defiantly, maybe

mega(fuck)upload (of problems)

2012-01-31T21:44:00.000-08:00

so this post stems from my reading this article, in which it is revealed that megaupload's legitimate (and illegitimate) user files are soon to be deleted. apparently the department of justice has already (in a frighteningly efficient move for our government) retrieved all the evidence it wants to use against megaupload's CEO/other people and so the rest is just going to be flushed.

as the story goes, this data is ultimately going to be deleted because megaupload has (presumably) megabandwidth bills, and with its assets frozen after the recent government takedown, it's unable to pay those bills any longer. makes sense, in a way: why should the megaupload's internet hosts continue to support their massive bandwidth if megaupload can't make their payments?

the subtext to this whole deal, of course, is that all of those files constitute evidence in the coming case between megaupload and the government, and it's a bit problematic that nobody's stepping in and saying "no, you can't just flush gigabytes of files down the drain in the middle of a case". in fact, one could make the case (as many have) that allowing these files to be destroyed constitutes a sort-of obstruction of justice on the part of the government. you could even make the case (as many have) that allowing these files to be destroyed is not terribly unlike burning down an entire neighborhood because you know there's a criminal in one house: from this perspective, those files are the owners' property, and since a lot of people store legit files on megaupload, their hard drive backups, photos of their wedding, etc. are being destroyed indirectly by the government despite the fact that they themselves did nothing wrong.

as i see it, there are big gaping problems with both of these arguments, but at the same time the government's lack of interest in acknowledging that not every single person even marginally associated with megaupload is a criminal is definitely troubling. it is a bit like, as one internet commenter put it, renting a garage on a storage company lot, and then finding out one day that your garage had been torched overnight because the owner of the establishment was laundering money through the business. maybe all you kept in that garage was some old furniture. maybe you had no idea the owner was a criminal. but now your shit's gone, and there doesn't really seem to be any recourse.

maybe this is another one of those new internet-changes-the-way-the-world-works things. after all, if the government's going to make a habit of shutting down online storage sites, the effect that those shutdowns have on the millions of people that use them is going to be immense. and probably something that, legally, the government is allowed to just totally overlook. imagine, if i can be hyperbolic for a moment, a situation in which the government suddenly decides "well, fuck, there sure is a lot of child porn being distributed over facebook. better shut 'er down!" and boom, out go the lights. it's an extreme example to be sure, but two assumptions that underlie it are, i believe, visible in the megaupload case as well: 1) that the "one bad egg ruins it for everybody" approach is justified in cases like these and 2) that it's okay to not be interested in hashing out exactly what "due process" might constitute in terms of determining guilt/potential punishment.

i'm absolutely certain that megaupload's CEO is guilty of whatever our government says he's guilty of, and i'm absolutely certain that the majority of users of megaupload used it to traffic in illegal content. but our law says you have to prove those things in court rather than just assuming that they're true and then acting according, and even if you do prove them, not every megaupload user was "in on it". once again, we've got prominent government offices acting just like they were regarding SOPA and PIPA: like old white guys who are too rich and too busy to bother learning about this newfangled technology, and the result is that they're reacting like megaupload was a physical business, located in a physical building, dealing in physical goods (read: one copy only) with physical customers. and that's just not the case.

but all the blabber isn't really what worries me. what really worries me is this sudden desire to pigeonhole all online storage as bad and infringing. because a lot of the stuff being shared on these sites is legal, and has been posted with the understanding that it will likely be there for awhile. not forever, of course, but take for example a music site called the midnight cafe. i've been following this site for years, as it generally posts a new live music recording every single day (or at least a few times a week) from a variety of different artists. these "bootlegs" are legal recordings, uploaded on the author's own time, just so that they can be freely available for anyone who wants easy access to them. recently, the site posted this, and then shortly after, this. there are a lot of music projects like this out there. another example is the phish spreadsheet, which is the work of one guy who spent a major chunk of his life tracking, tagging, and uploading every single phish show ever recorded into one well-organized spreadsheet (and again these are free, legal recordings) just improve ease of access and to provide a digital archive that could, in theory, last for damn near ever. now i know that most people aren't too keen on phish, but if you know anything about music, you know that they are mostly known for their live performances. this spreadsheet project is in a sense the culmination of thirty years' worth of taping and trading (nowadays done online and through torrents, but originally done for years and years using the mail and actual tapes), and yet if the site that hosts all of these shows is the next to go down, then it's all gone.

oh, not permanently, of course, as i'm sure there are backups of these sorts of things. but what's lost is the worldwide access to the music. i don't much care if someone's birthday photos are going to be lost when megaupload is purged. if you don't backup your personal files locally that's your own fault, as far as i'm concerned. but these sites are used as much more than a backup service for individuals. they're also the hubs of legal, vital online archives and similar communities. and, sure, if one site shuts down, another will always rise to fill its place, but how many times are people going to want to bother uploading 2000 individual phish shows if their hosting site gets taken down every six months?

i'm not sure what the solution to this problem is, but it's definitely more nuanced than the current department of justice/megaupload response looks to be.

how we once are

2012-01-31T13:35:00.000-08:00

this semester, i'm team-teaching a 300-level undergrad course in 20th and 21st century literature with my dissertation director. while "team-teaching" might make it sound like we take turns tagging each other "in" during the class period or like there's a family double dare-esque exchange of flags or some other sort of physical comedy involved, it (unfortunately) actually just means that one week i teach the class, and the next week he teaches it. so pretty much every other week i get to sit in the back row of a sixty-student undergrad lit seminar and just observe the goings-on.

this course is basically the analogue of the KSU courses that i found so engrossing in, say, 2000 and 2001 that i decided to change my major to english (from computer science), therefore in large part making me the me that you know and anonymously read the blog of (and love) today. when the aforementioned diss director announced to the class today, in reference to eliot's the waste land something along the lines of "most of you will hate it, and that's fine, but a few of you might become obsessed with it", he was describing me a decade ago, when i had been in those students' place (the waste land wasn't necessarily my watershed text/epiphany moment as i didn't really have one, but i was pretty obsessed with it, and still am). my work was suddenly jumping out and grabbing me in a way that i didn't think work could.

so being a fly on the wall now is pretty fascinating, especially in that large of a class. i walk over to the classroom twice a week, bright and too-early in the morning, with just my pen and a pad of paper and the class text (no laptops allowed, so it's just like in the old days), and i sit there for an hour and a half and i listen as our entire class tries to tease meaning out of primary texts. somehow the earnestness of this has gotten lost for me in a lot of ways after years of reading and studying abstract critical theory...theory's important and enjoyable in its own right, for sure, but the higher up you get in english studies, context seems to outweigh text. so, it's fun to go back and just look at a poem, or a short story, and say (aware of, but otherwise removed slightly from all the -isms) "what does this do to you when you read it?" i mean, that's how i got here in the first place, through the appeal of answering that question, and then following the progression of questions that the answer raised in turn, and so on, and so forth.

during class, i often find myself wanting to raise my hand, just to have a conversation with these students who all seem so very invested in the idea that studying the text for the sake of studying the text is important. teaching literature to a roomful of english majors has a very satisfyingly reinforcing quality to it: nobody asks "well, why does it matter what this poem means?" or "who cares that eliot was writing right after the first world war?" it's a given that in that room, at that time, those questions matter. after what seems like a never-ending process of having to justify the worth of my field (generally) and my research (specifically) to everyone in the universe, it's sort of amazing to suddenly find myself in a room where sixty people have just decided to read, say, sassoon's war poetry and are ready to spend the next 90 minutes telling you what they fucking think, man.

that's not to say, of course, that it's unimportant to question the validity of english studies, etc. but at some point, self-critique becomes self-flagellation, and the innocence (in a professional sense, at least) of the students in this class is a nice contrast to that old cycle.

it makes me more aware than ever that i enjoy reading a lot and enjoy writing even more. i enjoy talking about both of those things with other people who do them, and i absolutely don't mind getting paid a barely-living wage to do so, if that's what it takes. i enjoy getting paid to fly to conferences and present my research, and it's sort of amazing that i've essentially gotten paid to have a year off to write a book, let alone the fact that i've gotten to go to school for free, more or less, for six years now in a beautiful part of the country and in a great department with great faculty (and staff). i'm here because i'm convinced it matters, even if it just matters to me, and i definitely consider myself lucky...sitting and watching classes like the one i was describing above just reminds me even more of the truth of that. so many grad students (and faculty) i've known over the years don't seem to feel this way about this job at all*. instead, they're hostile, exasperated, uninterested beyond what the job requires of them. it makes me wonder why they don't just do something else. this isn't a career for going through the motions. not when you have students like these.

*this isn't a passive-aggressive gesture at anyone in particular. it's just a general statement made from a bit over a decade of experience in various english departments.

"a meditation on feminism" or, "short skirt, long jacket"

2012-01-27T16:39:00.000-08:00

"the idea of a vernacular gender was widely misunderstood in the antagonistic atmosphere of the 1980s, in the anger that repudiated four thousand years of male sovereignty. men and women are unlike because of their evolution, a matter not to be deplored but to be celebrated and fulfilled, with the caution that power over the other is not part of the difference. roles and duties are divided, but not to make inequality. a vernacular society, divided in many of its social and familial responsibilities and privileges, would be inappropriately dominated by either gender. men and women have different roles int he group, similar but different bodies and psyches, shared but also different satisfactions, desires, fears, and sorrows."
-paul shepard, coming home to the pleistocene

so here's a thing that encapsulates that feeling that all guys occasionally get (or that for some seems to be a constantly-burning fuse of rage in the back of their caveman skulls): the fact that girls are different and that that is sometimes weird.

getting people to accept this is often a lot like trying to get white freshmen from the west side of washington to understand that yes, racism actually still exists, and no, they don't really "get it" because they live in a country and a culture where they are the majority (and no, once having a black friend long ago doesn't fix this). this lack of awareness isn't anyone's fault (except for when it's intentional, like in the case of the hypothetical cavemen referenced above who aren't actually hypothetical because i used to work with some of them), but more a cause of the "everyone's equal!" rhetoric that we superficially layer atop all of our discourse nowadays. now,"everyone's equal!" is a nice sentiment, of course, but the reality is more complex. some races (read: different melanges of cultures than the melange that makes up american white people, with different amounts of melanin in their skin) are different from others in significant ways. women are different from men in significant ways. to completely ignore this is to do violence to one's identity.

it matters to me that i am a man and not a woman. i didn't choose to be a man and i don't (in an abstract sense) prefer it to having gotten to be a woman. but, if someone were to tell me (as my students often do) that men and women are "equal"...well, that's kind of silly, because i'm aware of a lot of ways in which my biological/embodied experience of the world as a man is fundamentally different than that same level of experience is for a woman, and i know that that difference informs my thoughts/actions/what-have-you on less fundamental levels like how often i'm asked to help people move cabinetry or push cars out of snowbanks. telling me men and women are equal is sort of like telling a firefighter who finds meaning in his/her firefighting that "everyone can fight fires equally well!" you just hurt my feelings, man. seriously.

it's sort of like that. sort of.

[reheats cinnamon tea, sips.]

anyway, back to my fun story. so i was walking past valhalla (the horrifically trashy undergrad bar just on the legal side of the border between pullman city and campus proper) the other night, and there was a group of girls crossing in front of the building in front of me. they were clearly bar-hopping, but couldn't have been older than 21 or 22. despite the 20 degree temperatures and freezing wind, they were all dressed in short skirts and those wrap-things that pass for shirts these days (no long jackets were in sight, alas)*.

so, valhalla has recently renovated its top floor. this means that while you can still go drink and make out in its creepy, creepy basement if you so choose, you can also sit upstairs at a table and drink or eat cheeseburgers while you look out the gigantic front window at the sidewalk. well, these girls crossed directly in front of the window, pretty much every curve of each of them either visible or outlined by their clothes tightly enough that there wasn't anything really left to the imagination.

as they walked by, of course, the eyes of every single guy in the bar locked onto them and followed them for the length of the window. they weren't unaware of this, and as they finally passed from view, one of them remarked "ugh. i cannot believe how disgusting that was. i hate how every guy at the bar is always staring at my ass". then they proceeded down the street, turned right, and walked directly into the next bar down.

so basically the point of this post is for me to say: ladies, please explain this to me because it makes no fucking sense.

from my perspective as a guy, this is what i see:

first, i see women expressing disgust at the concept of the bar as a device for men to check them out and then choose their mates from the pool of women available. this disgust makes sense. bars are (generally) disgusting places, with people not on their best behavior. when it comes to men, young twentysomething ones are (generally) disgusting when it comes to their behavior around women. if i was a woman (and we've established that i am in fact, not), i would probably never go into any bar full of twentysomething men after, say, eight o'clock for this reason. but, i've "accepted" the fact that the dating M.O. for most kids nowadays is to go to the bar, get smashed, and try to make out with someone in the hopes that afterwards, when they've regained their inhibitions and their actual personalities, they'll somehow be compatible enough to function in a long-term, non-sex-centric relationship. and so...

second, these girls were obviously engaging in that exact same process, whilst criticizing the grossness of it. they didn't want to be ogled by the guys at valhalla...so why go into the next bar, where the same thing will happen while you are stationary targets for a goodly amount of time?

third, if you're not trying to draw sexual attention to yourself, why dress the way that you're dressed at all? this is sort of the crux, here. i'm forced to assume that maybe dressing scandalously is just a status symbol among young women nowadays? maybe you have to dress this way for your female peers to consider you cool, in the same way that guys apparently have to wear tank tops, basketball shorts and a backwards baseball cap for their brahs to think that they're cool. is that it? if that is in fact the case, isn't there some other "cool" way that women could dress amongst themselves that isn't so baldly sexual? i wonder about the side effects of young women essentially parlaying their sexuality into social currency among their "girlfriends" while seemingly assuming that that shift in intention should make that same sexuality suddenly invisible to guys. because it doesn't. obviously.

following this (possible) line of inquiry makes me sad. every single woman i've ever known (including the ones i've found extremely attractive) have had many other qualities that make them potentially "cool" to others besides how physically attractive they are or how revealingly they dress. i certainly don't promote my own sexuality in the way that i dress, and yet i have a lot of friends who respect me (some despite having seen me make a drunken asshole of myself while trying to impress girls at bars in lifetimes past) and at least one person who (for some reason) finds me attractive. so actually trying to get others to respect you without wearing short shorts can work. have we really reached a point where not just any sexuality but egregious, totally public sexuality is assumed to be the primary currency for negotiating social and sexual relationships for the majority of our young women?

i'd like to hear what people (and especially women) think, because i just don't get it. you know, on account of my penis and all.

*incidentally, both men's and women's refusal to dress practically for inclement weather is a whole other blog post entirely, dealing with an all-consuming rage that is fueled by my years of winter survival training and prizing of pragmatism over the desire to look "pretty" or "cool" for a large crowd of people who don't even know who you are...i can only hate one thing at once, sadly.

voulez-vous THE BUS?!

2012-01-26T15:19:00.000-08:00

i've got a bunch of half-finished posts about smart things in my queue for today, but instead i'm just going to complain about my life because why else have a blog nobody reads?

i'm extremely tired today, and for once i don't even have a good excuse. i've just stopped sleeping, for some reason.

those of you non-existent readers who know me know that i used to have horrible, terrible insomnia problems. over the last few years, they've pretty much abated, quite possibly as a result of me finally taking the time to get a lot of my other emotional/mental shit together. but for a long time they were quite bad. i mean, i always have been and likely always will be a "night person", and if i continue working in higher education, my night-person-ness will likely continue to be exacerbated by the fact that will always have to take my work home with me and that work will always require the occasional late night. but. for most of my life between the ages of...oh, say fourteen to twenty-four i slept much less than eight hours a night every night, due to stress, overuse of caffeine and just generally being a total nutjob. once i got to wsu, it somehow got even worse because the insomnia collided with a suddenly massive workload. then, i was often working 12-16 hours a day for weeks at a time, but still only sleeping 3-4 hours a lot of the time.

anyway, the point is that it was bad. but, just like that year of college where you drink yourself into oblivion (everyone does that, right?), i didn't really realize how bad until i stopped sleeping again over the last few days. basically, having some time off from being crazy and then returning to it really put into perspective just how crazy i was.

the experience has been extra weird this time because my inability to sleep doesn't really seem to be caused by anything. i mean, i'm stressed over not having a job lined up for fall, and i'm stressed over needing to finish my dissertation, but i feel like those stresses are within normal levels. otherwise, i'm pretty normal-feeling in terms of my brains and my thinkings and my word stuff things go cant gonna be for now

last week, lindsey and i went sledding twice, right after the first and second big snowfalls that we had here in pullman. during the first night, i banged my legs up quite a bit, because right before we went out, the snow turned to rain for a few hours, which built up a thick crust of ice on top of the inches and inches of snow. the result was a sledding surface that was fast, but prone to breaking and catapulting you off the sled onto a sheet of ice with little ice-knives sticking out of it that made ice-holes in your body and caused you ice-pain. it hurt a bit, but i was fucking excited to sled and thought little of it. the next morning, i could barely move. anything. anywhere. so what did i do? go out sledding again the next night, of course. this was on softer snow, but i still added new bruises atop my bruises and was less than happy the next morning. later that same morning, i slipped on a patch of black ice and fell in the parking lot. and i mean fell, as in i saw my feet above my head before i hit the ground. this felt like it had probably broken every bone in my entire body, a feeling that persisted for at least 12 hours. 36 hours later, i still couldn't move my head to the right without pain, and sleeping started getting difficult. now that i think of it, that's probably where the problem started.

three nights ago, i couldn't get to sleep until about 5am, which was unfortunate because i had to get up for class at 7. this seemed a bit odd to me, considering that i should have fallen asleep quickly because i had only slept for about five hours the night before...but i didn't think too much of it. i was much more weirded out the next night when, on 2 hours of sleep i couldn't fall asleep by 6am. a bit confused and panicked, i jammed a ton of melatonin down my face and finally nodded off around 7. i got up at 10:30 or so to go to work, and it felt like it took the melatonin about 12 hours to get out of my system. nonetheless, i managed to spend a decent amount of the day at work, and i even Accomplished Things. then last night, somehow, i didn't fall asleep till 5 again, and i had to get up at 7 to teach.

throughout this entire process, i've been able to feel myself slowly becoming more and more impaired, sort of like getting drunk slowly over three days, but without the part where it's fun and you're screaming obscenities good-naturedly and riding a skateboard uphill backwards naked while on fire.

anyway, i'm not really sure why i spent a ton of time writing all of this. i guess it's a long way of saying that i've finally realizing how much of a difference actually sleeping a decent amount most nights a week makes in making me an emotionally functional, socially useful person. because i am totally not that right now.

also, if i never fall asleep again and die from exhaustion, this will be my pointless, pointless three-day memoir. it will be ALL THAT REMAINS OF MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH WORDS

oh, and also, this entire sleep-deprivation weirdness episode has played out while i've been reading mike doughty's new book the book of drugs, which is a memoir about...well, drugs. it's certainly supposed to be a sad book, mostly (i think), but there's something about lacking sleep that makes drugs (especially nicotine) seem charming. also, listening to lots of soul coughing when you're not even entirely sure that you would pass that self-awareness "mirror test" is not a good idea. i feel like the music is making paint drip out of my hair follicles in all of the primary colors.

i should probably take a nap.

UPDATE: it has been suggested to me by various sources that my sleeplessness might have been caused by the sun. THE SUN! well, fuck the sun, then.

i cover a gillian welch song. in my office, using a shitty webcam. hooray!

2012-01-14T18:14:00.000-08:00

here's what i got up to last night between writing breaks:

if you prefer, here's gillian welch herself doing a much better job of singing the song:

and just for shits and giggles, here's the tragically-cut-short ryan adams cover that led me to discover this song in the first place:

also, i found out today that if you type "phish" into youtube search and filter by "videos longer than 20 minutes", wonderful things happen.

things i heard today

2012-01-14T00:54:00.000-08:00

this might become a regular feature, but even if it doesn't...whoo-hoo, today was a whopper for in-public oversharing:

1. [On the Hello Walk, 3:10pm] Girl 1: "I made out with Eric and Mike right after they both threw up...and then once I found out that they had thrown up, it made me throw up. Then I passed out until this morning!" Girl 2: "That's amazing! Awesome!"

2. [Outside Valhalla, 12:10am] Girl 1: "Hey, bitch!" Girl 2: "Yeah?" Girl 1: "Is my ass hanging out?!" Girl 2: "What?!" Girl 1: "Can you see my ass, is it hanging out?" Girl 2: "Umm..." Girl 1: "Is my fucking ass hanging out of my skirt, can you see the bottom part of my ass?!" Girl 2: [Looking] "No, I don't think so..."

3. [D Street, 12:15am] Girl 1: "Katherine! Kate! Kat! Slow down!" Girl 2: "Sorry I'm walking so fast, Mike's got coke at his house and I need to get some before he goes to bed!"

that's when i knew if i stopped running, i would die [/melodrama]

2012-01-11T21:39:00.000-08:00

and that's not some emo-blog metaphor-y statement this time, oh no. it's literally how i felt an hour ago running a five mile loop from my office out along terre view and back.

i do this route pretty often, but i haven't done it recently because, well, it's winter and it gets windy out there, and i can't run in pants because it feels weird. running shorts + winter = bad. BUT...i haven't run much lately because i was home for break for three weeks and i've been slammed with work (and the accompanying stress) since i've been back. so today i came in to work a bit early so i could be sure to finish in time to run before i went home for dinner. i finished at 8pm. unfortunately at that point the animal-brain part of me that thinks mountain climbing in a snowstorm is "fun" took over and i decided i was not only going to run in shorts in weather that "feels like" 15 degrees, i was going to run FIVE FUCKING MILES.

fortunately, i'm in good enough shape at the moment that the physical exertion of running those miles was something i could pretty easily handle. however, exposing a lot of bare skin and a torso that had to power a really busy circulatory system to 15 degree temperatures for the forty-five minutes it took to run that far was a bit tricky.

ultimately, it was more of a mental challenge than a physical one (i.e. it's hard to keep up your morale when you're trying to run and shiver at the same time), and there were a few moments when i thought about turning around...but of course that was at the halfway point, which made things sort of hopeless either way, so i kept going.

note: i'm pretty well trained in winter survival, so i'm smart enough to not actually freeze to death, in case you were wondering that at this point.

on the home stretch, when i reentered the main part of campus by the football stadium, i passed a few large groups of students that were actually rooting for me, which was hilarious, considering the usual (and frequent) comments i get from students about being a "faggot" or a "faerie" or a "homo" (from men and women alike, oddly enough) when i'm running. the first group i passed (a group of girls) actually just shrieked in terror, one yelling "what's wrong with you?!" another yelling "how are you running?! it's so cold!" and another just yelling "fuuuuuuuck!" the next group was mixed-gender, and one of the girls yelled "DO IT!" at me in such a super-intense, drill-sergeant sort of way that i had no choice but to high-five her as i ran by, yelling "YEEEEAH!" in response.

it was a good time. oh, and i finished in 45:55, which is a super fast time for me, even when it's not bloody freezing.

the return of the king

2012-01-10T12:02:00.000-08:00

by "return" i mean "a return to this blog", and by "king" i mean "me".

i've decided to revamp this blog and start using it again, partly because i found an acceptably uncomplicated way to simplify my once oh-so-crowded template and partly because i just got a new android phone and so it just makes sense to migrate everything more firmly to google. plus, blogger integrates with google+ nicely now, so that's fun.

i've left links to ye olde tumblr (the shortest-lived of all my blogs to date!) and my old livejournal (which is still active for some reason) above, in case you discover that you prefer old me to current me (i don't, but you're entitled to your opinion, of course). otherwise, prepare for some more pontificating on meaningless topics, inane babbling about important topics, and probably a little hand-wringing and discussions of personal issues that will probably make you feel a little awkward for having read them on the internet. because that's what i do.

since i posted a bathory video to celebrate the end of my tumblr, i'll post a fila brazilla video to celebrate the beginning of this one. because that totally makes sense. to me, at least. and, as you'll quickly learn, that's all that really matters around here.

change

2010-12-08T10:26:00.000-08:00

so, i made a rather impulsive and hasty decision (treebeard would be discomfited) yesterday to switch my blogging platform to tumblr. the interface is great, it's way easier to set up twitter and facebook forwarding, and hooking it up to my lazyblazers.com domain was super easy. all things that blogger made unnecessarily difficult. plus, now that i'm in the habit of making many short posts rather than many long posts, tumblr appeals to me...not having to navigate all the (admittedly nice) options and menus on blogger will make things easier and faster.

nonetheless, i made something ridiculous like 1,250 posts on this blog over a few years, and a lot of those words and the thoughts and comments generated by them helped get me through a lot of tough times, so it's a bit sad to close the doors on the ol' blogger. then there's the madden 2003 playoff coverage, which was just, like, whoa.

anyway, i'll be on blog.lazyblazers.com still, it'll just point to my tumblr blog now. it's also (amazingly simply) set up to cross-post to facebook and twitter. so if you follow me there, get ready to get frustrated and stop.

also, i'll be leaving this blog open in case i want to come back to it someday, so my little emo corner of the internet here will still be open for business.

confucius once said "only the wisest and stupidest of men ever change". huh.

RIDESHARE - Phish 2000.05.23

2010-11-02T21:35:00.000-07:00

I can't seem to get enough Phish lately, and the Phish shows indulge me by continually being awesome. It's a vicious cycle.

I'm digging through a lot of solid '92-'93 stuff right now, but about a week ago I tumbled to a great '02 show and this amazing '00 one.

Phish 2000 shows, when they're good, hit that spot where it's almost like a 90s-era Phish live mixtape: you get some early 90s shredding, some mid-90s technique, some late-90s funk, and a few Farmhouse tracks jammed out in jaw-dropping ways that only seemed to happen before the hiatus. This show is one of those.

"AC/DC Bag" sounds like it could have come straight from a '92 show, and it moves right into "Wilson", and then, just when you're settling into the groove, out comes "First Tube" to surprise and otherwise stimulate you.

Take, for instance, the "Weekapaug"-less "Mike's" that comes out of "Ya Mar" and goes into "Simple", then "It's Ice" before finishing up the run with "When the Circus Comes". Not only are these segues effective, that combination of songs is just bizarre. Just reading it makes me want to listen again.

Pretty much the entire second set is this way too...and the band jams throughout in a way that's fitting to the setlist...oftentimes you can almost hear them reaching to figure out a way to connect such interestingly disparate material. And that's a good thing. This weird mix doesn't work 100% of the time, but I'd rather listen to a show like this than a perfectly played but paint-by-numbers show any day. I should eat this show.

RIDESHARE - Wilco 2004.11.13

2010-11-02T21:23:00.000-07:00

This review is mega-short because, honestly, I listened to this like 2 weeks ago and after everything that's happened since then, I barely remember it.

Here's the setlist.

Most of the main set was standard 2004-era Ghost tracks, until the end which was a particularly stellar "Poor Places" > "Spiders" match-up.

Also of mention was the first encore's rare "Another Man's Done Gone" and "Candyfloss".

High quality show, but nothing revolutionary if you've already heard some 2004 SBDs.

RIDESHARE - Phish 06.11.1994

2010-10-18T18:09:00.000-07:00

setlist here.

this is the only full show i've gotten to in the last couple of weeks, though i've gotten partially through a pair of fantastic phish shows (2000 and 2002, surprisingly) that i'll review as soon as i find the third disc of each and listen to it.

this show is one of the treasured june '94 phish run, arguably one of the finest months of live music ever done by anyone ever in the universe of history for all time. infinitely.

while i didn't like this show as much as i did the 06.18.94 show, it could still be one of the not-best-ever-but-still-best parts of the best-ever month of 6/94. make sense? let's move on.

this setlist was definitely more interesting. it starts off with some pretty standard rockers ("wilson", "chalkdust torture", and an amazing version of "you enjoy myself"). YEM segues into "rift", and then things really start to pick up. as usual, "rift" live is a little spotty, but "down with disease" and "it's ice" are standouts of the first set. "tela" is an interesting addition; a song i hadn't heard in awhile and that put a smile on my face. but, you know, it's not really known for its jam pyrotechnics. "stash" was a solid, if standard-to-great rocking jam to end the set on.

the "2001" > "antelope" opener was a great way to start the second set. "flufflhead" is one of my favorites, and this was a pretty standard version. the rest of the second set and the "suzy" encore is when things really started to take off and never really let up.

the selection of songs is the attraction here. there's a great variety of songs in the setlist, but not really any terribly exploratory or strange jams to enjoy...most of the show is flat-out rock-jamming, so if that's your thing you'll love this show. it goes without saying that this sort-of-criticism should be considered along with the fact that this is a june '94 show, which means that even if most of the show is straight-up rock, every single note is perfect, all the harmonies are spot-on, and every solo is perfect. so, while i found the 6/18 show more interesting, this one is still better than 90 percent of any other live music (and any other phish) that you'll ever hear.

late saturday night polemic: singlism is stupid and should die in a fire

2010-10-17T02:39:00.000-07:00

so, as i've been made increasingly aware by the internet, there's this thing called "singlism". as many of its proponents point out, it's a stupid word. as i am now going to point out in the most polemical fashion possible, it's also a stupid concept.

it is perhaps telling that in the most coherent and professionally-published piece on singlism i could find (through an admittedly quick google search), there is no concrete example, ever, of how people have been, or will in the future be discriminated against by the fact of their being single. there's a lot of mumbo-jumbo about how people who are single are frowned upon in the workplace and in life because being single isn't "normal" or whatever, but beyond that i see no reason in any of the reason i've done thus far for organized, militant action on behalf of singles whose lives are judged so pointless in our relationship-obsessed culture that that culture goes out of its way to enact its bias against singles in real-world ways like paying them less (as women are paid less, on average than men) or giving their children lower-quality education (as is generally the case for minority children when compared to whites).

and there's where my first problem arises. it's a purely rhetorical one, to be sure, but i'm still angry and want to rip the heads off of teddy bears: the idea that somehow singlism is on par in severity or in the necessity for social awareness with racism, sexism, or classism is just absolutely ridiculous and is a testament to how transparent those first three things are to most white, upper-middle class americans (generally the people agitating against singlism). is there a set of culturally-reinforced assumptions made on behalf of single people by not-single people? yes, of course. is the practice of group A making up a set of then-culturally-reinforced assumptions about group B based on perceived difference as a way of group A self-reinforcing their already-assumed superiority a practice that's been going on for at least thousands of years, partially as a method of defining community? yes, of course. people in relationships are going to insist that being in a relationship is the norm, the same way that men who get to have better jobs over women are going to insist that it's just normal because to argue otherwise might be to put their own jobs in jeopardy.

i'm not completely insensitive to the singlist plea. i've got a good amount of experience being single myself. now you're thinking: "wow, the dude who insists on hard evidence from the internet is going to prove his point using personal anecdotes?" yes. shut up.

there was a period not long ago at all where i was single for about three years. going into said period, i was pretty aware that it was likely to be a long single period (i.e. i wasn't really interested in dating, didn't think i would be for awhile, and didn't know of anyone that was beating my door down to get a ride in my motor-carriage). as such, i tried to approach it constructively. unlike, say, the last time i was single for an extended period of time, coming out of a long high school relationship that i, in my AWESOME high school naivety (is that a word?) thought was going to last forever. the result was a decent near-year's worth of sullen depression until (of course, you guessed it) i met someone else and got to scurry back to the haven to dated-dom rather than deal with my issues.

anyway, the time was i was most recently single was rough, in a lot of ways. especially the second year or so, which coincided with the time in which most of my friends moved from pullman and i, too socially awkward to really make any new friends, basically spent an entire year or so in my apartment watching movies and playing madden 2003. eventually, though, i decided that four virtual super bowl rings were enough to secure my online legacy and i ventured back out into the world.

i guess my point is that i learned a lot through those years, both about making friends and about dating relationships. i learned a lot about how i had viewed friendships and relationships before and how detrimental my own selfish need for that kind of contact made it so difficult for me to initiate in the first place. interesting thought: if you don't desperately, creepily, intensely need every interaction you engage in to sustain your mental and spiritual health, those interactions get a lot easier, and more fun, and ultimately more fulfilling.

and i wouldn't have learned all that downward-facing-dog-bullshit had i remained in relationships. i had to hit what my old self regarded as the bottom to realize that that bottom was really just a different type of life. aside from the snarky label (which i'll get to in a minute), you could consider me a converted singlist. by the end of my three-year exile into singleland, i was absolutely happy and content to be alone romantically. which was about the time that i met someone and started a relationship that was functional and made me happier than i thought you were supposed to be in relationships (i don't think this was a coincidence). it's cliche (or, as spellcheck suggests, "cloche") to say that you have set the bird free and see if it comes back on it's own, but that's exactly what happened. the minute i stopped needing my life to be a certain way, the minute it became clear it was fine just the way it was.

so how does this tie back to singlism? IT DOESNT

no, i'm just kidding. it does.

"singlism" simultaneously expresses discontent and reinforces the idea that being in a relationship is a status symbol, neither of which actually helps anyone be any happier with their lot in life.

the first of my two complaints is pretty easy to grasp. if you feel the need to express loudly and clearly how perfectly okay you are with being single, to the point of discriminating and/or trash talking people who are in relationships...clearly you're not actually okay with being single. and this goes both ways, lest you think i'm choosing sides: if you really need to brag about how happy you and your SO are to everyone within hearing range, obviously things aren't going that well on some level.

the other complaint is a little more esoteric, but probably more important. i guess the best way to say it is that "singlism", by its very existence as a term and as a way of expressing difference between two perceived-different social groups, simplifies much of the reality of both being single and being in a relationship. it reinforces the idea that the main reason to be in a relationship is because you can be or because you should be - it doesn't matter if you're happy in the relationship, or who the other person is or what they're like or what they're name is...what matters is that you've got a date! on the other side, it casts not-dating as rebellion against the status symbol of dating. if you're not dating, it's not because you've got issues you're refusing to confront, or because maybe, simply, you just don't want to date. no, you're special because you're standing up to the institution! "singlism" just reinforces the idea that dating is the country club, and not-dating is wearing ripped-up jeans and ramones t-shirts...with the added "twist" of saying "hey, the ramones are fucking better than stupid golf anyway!"

if there turns out to be legitimate discrimination in any case (in a professional sense) because of someone's relationship status, then obviously that's bullshit and should be opposed. but i don't see any of that here. what i see is people who want to make a legitimate lifestyle choice a social statement. suddenly, dating or not dating is on the same level with whether you choose to wear a tie to work or a t-shirt, whether you wear dress shoes or converse all-stars. and that's not fair to the actual people you might actually be dating (or not dating), because the reality is that relationships are way more complicated than this stupid binary gives them credit for. it's like reducing politics to two parties just so that everyone has to pick a side. and we can all see how well that's working out...

but i suppose that's a rant for another late saturday night.

DUH-DUUUUUUUUUH!!!

ever wanted to hear a big beat mashup of phish and the dead?

2010-10-06T18:56:00.000-07:00

i've been a little bit obsessed with this set of remix/mash-ups that i found on soundcloud the other day. all of it's pretty much great - the guy has a great ear (?) for this stuff. if you're in a hurry, though, just check out "a gentle hell" (a trippy version of wilco's "hell is chrome" mashed with thievery corporation), "just break" (jurassic 5 and radiohead), and best of all "freezerflowerfluff" (phish's "tweezer" and "fluffhead" mashed with the dead's "china cat sunflower").
Bonnaroo Booty by mopo

hang it on the fridge 2!: my first ecopoem

2010-10-06T15:18:00.000-07:00

so, i've reading a metric shit-ton of ecopoetry lately and while it's not really my genre (mixing environmental justice and poiesis has never really seemed like a recipe for anything but disaster, but i digress), i thought i'd write a poem mimicking some of the gestures i see in a lot of these poems. let me know what you think!
------------------------------

i'm eleven miles from pasco
traveling south on US-395
when it hits me

this smell that clouds the air
invisibly suffuses my car
slides through the air vents
and dives down my nose

at first contact it's
already too late
it's everywhere

i don't smell it as much as feel it
it punches my sinuses like a double shot of vodka
with slightly rotting sausage floating in it

at this point, my eyes are watering
the factory smokestacks dotting the banks of the columbia
in the distance
reduced to white smudges against a blue sky

after a few moments, my brain assimilates the assault crookedly
responding with both nausea and hunger
to a smell that makes less sense on the level of instinct
than the sensation of having your own arm hacked off

now, at various points in my life you could have rightly called me
hippie
bleeding-heart
inhumanist
vegan
idealist
granola
etc.
and it would have been accurate

but

i wouldn't be exaggerating if i said i would gladly give up
my car
my computer
my apartment
my guitars
my furniture
my bed
my bicycle
my microwave
my refrigerator
my records
my TV
and my shoes

if it would make it so no one on earth would ever
have to smell
that smell
again.

RIDESHARE: Wilco 04.28.2000

2010-10-06T15:01:00.000-07:00

like all the other millenia-era wilco shows i've listened to lately, this one was a grower. at first i spent awhile nearly driving off the road while screwing with my CD player's EQ (the recording, though a SBD, is not necessarily the best, and the vocals are really low in the mix with the odd combination of drums and keys being preeminent). on top of all that, "candyfloss", which is the first song and one of my early-era wilco favorites, starts about 2/3rds of the way through the song. what is it with wilco recordings lately and cutting off the first half of the opening song?

i was considering taking the disc out and playing something else until "i must be high" came on. it was a really interesting version: energetic and folksy, but with that unmistakable post-summerteeth electronic touch. this was a theme throughout the show. some of the best moments of this show are the times when you get to hear a.m. or being there songs sounding more like yankee hotel outtakes than their original versions. another main set highlight was "hotel arizona", hands down my favorite song on being there, recreated into a wholly different animal and yet still just familiar enough to be fascinating.

this band sounds so different than the raucous noise-jam band of even a few years previous. while they're clearly still willing to experiment on stage, they do so with a little bit more patience, and ultimately their sound is better for it. take, for example, "how to fight loneliness", which gets a few little instrumental jams throughout the song. while it might have been "experimental" for the wilco of '97 to scale this quiet, introspective song into a flurry of feedback screams as it neared its end, this wilco peppers the song with quiet but complex instrumental interplay that's just as impressive but that suits the tone of the song. when every single song doesn't end with everyone screaming and guitars catching on fire, it makes the songs in the set more distinguishable and thus makes the show in general a more nuanced experience.

anyway, one of the "loud" highlights, as usual, was "someone else's song", played as a metal dirge. the main set closed with "misunderstood", and most of the double (triple?) encore was mermaid avenue songs. so if you're not a fan of those albums, the second half of this show might be a wash for you. i really dug it, especially, as usual, the "hoodoo voodoo" closer.

if there's one gripe i have about this show it's that, for all the summerteeth material in the setlist, none of the songs were played like summerteeth songs. maybe this was a choice on the band's part, or maybe they simply just didn't have the equipment, but when you hear a song like "can't stand it" (or "candyfloss", or "i'm always in love", etc.) without all the little flourishes that are present on the album version, the song tends to sound less artistically different and more just flat.

RIDESHARE: Phish 06.25.1995

2010-10-06T14:24:00.000-07:00

one more review to dredge up from memory from last week, and then i'll be caught up to what i listened to yesterday. then i can go back to blogging about other things that actually matter.

RIDESHARE is my 2010 version of my old Madden 2003 franchise posts...

this '95 show (setlist here) was a pretty fascinating meld of the technically precise, no-holds-barred '94 sound and the more experimental spacy '96 sound. like, in all the best ways. first of all, the show starts with pretty standard but solid "ya mar" and "AC/DC Bag" (when does "AC/DC" ever really sound any different, anyway?), then immediately jumps into very early versions of "taste" and "theme from the bottom", both of which are instructive and exploratory.

to address my own setlist bias for a moment, i'm basically just in love with the first half of this set. while i could generally take or leave "AC/DC bag", "ya mar", "taste", "theme", "if i could", "divided sky", and "i didn't know" in one set, even if they were terrible versions, would make a killer set in my opinion. and these are far from terrible versions. one of my favorite phish guilty pleasures are the noodle-guitar-and-piano jams at the end of songs like "if i could" and "squirming coil", and this "if i could" brings that jamming in spades.

this show has another great "scent of a mule" with some page pyrotechnics, though "maze" is, well, it's just "maze". i've never really understood the appeal of that song. the "mike's" > "why don't we do it in the road?" > "hold your head up" > "weekapaug" string is probably the highlight of the show. again, i'm biased because i love the "mike's" > "weekapaug" duo as much as i love anything phish, but this version of "mike's" is particularly gnarly ("gnarly" in this case meaning "super dark guitar-led jamming").

overall, this show wasn't on the same level as some of the shows i've previously reviewed as far as setlists go, or as far as playing (there was a lot of technically great jamming, but a few of the songs went on for upwards of 10 minutes without actually really developing any themes or differentiation). however, there were some standout moments (middle of each set) that would be worth another listen.

stun the puppy, burn the whale!

2010-10-05T19:36:00.000-07:00

one of my favorite moments (if not THE favorite moment) of the phish shows i've seen so far...just found some youtube videos of it for the first time.

the last song they played at blossom this past summer was a great version of "squirming coil", which ended, as you can see below, with page alone on stage playing a piano solo. then, he finished, the spotlight went off, and the lights came up for the night. great encore.

two versions of the video, neither of which are amazing quality, but they both do the job :)

hang it on the fridge!: my translation of genesis from 2006

2010-10-04T18:07:00.000-07:00

i did this translation as part of my language project back in 2006. it's translated (if i remember correctly) from king alfred's old english. i don't know if anyone will find this interesting, and i'll be the first to admit that it's not the best translation, but it's certainly closer to the sense of the "original" text than anything we've got today, for what that's worth. my notes in parenthesis:

Also, the serpent was (geappre) than all the other beasts that God had made across the earth; and the serpent said to the woman: ‘Did God forbid you (plural), that you (plural) cannot eat of any tree in Paradise?’ The woman answered: ‘The fruit of the trees which are in Paradise we eat: and of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, God bade us not to eat, not to touch that tree, lest we die.’ Then replied the serpent to the woman: ‘You will not die at all, though you eat of that tree. But God surely knows that your eyes will be opened on the day which you eat of that tree; and you will be then like angels, know both good and evil.’ Then the woman saw that the tree was good to eat from, and it seemed to her beautiful to the eyes and pleasant to sight; and she took of the tree’s fruit and ate, and she gave it to her husband: he ate it. And both their eyes were opened: they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves and they made breeches (clothes?).

In response God came and they heard his voice, there he walked in the garden during midday, and Adam and his wife did hide from God’s sight in the midst of the trees of the garden. God called to Adam, and said: ‘Adam, where are you?’ He said: ‘I heard your voice, sire, in the garden, and I was afraid, for I am naked, and I hid.’ God said: ‘How do you say that you were naked, if you have not ate of the tree that I had bade you not to eat of?’ Adam said: ‘That woman that you gave to be with me took of the tree and I ate.’ God said to the woman: ‘Why did you do that?’ She said: ‘The serpent deceived me and I ate.’

God said to the serpent: ‘For this that you did, you are cursed among all cattle and wild beasts. You will go on your breast and eat the earth all the days of your life. I set enmity between you and the woman and your offspring and hers; he will crush your head and you will (strike?) at his heel.’

To the woman said God also: ‘I multiply your misery in your childbearing; in pain you will bring forth children and you will be under your husband’s authority and he will control you.’ To Adam he said: ‘Because you listened to your wife’s voice and you ate of the tree that I bade you not to eat, your work on the earth will be cursed; in sorrow will you eat of the earth all the days of your life. Thorns and brambles will spring forth, and you will eat the earth’s plants. In the sweat of your face you earn your bread, then you will return to earth, from there you were taken, for you are dust and to dust will return.’

why don't more video games address critical thinking?

2010-10-04T17:31:00.000-07:00

so, after reading this article over breakfast this morning (oats with smuckers' jelly mixed in, as i forgot to buy enough actual fruit to get me through the week), i got to thinking about a few of bogost's points. and, since i'm taking a break from exam-ing this afternoon, i thought i'd blog about them. you know, like a real, old-fashioned blog post.

i really like the way that bogost breaks down and effectively dissolves the idea of a free speech debate around the content of the new medal of honor's use of the taliban as a multiplayer (team? side? what's the right word here?). that the debate boils down to whether or not it is tasteful to include the term "taliban" in the game does in fact illustrate how little of a political point the term's inclusion - or the taliban's inclusion - was meant to make in the first place. what's (maybe) worse, the fact that taking the term out of the game - replacing it with the catch-all term "opposing force" seems to have largely sated the game's critics shows how little the popular view of video games still expect from those games. in a time when so many are ready to fiercely defend video games' status as "art", doesn't it seem strange that the things that still get us talking critically about games most readily are things that are projected onto those games from outside cultural contexts?

as bogost mentions, the inclusion of the taliban in medal of honor could have been a point within the game and therefore also outside the game for discussion regarding the nature of war and the ambiguity of conflict. instead, what you get is the same old "you can play as the bad guy!" bullshit "special" game mechanic, made controversial by a label slapped on it meant to refer to real-world events outside the game, and thus stir association with the controversy attached to those events. the bottom line is that even our most controversial, thought-inspiring games generally refuse to start discussions of their own, and are content to ride on the backs of controversies already being enacted on the culture at large.

example: GTA, the game series best-known for pissing people off in the real world (the fact that it introduced the genre of the sandbox shooter is never nearly as important, somehow). GTA isn't controversial because the game itself forces you, through its gameplay and/or story, to confront interesting moral conundrums or engage in critical thinking. it's controversial because you can shoot hookers and shoot down police helicopters in a fighter jet. so what? i mean, i don't want to derail my point into a different conversation about whether GTA's level of violence is acceptable, but, seriously: so what? how is the conversation about whether or not playing GTA will turn our kids into murderous maniacs a more important conversation to be having than a more basic conversation about why, 30 years after the NES, we're still playing games that only challenge the gamer to mindlessly gun down everything that stands in their way en route to a completely heroic objective in a universe of perfectly black-and-white morality?

games have the ability to generate such a conversation, but they so rarely do. players stomp everything in their way for hours upon hours en route to rescuing the princess, but nobody ever stops to think that, hey, when luke blew up the death star, he was technically killing thousands of potentially innocent people.

does this mean that i think every game in the universe needs to address the metaphysical implications of mortality, or that the next time you boot up your franchise in madden you should have to face maddeningly (no pun intended) complex decisions regarding the emotional repercussions of your fake players' professional sports careers on their marriages? of course not. part of what makes games fun is the magic circle, the idea that there's a border beyond which the game doesn't go. sometimes i shoot a scientist in half-life or blow him up with a pack of explosives simply because i can. precisely because it's something that would be completely outrageous in real life but within the game there are no consequences. games like medal of honor build their appeal on the basis of the idea that you can be one man and single handedly save america from the taliban, or the nazis, or the combine, or whatever. of course that's ridiculous, but that's often why we play.

however, is it too much to ask to want games that are still games, but are smarter? here, as much as i HATE intimating that video games and movies are in pretty much any way related, i think bogost has a good point comparing the criticality of games to that of film. sure, a lot of people go to the movies for explosions, or date movies, films that could hardly be considered "critical thinkers". at the same time, though, you have a movie like avatar becoming the biggest movie of all time. now, say what you will about the mythic, derivative story (aren't all our big stories derived from myths?), at the core of avatar is a film that forces the viewer to consider a lot of post-Columbian assumptions of Western superiority...it's a popcorn flick,but it's also a postcolonial text, albeit one that's fairly obvious and ham-handed. and when people saw it, even people who weren't stuffy lit majors or cultural critics, people fucking talked about it. for months. it started a discussion that likes of which i haven't seen touched off by a movie since The Matrix. which, incidentally, was another movie that worked both on the level of popcorn flick and metaphysical garbage masher. whether or not you thought either of those movies were good, nobody can argue that they don't force the viewer to confront a critical subtext amidst the explosions. people make movies that are all about challenging assumptions, too: brokeback mountain, food, inc., restrepo, and people go see that shit.

yet, then there's video games, sitting forlornly on the fence, complaining that nobody will buy them if people are forced to actually think. the primary difference between movies and games is obvious - interactivity. the interaction the player has with the game has to be enjoyable, or else the player won't come back. but can't you have interaction without casting the player as a Good or Evil in the game world? wouldn't players be more likely to want to play a game if the character they embodied was able to interact more realistically with a more morally ambiguous world? there's a difference between wanting to play in the magic circle because games are fun and wanting to escape into a stupider microcosm of the real world where nothing you ever do is questioned.

i have little to know experience with MMORPGs, but i almost wonder if those types of games simulate a critical reality more than traditional games, because at least within the world of an MMORPG, your actions effect others and you have to acknowledge some level of society.

geesh...i was going to talk about some examples of games, but i see i've gotten way carried away. i guess i'll see if anyone responds to this and then maybe i'll write a part two...

DO NOT HOLD OVER PEOPLE

2010-10-04T16:27:00.000-07:00

i just got a huge kick out of the warning on this coffeemaker, as i instinctively took "do not hold over people" in an emotional sense rather than a physical sense. as in: "if you ever find yourself in a messy breakup argument with your ex-significant other, you CANNOT say 'how can you say i don't love you?! i bought you that coffeemaker!'".

'twas funny to me at least.

RIDESHARE - Phish 06.06.1996

2010-10-04T14:31:00.000-07:00

so after my near-transcendent experience with the '94 shows, i decided to bounce around a bit, and first went back to '96 (i also listened to an '02 show last week, but misplaced the last disc, so i'm sort of waiting to find it before i write anything). this '96 soundboard is a "page show"...you know, one of those shows when, time and time again all of trey's guitar pyrotechnics are completely overshadowed by page just ripping off one absurd keys solo after another. i like these kinds of shows, but if you're one of those fans who only enjoys hours of guitar noodling and nothing else, you probably won't like this one.

sEtlIsT

usually, a show opening with "split open and melt" is not a good omen for me. i don't know what it is about that song, but i've never really enjoyed it. the hook repeats too many times, and the jam at the end is usually too structured to really break into anything interesting. that said, this was a decent version (i.e. better than bad, at least) and the segue into "poor heart" was pretty unexpected and hilarious. this was page madness moment #1. "runaway jim" and "funky bitch" were par for the course, which is to say, awesome. then there was "theme from the bottom", which was page madness moment #2, followed indirectly by "scent of a mule" in which entire warehouses of keyboards and pianos must have been melted to fine ash. the first set closed with a pretty by-the-books "highway to hell", which prompted a horn jam by yours truly.

part of the draw of this show for me comes from the fact that billy breathes has some of my favorite phish songs on it, and here you get to hear a number of those songs in early form, before years of touring sort of formalized the jams that build around them. "theme" was one of those, and the second set brought extremely raw versions of "waste" and "character zero". they weren't the best versions i've ever heard, but it was interesting to hear them so differently. the second set had few standout-type moments otherwise, but was overall a great set of tunes. the show closed with page rocking one more time on "ya mar", and then a cover of hendrix's "fire" that had trey sounding more like '92 or '93 phish than '96.

RIDESHARE - Jeff Tweedy 02.25.2006

2010-10-04T14:09:00.000-07:00

well, hello there. it's been about thirty-five years since the last rideshare...exam-writing has intervened, and lindsey has been going to tri-cities with me often lately, which means that 35-minute "tweezer" jams don't go over as well as when it's just me in an empty car.

these reviews are actually from about a week and a half ago, and so much has happened since then, i don't really remember the content of the shows that well, or even what a "CD" is, really. nonetheless, i'm going to take my best shot at reviewing mr. tweedy's show at mandel hall in chicago, for which the setlist can be found here.

i'm getting to be really fond of starting out these cold, cloudy, morning drives with a mellow wilco or tweedy show, then following it up with a blistering early phish set on my drive back out of the canyon of heat-induced despair otherwise known as tri-cities (despair only because the temperature is like 20 degrees higher there than in pullman due to elevation droppage). anyway, this tweedy show really hit the spot.

it was a great soundboard, and the songs were a great mix of the ones that you can hear in similar incarnation on the sunken treasure dvd (which you should buy if you're a wilco fan at all) and a lot of songs from a ghost is born. hearing really clean, precise solo acoustic versions of tunes like "muzzle of bees", "spiders" and "theologians" was a treat. there were even some surprises among the expected, more "folky" choices in the set: "one by one", "(was i) in your dreams", "bob dylan's 49th beard".

though the third set followed the usual procedure for this particular tour: usually nels and/or glenn joining tweedy onstage for a few songs, the songs for this particular show were a bit of a surprise. getting to hear rearranged versions of "in a future age" and "dash 7" was maybe the highlight of the whole show.

overall, a great combination of a unique setlist, solid sound, and of course a solid performance makes this, for my money, almost as good as the aforementioned sunken treasure audio companion for a collection of solo tweedy tunes.

ye olde recordings have finally be re-upped!

2010-09-29T14:28:00.000-07:00

though my hunt for an easy website design tool and time to make an AWESOME personal/professional website continue to fall through (it's been what, 2 years now?), i've finally found a convenient and non-stupid way to re-up all of my old sessions and records for download.

all hail mediafire!

okay, now i seriously have to go write my exams.

mint medley session available for free download and consumption!

2010-09-27T15:28:00.000-07:00

so in defiance of my coming exams, i found myself staying home saturday afternoon and setting up a recording space in my bathroom. i'd been toying with the idea of using the bathroom to record any guitar-based songs lindsey would want to put on her album, but i'd never actually tested the room to see what it sounded like. so, i decided to take an hour or three and see what a song or two of mine sounded like in there, sung from different parts of the room, sung with the mics shifted around, with the shower curtain open or closed, etc.

by 8pm i had recorded 14 songs.

so, i thought it would be fitting to post them online as a soundcloud session before i disappear into the abyss for three weeks. there aren't any new songs here (i'm mostly working on poems right now, and usually those flesh out into songs eventually, but none have yet), but there are a lot of new covers. here's the whole setlist:

1. Angel From Montgomery (John Prine cover)
2. Damn Sam (I Love a Woman That Rains) (Ryan Adams cover)
3. Dusty Roads
4. The Melody
5. Albuquerque (Neil Young cover)
6. Bob Dylan's 49th Beard (Jeff Tweedy cover)
7. Palace
8. Ripple (Grateful Dead cover)
9. Forget the Flowers (Wilco cover)
10. Hey Sue
11. Sample in a Jar (Phish cover)
12. Box Full of Letters (Wilco cover)
13. Better to Be Loved > Jam > Millie > Shelter From the Storm (Bob Dylan) > Millie
14. Via Chicago (Wilco cover)

and here's the soundcloud widget:
Mint Medley Session by lazyblazers