As the daily-paper routine slowly recedes from the habits of our online-dependent little selves, and it's no longer affordable for any but the biggest national papers to send reporters to cover national stories (the locals just run wire feeds or the aforementioned big papers' version), our local beloveds increasingly have to focus on local coverage to make themselves worth the bother to their local audience.
Which isn't all bad. Life, like politics, is essentially local. I can fret all I want (wait, I do!) about the fate of the planet, the youth in Asia, and Trans-Siberians, but if Ameren can't keep my freaking power on for three days straight, that will always capture my most immediate attention. And The New York Times won't ever give me Ameren's latest knee-slapping PR response about how much their poor shareholders have screwed their union linemen sacrificed to help us in emergencies.
When I was a pup, the Post-Dispatch was quite good at a lot of things; now it's filled with wire stories and -- having bought the local throwaway papers to corner the meatloaf-recipe and school-board-meeting market -- it's products have a bit of this. That's right. Our local dog park expelled a member, who appealed the expulsion twice, all the way up to the City Council.
Alas, despite our ridiculous love for our pooch, we are not members of the dog park -- serious dog owners being, like other zealots, a little scary to us. So we weren't up on the gossip that is so thoroughly and skillfully documented here [That's not sarcasm -- it's actually a quite well-done story!]. Thus, it's nice to have the local coverage to keep us up on these shenanigans, especially when the events sound like something from the Onion.
"Things are falling down on me Heavy things I could not see When I finally came around Something small would pin me down When I try to step aside I move to where they'd hoped I'd be" --Phish, "Heavy Things"
More inspiring news from the Arctic ice melt, where our world's states are fighting to counteract climate chan-- er, are fighting over "securing sea routes and seabed resources" once the much-sought, mythical Northwest Passage and Russian North Sea Route become realities. This year's melt opened up "one million square miles of open water — six Californias — beyond the average."
Worse, to the surprise of experts, as much of the drastic change this year appears to be due to ice moving as melting, meaning the changes may continue faster than the worst-case models. Which I'm sure will turn up in some oil company or Bushian playbook as another example of how "scientists are uncertain of the causes," fueling more distracting debate rather than actual policy action.
It reminds me of the former Exxon exec asshole [sorry, there is no other acceptable term] who now chairs the National Petroleum Council and President Bush's alternative-energy committee -- "Now isn't that conveeeenient?" -- in his recent Q&A with Newsweek, in which he repeatedly refused to discuss climate change. Because, you know, it has no relation to oil and energy policy. Best excerpt:
Newsweek: How serious a threat do you think global warming is? Asshole: "That's where we started this [interview, when I dodged the question because the massive growth in CO2 in our atmosphere has nothing to do with our policy of burning a whole lotta CO2-producing fuel] ... I'm not going to comment on that." [my brackets] NW: Your view on global warming as a citizen is "no comment"? [my italics] AH: "My view on global warming is the purpose of this interview is not to talk about that."
Thanks! Asshole.
"... women and children first, and the children first, and the children ... Ice age coming, ice age coming '--Let me hear both sides Let me hear both sides Let me hear both--' Ice age coming, ice age coming '--Throw 'em in the fire Throw 'em in the fire Throw 'em on the--' We're not scaremongering This is really happening Happening ... ... 'Here I'm allowed Everything all of the time Here I'm allowed Everything all of the time'" --Radiohead, "Idioteque"
I don't know that I've ever raved here about Sampa, the service upon which this blog/site rests. But my praise is long overdue, particularly since it's a very useful startup, and it's free. (Bonus: it's founder is Brazilian, the culture I should thank for truly putting the "beauty" in the Beautiful Game.)
In a word, Sampa is fantastic. Frankly, I underuse it: There are so many more services/options Sampa provides that I should or could use but haven't had the time or inkling to do. They're constantly adding more options, and the customer help is friendly, immediate and thorough -- although the service itself is so smooth, I've rarely had occasion to need it. Though I don't take advantage of many of the features, they are all very simple to use, and there are several design options (not to mention language options, including Arabic and Chinese!), and the menus/navigation are customizable to your liking.
You can set it up to be a virtual personal network, with multiple password-protected creator/authors, users and pages -- and no one bugging you to be your "friend" unless they really are such. So you could set up an on-going interactive site for just your family members and/or friend groups, or your family minus black sheep, plus a "family tree" ... or create different areas of your site accessible only to specific groups of people.
It easily integrates many "you" services: photos through Flickr or Twango, or your videos from YouTube, or your blogs from Blogger. Not to mention multiple personal profiles/pages/sections, photo albums just for the site (although photo storage is understandably memory-limited, but that's what the photo-sharing site integrators are for). A grandma could easily use it, creating a shrine to herself or her offspring.
I first found it when I was looking for a quick-and-easy site to host float trip photos and stories to stir banter among the floatees. One I could launch immediately, without messing with code. That led to a folder for game recaps to spur banter among my hockey team, and of course to the use of the blog, which is what I have primarily used Sampa for.
Basically, if you want any of these options, or you want anything more than a blog but you're not sure how to go about it, there's plenty available with Sampa.
Man, Krugman seemed to boil with frustration today. After the SCHIP veto, he slays the conservative stance on access to health care for poor and children.
You know, how the good life and medical care are available to everyone, as long as you're a hard worker? Oh education, too. (Wait, what? Who let our taxes pay for public education?! Whose idea was it that a healthy society values education? Taxes are for roads and cleaning up wherever I litter, by golly.)
Krugman references the Bush instant-classic line from July: "The immediate goal is to make sure there are more people on private insurance plans. I mean, people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room."
Wow ... just, wow. Wonder if Bush has ever set foot in an ER. Maybe someone at least told him about the TV show, so he knows Dr. George Clooney is a good man, a good doctor, who practices his "love with women" with great loyalty and patriotism. Ladies and gentlemen, your President!
No Money Down! Pay It All Later! Anyway, Krugman makes the compassion play, which is fine and I'm down with that, but so many are not and their minds will not be changed until it bites them in the ass. The thing that stuns me about the conservative stance isn't its clinical lack of compassion -- it's the incredible short-sightedness, fiscally speaking:
A society that does not get adequate, preventative childhood and adolescent health care is an unhealthy society. As a society, we are rich but unhealthy. That has many consequences that spiral as time goes on. We may not want to pay society's health costs right now, but if we continue to just sit there and horde resources while more people are born and neglected of proper health care, the entire system will be burdened with the same growing population's health care costs -- as well as related crime, poverty and unemployment, anyone? -- while they multiply down the line.
As with poverty, education, and environment, these problems will not just go away after a good-ol' fashioned "hard work" pep talk. They remain. The more we neglect them, the bigger they get. Pay now, or pay much, much more later. The answer isn't in the emergency room.
But who knows: Maybe the veto will actually further the cause of some form of universal health coverage. And maybe I can stockpile enough money to build my own fort with its own clinic and hope no icky, diseased, lazy non-worker without coverage traverses the moat to ruin my over-my-cold-dead-body-do-I-have-a-responsibility-in-society day.
But before Arcade Fire, a wildly pleasant surprise: Opening act LCD Soundsystem was so good, they may have ruined me on listening to them. I knew a wee bit about them beforehand, and from the context, I figured I'd like them well enough for an opener.
But then they go and put on a show that left me and Mrs. Fall of Because catching our breath between sets. We were nearly drained before Arcade Fire even hit the stage because LCD Soundsystem kept us so engaged. We needed every bit of the intermission to regroup.
LCD Soundsystem played a set of techno-styled dance music, accented with funk-and-scratch guitars and backed by great groovy bass and a tireless drummer. These were techno-ish beats -- the furious kind a DJ would simply hit a button to get moving -- played out live by a real, relentless, sweating drummer. And all performers were lined up spread around the front of stage, with the drummer turned to the side, so we had a great view of his performance without it being blocked by his kit or the rest of the band.
The lead singer -- a record producer who started this project on his own -- has a bit of a average Joe appearance, from which emits witty lyrics and an entertaining ability to sing in all sorts of styles. (He also plays a bit of multi-pitched cowbell, among other essential percussion).
There were several keyboards -- I think one keyboardist was missing for family reasons, so rotating Arcade Fire members filled in -- using different synthesizer tones, sometimes to provide accents or atmospherics and sometimes to provide the main, pulsing rhythm. I LOVE it when a variety of instruments are well-used in a variety of ways (which partly explains my unyielding appreciation for Arcade Fire).
One song of theirs, "All My Friends," I had heard before, but where? ... A-ha: A Slate music column devoted to the song and its covers (wow, why doesn't that ring a stronger bell? That was just a few months ago ...). That column even aims to explain the song's apparent popularity (episode #291 of me being late to the party), in words I basically agree with:
"At heart, 'All My Friends' is a poignant piece of songwriting designed to resonate with those in the upper limits of the 18-to-34-year-old demographic. It's a song written by a middle-ager that looks back upon the kinds of simple momentary glories it's likely soundtracking this summer: hanging out, joking around, escaping into flings, and dancing on drugs."
Actually, though, I personally get out of "All My Friends" a general melancholic resignation to dealing with the mix of a fast-moving, corporate-oriented, career-pursuit, info-overloaded world while really just wanting to take a breath and enjoy the good things in life (like friends) -- but that's unquestionably my personal spin. The combo of frenetic rhythm and his ponderous vocals gives me that feel.
Also get that feel from lyrics like: You spent the first five years trying to get with the plan, and the next five years trying to be with your friends, again.
and
It comes apart, the way it does in bad films. Except the part, where the moral kicks in.
You drop the first 10 years just as fast as you can, and the next 10 people who are trying to be polite. When you're blowing 85 days in the middle of France, Yeah, I know it gets tired only where are your friends tonight?
and
And with a face like a dad and a laughable stand, You can sleep on the plane or review what you said. When you're drunk and the kids look impossibly tan You think over and over, 'Hey, I'm finally dead.'
Anyway, they were already blowing me away before they got to that song -- at which point that connection of familiarity and past "I've been moved by this song before" kicked in.
I have an annoying habit of hearing the riffs, drumbeats, or general timing of other songs in the middle of completely unrelated music. Hence at the beginning of "Daft Punk is Playing at my House" I heard Collective Soul's "Gel" and -- as if to unburden myself from the conflict in my head -- I felt compelled to sing "Gel" to Mrs. Fall of Because during the riff in question.
Since their set I've revisited some of their stuff online, and maybe I need to buy it and play it on the home stereo, because it doesn't come close to capturing the beauty of that live experience.
So the LCD Soundsystem part of my concert review took longer to distill than I expected. Now on to Arcade Fire ...
At this point, night had fallen on a beautiful, crisp, late-summer evening, with the moon shining on the seats of the outdoor theater that was much more cozy Muny than corporately detached [insert sponsor] Riverport. They came on stage and got right to it: The excitement from the crowd and the clear happiness the band had for being there said this was going to be a fantastic night.
The stage included out-of-sight, fixed, low-angle cameras pointed to specific spots on the stage -- rather than following performers around -- and they were displayed on circular-screen, box-shape surfaces reminiscent of the earliest '50s-era televisions. All of which created a cool remote effect when black-and-white shots of various performers moved in and out of the "screen" as they played each song.
Totally, TOTALLY different effect from the Riverport lawn experience, in which a large pixelated screen shows the results of a camera following a gyrating performer around stage, and that is your best and sole view of the performance happening on the far-off stage jammed under the pavilion roof.
As Arcade Fire opened this "Neon Bible" tour, those screens were used to show a disturbing, multiplying mix of televangelists spouting their crap over one another until you couldn't think or differentiate their words, and you started to hope organized religion was just a piece of Kafkan fiction.
We were some 30 rows back, but close enough to easily pick out the head of our friend Tall-T -- who always scores great seats -- bobbing up and down in the first row. The crowd was singing and swaying (or bobbing) through the whole set. Arcade Fire went through virtually every notable song from their two albums.
Madness, beautiful madness As I mentioned before, I love bands that make great use of a whole crapload of instruments -- and enjoys the hell out of performing them -- and Arcade Fire certainly does that. A sampling of the amateur "covers" on YouTube gives me that much more respect for how talented they are as both performers and composers.
Rejean played the accordion, piano, organ, drums, hurdy-gurdy, and surely other instruments I'm not versed enough to name. The French horn, oboe, sax and trumpet were also featured by band members. And the two violinists simply kicked ass. There's something sexy about rocking out with violins and an accordion, particularly if you have -- ahem -- nice legs and sculpted violinist arms. (Mrs. Fall of Because said their flowing skirt hems were a tad short, but Tall-T and I liked them just fine. Huh.)
Lead singer and Texas native Win Butler introduced "Intervention" with, "This is a song about the ex-governor of me and my brother's home state." Heh heh. We need this therapy.
Another great part about Arcade Fire that is perfect for live settings is the number of songs that easily grab the crowd into singing with a chorus of "HOhhhhh-oooh, hoh-oooooh, oh-ooooh"s. It sounds great already on record with all their performers joining in. But in concert, when it yanks thousands of people to sing melodically in unison with a burst of energy, it's priceless -- it brings you into this single, singing organism with people you could very well be cursing in the parking lot 60 minutes later (or for chain-smoking cigarettes throughout the set, which the dudes behind us did).
They did two encores after some 90 minutes or more of playing. I don't even remember how long or what songs came where -- it was just an immersion of every great feeling I've ever harvested from live hearing music all wrapped into one. An overwhelming experience of chills, tears and life affirmation. Damn, music has some incredible physiological effects on a body. What coma would I be in without it?
Saturn's moon Iapetus is all black and white. A bit of yin and a bit of yang. It has a very dark side and a brilliant white side -- no grey in between, something that has puzzled astronomers for most of the last 300 years or so.
It is thus referred to as Saturn's "two-faced" moon (Saturn has more than 30 others). And it's for this reason that high school girls so often say of former friends who steal their boyfriends, "She's just an Iapetus with bad hair, anyway."
Poor jokes aside, astronomers think they've figured out the source of Iapetus's tendency to backstab its friends: It's a space duster, scooping up dirt while keeping a clean white behind.
As it orbits with its black side facing forward, it scoops up space dust, lost NASA bolts and Milky Way wrappers. That dark side also then absorbs more sunlight, stays warmer on the surface, and melts its surface ice, exposing what's in its dust bag. The released vapor from that melting ice then condenses in the colder spots of the moon -- such as its trailing, sun-reflecting white half -- and the process continues on and on ... The Yin-Yang of Saturnians Like the moon that orbits Earth (You Are Here), Iapetus always has the same hemisphere facing Saturn -- but that hemisphere is the "side view," so it would always appear half-black, half-white to hypothetical three-eyed Saturnians. Which makes me wonder, man, how would it have affected our ancient Western and Eastern mythologies if we'd had that kind of moon to stare at in the night sky?
Back in college, I was always mindful that in some ways I was experiencing the best years of my life. Not that I was dreading its passing or the future – just making sure I relished this unique combination of responsibility, opportunity, youth, social fun and experimentation that would not come around again.
By the end, I was ready to move on. Even though I knew I’d miss it 6 months later, I was ready for some bit of certainty. Like a salary, health coverage, and the ability to fall asleep with the knowledge that I wouldn’t be woken up at 3 a.m. by the whooping Spanish exchange students playing video games on the other side of the wall, nor the freshmen down the hall embarking on the four-year journey I was just completing.
Of course, time doesn’t care if you’re ready; it moves you along anyway. Working at a university, I get to glimpse this portion of the life cycle repeating itself for new protagonists each passing year. It's fun, it's good, it's refreshing.
*Sigh* Must Everything Relate to Hockey? Through each life movement I’ve kept playing hockey, as I have since I was 5 in my basement and since I was 12 in some “organized” form. Here, too, I’ve tried to stay cognizant of what I have and relish it before I lose it. In the “athletic prime” years, those military infantry-worthy years of 18 to 25, I tried to enjoy the injury-free, relatively healthy moments where even your sprains and pulls seem to heal with a beer and a good night’s sleep.
I’ve been so lucky with this sport. The longest I’ve gone in my life without playing was five weeks in Europe at 21 and eight weeks with a broken wrist at 10. Meanwhile, it’s given me great friends, great memories, constant laughter, regular exercise, plus some agility and relative amateur skill. With this fortune in mind I’ve also always wondered what factor of age and time would finally ignite the “decline” – or even abrupt end.
The Body Speaks First there was achy tendonitis knees … then a bulging disc in my back, reined in by physical therapy … now this past year a cyst and bone anomaly on my ankle that shot pain in my foot every time I skated. Although my ankle didn’t affect any other activity, it effectively kept me from playing hockey. It’s the result of years of repetitive motion from … hockey. So I had surgery to remove the cyst and smooth the bone, with the idea of prolonging this fun, keeping it going for as long as possible. The doctor figures the cyst will return, but maybe not for five or 10 years.
After eight weeks off, it still hurts, but I am again able to resume this lifelong recreation.
Last night, as I’m taping and padding up my post-op ankle before a game, the point hits me again: This dressing probably isn’t a temporary fix. You’re going to be taping or dressing up this thing every time you play, for the rest of your life, until you quit this game. Your ritual has changed.
From my naïve young perspective, that’s aging: Stuff declines, things stop working, your capabilities change along with your priorities, you administer permanent “temporary” fixes, and you get on with it.
For every phase of my life, I’ve been incredibly lucky to have older siblings and older friends who I trust and love: From childhood to the present, it’s like I’ve had a thousand mentors to observe, take notes, and learn from. It’s helped me see life as this natural continuum where I’m – despite a lucky lack of personal tragedies or burdens – mentally adjusted for whatever uncertainties lie around each bend. [All due irony shall be noted when my house burns down tomorrow.] Cry at weddings, cry at funerals, cry at films. Relish the intensity of the human experience.
It’s just one life, it never goes in reverse. Got to get your kicks out of it as they come, while you can. And keep truckin’ on.
Because it seems so inevitable, I haven’t closely followed the news about Radiohead dropping its record label and selling direct to fans. Now Nine Inch Nails/Trent Reznor says he’s doing the same. Supposedly Madonna, too.
Good for them. Nice to see bands that can afford to do it take this “risk.” I miss record shopping and holding physical, graphic CDs in my hand in the store and at home, but it’s been so long since I could go into one of those stores and find anything interesting – save for a classic I’ve long overlooked – that era is about long-dead to me anyway.
Good that it should bring the era of the fattened, lazy, technology-averse, unprogressive record label marketing middle-man down with it. Such shall be their punishment for foisting the Britney/Lopez/ ___[insert pop crap, whose fans will be quite irate, here] on the rest of us, for consolidating, for dominating the business and crushing our collective musical souls and turning radio into a marketing outlet for what shall be hot. I'm sure I'm missing the well-meaning label guy's side of the story, but the means here has completely undermined what little positive ends there were.
Recorded music procurement, of course, has changed. Shooting for a “record deal” for an aspiring band so rarely makes sense anymore. Throughout history it has always been difficult for artists to find benefactors who let them make a living at their art (-- The Church: the first Western A&R guys? --). This transition is no different. Better that musicians make a go of it through word-of-mouth, performing, online samples/downloads, and touring to build their benefactors.
Use small, music-passionate agencies when appropriate. Independent labels are doing all sorts of creativethings to get people to support the artists they love anyway. Failing that, keep the day job and pursue art as a ~gasp!~ passion on its own accord. This struggle is long, this struggle is beautiful.
I am the kind of fan who happily pays for the artists who bring me joy. Not soapboxing morals here, not fanaticism, it just conforms to my soul. Support the things that I believe in or bring me joy. So I pre-ordered the Radiohead album download and paid about $8 for it (though you could pick your price, including free). Of course, I’m also the kind of fan who will pay for – or else mourn its absence – the graphic art and packaging, and the lyric book. But Radiohead’s colorful box set for the new album is some $80. Eighty! I’m not that kind of fan. Give me middle ground.
Anyway, the new album, “In Rainbows,” is good. I’m taken aback that it doesn’t open abrasively, though. Most Radiohead albums open with harsh sounds that unsettle me, that take a few listens to adjust to. Then everything clicks, the sounds get their hooks in me, and every tone makes sense. This one doesn’t open so harshly. Overall it seems tamer than “Hail to the Thief” and more conventional than “Kid A” or “Amnesiac” but fits in with all three of those, if that makes sense.
My next class in International Relations is an online class, on research methods ... and statistics. As a tree-hugging, coffee-sipping, global-pondering, word-loving cynical idealist hermit, I tested out of any collegiate math requirements in high school. I knew I'd be exploring the traditional liberal arts in college and didn't want any math getting in the way of other electives. (Though truthfully, I see mathematics as an essential component connecting and enhancing humanities and science ... as crucial a component as any other for compiling a holistic view of this planet and its bizarre inhabitants.)
My last math-class memory is a vague recollection of always feeling a chapter behind in high school Calculus (well, a real mathematician would surely call it pre-Calc). The concepts and their real-world application were cool, but crunching them and figuring out how one would crunch them if one had a clue was not. It usually took me until after each test was returned to finally "see" it.
So to my brain's detriment, I left numbers to people who were much better with them, trusting them to feed me good data to support my oh-so-worldly theories of How It Should Be. Maybe read "Innumeracy" every once in a while to keep me honest. Amusingly, taking German classes, with its systematic grammar and compounds, helped fill the void in that part of my brain for a little while.
But since then those neurons have gotten really sticky. I'm a perfect candidate for a "one math exercise a day" routine, if I could only start it. Now comes this requisite research and stats course, before I get into the issue-specific areas of International Relations.
Sometimes I click on those little eye/mind game links people forward, and sometimes I don't bother. I bothered with this one and was rewarded, at least, with the silhouette of a naked woman.
But nude shadow aside, the point is to supposedly determine if you're "left-brained" or "right-brained" depending on whether you see her spinning clockwise or counter-clockwise. No idea whether it is based on lab science or strip-mall science.
My first, uninfluenced view was clockwise (allegedly making me "right-brained"), but then I got her to go the other direction. She goes back and forth. This always happens to me. Personality tests, brain tests -- I always seem to be on the middle line. To hear these tests tell it, I'm an extroverted hermit, a rational romantic, and a self-centered socialist who disregards the fate of others yet feels great empathy when it befalls them.
Which tells me I'm either: a) incredibly balanced and thus destined for both success and happiness; or b) incredibly ambiguous and destined for nothing more firm than inaction itself; or c) the victim of yet another Big Brother psychological experiment manipulating me like a puppet.
Speaking of (c), I never could see those stupid "Magic Eye" posters (stupid because I couldn't see them, naturally) that were big around the early 1990s. I'm still convinced they were a social experiment perpetrated to determine just how gullible people are and how easily they will lie about what they see just to bend to peer pressure and/or conform to the masses.
... Or maybe they were an experiment to study just how paranoid people can get when they don't see things the way everybody else does. You tell me.
For other silly mind games, such as your consciousness' ability to "stop time" (isn't it all relative?), go here.
David Crane, CEO of the tenth-largest power company in the U.S., takes an interesting tack: He pens (or has his PR flak pen) an Op-Ed in the Washington Post inviting government intervention and regulation of the CO2 emissions of power companies (and by extension, the CO2 emissions of us consumers and air-breathers).
Whatever his other motives (such as appearing to have been "proactive" when the $hit hits the fan), it's of course the right move. Profit and markets dictate that power companies will keep selling -- and consumers will keep buying -- the cheapest and most profitable power source, planetary health be damned. Business is great at maximizing short-term profits. Not so much at maximizing long-term common good (except when it coincides with profit).
Now sure, a business that harms the collective good is theoretically at risk of profit-depleting lawsuits down the line, but those don't tend to come around until after the Company Decider who amplified the harm has retired or died, and the golden parachute his company sent him away with is in the hands of his lucky descendants.
People, too, aren't always so hot at the long-term thing. It's taken several years for compact-flourescent bulbs to take off -- and one reason is people's inability to stomach the upfront cost that will nonetheless save them many times that cost down the line. (Speaking of which: man, it seems like I used to change a bulb every month; now I can't remember the last time I changed a light bulb in the house.) But even when compact-fluorescents become the norm, will people think beyond the convenience of their own trash day to carefully dispose/recycle them? Probably not without some governmental messaging/stimulus.
The thing with our global CO2 danger is, by the time an unfettered free market sees profitable opportunities in correcting it, it's too late. So even if he's only #10, it's nice to see an energy CEO support CO2 regulations. This appears to be a case where government mingling is virtually required. If the role of government does not at least include regulation and/or market stimulus against long-term harms that we market-loving short-term occupants would otherwise blissfully ignore, we might as well scratch the whole experiment.
My dancer sister, she's been playing children songs on her acoustic guitar. She made a CD and does kids' birthday parties, too. She started playing them live at the invitation of a new kid-friendly cafe and boutique in Maplewood. (What a great idea for a hang-out for parents with young kids, by the way.)
Then she made some "adult" songs -- in a folky, "chick rock" style -- and started playing them out at a friend's set, and later started jamming in our brother-in-law's basement with him on complementary guitar and me on nominal drums. Now the coffee shop invited her for a "kids" gig this week in which she will also play some of the grown-up songs at the end ... with my brother-in-law and me joining in.
Nervous? Not exactly, but who knows if that will change once I see other faces. Definitely out of my element. I'm a pretend drummer, but I can at least keep time. (Kind of like saying, "I'm a pretend editor, but I can at least read.") Don't think a trusty Killing Joke t-shirt would set the right tone, either. Still, these are simple songs, and I'll barely have enough different drums there on which to screw up. Barely.
This here Web site is now past a year old, and though it has successfully moved me to simply write more and more -- in on- and offline varieties -- I've still not gotten around to using it to hold, organize and perpetually edit some, ahem, "creative" (non-blog) writing.
The heavier things I end up struggling over in Word and never finishing. But the lighter things, for now I'll store such things in "Works in Progress," beginning with the easiest one: "Spamlines," an intentionally organized and constantly growing collection of actual spam subjects or offers and their spellings.
When spam sneaks through my filter and into my inbox, about 25% of the time the subject or intro text makes me laugh out loud. I know spam is very cheap (for senders), but still: People really respond to this stuff? In large enough numbers to make it worthwhile? Phenomenal.
I started to wonder what these offers teach me about humans. (As my buddy BH boiled it down, bluntly: People will always do stupid things for money and sex.) So I arranged them out of context, in three-line stanzas, because this arrangement amuses me as much as when they first snuck into my inbox.
And now, to temper this "interpretive" pretentiousness for just a moment, I offer The Onion's hilarious piece where art and terrorism meet: "Conceptual Terrorists Encase Sears Tower in Jell-o." Beautiful.
SABMiller, itself a conglomerate of some big brewer and some other big brewer, is joining in a veritable harem-swapping partnership with MolsonCoorsParkerGoldsteinBrewerston. Or something. They say this will ultimately lead A-B to formalize a more serious B(est)F(riends)F(orever) with InBev, whose good beers A-B already imports.
A Brooklyn craft brewer writes a nice Op/Ed proposing that the average beer-lover (well, the one who likes to tickle the palate with more than just Mass Swill Light), need not fret: The era of enticing, eclectic varieties of "micro" brews is here to stay. I know it's crazy for the six-Stags-a-night crowd to fathom, but some people actually like variety and complexity in their beer. Different beers for different occasions, even. It's not a snob or image thing. It's an "I like to enjoy what I consume" thing.
Now Americans are moving away from spongy industrial bread, watery coffee, plasticized “cheese” and other wonders of modern food science. The top maker of white supermarket bread went bankrupt a few years ago.
Industrial beer is still the vast majority of the American market, and it’s not going away tomorrow, but there is no future in it. While industrial beers suffer flat or declining sales, craft brewers are experiencing double-digit growth. The big brewers now try to copy craft beers. European brewers, who once laughed at watery American beer, now look to the United States for inspiration.
MillerCoors is not a threat to craft brewers but a warning: we should not walk the road of overexpansion or be tempted by the lowest common denominator of the mass market. Miller, Coors and Anheuser-Busch were once small breweries making fine local beer, too.
Hear hear! Once A-B's major brand growth started leveling off domestically, and they were losing "mouth share" to small brews and liquor, I knew we were safe. They responded by making their own "craft" beers in disguise -- some of which are good! -- and by using their mammoth distribution network to import beers they don't make but consumers actually ~gasp~ like!
We're no longer forced into a "Both kinds: country and Western" choice in our beer. Gone are the days of having to enter a yuppie store just to find a six-pack of something a wee bit different.
So we're cool. A-B and the industrial brewers just want to make money -- they don't care how -- so if the market declares they must actually provide a variety of beers (and other drinks) in order to do so, I say hallelujah! It's about time. It helps the cause. Hell, now A-B is even importing Budvar--er, "Czechvar."
"So I figure, I got that goin' for me ... which is nice."
The live debut went well Thursday night. First my sister played her kids-shtick thing with the kids for about 25 minutes -- it was pretty amusing to watch her kneel on the floor and engage them in interactive songs about ice cream and trees and flying and devil-worship. (Maybe there was no devil-worship.)
One of the kids tunes is clearly modeled after "Ring of Fire" -- as in "I went down into a great big bowl of ice cream / I ate vanilla, chocolate, strawberry and topped it all with whipped cream," or something like that.
I kept chuckling at how at least one of the kids, when they get older (and if one is as jaded as I was when the priest and the nun and the Bible didn't jibe), will one day hear Johnny Cash's song and feel totally ripped off. Whether they blame Cash or my sister is a coin-flip, but I bet it'll go like, "First the Easter Bunny, then Santa, now the ice cream song. What is up with this world?"
The Headliner Anyway, then we joined in for the "adult" songs. The kids and their parents stayed -- I'm sure the dormant drum set kept the kids interested in what mystery came next. Some other friends were around, too. Man, it doesn't matter how simple it is, there is something fun about playing music -- all the better with people you love. My brother-in-law is a talented guitarist, and it was cool to see him watch my sister's fingers and then play perfectly complementary riffs to it all.
Great, too, to see my nephews and nieces eyes light up when the drums were actually making noise -- and the cymbal, too! A couple adults were even dancing.
It was actually a decent challenge to maintain concentration over the din of kids' voices and running around. But it also helped assure me that mistakes were no problem. I made a few, or we got on different pages a couple times, but I was able to recover quickly each time. Some of my sister's musician friends complimented me, though that may have been a way of angling for more of her attention. (Either way, I applaud.)
To keep the volume tolerable, I just used a floor tom for the 8th beats and low sound -- no chiming high-hat or booming bass drum -- then the snare, and a nice ride cymbal to accent choruses. That was it, and I think it worked. Groovy enough to be pleasant and danceable, yet quiet enough for people to hear themselves talk. I figure that's the ideal for live restaurant music.
I think we'll do one more adult-centric gig in November, then maybe something with my brother-in-law's "real musician" sister when she's in from California in December. Then I'll bust out the Killing Joke.
I guess it's another marking of time when your closest music heroes start to die.
Still, Paul Raven, 46, was taken awfully soon. He apparently died of a heart attack in his sleep in Switzerland, where he was doing what he loved -- in this case recording with former Prong and Killing Joke bandmate, drummer Ted Parsons.
Fans are in shock. The tributes are flying in online. He was always the most accessible member of Killing Joke -- the most "average Joe" of the members, who was always willing to talk to fans, was always excited and ambitious about music projects -- wherever in the world they took him -- and never seemed pretentious. Maybe he was that way because he was a fan (and fellow musician) before he was part of the band.
I met him before a show once, and he immediately started shooting the breeze about music and the show like I was an old friend; there's a thousand fan stories like that only much better. One thing everyone assumes is that he got everything he could out of his rather brief life.
He put up with Killing Joke lead singer Jaz Coleman's maniacal crap and bipolar unpredictability, seemingly for the intensity and rarity of the Killing Joke musical experience. As he said of the recording of the last album, "Hosannas...":
The recording was supposed to take three months and wound up taking seven. "It was absolute torture making the record. We nearly destroyed ourselves, each other and Killing Joke in the process," he says. "But I still think Jaz Coleman is a genius. It is difficult to describe what goes on with those guys. I am there and I can't describe it. Damage, broken bones, stitches all from that record."
Killing Joke hasn't recorded anything new since then, but in the meantime Raven has been on at least three or four major projects, including two Ministry albums.
"Full of life" ... "a guy who truly LIVED" ... "endless amounts of stories, endless amounts of ambition" ... "Told me Uncle Raven would make sure my boy grew up an Arsenal fan" ... "a musician to the core" ... "brightest flame burns half as long" represent the sentiments.
I loved his bass in Killing Joke because it was straight-forward and simply thumping. Like great bass in what is essentially a groove band, his was not there to steal some of the spotlight from Geordie's cascading chords, but rather to establish and amplify a deep, driving groove that you felt in your body long before you mentally recognized that it was there. "Like a shark lurking" is how a Gatherer once described his style with the Joke. Another "lurking" groovy bass track of his is "Night Time."
Here is Raven playing the seminal Killing Joke track, "Pssyche," and singing the first verse. That's taken from the band's "XXV Gathering" 25th anniversary show a couple years ago. The song was first recorded with KJ's original bassist, Youth, but Raven's bass was shining so crystal clear on that XXV Gathering recording (not as much so in the compressed online clips), I'm glad to have the DVD as my lasting memory of him.
Despite my pontifical anti-marketing tendencies, I really don't mind marketing that connects me or anyone else with niche goods and services that fit a likely need or professed interest.
When I buy from an online drum store and later get an invite to try a drumming magazine, that's fine. When I watch international soccer on TV and it's sponsored by an international calling provider -- hey, that just makes sense. A lot of soccer fans want to call the folks "back home." I found a cheap international phone service that way.
Once, a dial-around service I used to use to call my father in the Czech Republic sent me a magnet with their dialing code on it -- and the accompanying letter and all the text on the magnet was in Czech. They saw the destination of my calls and made a marketing guess that I'd appreciate a letter in Czech. Invasive, sure, but fairly harmless.
I do admittedly loathe mass marketing, though. The "Everyone should want this!" -- Why? "Because we paid a lot of money to market it to everyone!" -- that stuff gets on my nerves. Save your ugh boots, your Shoot Me Elmo, your Heart Attack Burger, and other shove-down-my-throat consumables, please.
Send it to the Slavs BUT -- here's where I really draw the line: Dish Network has sent me a promo letter that looks funny ... because it's in Polish. That's right. I've never called Poland, period. I've never done anything international with them (I had their TV service for a while), but they apparently scanned the names on their former customer rolls and decided to send letters in Polish advertising their international and Polish TV services to whatever funny names their list kicked up.
A memo to Dish: Not all Eastern-European names are Polish. Really. Not all "skees" are Polish, either. In fact, if it ends in "-sky" (like my name) or "-cky," it's likely not Polish, but if it ends in "-ski" or "-wicz," it just might be. If there's a funny 'w' in the middle, it might be Polish. If it has a funny 'z' in the middle, it could be anything depending on what other funny vowel-starved combinations surround it. If it ends in "-ova," good luck -- you've narrowed your targeted Slav down to a female, but that's it. There are all kinds of other letter combinations that tip you off for what's Polish, what's Czech, what's Slovak or Croatian or Serb or the other Slavic languages.
So please, Dish. Next time you get the bright idea to boost your Slavic marketing, check those combos out first. Don't be a sky-ist.
I love that most things in the night sky are so incredibly old that even Earth's earliest mitochondria -- had they been so inclined and equipped -- wouldn't have seen them change; and yet, there are so many billions of things in the night sky, we are occasionally lucky enough to witness a truly remarkable change in the heavens.
Today we received this update from a physics teacher we know, who always has an eye on the night sky. That there comet Holmes darn nearly blew up:
Dear Skywatchers, A normally uneventful comet, Comet 17P/Holmes, exploded on Oct. 24th, making it easier to see. It is also unusual, because at this point, it has no tail. Skywatchers around the globe are hypothesizing about its emergence and development, but as of yesterday, there was not a significant tail. The tail is a result of solar wind influences and should point in a direction away from the sun, wherever the sun is at the time of comet viewing. About an hour after sunset, look NE to the left of Perseus and above Auriga. Comets are fuzzy balls of light not points of light like stars.
As you may have noticed, the site has changed. Sampa, the free-site host, did a version 2 of some sort.
Despite an FAQ that made it sound like allowing one's site to go through v.2 surgery would be okay, there were several flexibilities that surprisingly disappeared with the click of a button. (e.g. I cannot believe sidebars like this one are even narrower than before.)
And I'm told -- miraculously! -- that the conversion cannot be undone. Truth be told, I'm actually quite pissed. But free is free. Sampa has otherwise been good to me.
So I need to sort through site "features" to see how I can make do. Except that I don't have the time at the moment, in the middle of graduate classes and Lighthousehockey.com. (btw, I've removed that Lighthouse RSS feed so that you're not clogged with random Islanders hockey gibberish).
But I promise to touch up the accessories when I get a chance, and return to irregularly scheduled blogging.
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, and Trans-Siberians, but if Ameren can't keep my freaking power on for three days straight, that will always capture my most immediate attention. And 
It is thus referred to as Saturn's "two-faced" moon (Saturn has more than 30 others). And it's for this reason that high school girls so often say of former friends who steal their boyfriends, "She's just an Iapetus with bad hair, anyway."
February, 2008