these comforting sounds you make

I went to see Mew last night at the Fillmore with Snow. I hadn't been to a live show since I saw Dead Can Dance in Seattle... and that was well over a year ago. I used to see live music on a monthly, if not weekly basis - am I an old person now? I forgot how happy it makes me.

The opener was a band from Austin called Oh My, Oh No (or was it Oh No, Oh My?). I liked them, but didn't think I'd like them outside of a live venue. I wondered if Nate knew them, just because you know, Texas. Not that Texas isn't a giant huge wasteland with a few loosely interconnected bands or anything.

Mew were fantastic. Truly wonderful. Their visuals were eerie and appealing at the same time, and unlike most things I've seen projected behind bands, actually really added to the experience. The crowd was good, and by the end I actually saw more than a few people moving their bodies - we are NOT New York, SF people. You can dance if you want to. (If your friends don't dance, they're no friends of mine).

They didn't talk much, but a line which cracked me up - "Is Lars Ulrich here? No? Because he's kind of a hero, the guy who went to America and made it big..."

Seeing live music does something really good to my brain, something akin to exercise or sex. Endorphins and emotional satisfaction, which I guess makes it closer to the latter than the former. I feel really good, I feel like I'm coming out of this period of utter and total mental breakage. I slept when I got home, and I woke at a good hour. It's cold and rainy out and I'm optomistic that I can return to the real world this week.

Radio silence sounds like scary

So just to round out my trio of computer related disasters - the first two being my hard drive and my desktop machine - I spilled a full glass of water right on my laptop yesterday. And it stopped working.

So, I let it dry out overnight, but it wouldn't boot. MBR was corrupted. fsck couldn't fix it. I lost my copy of Essential System Administration years ago.

Fortunately, Snow had a copy of Techtools, which fixed the thing, and now I am back in contact with reality. Or not-reality. As the case might be.

And, I'm going to go see Mew at the Fillmore tonight, which should be lovely. So no more computer badness. I'm burning incense and sacraficing kiwifruit. (Chickens are too messy).

The Martin Luther King You Don't See on TV

This essay really struck me. History has selective memory. Martin Luther King stood for many things, but the official remembrances of him will only remember a few - the sanitized, disinfected, vetted accepted and pre-digested. But there's always more. A whole lot of relevant more.

[insert string of offensive profanity here]

Just when I thought I might be on the mend from a mixed manic episode that kept me more or less completely useless for more than a week (aside, that is, from doing totally useless things like manically building bookcases), I was dealt a really irritating modern life blow.

The LaCie external drive I'd bought about 6 months ago kicked it. I'd just finished moving all of my encoded music (about 80GB worth) and six years worth of digital photos to it, to clear space from my working drives.

It started yesterday, making an odd atonal humming noise, not unlike a woman in line with me at the store the other day, who hummed every note of a song in one of two notes. Then, I noticed it was inaccessable. I tried to unmount it - no go. I disconnected it, powered it down, let it rest, re-did... no go.

I took it over to Morgan's house, after a good cry. He took it out of the enclosure and put it in a spare he has. Same bad hum. His computers at least partially recognized it, but couldn't see any of the data.

So, I might be fucked. The idea of this much data loss is really painful. Yes, some of it is backed up, but it's the goddamned insult to my attempts at an organized or rational world that gets me. I am sick and tired of supposedly consumer products which require expert level interaction, and fail like a sixth grader with a glue habit.

Next comes bargaining, I imagine. The disk doctors, the dropping from 2 inches, the freezing. But I think my music and pictures are gone, and it has rocked my mental stability more than is entirely reasonable.

Perhaps I should be more accepting, try to live a more informationally zen-like existence. Is information a posession? Does the desire to retain information inherently corrupt us, keeping us from a truer state of being?

Or do I just have to dig out my cds every time I want to listen to a piece of music again?

It's amazing how even when I can't function in any other regard, I can figure stuff out. Got the doors on the damned bookcase.


"Click", indeed.

my triumphs, my mistakes : ikea edition

So I got the bug to get some Ikea furniture. Mostly inspired by the fact that I badly needed a new floor lamp and a tall bookcase, things which Ikea is great for.

I somehow coerced Snow into going. He actually hates Ikea more than most people I know, but he needed a tall bookcase, too. So off we went in our Flexicar van

After wandering through the showroom jotting down the aisle numbers of the bits we needed, and dragging through the housewares where I found a couple of very cute lamps and a lampshade for one of my side table lamps, we loaded up our 200 lbs of bookcases, waited in a very long line, and somehow used the combined strength of our flabby limbs to get them up to our second and third floor apartments. (To be fair, I have an elevator, he doesn't - so his was 3 floors of stairs. Ow.)

I got the big tall medium brown Billy bookcase. I put it together this evening, and it looks pretty great. It was actually fairly easy - I am an Ikea veteran, if there is such a thing.

But that's just where the fun starts. In addition to my lovely (and tall - did I mention tall?) bookcase, I got doors. Really pretty etched glass doors. Really pretty etched glass doors with the most incomprefuckinghensable instructions I have ever seen.

You'd think it'd be a bit of Tab A into Slot A, which I'm pretty good at. But no, instead they have illustrations of a man holding the door next to the bookcase while the woman does something INEXPLICABLE which makes the noise, "CLICK".

CLICK?

I couldn't get it to go click. Well, I could get one hinge to go click, at best. But never all three at once.

I messed with it for an hour. Or more. I tried my best, but couldn't get it to work. So tomorrow I'm going to get Snow to help me with it. And you know what? It'll work the first time. I just know it.

It's gonna look cool though. Cool as any bookcase drenched in the blood of the frustrated can, anyway.

300 + 1

I went to see 300 tonight, with Snow. It was actually a pretty good movie - the visual style was spectacular, the light in particular appealed to me. It was unnatural, utterly created, but beautiful. It made a remarkable contrast to the absolute violence of the film, which was executed somehow gracefully. I'm not really a huge fan of violent films, or war films in general, but I was thoroughly engaged.

What broke the scene for me, though, were the fuckheads in the back row of the theatre and their running commentary, their throwing of peanuts, their inappropriate laughter. These little imbeciles managed to nearly ruin a movie that Snow graciously payed $19.50 for us to see. After a fairly polite (or, amusingly sarcastic depending on your view) request from M. for them to shut up, and finally an uncharacteristic outburst from me in the form of a loud, "What the FUCK is wrong with you?", they finally left, leaving the last 10 minutes of the movie for us to enjoy.

This is why people are crazy about building home theatres. No one to throw stuff. No color commentary from the peanut gallery. No sticky floors, no over-loud audio, no skipping video (why on Earth would a movie have visible flaws in it, when it costs that much? It's not reasonable). In short, a perfect movie experience, for only a few grand in audio-visual gear.

When I get a house, it'll be high on my list.

(For those curious, also on my list: fruit trees and a wine cellar)

Plotting a mutiny is very cathartic.

blurg

It's summer! Well, it feels like summer. It's warm enough to be summer, and that means my windows are open.

As it happens, my upstairs neighbours have an annoying summertime habit. It's actually more annoying than my previous annoying summertime habit-having neighbours, who used to hibachi grill in such a way that the whole block was full of smoke, and my fire alarm would go off nightly.

Yes. No. Don't do that, kids.

Anyway, when the weather gets nice, everyone opens their windows. That means we're all to one extent or another living outside. We hear each other's dishes clanking, conversations and well... anything else.

Now, keep in mind that these neighbours are what can only be described as vocal in their bedroom behavior, the rest of the year. (See also: I'm pretty sure she fakes it). But they do something even more annoying.

When someone is having a party in another building, or some people outside are talking, they yell at the top of their lungs out the window. Repeatedly. It is in every case more annoying than the thing they're yelling at, so I'm guessing they just want to express themselves.

Anyway, this is all rote neighbour annoyance. What made me laugh was what the first thing that came to mind was --

"I bet they blog, too."

Movie Metrics

Important metric for science fiction movies: Time to First Burning Trashcan

District B-13 won this one on the night we created it, by having one in the opening credits. Huh.

Gate

Gate
Originally uploaded by zzzzoem.

Time Delay

I've been catching up on some TV I missed during one of my frequent hiatuses from anything tv-ish... specificaly, Lost and Scrubs - two shows that couldn't be more different. Well, mostly. I suppose both have a cast of charismatic villains and heroes, and a permeating fantasy...

Ok, that's stretching it.

Anyway, I just realized that part of the problem with watching two year old TV programs is that there's no one to chat about them with - no watercooler, so to speak. That's ok, though. With Netflix and BitTorrent providing me with a more or less constant stream of the better TV that's been made in recent (or not recent) years... I will be succesfully avoiding the outside world for some time to come.

Somnia

When you fuck with sleep, everything turns into an experiment. How little can I sleep before I start to see things? How much caffiene can I have before I get heart palpitations? Simple office lights start to feel like a lab, glaring and unkind, compared to the dark world outside. Night and Day turn to Sleep and Wake cycles, increasingly indistinguishable. The depths of night lose their sacred status as the time for dreams and take on new, stranger meanings.

I don't miss graveyard shift. The last few days, I've been covering one of my employee's shifts. It is a small recap to the times when I was sleeping four hours a day, when the whole world felt like a hallucination, punctuated with moments of blistering clarity, which in retrospect, were probably delusional epiphanies. Theories and philosophies formed and disintegrated over the course of nights.

I would like very much not to fuck with my sleep, for a while.

Silly rabbit. iTunes is for tunes.

Wow. I just watched my first download from the iTunes video store. Let me sum up, to prevent a long ranty post:

iTunes
Price: $1.99
Quality: Tiny and highly compressed. 3"x3" default size.

BitTorrent
Price: Free
Quality: 80% of TV quality, good enough to fill my whole monitor without artifacts.

If this is what they expect to save the movie industry... I hope they have a backup plan.

Maybe a pretzel stand. Or door to door popcorn.

Mmmm. Popcorn.

Corporate Radio Sucks ... Less

Live105 is sometimes less annoying than I give them credit for.

I may be misremembering, but in the mid-90's, they seemed to be a savior of relatively decent music in the suburbs, where college radio is nonexistant, and at a time where internet radio hadn't yet been born. Then, sometime around 2000, they got bought by Clear Channel and started playing a lot more crap. A lot of things like Linkin Park.

When I lived in the South Bay, I'd listen to KSCU, KFJC, or KSJS. I was utterly spoiled with a constant stream of new music vetted by real and honest college indie rock kids.

Really though, I mostly listened to the radio in my car. When I moved up to Berkeley, I stopped using my car, and thus stopped listening to the radio - and my stream of new music dried up. It's been rough.

Fortunately, Live105 is once again saving the day. On Sunday nights, they have their long-running new music show, Soundcheck. And it really is good. Every Sunday, I come away with a half dozen bands to check out.

Now one difference between now and my previous bouts of radio-driven new music obsession is the magic of soulseek. Being able to download a few tracks, see if it's my thing, has probably saved me hundreds of dollars I would have spent on albums I never would have listened to after the first time. I guess the argument could be made that I'm hurting the music industry, but I think there's a better argument that the music industry was hurting my finances.

Tonight's discovery was Hot Chip. So far so good. I may even end up with a new chunk of acrylic to show for it.