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6 Sep 2004

I was going to have a message up here that said: "I'm gone until Labor Day." But then the Carleton network didn't let me do that before I left.

The Shortlist prize committee has a longlist of albums to choose from for the Shortlist 2004 prize. It's kind of too long to look at very closely.

I'll write more about my lengthy trip west later, but tonight I'm working on the concert list, which is bigger than I can imagine. There are at least 33 worthwhile shows in the Twin Cities this fall. The worst day is Saturday 16 October with four simultaneous concerts I'd like to go to. There are five nights with at least two listed. This is insane.

This one's not going to make to my concert calendar, but wow, Dennis DeYoung (of Styx) and Symphony Orchestra sounds like a lot of excitement!

I have summarized my trip out west. Don't feel pressured to read it, though, if that's not really your thing:
* * *

My Trip Out West. No Pictures Because I Don't Feel Like It.

First, there was Mount Rushmore, which didn't impress me as much as it might have had I not been to Stone Mountain, Georgia about four years earlier. Stone Mountain has the advantage of being a geologic oddity as well as an enormous stone carving memorializing US history.

Wyoming offered the first of hundreds of miles of scenic mountainous switchback roads. We drove through Yellowstone National Park for a couple of days, and found a pizza place in Gardiner, Montana that was staffed solely by really attractive French-Canadian waitresses. Yellowstone was awe-inspiring as well.

After van-trouble in Idaho, we made it out to my aunt and uncle's place in the mountains southeast of Medford, Oregon. Eastern Oregon was kind of desolate, but I had a really good pastrami sandwich on rye bread there. In Ashland, Oregon, where there are trees and greenery in bountiful supply, I bought Graham Greene's End of the Affair at a used bookstore while waiting for our time at the laundromat to be over. I am not yet finished with it.

My relatives live in a 150 square-foot building while they methodically proceed toward completion of the real house they're building on the property they have. It was all very rustic, but I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. They're probably at least twice as interesting as any of my other sets of relatives.

Our van had problems again, so we got new tires, and then drove to the California coast. We saw redwoods, sequoias, and signs that said "Maximum Speed" in addition to the more common "Speed Limit" signs. I was unable to figure out the purpose of the max-speed signs.

We spent a day in San Francisco. Luckily on our walk around the city we hit City Lights bookstore, where I would have preferred to stay until closing, and then probably to go back again the next day. I tried taking pictures from Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill toward the end of the day, but I couldn't figure out how to switch off the flash on our borrowed digital camera.

Yosemite National Park was less thrilling because of the fact that we'd already seen Yellowstone, miles of mountains and trees, and Crater Lake in Oregon. The park still provided some impressive views.

Sony Pictures Studios in Los Angeles was interesting but not as great as I'd have liked. Later on I made a pilgrimage to Grauman's Chinese Theatre, which is awe-inspiring. I could have sat and stared at the patterns on the quite high ceiling for hours, and that might have been better than watching Anacondas, which was the only thing showing at the time. The screen was, according to my estimation, 75-80 feet wide and there were probably 1100-1300 seats, with more legroom than I knew what to do with. It'd be nice to see a good movie there sometime.

After that, I drove around in the hills and took some video which wasn't very impressive afterwards.

The next night was spent in Las Vegas, which was fairly boring. It was pretty much the same thing repeated fifty times with surface variations. Enormous hotels with giant casinos, multiple buffets and restaurants, and a lot of people looking to blow their wads of cash. My brother claims we walked by the top current poker player in the world, but I haven't seen him on TV yet to confirm it. I don't plan on returning to Las Vegas, unless it's to play the penny slots, which with up to 100,000 credits, could provide some extended entertainment. But then, what kind of payout do you get with penny slots? Not much I'd bet.

I failed to care much about the Grand Canyon after having my senses dulled by two weeks of seeing natural wonders and spending every last minute with my family.

We drove back from Flagstaff in one, unbroken, twenty-five hour stretch. It was kind of long.

The tourist-type places imbued me with some sense of national unity, seeing all the various license plates gathered at whatever legendary attraction we might have been visiting. Also, the German speaking tourists outnumbered all other non-English people by far. Maybe it was German vacation month, I don't know.

My dad and my brother like to be jerks to each other, and also seem to share the habit of complaining loudly about things they don't understand. Also, they, along with my mom, like to make pointless observations that contain no insight nor potential for change, but then few share my penchant for silence. I did read something a while ago, maybe in The Oregonian, about how peace is much more possible when people talk less, which I heartily agree with. I'm sure I'll feel much more positive about my immediate family after a few weeks or months back at college.

When we got back my car wouldn't start, but it seems something had gone wrong in the fuel system between the tank and the engine, so hopefully it was something random that was the simple result of sitting for such a long time. I'll be driving it to Northfield in two-and-a-half days.

While in San Francisco, I think I read something about the Pacific Film Archive, which made me want to study film at Berkeley when I resume my schooling at some point after graduation.

Trail of Dead just bumped up the tally of great shows in the Cities (plus the Cave) this fall to thirty-four.

* * *
Tonight after finishing The End of the Affair, which lived up to the tortured brilliance of its last line that inspired me to buy it in the first place (you have to find it for yourself), I took a walk around town; not quite around the whole thing, but a fair amount of it. I did this because I can't really do anything else after finishing a book for at least fifteen minutes. My mind always starts spinning and I invariably end up staring at the clock on the wall until I've calmed down enough to concentrate on something else. Wayland was not very interesting, although there was an owl hooting and the stars were quite visible thanks to the cloudless weather we've had since returning from the trip. The sidewalks are kind of uneven, though; I'm glad I didn't trip on anything.

I came into possession of a headphone extension cord, so I can now sit up to 26 feet away from my computer and listen to loud music at night. I think this should pretty easily cover my Burton single, although I haven't actually seen it yet.

9 Sep 2004

I enjoyed this article about college and workload from the brand new issue of Professor Yeti.

I can't seem to figure out if the Thermals ever tour, but I want to see them a lot. I would also like to see Keith Fullerton Whitman play live, probably because I just listened to Antithesis for the first time in its entirety. Oh man, now I'm listening to Terry Riley's Rainbow in Curved Air. The nighttime is the right time for experimental/electronic/minimalist/ambient freakouts, for sure. [Note: Have you played Pinbot for NES? Because it kind of sounds like this.]

Speaking of the nighttime, I'm trying to get back on a college schedule after getting to sleep in approximately four times in the past two months. That means it's definitely after 2 am right now. Since my first class doesn't start until 12:30, I just can't afford to waste time waking up bright and early or anything like that.

11 Sep 2004

I moved to Northfield again and I think the annoying cold I had for the past few days is over. It wasn't a real convenient time to get sick, but I seem to have gotten past it.

I reserved a refrigerator, which I managed not to do for three years, but it makes sense this since I can't access one and we don't even have water fountains to provide cold water.

I made a list of all the radio stations I can get this evening, which should interest at least Kevin. It's not official, since I need to check some of the information by listening for station IDs, but this website was pretty helpful. I'm having a hard time with 107.5, since it's a Spanish language station.

Before the radio, I went to Minneapolis to Let It Be Records. I got tickets to Interpol and Drive-By Truckers for myself (First Avenue shows), the savings on which paid for my gas, parking, and maybe even the album I bought. That album would be Wiley's Treddin' On Thin Ice. Wiley, you may not remember, was one of John Darnielle's alternate presidential candidates on Last Plane To Jakarta, which has gotten kind of messed up during their move to a Movable Type-based system. The album is pretty good, with rapid-fire lyrics and some pleasing beats and production underneath.

I only had to buy one book this term, which was for my math class. I feel a little unfulfilled by my trip to the bookstore.

After the radio stations, I sorted the iTunes shared playlists available to me into "interesting" and "not interesting" categories. The "interesting" playlists make up 18% of the total playlists, according to my interests. Just now I'm listening to A.C. Newman's The Slow Wonder c/o Becky's Music.

Speaking of iTunes, did you know that if you right-click on a playlist and choose "Open," it appears in its own iTunes player window? That's kind of interesting.

Whoever owns "Classic Rock" on the Carleton network deserves a lot of credit. The songs are all meticulously tagged and the selection is fantastic. It looks like they had a lot of time this summer to read Pitchfork and a fast internet connection to fileshare with, but even so, it's kind of stunning to behold. I just wish the connection was working. I can't figure out who the person is by any particular predilection for an artist or genre, but I guess that makes it all the more mysterious.

I'm moving surprisingly quickly through Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust. I had wanted to get Vile Bodies, which, in his review of the new film Bright Young Things, A.O. Scott suggested is one of the funniest English language novels ever written. But the Carleton library didn't have it.

13 Sep 2004

Wow, my homework for Cyberculture: The New Digital Image was the best ever. The first part was a blog post that included a picture. The second part was a short outline-based analysis of The Face of Tomorrow; specifically, how it differs from pre-internet art and photography.

Also, John Schott mentioned in class that either students in the class or all Carleton students are going to get free TypePad accounts, which could mean an imminent switch back to that service for this very weblog-type thing you're reading right now. He also linked to this site on his main blog that ranks the most used words in the English language. I discovered that "about" is the most used two-syllable word in the language, but I didn't feel like trying for three syllables.

The Internet is going to explode

I've sort of fixed up an alternative to that thing on my blog where I displayed albums and books.

My intranet works just fine, but my internet connection has slowed down to something worse than dial-up. I hope this will clear up in a while, but if not I suppose I'll have to ask for help from ITS.

I guess my internet is working at full Carleton speed again; that is, something less than desirable but better than what I'd had for a while there.

16 Sep 2004

After it was brought up in class, I decided I might as well get myself a Gmail account. It was pretty easy, considering all I had to do was reload this page a couple of times until there were invites available and then get myself invited.

Also, I got this terrific email today, the full text of which read: "I just thought you should know, in case you didn't, that you have a lot of music AND that you should be very proud." You really can't beat that, I suppose.

I think I'll be getting back on board with Audioscrobbler once I restart iTunes, which will be fun.

17 Sep 2004

Scratch that part about me getting back with Audioscrobbler. Their plug-in still has issues with my computer, so I'll just have to wait till that's resolved.

It looks like I've also fixed how the site looks in Internet Explorer, by going with a style sheet rather than just a header in each file.

Hopefully this will be one of the busiest weekends I'll have for a while. Today I had class, two hours of tabling for Film Society, setting up the email list and the website for Film Society (better than it looked yesterday), and getting ready for programming (we might have the correct number of applicants to fill the schedule, which would be terrific). Tomorrow I'll probably be working until I watch Kill Bill 2 at 11:30, even if everything goes well. Sunday I get to start on my three homework assignments. I'm glad there weren't any concerts I absolutely had to go to this weekend, although I'm strongly considering seeing the Black Keys on Tuesday, time permitting of course.

Also, it is 5/8 of a mile from Burton to my car in the parking lot.

It's so late I'm embarrassed to send out emails.

But, why go to bed when I can be listening to M83's Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts c/o the "Arcade Fire" playlist, formerly the "Classic Rock" playlist. [Pitchfork review and interview.] I've really got to get this album. It reminds of the Ratatat debut what with the dance/electronic synthesizers making more rock-oriented music, which seems to be a pretty fearsome combination. It also makes me hope that M83 go on another North American tour soon. I'll be seeing Ratatat this Sunday at the Quest, in perhaps my most anticipated show of the term.

I was thinking today that Pitchfork needs some RSS action, because it would work really well for them and for me, the reader. I was thinking this because our assignment for Cyberculture: New Digital Image is to start using a newsreader. I had a number of abortive attempts for various reasons before settling on a plug-in for Mozilla Firefox. From what I saw with the other free Windows newsreaders, the plug-in, called Sage, is pretty terrific. It looks nicer, is far more functional, and it's conveniently located inside the browser without a clunky web interface. I was going to post a comment on our class weblog (which I'm tempted to call a "clog") about how great Sage is, but then I realized how incredibly geeky that would look at the current hour. I mean geeky is good to a certain point, but after that point you start getting weird looks.

Also, I think I'm going to turn those colorbars into links back to the homepage, when I have more time. It'll be great, I tell you. I'm also going to start a WordPress blog using Carleton webspace, so watch for that link in the near future.

21 Sep 2004

I attended the Black Keys concert as planned this evening, along with Betsy Pfeiffer '05, Sinda Nichols '05, Colin Browne '04, Tracy Hruska '04, and the inimitable Travis Lund '04.

First, they were showing Touch of Evil on the screen that First Avenue pulls down in front of the stage before and between sets. That reminded me that I need to finish watching that; I don't remember how long ago I got it from the library and just watched the first part. Then they switched to an animated history of aviation, which was some wartime propaganda from the 1940's, and a ton of Disney shorts with the same theme from the same time period.

The Cuts were kind of pathetic. Their performance was lackluster, their frontman was a jerk, and their songs weren't very good. [Note: these often seem to occur together.] Mostly I noticed a lack of good hooks with which they could have drawn the audience in. I'm not convinced they would be a bad band if they could find themselves a good songwriter, but that's about all I can say for them.

The Black Keys tore the place up, and inspired the most appreciative audience I can remember being a willing part of in a long, long time. After the first encore, they were pounding on the stage and shouting, "Thank you!" Naturally, the Keys obliged with another encore.

Though this may be an overused and obvious comparison, their performance reminded me a lot of the White Stripes last summer. The enormous sound they produced just from drums and guitar was surprising and terrific. Patrick Carney pummelled the hell out of his minimal drumset, and Dan Auerbach wrung a beautiful, scorched buzz from his guitar all night long.

One could fault the Black Keys for not being entirely original, but then one would have to discount a lot of really good bands. The Keys clearly have enough talent that can carefully choose traditional blues and other riffs and sounds to combine with their own great stuff without using other people's ideas as a crutch. I'm definitely putting them on my shortlist of bands to see wherever, whenever possible. I'm also putting the way cool Aesthetic Apparatus poster on my wall that I got for five bucks.

22 Sep 2004

The first Film Society of the term went pretty well this evening. As Andrew Biliter noted, attendance was at its normal substandard for what you'd expect with the number of people on campus who seem like they'd be interested in such things.

Eric Smith and I managed to use Zoom, Focus, the Gamma setting, and other things on the projector to make the picture much larger and more attractive than normal. Next week I might even figure out how to use the anamorphic option on both the DVD player and the projector so we don't have to mess with the lens so much. If I get it down to a simple process, maybe SUMO will try it as well.

Also, I have Gmail invites, as might be expected after a period of using the service. I'll probably send them all to the Gmailomatic, unless someone else wants one.

Finally, I've previously neglected to share this thought which occurred to me on the trolley back to the parking garage in San Francisco: If Steve Perry had been backed by a speed metal band, Journey would have been the greatest rock group of all time. At least, I'm pretty sure of this without having actually heard it happen.

On Tuesday, St Olaf is showing Outfoxed at their Viking Theater at 7 pm.

24 Sep 2004

Radio.

I've been meaning to post forever, it seems like.

The first installment of my radio show for this term went pretty well. I played a lot of Galaxie 500's Today, as you may have noticed if you listened or looked at the playlist.

26 Sep 2004

Saturday night is pretty tough to beat as far as weekend nights go. First, after my regular late nap, I watched Mean Girls at SUMO, which was outstanding. Some important criteria for a great SUMO screening were met:
This final element is key. I'm not suggesting that correlation implies causation here by any means, but I'm just saying that almost every really great SUMO I've ever been to (except maybe the Kill Bills) has included an alcoholic glass bottle falling to the non-carpeted floor and rolling around for a while. It's even better if the audience kind of laughs, but not so much as to distract them from the movie.

After SUMO, I attended the party at 506 E. 6th St. The live bluegrass band around the fire in the backyard was pretty amazing, and in addition to potential footage for Charles Petersen Dance Party, there was surprise in-home potential footage for Nick Ver Steegh Dance Party, which I'm thinking would outsell the previous title. Also, there were drinks and great non-live music as well.

27 Sep 2004

Sunday night, I went to the Ascot Room. I only heard the last couple songs of the Junior Boys, because the Quest put the worst band, Macha, at the second-to-last spot, and not the early spot I'd been expecting. Ratatat was pretty great, but didn't diverge much from what's on their album. Macha was too loud and not very fun to listen to. I had to keep myself from leaving due to time and ear-fatigue in order to see Mouse on Mars. Mouse on Mars turned out to be a crazy electronic act with live drums and bass. It was kind of like an exciting dance party for misprogrammed, semi-functional robots who may be hard of hearing. The sounds were rough and not very pleasing, but the tempo and especially the spiritedness of the drummer kept things from getting depressingly atonal, as with Macha's set.

Sarah Moody did indeed burn me a copy of Interpol's new album, so I'm listening to that at the moment. I also noticed that the AAC files I imported sound less than satisfactory on headphones. I've never noticed it to this extent before, so I think I'm going to have to go through the albums I actually own and re-rip them with a higher bit rate. I'll also have to calculate how much space that'll take up. That'll not be a lot of fun, even for me.

Part of the point of my hard-drive full of music is that I don't want perfect-quality copies of albums I don't own, because I plan to either delete them or buy them some day in the future, so theoretically any digital artifacting in the thousands of illegal files I have fits my particular ethical demands, but I suppose there is a difference with the stuff I own and then rip to the computer.

I started going back through my History of Rock journal this evening and noted a few things. One is that the journal is at points revealing of how late I must have made an entry in it, perhaps best exposed by a 131-word sentence. In my defense, it did include a semi-colon. Another thing is that I felt the need to call one author, with whom I vehemently disagreed, a "fuck-up." I must have been feeling refreshingly mean-spirited at the time.

Surfing a big wave

In keeping with kottke.org's Voters Information Guide for the 2004 US Election, I thought I'd post my (unfinished) Listeners Guide to the Best iTunes Playlists on the West Carleton Campus.
iTunes song #12,000: This Mortal Coil's cover of Tim Buckley's "I Must Have Been Blind"