experience to be sitting on my couch with a notepad trying to think of ferret jokes.

I suppose I’m just aimlessly bitching. Scratch that. I’m definitely just aimlessly bitching. But I’m definitely not sure how this year will go and whether the magazine will be at the same level next year as it was last year, though I know it’s quite debatable whether it was any good last year.
That concludes my whining. If I write anything that’s too awful and unfunny for the magazine, I’ll put it on the blog.

You know, if http://itunes.berkeley.edu/ were better organized and had some more interesting content, it could make an interesting replacement for KALX, which no one really listens to at all.

Podcasting is kind of a dumb technology, if it can even be called that, but it is decent for long drives and things like that. A ways back the Squelch was supposed to have a comedy radio show on KALX, but there were creative differences:

They wanted us to produce an hour of comedy a week.

We wanted to produce a half hour a month and graduate on time.

Fear not, I have no intention of creating a Squelch podcast. Don’t have the talent or the time, but if the Berkeley itunes portal took off, producing 5 or 10 minute comedy bits sporadically would be a lot easier there than on legitimate local radio. 

Presenting the last issue of Volume 7 of the Heuristic Squelch. That’s right, I’ve done two issues in one day (read: God I wish my girlfriend wasn’t in Guatemala).

07-6: We Told You So! 

Issues 2 and 3 of Volume 7 are not in the Squelch office so I’ll have to get them from Sean or someone else at some point, but for my next issue I’ll probably dig back and do some Volume 3’s. Those are kind of a bitch because I have to scan each page twice (once for the top half and once for the bottom) then rotate and align them, which requires copious fiddling. On the plus side though, older issues tend to be almost all text, which makes for small files and easy reading.

Let me know if anyone has any requests for scans. 

Presenting the best in topical ASUC themed humor from 1998:

ASUC Titanic

Much happier with the way this pdf looks. Not beautiful or anything, but there were a lot fewer evil gray backgrounds to contend with so the text is a lot more readable. Enjoy.

Here we have the "South Park" issue, so-called because it has a really shitty and uninventive cover. I wish I could say more about it, but the darn thing was filled with tiny text and gray-and-black backgrounds that made the pdf much uglier than I’d like. Not sure how comfortable this one will be to read. Nonetheless:

17-4: South Park, California

Before posting a link, here’s some fun facts about scanning squelch issues (read: me bitching about how it’s much harder than I thought it’d be):

The scanning of a 16 page issue takes about one and a half hours. At 600 dpi, this produces a 30 meg image for each page, so you’ve got 480 megs for each issue.

Cropping, rotating, editing, and cleaning up a full issue takes about another hour and a half. Then pdfing can take as little as a half hour or as much as two hours depending on how many tries it takes to get the file size right and whether you try to OCR it so the text is selectable. Spending a day doing each issue wouldn’t be so bad except that getting the file size down to 6 megs makes the whole thing look like crap. Oh well, it’s still legible.

This is the Chelsea Issue from 1997. It’s somewhat sarcastically referred to as the start of the Squelch "common era," which is another way of saying this is the first respectable issue after a year or two of funding problems and most of the people who made it are still vaguely around. The cover may seem a little cheesy, but I’ve got a warm spot for it. Unlike most old Squelch covers, it’s actually funny. And though it’s extremely topical (it’s about Chelsea Clinton) it’s still easy to understand and fun.

The back cover was apparently popular. Someone bothered me about it last year, begging me to find a way to get a digital copy for him. Upon reading it finally I’m a little confused, but hey, the cocaine line is funny. I just sent him an email about it, pretty much exactly one year and one month to the day after his first email asking about it. Let this be a lesson to you. The Squelch cares about your emails, but not enough to answer within one calendar year. 

Another week, another old Squelch Issue. Unlike last time, this isn’t a scan. This is a pdf created out of original pagemaker files and graphics, though it’s still not perfect. It’s about 90% accurate. Some font problems have made the layout a little uglier, but on the whole it’s the best we’ll get for this issue unless we find the original PDF.

I haven’t read it. But enjoy. 

Scanned another issue: This one is Volume 8, Issue 1. Maybe the worst combination of cover and back-cover in terms of pure textiness ever.

Haven’t read much of the issue, just scanned it because it was in nice shape compared to the others in the office. I’m told there’s a lot of abortion jokes in one article, which explains why I had to use brightness/contrast to fix a picture of a fetus.

Should be moving to the new blog soon. Expect comments and whatnot then.

After about 5 hours of work I have a 90% accurate pdf of Issue 9-5 of the Heuristic Squelch. This is the so-called "Newsprint" issue.

It’s 90% accurate because I had to rebuild the pdf from the original pagemaker files on my mac using windows specific fonts. Why didn’t I use a PC? Because for some reason pagemaker refused to output the pdfs properly on the PC and it worked a lot better on my mac. The font troubles meant I had to fix a few small text errors, and of course the fonts didn’t display perfectly, but still, I checked it against the original and with a few exceptions, this is as good a PDF as we’ll get for that one.

This ended up being a spectacular amount of work, and I wouldn’t have started it if I realized what a bitch it was going to be. Luckily there’s only one more issue that I have enough files to repeat this process on (the Apocalypse issue). I’ll have to do it within the next 30 days because that’s when my free trial of pagemaker ends.