A Holiday Message From Ricky Gervais: Why I'm An Atheist

I'm sure anyone who reads this also follows what I do on Facebook to some extent, but this is so good that I also had to post it here.

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/12/19/a-holiday-message-from-ricky-gervais-why-im-an-atheist/

success!

My beer is moderately drinkable!

Beeeeeer!

Two posts in one day? No one can live at that speed!

So, I brewed my first batch of beer two weeks ago, thanks to a great deal on Groupon that finally kicked my butt into gear. $40 for a complete brew kit and a recipe kit was too much to pass up, given that the beginner equipment kt is usually $80 and a recipe kit usually runs ~$30 for a five gallon batch. It's an Irish Stout, which I'm led to believe is more or less a Guinness clone. It's been sitting in fermentation for 2 weeks and smells like beer. I'm bottling it tomorrow. It appears I haven't entirely ruined everything yet, so keep your fingers crossed. You may have a sixer of moderately drinkable homebrew in your Christmas stocking.

I have to say, for as much as I read leading up to doing the brewing, it didn't really click for me until I actually did it. Now it makes total sense. Next up, I'm planning on doing a strong Belgian witbier, with two-stage fermentation and everything. Here's hoping I don't blow up the apartment - I don't think my $300 deposit will cover it.

New City vs. Old City

Music Scene (you knew I was going to start with this, right?)

New City takes this one handily. I mean come on, Prince and Bob Dylan, enough said. Well, ok, not enough said, because this city's music scene is out of this world. I miss 4 or 5 shows a week here that I probably would have gone to in KC. The First Ave Club is great. There is a great collection of local musicians here as well. Of them, I've only seen Cloud Cult so far, but they are lovely. Doomtree, Jeremy Messersmith, and Mason Jennings are probably next up.

Art Scene

This one goes to KC. Granted, I haven't explored this much yet in Minneapolis, but there's no real companion to KC's Crossroads neighborhood and the associated First Fridays, which are really incredible.

Politics

Minneapolis takes this one. Minneapolis is pretty reliably leftie. Not being split across a state border makes it a lot easier to get civic-y stuff done (see: light rail), and as far as I have seen, there's no poaching of businesses between cities, at least not on the level of KC. Other than that, I don't know too much about the politics here yet.

Weather

Kansas City's too hot. Minneapolis is too cold. Minneapolis gets the slight edge here, because I deal with the cold better than extreme heat.

Dining

Kansas City has world class barbecue, and a pretty good food scene. Minneapolis restaurants in general have a remarkable selection of vegetarian entrees - not that I'm vegetarian, but it's striking in comparison to KC. Every hole in the wall place has something like vegan chicken nuggest or mock duck tacos or something. It's kind of great to explore this stuff, which is widely off the menu in KC. Haven't tried a ton of places yet, for fear of offending my poor wallet, but I like what I've seen so far.

Transit

See the aforementioned light rail, add buses that people actually take, and Minneapolis wins this one by a landslide.

Downtown

While Minneapolis lacks anything like the Power and Light District or the Crossroads, Nicollet Mall and the surrounding area are kind of amazing. Tons of cool restaurants and music venues. And everything is clean and there are always tons of people out at all hours. I have to call this one a draw...

Living Conditions

Well, housing is a lot more expensive here. We live in an apartment in the burbs, which is certainly an adjustment from our house in the thick of it in KC, but we are adjusting. Having light rail to take into the city is great (no driving or paying for parking), but there really isn't a lot to do in Burnsville. We're certainly not roughly a mile from two happening neighborhoods like we were in KC, but we're not near the crime either. I love the old house in KC, but I have to give the nod to Minneapolis here. The crime was a rough thing to deal with in KC. Living in an apartment has its ups and downs. Our management is pretty incompetent, but hey, getting all the laundry done in parallel is great. And we have a pretty large apartment for the price up here.

Public Radio

I love KCUR, but MPR is here. That means The Current in addition to a classical station and a regular NPR news station. Despite A Prairie Home Companion being recorded here, I have to give this one to Minneapolis, mostly on the greatness of The Current.

Job

My job here pays marginally more and has, on balance, slightly better benefits. It's pretty boring, and there's too much bureaucracy and process and 20 ways of doing the same thing, and my coworkers were totally way cooler at the old job (and I'm not just saying that because some of them read this). I have to give the nod to the old job. My Modern Warfare skills have totally gotten rusty. Everyone still says "the tire company?" when I tell them where I work.

Miscellaneous

Like I said, it generally seems a lot cleaner here than in KC. It's not total panic on the roads when snow falls. They actually have smartly planned bike lanes and buses take the shoulder in rush hour. I miss my group of friends in KC, and I know it will take time to build something similar here. It's still a little weird to live in the burbs again, but driving (a lot) less is really nice. I still like KC a lot, and I am having trouble distancing myself from it, but I guess that will come in time.

Only Shallow

There are relatively few songs that, when they come up on random, force me to listen to the entire associated album immediately. Only Shallow by My Bloody Valentine is one of those songs. That riff is simply ridiculous. Amorphous and interesting and ass-kicking and catchy all at the same time... who cares if you can't make out the vocals? That's kind of the shoegazer thing.

Forgive the laughable early 90s video.

Watch. Listen.

One for every year he's away

Ok, because it's Tom Waits, and it's amazing, and I live in Minneapolis now (and have been to 9th and Hennepin a number of times), I have to post this.

--------

Well it's Ninth and Hennepin
All the doughnuts have names that sound like prostitutes
And the moon's teeth marks are on the sky
Like a tarp thrown all over this
And the broken umbrellas like dead birds
And the steam comes out of the grill
Like the whole goddamn town's ready to blow...
And the bricks are all scarred with jailhouse tattoos
And everyone is behaving like dogs
And the horses are coming down Violin Road
And Dutch is dead on his feet
And all the rooms they smell like diesel
And you take on the dreams of the ones who have slept here
And I'm lost in the window, and I hide in the stairway
And I hang in the curtain, and I sleep in your hat...
And no one brings anything small into a bar around here
They all started out with bad directions
And the girl behind the counter has a tattooed tear
"One for every year he's away", she said
Such a crumbling beauty, ah
There's nothing wrong with her that a hundred dollars won't fix
She has that razor sadness that only gets worse
With the clang and the thunder of the Southern Pacific going by
And the clock ticks out like a dripping faucet
'til you're full of rag water and bitters and blue ruin
And you spill out over the side to anyone who will listen...
And I've seen it all, I've seen it all
Through the yellow windows of the evening train...

I am not my father, or an extended blog post title in honor of Sufjan Stevens, who I saw in concert last night, and who has a preponderance for long s

....ong titles. I blew past the Blogger post title limit!

Last night, I spent a couple of hours walking up and down Nicollet Mall and Hennepin downtown before the Sufjan Stevens concert. It's a really cool area. It seems like the most conventional of businesses are there (Target, Walgreens, etc), but they did an excellent job of using the existing urban fabric for their buildings, which is not something those businesses tend to do. I know that Target, being headquartered here, has an impetus to look cool and invest in downtown, but I was really impressed with their store that was shoehorned into this odd two-story space. A two-story Target. How about that?

My grey Fedora made its Minneapolis debut last night. While I was walking around, the cutest little girl ever (maybe 6 or 7) said to me "man, you looking' REAL fancy!", and started imitating my walk. It was really the cutest thing I could possibly imagine. The actual amount of my fanciness is a topic up for debate.

The Orpheum Theatre is nothing short of amazing. It was built in the 1920s and very obviously taken care of very carefully. I love old theaters like this, especially for concerts, and this one is in impeccable shape. The acoustics were also excellent.

Once I got in, I wandered around for a while admiring the architecture of the place, ordered a gin and tonic, and took my seat. I was sitting next to the cousin of the girl who I bought the ticket from, and she struck up a conversation. It was nice to talk to a new person who's into the same random stuff I am, but it did make me (once again) realize that I am a terribly awkward conversationalist. These things happen, I suppose. She had just moved to town too, so we talked about getting lost, where we were from, and Asthmatic Kitty records and other artists we liked on that label. It's really the first time I've had a conversation with a random stranger at a show, and it was nice.

The above is deceptive. I was thinking, oh, hey, Sufjan Stevens is touring solo. That's cool. his arrangements are fairly complex, but hey, maybe he's got backing tracks or something. Oh, how wrong I was. This was the setup for the opener, who was a dude with an acoustic guitar whose name escapes me. He played about 4 songs, and that was it. It was a nice opening set, for sure. After a short wait, Sufjan came on, and I realized how wrong I had been about the night's setup.

He had a backing band of ten people, I shit you not. Two singers, two brass players, two drummers, a pianist, another keyboard/sampler guy, a bass guitarist, and a rhythm guitarist. All those instruments that show up on his arrangements? Played live, by real people. It's sad that I have to point out and be impressed by this fact, but there you have it. Also, and this is a weird thing to point out, but the sound mix at this show was amazing. There were 11 musicians on stage, and no one ever clobbered the other in the mix. Everything was crisp and nice and audible. It honestly sounded like a studio mix or something, but it was being performed live in front of me. Along those lines, Sufjan's vocals were crystal clear, and not muddied in the mix or anything. It was really important to get this right, and they nailed it. Sufjan is one of those vocalists where you have to be able to take the nuances of his performance to really appreciate it, and in this regard, this show knocked it out of the park.

Most of the show's set came from his new album, The Age of Adz, and the accompanying EP, All Delighted People. I hadn't had much exposure to this material yet, but it blew me away. He has (re-)introduced a lot of interesting skronky electronics to his music, and you know I eat that shit up, so it was totally great. The set was very light on Illinois material (just Chicago and Casimir Pulaski Day), and there was nothing at all from Michigan. He did open with a song from Seven Swans, though, which was great. It was a talky set. Who'd have thought that Sufjan would like to yammer on a bit, given song titles like "The Black Hawk War, or, How to Demolish an Entire Civilization and Still Feel Good About Yourself in the Morning, or, We Apologize for the Inconvenience but You're Going to Have to Leave Now, or, 'I Have Fought the Big Knives and Will Continue to Fight Them Until They Are Off Our Lands!'"? (editors note: that song is a whopping two minutes long)

It was mostly banter, but one of his longer conversational interludes was a discussion about Royal Robertson, an outsider artist who inspired The Age of Adz's artwork, much of its material, and most of the visuals for the show. I guess he was a schizophrenic who perceived all of these apocalyptic events unfolding around him, and turned them into art. He had a huge, loving family, and he eventually kicked them out of his life and lived in a tiny trailer making this art for decades, hardly seeing anyone the entire time. It's kind of an amazing tragic story, and his work is really interesting as well. I hadn't heard of him before this, and I'm intrigued to look into his work further. I'm very curious about outsider art and music, so it was great to learn a little something aligned with my interests in between instances of face-rocking. Some of his work can be found here.

Sufjan Stevens and company played for about three hours total, including encore. It was really a great show, probably among my top five ever. Anyway, I've gone on about this long enough, don't you think?

How to make yourself more awesome in just four hours a week

Ok, the title is pretty tongue in cheek. However, my new job allows for the 4 9s + 4 schedule, which I happily took up. This gives me Friday afternoons off, so I have decided to spend them doing awesome things - brewing beer, cooking adventurous food, random adventures. It will be fun. I'm going to try to challenge myself to try new stuff with this little pocket of time each week that I now find myself with. Taking suggestions.

The next portion of this post is dedicated to the magical radio station that is The Current. It's a music station run by MPR (and thus NPR). It's basically the perfect radio station, because:
-it plays the music I would probably seek out and listen to anyway (of Montreal, Yeasayer, MGMT, Arcade Fire, Cloud Cult, Janelle Monae, Jenny and Johnny, Brother Ali, etc) and exposes me to new stuff along the same lines
-it plays a LOT of local music. I can partly thank the vibrant Minneapolis music scene for this, but I am grateful for the exposure to local acts. I have already discovered a lot of new (to me) music that I need to be checking out.
-they tell you the song and artist name for every song they play. No really, every song they play. It's very helpful and much appreciated.
-they give away tickets to great shows nearly every hour (this week: the Walkmen, LCD Soundsystem, Sufjan Stevens), although I've yet to get anything but a busy signal
-they are an NPR station, so the advertising is only as obtrusive as it is for any other given NPR station. Which is to say "not very". no loud irritating car dealership or diamond ads. Just "89.3 The Current is supported by _______, serving you ______ since ______". and then on to more music.

Good news, people who like awesome music but don't live here! You can stream the station online from their website!

Hooray!

T-minus 5 days

Yeah... I have five days left at my current job. That's pretty wild to think about. I'm pretty sure the new company isn't cool enough to allow for playing X-box over lunch, but you can't win them all.

Casimir Pulaski Day

It's apparently been too long since I've made a total downer post, so here we have it. This Sufjan Stevens song makes me a total mess. It's just the perfect song about death and loss, and I'm not sure else how to say it. It just has this perfect economy of lyricism that allows you to read between the lines - and it's mostly NOT about the death of the person. Thoughts start in the middle and aren't really completed in several of the stanzas. That's how it just kind of works sometimes, the grieving process, and it's brilliantly captured in this song. It's just... a perfect song. I don't know. I can also definitely appreciate the struggling with faith angle of the song, though I approach it from the opposite perspective from the subject of the song.

Listen here: Sufjan Stevens - Casimir Pulaski Day
or: go to his Bandcamp site and listen to all of the Illinois album, because it's amazing.

Lyrics:

Goldenrod and the 4-H stone
The things I brought you
When I found out you had cancer of the bone

Your father cried on the telephone
And he drove his car to the navy yard
Just to prove that he was sorry

In the morning through the window shade
When the light pressed up against your shoulder blade
I could see what you were reading

Oh, the glory that the Lord has made
And the complications you could do without
When I kissed you on the mouth

Tuesday night at the Bible study
We lift our hands and pray over your body
But nothing ever happens

I remember at Michael’s house
In the living room when you kissed my neck
And I almost touched your blouse

In the morning at the top of the stairs
When your father found out what we did that night
And you told me you were scared

Oh, the glory when you ran outside
With your shirt tucked in and your shoes untied
And you told me not to follow you

Sunday night when I cleaned the house
I find the card where you wrote it out
With the pictures of your mother

On the floor at the great divide
With my shirt tucked in and my shoes untied
I am crying in the bathroom

In the morning when you finally go
And the nurse runs in with her head hung low
And the cardinal hits the window

In the morning in the winter shade
On the first of March on the holiday
I thought I saw you breathing

Oh, the glory that the Lord has made
And the complications when I see his face
In the morning in the window

Oh, the glory when he took our place
But he took my shoulders and he shook my face
And he takes and he takes and he takes

Only 720 Bars Left

Two demos for 900 Bars are streaming now on my Band Camp site here: Data Damage. Enjoy!

Working with 90 bars is hard, because 90 isn't evenly divisible by 4. Whoops.

900 Bars

Constraints can drive creativity. To that end, I thought up this odd idea for a project on the way home from Minneapolis. 900 bars of music. At 120 BPM, that's exactly 30 minutes, but I'm not constraining myself to that tempo. 10 tracks, 90 bars each. Get in, get out, do something (hopefully) marginally interesting. Let's see where this goes.

15 Films

Ok, internet meme overlords, you win.

To be fair, this list is heavy on movies I first encountered in my late high school or college years, when my "adult" taste in film was developing. So, most of these are narrowly banded to a particular few years, 1999-2005, but oh well.

1. Amelie

Charming, almost - but not quite - to a fault. Audrey Tautou makes this one, of course, but it's a fun, quirky story that makes me grin whenever I go back to it. This one I watch over and over and over.

2. Lost in Translation

Sigh. Bill Murray, take me away from all this. A lot of people don't like this film because "nothing happens" in it, but I couldn't disagree more. It's a deep study of two people who bump into each other in strange circumstances and build a deep, if brief, friendship. Sophia Coppola does an excellent job of capturing the daze one can find oneself in when traveling internationally, as well (bolstered by the Kevin Shields-arranged soundtrack). Bill Murray and Scarlett Johannsson turn in excellent performances. It's alternately delicate and touching and crass and abrasive, seamlessly shifting between the two. This is way, way, way up there on my favorite films of all time.

3. Minority Report

So much science fiction deals with far-futurism, in the year 3000 or something similar. Minority Report struck me because of its near-futureness and general interesting concept. Also, I don't hate Tom Cruise in this one, so go figure. I really have this film to thank for introducing me to the writing of Philip K. Dick, which is, by and large, fantastic. More so if you are into science fiction, but his themes seem to reach beyond stereotypical Sci-Fi tropes.

4. Children of Men

More of the near-future sci-fi stuff. It's an interesting story. Humanity as a whole has gone infertile in the near future. England appears to be the only (nominally) functioning government still around. Hordes of refugees flock to England, where they are most often carted off into hellish ghettos. The youngest person still alive, age 18, dies minutes into the film. Then it starts to get dark. The whole thing has razor sharp writing, really strong action sequences, stunning cinematography, solid acting, and the set design is amazing. Little details - like graffiti that says "last one to die please turn out the light" highlight the zeitgeist of this imaginary future filled with desperation. The ending is brilliant in that you can pretty much take what you want from it, depending on whether you are an optimist or a pessimist.

5. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

What else can be said about this movie? It's inventive, risk-taking, well-acted, more than slightly bent, and most of all, really charming and heartwarming. Meet me in Montauk.

6. Me and You and Everyone We Know

Ok, it's really weird, pretty gross and uncomfortable in places, and a little aimless. But hey, it's quirky art house cinema, so that's probably par for the course. Lots of touching moments to be found here, with people momentarily making connections. That seems to be what most of Miranda Juy's work is about. Anyway, it's an interesting 80 minutes or so for sure.

7. The Matrix

Ok, listen. In retrospect, I admit that this movie is pretty horrible. The sequels in particular really ruined it for me. However, you can't deny that at the time it came out, it was totally groundbreaking in terms of special effects, and it had a pretty interesting plot to move things along. And a great soundtrack. Oh, my 17 year old self loved the hell out of that soundtrack.

8. Pulp Fiction

The first Tarantino I saw. My taste in film wasn't quite the same afterward. Again, I don't know what to say about this one that hasn't been incessantly beaten into the ground already. It's Tarantino. He makes films in a really warped world, but damn it's an interesting ride.

9. Akira

This film made me start to take animation seriously as an art form. It's sweeping, epic, and really really long, but I suppose I am repeating myself. It also only covers 2 of the 6 books, which is kind of wild.

10. Everything is Illuminated

Elijah Wood goes off on a journey to find relatives in Ukraine. He's accompanied by Eugene Hutz, frontman of Gogol Bordello, as Alex, a Ukranian guy that speaks hilarious halting English. The first two thirds of the movie is hilarious road movie, driven mostly by Alex's character. The last third packs some major emotional punch, and the transition happens quite quickly, leaving you with a sort of gut punch feeling. Great soundtrack by Devotchka. I will say that this is another case where the book is much, much better than the movie, but the movie didn't stand a chance, because the book is fantastic.

11. When Harry Met Sally

One of the few "relationship movies" I like. It's aged remarkably well. It's funny and touching. There is too much pepper in my paprikash.

12. Pi

My first Darren Aronofsky film (coincidentally, also HIS first Darren Aronofsky film). On the surface, it's about a brilliant mathematician trying to figure out patterns in the stock market, and the various people trying to use him for the information. On a deeper level, it's about the perils of ambition and burning oneself out, often overtly (the main character gets migraines because he once stared into the sun for too long). The film does some interesting work with tying together religion and the mysticism of numbers and how simple ratios determine a large portion of the working of the universe (mathematical errors notwithstanding). It's shot in stark black and white, giving the film a paranoid feel that closely mirrors the main character's mind state.

13. Donnie Darko

It's weird and doesn't make any sense, at least on the surface, but it's an oddly compelling film apparently involving time travel.

14. Mulholland Dr.

David Lynch is David Lynch. This is the first one I saw. It's mostly dreamlike and makes no sense at all, but many scenes have stuck with me over time. No Hay Orchestra.

15. Fight Club

Other than being more than a little misogynistic, it's a good movie. Interesting twist, though it's long slipped into cliche. Introduced me to the work of Chuck Palahniuk, who has written several good other novels as well as several not-so-good ones (mostly his more recent work, though Tell-All was great). I'm still waiting on that screen adaptation of Survivor, dude.

------

There are so many films (and directors, even) that I want to include on the list but can't seem to fit in there. The Darjeeling Limited/Wes Anderson, Memento/Christopher Nolan, City of God, The Usual Suspects, Dark City, the Cohen Brothers, Good Bye Lenin!, Once, The Fifth Element, Kubrick, Pixar, Hayao Miyazaki, The Corporation, Food Inc., Dig!, any number of other documentaries, et al et al et al. The problem with me and these lists is that I can usually go WAY past any preconceived boundary. You should see my top 10 albums of 2009, which is about 44 albums. Anyway.

Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Indie Rock

Way back in the year two thousand and something or another, I encountered a little film called Igby Goes Down. It's a pretty cool movie, sort of a Catcher in the Rye type thing starring Kieran Culkin. The soundtrack, however, blew me out of the water. To that point, I had mostly been listening to radio rock along with bizarre electronic music like Aphex Twin and Squarepusher. The soundtrack here was something different to my ears, for sure. The highlights are two songs by The Dandy Warhols, "Bohemian Like You" and "Boys Better". The former is on a record titled Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia, and it's a record that went a long way towards shaping my tastes in indie rock. Even though it came out on Capitol Records. *ahem*. Anyway, the record is all kinds of fun, and I highly recommend checking it out (and the band in general, really. They're great).

Some videos/songs from Thirteen Tales:

Bohemian Like You: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTcihBUWIVA&ob=av3n (video is NSFW. song is safe for rocking out)
Horse Pills: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4KqdABwQqY
Get Off: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky-LBarfe4g
Sleep: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCrIt1koGao

Scott Pilgrim vs. 30 Years of Pop Culture Iconography

So, I saw Scott Pilgrim vs. The World today. It was funny. It was cool. Michael Cera wasn't even very much like Michael Cera (the character). It was a love letter to people who love video games and/or comic books. It wasn't the most amazing movie I've ever seen, but I was grinning from ear to ear for a lot of it. It was just downright fun.

It does make me wonder a little bit about when video games will stop being a geeky thing and become widely accepted as a part of our culture. Super Mario Bros. came out roughly 25 years ago, for crying out loud. I suppose the Wii, and casual gaming in general, has helped things along. It's a huge, multi-billion-dollar industry, but the people who partake, especially adults, are still somewhat marginalized.

Anyway, there were a lot of wink-and-nod references to video games throughout the film that were fantastic, and really cleverly inserted into what could otherwise have been a pretty boring movie - Pilgrim's foes explode into coins when defeated, and scores pop up. He "levels up" a couple of times in the movie. There is a visible combo counter at one point. There's a lot more that I won't spoil, but you get the point. There's not much plot to speak of, but plot really isn't the point here. Sometimes style over substance just kind of works (e.g. Sin City), and this is one of the cases where it works really, really well. Great movie, great soundtrack, and hey, Michael Cera didn't irritate the hell out of me, which is a bonus.

Trailer, if you still need convincing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wd5KEaOtm4

Cerebral stuff this is not. But it's a hell of a fun movie.

Rik and I spent most of the weekend repainting our spare bedroom a cream color, as well as touching up paint in some other places. It looks much better than the deep red that was there before. We've also got a handyman in to help us finally finish up the bathroom, which will ideally be out of the way this week. We're both kind of exhausted, but I have to give Rikki props for just generally working harder than me this weekend. The house is starting to look pretty great. Cleaning, organizing, getting rid of stuff, touching up the caulking around the house (along with the requisite uses of "caulk" in totally immature ways), sweeping (it's always fun to see the weird looks from the neighbors as I stand on top of our garage sweeping), all kinds of good stuff. We had a four hour (yes, FOUR HOURS) adventure where we looked for tile. We started at Habitat ReStore, but they didn't have what we were looking for. The Home Depot (nope) The Tile Shop (yes, but with a week and a half lead time), and then finally Lowe's (success, and for less than half the price of the tile shop). As a side note, I am pretty sure my personal hell in some way involves The Tile Shop. That store is horrible. ANYWAY, the point is that we are doing some long overdue things to get the house in shape, and it's nice to see the results coming together.

Good music I've picked up lately: Best Coast, Arcade Fire, The Heavy, Wavves, Florence and the Machine, Scissor Sisters, Kings Go Forth, and The Books. So if you're REALLY bored, go check all of those out. If you're only partially bored, I'd say go with Best Coast, Arcade Fire, Scissor Sisters, and The Books.

We were on vacation in Iowa for the last most-of-a-week. It was nice to see friends and family and just generally chill out. Last Saturday was our 10 year high school reunion. It was pretty much like paying a $20 cover to go to a bar where 100 people you graduated high school with (side note: my class was around 300) happened to be. All of those things they say about reunions are true - mostly that everyone just kind of talks to who they talked to in high school. Only everyone was a little drunker. I mostly keep up with my friends from high school, so with a few exceptions, I'd say it wasn't really worth the bother. HOWEVER, we did run into Rikki's old friend Anne, who figures into the third act of this vacation story.

After the reunion, we drove to Dubuque for a few days to visit with Rikki's extended family. Lots of walking the dog and playing cards. It was fun and pretty laid back. Nitro and Daisy (Rikki's aunt's dog) got to walk off leash for a while in this awesome park area that had a lake and a creek. Nitro swam around for a little bit. Then, disaster struck (or nearly struck). Daisy heard some ducks going along in the stream and TORE off after them. The resulting scene was like something out of Looney Toons - daisy swimming along behind a duck going one direction, the duck swimming away and quacking frantically - and then the same thing happens in the opposite direction. Then, the water gets shallow enough that Daisy can run instead of swim - and then she takes off after the duck, out of our field of vision. Suddenly, there's no much quacking, and no more dog noise. Oh no... we lost Daisy for a little bit, and she may have killed a duck. After calling after her for a while, we finally got her back, and she wasn't covered in blood or anything, so we figured the duck just got away. We hope. Anyway, the visit to Dubuque was good times.

On the way back from Dubuque (Act III), we stopped by Iowa City. You see, Anne now works full time as a tattoo artist, so Rikki and I thought we would get our first tattoos. Who better than someone we know from way back, right? Rikki got the Hyde Park fleur de lis, and it looks really great. I got - nothing, because I guess my design was too hard. I wanted to get the Amen Break tattooed in a loop around my arm, but I guess it's really hard to do parallel lines well (music staff). Oh well. I still want to make it work somehow. I will have to think on it. What's the Amen Break? It's a 6-second drum loop that's used all over the place in popular music (and lots of generally unpopular music), usually spliced and rearranged. Here's a handy video about it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SaFTm2bcac Anyway, after Rikki got inked, we wandered Iowa City for a bit and got dinner at Quinton's. Then we drove back to Ankeny, stayed the night, and then drove back to KC and started the grand home improvement adventure. This whole blog post has taken kind of a Pulp Fiction sequence of events, huh? Oh well. Toodles for now.

The lack of anything worthwhile to post in a while makes me think I need to seek more adventure in my life. Yup.

This is the room for people who care

So, Rikki's been up in Minneapolis all week working at the home office. It's been really lonely. I went into super hermit mode last weekend and generally only left the house to buy food (and to see Inception. Go see it. It's great.). I finally got out of the house for a social reason Tuesday. I've mostly been reading, watching a lot of movies on Netflix instant watch, and doing odd jobs around the house. Oh, and I finished my summer class Tuesday. It had that rare combination of being easy and pretty interesting. An easy-A grad class is pretty rare, so I'll take it. The professor is tremendously lazy, but hey, whatever works. Two more classes to go. Computer Graphics and Geometric Modeling this fall, and either Cryptography of Distributed Systems in the spring, and then I will (finally) finish my Master's degree. This is taking longer than my undergrad did! Better late than never, eh?

For those of you who have not checked out A Softer World. It's pretty great. http://www.asofterworld.com/

The most recent one is fantastic.



Um, what else. I tried a mumblecore film (Hannah Takes the Stairs) and hated it. Oh well. Other things I have watched recently: The Girlfriend Experience (hated it), Jesus Camp (hated the people in it), No Impact Man (liked it), In The Realms of the Unreal (pretty fascinating), Dead Snow (really dumb). I'm averaging pretty poorly here.

I think that's really it for now. Rikki gets back Saturday afternoon, and I'm really glad for that. I hardly know what to do with myself.

Random!

Hi. I haven't posted in a while. Here's a sequence of 25 songs that came up on Random today.

1. White Rabbits - Right Where They Left
2. Beirut - A Sunday Smile
3. Art Brut - Twist and Shout
4. Shawn Lee's Ping Pong Orchestra - Rehab (Amy Winehouse cover)
5. The Octopus Project - I Saw The Bright Shinies
6. Dengue Fever - Monsoon of Perfume
7. Final Fantasy - Horsetail Feathers
8. Justice - One Minute to Midnight
9. Chemical Brothers - K+D+B
10. Architecture In Helsinki - In Case We Die (Parts 1-4)
11. IAMX - Nature of Inviting
12. The Roots - Doin' It Again
13. Noah and the Whale - Five Years Time
14. Yacht - Ring the Bell
15. Viva Voce - Good As Gold
16. The Antlers - Bear
17. Darla Farmer - Big Accident
18. The Thermals - A Pillar of Salt
19. Flight of the Conchords - Bowie
20. Battles - Atlas
21. Venetian Snares - Bebikukorica Nigiri
22. Rumble Strips - Cowboy
23. Broken Bells - The Ghost Inside
24. OK Go - Needing/Getting
25. Son Lux - Weapons

I've been busy. Summer class, running, work, 80/35, a funeral, and, this weekend, a wedding.

Take that, Hugh Grant.

Toodles.

I take part in your grief

With apologies to any of my (two? three?) readers that are sick of me talking about funerals and/or Humanism, and with apologies to the author, Greg Epstein, for the blatant plagiarism (I'll take it down at your request), I wanted to post a few paragraphs from Good Without God regarding funerals that I found rather profound. I'm almost done with the book, so the random quotes about Humanism should slow down a bit after this.

---

As much as I try to give religion and religious people the benefit of the doubt when possible, it is almost always a bad idea for a nonreligious family to stage a religious funeral for a nonreligious loved one who has died. At those moments when we are feeling most vulnerable, the last thing we need is false comfort. "I'll pray for you," even nominally believing people suddenly begin to a dying friend. "He's in heaven now," we are told by people who haven't been to church in a decade, about a husband, brother, or son who has just died in pain. If you are among those who do not believe such words true or effective, they can add insult to the pain, because these are not theological statements. They are the words of people who cannot bear to participate in your pain.

For a Humanist, the mourning process begins with accepting that death is real and final and that, with apologies to Epicurus, we fear it. Our fear of death is not only normal, and not to be dismissed, it is part of the motivation we feel to live a good life now, while we still have time. But when the moment comes for for someone we love to die, there are almost never good answers for our questions: Why? Why now? To what end? The raw feeling of these unanswered questions is so strong because they are the sign that we care about life, and without our ability to care, sometimes to the point of great pain, we could perhaps continue to walk and speak and chew but not really live. And so we do not try to find words that will wish these feelings away - we tell no stories of worlds or reunions or rewards to come - because the mere suggestion that our feelings can be magically washed away is trivializing. And we do not speak of God's presence in the mystery. We acknowledge that no God, no one, no thing can take the pain away except for time, and never entirely.

But there is something else we do - the most important thing. We offer our own presence. A funeral is about people who cared about a common loved one, and who care about themselves and each other, coming together to be present with with one another despite the tension and the ambivalence. It is a time to recall the significance of the life that has ended, no matter what it may be - to share stories and memories, meaningful readings and songs, and to express love in the form of laughter and tears, hugs and just sitting. It's amazing that just sitting in the room with a grieving person, neither running away nor wishing his or her pain away, is the single best thing we can do. This is why secular Israelis, with their tradition of building a secular nation from the ground of traditional Judaism up, do not say "I'm so sorry" at a funeral, or "My condolences," or even, "My sympathies." They say "Ani mishtatef b'tzarcha" - "I take part in your grief."

Oh Joss, I do love you so much.

The enemy of Humanism is not faith - the enemy of Humanism is hate, it is fear, it is ignorance, it is the darker part of man that is in every Humanist, and every person in the world... but faith is something we have to embrace. Faith in God means believing absolutely in something, with no proof whatsoever. Faith in humanity means believing absolutely in something with a huge amount of proof to the contrary. We are the true believers.
--Joss Whedon

Financial Aid

So, I just applied for a little financial aid for my classes this fall, and the application form asked for information about my parents individually. I checked the "Deceased" checkbox for my father, but the form still required an address. Should I have entered the grave site....?

Ugh

I need to stop surrounding myself with people that are constantly negative and cynical. Fault can be found in anything, sure, but are you really getting joy out of life when you constantly bash everything? I'm kind of sick of it.

And the first quarter results are in...

So, how are things going with my foolish predictions for 2010?

(I have at least signed up for things future-dated here).

-Finish the bathroom remodel. The hard stuff is done (other than the shower tile, I guess).

TODO: finish, grout, seal baseboard tile, install medicine cabinet, finish painting, finish, grout, seal shower tile, paint and install furnace vent, do the glass block replacement window, put in final shower plumbing, fix gouge in bathtub, trim work around door. Believe it or not, this actually represents some progress on the project.


-Release Stress Test. Give 100% of sales to United Way of Kansas City.
Done. No one bought it, though. It's the thought that counts...?



-Volunteer 10 times in 2010
1. KCUR spring funding drive
2. Bridging the Gap Arbor Day tree planting 4/24
3. Fringe Fest Artopia setup 4/2
4. Pilgrim Chapel easter egg hunt 4/3

-Paint the porch and deck
Nada so far.



-Get involved in the KC Fringe Fest


The Artopia thing counts, I think. The wider Fringe Fest is this summer sometime.

-Read at least 25 books

1. Haruki Murakami - Sputnik Sweetheart
2. Chuck Klosterman - Fargo Rock City
3. Benjamin Wallace - The Billionaire's Vinegar
4. Chuck Palahniuk - Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk In Portland, OR
5. Sarah Vowell - The Wordy Shipmates
6. Banana Yoshimoto - Kitchen
7. Jake Adelstein - Tokyo Vice
8. Guy P. Harrison - 50 Reasons People Give for Believing in a God
9. Michael Largo - Genius and Heroin
10. Bret Easton Ellis - The Rules of Attraction
11. Lydia Peelle - Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing
12. Stig Saeterbakken - Siamese
13. Jack Kerouac and William S Burroughs - And The Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks
14. Sam Tanenhaus - The Death of Conservatism (in progress)
15. Alfredo Vea - Gods Go Begging (in progress)


-Run at least 7 races
1. 3/14 St. Patrick's Day Run
2. 4/11 Brew to Brew
3. 4/17 Race for the Cure
4. 4/25 Trolley Run
5. 6/5 Hospital Hill 10K


-Build a linen closet at the end of the second floor hallway


Nada so far.

-Either substantially complete my thesis or switch to a non-thesis degree for the sake of getting it done.
Switched to ME. Taking classes this summer and fall. Graduating in Spring next year.



-Take the bus or carpool for at least 50% of my commutes
This has not gone well so far. Lofty goal, indeed.


-Pay of Rikki's low student loan and substantially pay off my student loan
Solid progress made here. This may slow down a bit with impending grad school for the both of us.

-Expand my musical tastes beyond what Pitchfork sells me. Listen to more Jazz, Neoclassical, and Soul music.
This is admittedly an ambiguous goal, but I'm striving to try out new music.

The Sea Is A Good Place To Think Of The Future

Before my father died, I always thought that joking about death was in poor taste. Since then, however, I have found it to be quite the opposite; rather, gallows humor got me through a rough time in life. Joking about death is a way to deal with it, I suppose. At least one good friend has confirmed with me that those who have lost close relatives are entitled to a little gallows humor. I understand that some people feel awkward about this kind of thing, and to be sure, there is a time to be serious about it, but there's only so much seriousness one can take before cracking a joke or two to ease the tension. Two examples.

1) When we went to the graveyard to choose cemetery plots, I noticed a dumpster behind the main building of the cemetery and barely managed to keep myself from wondering aloud how much that plot cost. I started cracking up, and couldn't bring it to myself to explain why to my mother.

2) While on a recent trip to visit some friends, Rikki mentioned that we should visit Iowa more often because of my dad. I responded that he wasn't getting any deader, to a mix of horror and laughter at the table. The laughter was from my friend, who has also lost her father.

You get the idea. Or maybe you don't, but there it is. On to happier things.

The title of this post comes from a song by Los Campesinos! I downloaded their new album, Romance is Boring, from emusic this month. It's freaking great. I particularly recommend the song that lends its title to this post, but the whole thing is good. The lyricism in the record is really interesting, especially on repeat listens. If you hate "indie music", you will probably hate it, but to each their own.

It's not a happy song, but the best ones aren't. Video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoIr60buB1I

Grad School. I am finally going to wrap up my degree, after dawdling for far too long. I am switching from an M.S. with Thesis to an M.E. (Master's of Engineering) program, which amounts to me taking another 9 credits of coursework. 3 will be at ISU, and I will take 6 locally to transfer back. I'm planning on taking my last ISU course this fall, and depending on the KU course offerings, I will either take one this summer and one this fall or two this fall there. It will be a relief to finally have this thing behind me, as it's been bothering me to varying degrees during my time in KC.

Books. I am currently reading Tokyo Vice by Jake Adelstein. It's a pretty interesting book about the reporting he did for a Japanese newspaper, mostly crime stories involving the Yakuza. I have a potentially unhealthy interest in reading about criminal underworlds of all types, so I am, of course, finding this book riveting and will probably go back to it immediately after finishing this post. I'm well on my way to getting 25 books in this year, having finished the following thus far:

Haruki Murakami - Sputnik Sweetheart (definitely not my favorite Murakami, which remains Kafka on the Shore. Pretty forgettable)
Chuck Klosterman - Fargo Rock City (I love Klosterman and all, but this was a little too scattershot even for me)
Benjamin Wallace - The Billionaire's Vinegar (pretty interesting book about the old wine industry, and forgeries in particular. Remember that criminal underground thing I mentioned?)
Chuck Palahniuk - Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon (I read this in about an hour and a half while on a plane to Washington DC, and it was awesome. I will probably pick up a copy at some point)
Sarah Vowell - The Wordy Shipmates (read this on the flight home. It was awful, and I love her contributions to This American Life. Stick to radio!)
Banana Yoshimoto - Kitchen (great stuff, though I preferred Lizard)

Speaking of Portland, we are going over memorial day weekend with some friends, which should be fun. I loved the city on my brief solo trip there last fall, so I am super excited to go again with company. On the menu is getting silly drunk on the regional craft brews, eating lots of voodoo donuts, convincing myself (again) that I don't need the $8000 leather-bound, signed, first edition of The Little Prince at the Powell's rare book room, possibly seeing a show, definitely going back to the chinese gardens, definitely checking out the rose test garden, which I missed out on last time, and ideally trying what they call barbecue out there. Staying at the Ace Hotel again. STOKED.

Finally, I think I suffer some cognitive dissonance when it comes to the subject of shows. I have what some people might call a fondness for music, and always get really excited to go to shows, and then never have that great of a time when I actually do go (at least recent shows). So, I am trying to tell myself that it's ok to miss some stuff (like the St. Vincent show in Lawrence going on as I write this post). Cheaper that way anyway. Maybe it's the fact that I'm turning old and grumpy and I'm 5-10 years older than most of the people at the shows for bands I like. Who knows.

On that sourpuss note, farewell for now.

P.S. Sorry Los Campesinos!, but Blogger will not let me put an exclamation point in a post tag, so I've misspelled your name.

2009 in Review, and foolish goals for 2010

So, here's the year-end thing for 2009, and some goals for 2010. They will probably look somewhat similar to 2009's goals, but isn't that how it goes?

2009:

-Lose 16 pounds (to 195)
Well, I am hovering around 205, So I guess I lost a little bit of weight. That could be within the realm of the statistical variability of my terrible scale, though.



-Get to 80% done on the thesis (to first draft status)
I have what I think is a solid topic now, I just need to dig in and do it. 80% it is not, but I should have less distractions next year (hopefully!)

-Finish Stress Test. Whatever state it's in at the end of the year, it's done.
It's done, and I have album art. The next step is getting it released through Bandcamp and CDBaby, which I am working on now.


-Pay off credit card debt entirely (potentially doable this time)
Done. It's such a relief to be completely out of credit card debt. It was mostly house-related stuff, and not totally frivolous, but still. Additionally, we totally paid off the loan on the Civic. So no car payments either!

-Volunteer 10 times in 2009

1. Harvesters distribution center

2. Bridging the Gap recycling center

3. Children's Mercy game night

4. KCUR spring funding drive

5. Bridging the Gap Arbor Day tree planting
6. Manheim neighborhood cleanup
7. Hyde Park graffiti cleanup

8. KCUR fall funding drive
9. Kansas City Marathon course monitor

Almost made it. 9 is still pretty good, right?


-Do RPM Challenge in February

Done! Get the record here.



-Do NaNoWriMo in November

I signed up, but didn't deliver. One of these years, perhaps.

-Get involved in the KC Fringe Festival in some capacity

Epic fail. Didn't volunteer, didn't go. To be fair, my father was dying at the time.



-Paint the porch and deck

Paint mostly removed from deck. Need to rent a power washer, power wash, and then prime and paint.



-Install the new windows

Done, just need to finish up the trim, caulk and touch-up paint



-Do at least one other home repair that improves my home repair knowledge

I think the complete bathroom remodel more than suffices here.



-Get more involved in public transit advocacy and improvements

I've talked at least one person at work into riding the bus. Does that count?



-Spend at least one entire month without driving to work

This just didn't work out, unfortunately

-Read 20 books, courtesy of time spent on mass transit

1. Alan Weisman - The World Without Us

2. Banana Yoshimoto - Lizard

3. Chuck Klosterman - Downtown Owl

4. Neil Gaiman - Stardust

5. Dave Eggers - What is the What

6. Mark Kurlansky - Salt: A World History

7. John Updike - Trust Me: Short Stories

8. Maira Kalman - The Principles of Uncertainty

9. Dave Eggers - How We Are Hungry

10. Frank Schaeffer - Crazy for God

11. Alex Beam - A Great Idea at the Time

12. Haruki Murakami - What I talk about when I talk about running

13. Brent Runyon - The Burn Journals

14. Don Thompson - The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art

15. Neil Gaiman - Smoke and Mirrors

16. Remy Stern - But Wait! There's More!

17. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr - Armageddon in Retrospect
18. Dave Eggers - You Shall Know Our Velocity!
19. Haruki Murakami - After The Quake: Stories
20. Michael Pollan - In Defense of Food
21. Bill Ayers - Fugitive Days
22. Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart

Two bonus books!


-Run 5 races

1. Love 2 Run 2/14
2. Westport St. Patrick's Day Run 3/14

3. Olathe Marathon 4/4
4. Brew to Brew 4/5
5. Trolley Run 4/26

-Participate in Carrot Mob
I'm not sure these guys are still active. I've tried to contact them a bunch without much luck.

-Damn the man, save the empire

Man damned. Empire's more or less ok.

So now, for the 2010 goals, with some carry over from 2009:

-Finish the bathroom remodel. The hard stuff is done (other than the shower tile, I guess).

-Release Stress Test. Give 100% of sales to United Way of Kansas City.

-Volunteer 10 times in 2010

-Paint the porch and deck

-Get involved in the KC Fringe Fest

-Read at least 25 books

-Run at least 7 races

-Build a linen closet at the end of the second floor hallway

-Either substantially complete my thesis or switch to a non-thesis degree for the sake of getting it done.

-Take the bus or carpool for at least 50% of my commutes

-Pay off at least one student loan and substantially pay off another one.

-Expand my musical tastes beyond what Pitchfork sells me. Listen to more Jazz, Neoclassical, and Soul music.