the world has turned and left me here

early man

Caught Early Man down at the Crocodile. Conclusion: Seattle can't mosh worth shit. Except for one really aggressive guy who started slamming into all the nice toe-tapping patrons with a few of his buddies halfway through the show. The toe-tapping and slight-head-nodding continued mostly unabated.

Sometimes I miss thunderstorms, and trailer trash rage.

praying mantis, legs aplenty

Dream in which we all look up and see an enormous praying mantis on the ceiling. It has an enormous fan of feathery legs spreading out in all directions. As we watch, it becomes self-conscious and starts to shy away into a corner, drawing its legs together.

Then we're sitting at the dinner table. I take a break from conversation to look down at my plate. Good god, I'm eat large chunks of praying mantis covered with brown grasshopper-spit sauce.

Credit where due: this dream was almost certainly inspired by an amusing story from my bro wherein a brood of praying mantises hatched in his dorm room.

mice parade plus pent-up digression on the production of music

[Pre Facto] Going to see Mice Parade tonight...interested to see how Adam Pierce pulls everything off live. If sufficiently motivated I'll update with a review.

[Post Facto] ...and the answer is: with 7 other people (!!!). For some reason I thought he would perform everything himself and loop it. Now I realize how insanely impossible that would be. The stage was bursting with too many instruments to detail here; when in full throttle, the frequency spectrum was saturated...you couldn't have crammed in any more sound if you tried.

So Mice Parade is a sort of mini-orchestra. Of course, blending all these instruments together presents quite a mixing challenge, and you're right if you guessed they wouldn't leave that part to chance: they bring their own mixer guy. I count him as one of the 8 band members, since this is no trivial job. He's right on stage with the rest of them.

But what would an orchestra be without its conductor? This is of course Adam Pierce. Mice Parade (anagram of his name) was originally a solo project of Pierce's, who is by trade a drummer, but apparently plays everything under the sun. Just like your high school band teacher...

For the first half of the concert he played an acoustic guitar, center stage, sang some of the vocals, and drummed on a box he was sitting on. There was a nice little back and forth session between Adam and the drummer that seemed to have been improvised. The rest of the band, on the other hand, didn't seem to enjoy the same peer-to-peer relationship, and mostly took cues from Adam. Or sometimes they took shouted directions, even the occasional piercing (no pun intended) glances thrown across stage in order to correct some bit of instrumentation he wasn't happy with.

The result of all this was that you felt a little bit like you were watching these guys through the control room window, instead of sharing the live concert experience. I'm not saying this is all bad; it's definitely neat to see how musicians work and all. And I caught them relatively early in their current tour so I guess they're still working some kinks out. Okay. But...if you happen to live in Austin, TX (currently the last stop on their tour), you should go see them and tell me if it's any different.

I'm guessing it won't be. Because it all comes down to the fact that (a) Adam Pierce is a perfectionist type and (b) these are other people playing his music.

These days, I derive much less pleasure from seeing song-based, improv-light bands play live than I used to. I remember going to Weezer concerts and belting out all the lyrics and loving every moment of it...the closer they approximated the album, the better. A few words addressed to the crowd between songs were enough variation for me back then, as when Thom Yorke announced, "This song is about the future," and launched into Pyramid Song. Musically, there was little deviation from what I'd previously heard, but it still blew my mind. That doesn't seem to happen to me anymore.

To summarize before I digress again (I want to digress again), Mice Parade makes great albums-- go buy them--but seeing them live is unfortunately no big revelation, and in fact may annoy you a little bit, depending on how much you're still affected by "the magic."

Digression resumed: did you just hear that? I encouraged you to go buy something. That seems a little effed up to me given what I'm going to say. This is really what it comes down to: the song is a product in musical form.

Ditto with albums. As usual, we're dealing with the old assembly line approach to things, or what Burroughs calls "the cancer model of production," implying that the process itself of making and distributing copies quickly gets out of control. Apply the idea to music and you get top 40 radio playing and replaying and re-replaying the same exact thing with no variation, and you get your favorite album which is perfectly and reassuringly identical every time you pop it in. Replication.

Now think back to your first concert-going experience and ask yourself if you weren't disappointed that the band didn't play the songs exactly the same way that you were used to? I know I was. Every deviation seemed like a mistake, it's as if I'd gotten a G.I. Joe with a cosmetic defect and I wanted my money back. Or if not that, then at least store credit, so I could exchange it for one just like everyone else had.

Anyway, I suppose eventually the whole model starts to bore you and you want something else. If you feel like you may be getting to this point, do yourself a favor, go see a good jazz show, or someone who's willing to improvise. The moment it hits you that what you're hearing was not carefully scripted beforehand and replicated infinitely, you're forever changed. You realize the real value of music not as a product but as a service--no, as an experience, i.e. something that will never happen again like this.

Your experience has no resell value. You can't turn it back into a material good like the money that you perhaps paid for it. And even if you tried, people would probably say "what is this crap? that's my favorite song and you just totally messed it up." :)

perry bible fellowship

While you're at it, just read the whole pbf archive. Hats off to the strange mind of Nicholas Gurewitch.

unmanned spacecraft

A song for you: unmanned spacecraft. Fairly arbitrary working title; still needs lyrics.

Since my linux-based sound recording studio finally took form last month (a process I plan to describe at some point over on maelstrom), I've been having many musical adventures. This one isn't very representative. Most also involve my bass / a drum machine / various synth layers and heavy editing. This one was just a single take on my Yamaha P-60. As such, you get to hear some really obvious mistakes.

the opportunity costs of geekery

But on the other hand, I've been geeking out to a degree which, up until just now, was depressing me immensely, as it usually does. Extremes make fertile soil for sadness. Sadness grows there like a voracious crop of mushrooms. I suppose a realization of mounting opportunity costs has something to do with this sadness? No one's immune to it, unless by chance you're blessed with obliviousness as well, in which case your extremes continue without check, and people call you a "genius." Or a head case.

You see there's this idea that one should have a social life, be human blah blah blah. Well for the past few months I kind of said screw it to all that. I just geeked out. When I stopped geeking for a moment and would take stock of the situation, I would be overcome by regret. The price I paid would be apparent. This has become a familiar pattern in my life, and I have developed all these weird ways of coping with the regrets / avoiding payment.

Just now though, I really did say screw it, I'm a geek again. All these years of trying to be something other than awkward...learning how to interact comfortably with other people, even trying on the varied masks of extroversion...never thought I'd do that...I was the little kid with the big brown glasses that always got broken, who in fact broke them one time by tripping and falling on his own face. I was the kid in your 4th grade class who you wanted to smack because he raised his hand after every question. My mom made my shorts. They were way too colorful. All this shit may sound cool now but it sucked at the time when it really mattered. I wrote computer games for myself and read science fiction during the summer. I was the kid who didn't get interested in girls until one got interested in me in high school, it was just too unthinkable at the time. I didn't ask out a girl until college. I didn't drink until I was (almost) 21.

By about that point I must have gotten tired of the...disrespect. I tried to "fix" myself. I'm still trying to "fix" myself. Sometimes I manage to fit in well enough that you can't tell, When someone I've met doesn't suspect me of geekiness, I find myself extremely flattered. Imagine it: pleased that I've managed to conceal my true self! Pleased by my own act of falseness. Amazing.

I guess it finally hit me. I'm a geek, I spend immense amounts of time solving problems that to most people seem either totally pointless or way too detailed to undertake, and I *love it*. There's nothing really to be ashamed of there. So I should start enjoying it for pete's sake. It's the only thing I consistently enjoy.

However, because I've been trying so hard to avoid looking like a geek, I've pretty much broken ties with the geek community over the last 5 years. Didn't want to be seen with those people...guilty by implication...you know. But along with this unfortunately came an increasing tendency to regard myself as something extra extra special, especially since done my best to surround myself with people that are maximally different. Then when random geeks would wander into my little geek-free bubble my specialness would feel shattered. Sometimes they were clearly geekier than me..."that's not possible," I'd say, and try to forget them.

But it is possible, and in fact quite natural, because I've neglected my geeky pursuits more and more as I learned to fit in. Now I'm behind the curve. Sure, I can still sit down and write you a perl script to do just about anything, but

• can I build things from hackaday.com?
• do I understand mesh routing?
• have I learned a new language recently?
• have I ever tried obfuscated code contests?
• have I contributed anything to wikipedia?
• when did I last write anything in assembly?
• have I crafted an exploit?
• have I ever even used someone else's exploit?
• do I know what's going on with my favorite OSes between major releases?
• can I debug a kernel?
• can I write a new kernel device driver?
• what about writing that roguelike I'm always talking about?

No! It's pathetic! What the hell was I thinking? I want to do all this stuff and I've already wasted 5 years not doing any of it. Meanwhile the geeks everywhere I've been conveniently ignoring have passed me by, so that my smug claim to the title now defames their truly legitimate one.

trained to control

On the one hand, I've been intentionally without a job for a month and a half now. Which is as weird for me as it is for those of you who know me. Yes, I hear that tone of concern in your voice. It's okay. Thanks, if anything it's actually nice to know by that sense of concern that there are people who give a damn. Anyway, it's strange for me too...I think most of us just aren't ever prepared to control our own lives...we're trained to take control someday, but the training goes on for so long and takes control of us little by little. The impossibility of training someone to control should be self-evident, the phrase itself is a spectacular example of an oxymoron.

So we realize one day that we've lost all our powers of self-control--we've outsourced them, we've surrounded ourself with things which control us. We're vaguely aware of this. Yet we're incapable of taking the control back, only of expressing frustration--the emotion of the controlled, the impotent.

Those of us who do rush headlong towards the day of self-control often make a fatal misstep somewhere. Brisk-moving men come up to us, take us by the arm and lead us to the back room where the rest of our lives are explained to us. We age years just sitting in that room. We come out of the room broken, eyes extinguished, soul already departed from body and lead the life that was explained to us. It was the only way, clearly. The issues of control and our own powerlessness do not occur to us anymore than they would occur to a plant. Unlike those who retain the power of volition, yet refuse to exercise it out of fear, we lack even that volition now. Frustration does not exist. This is the way things are.

But there are some who never get stiff-armed into that back room for openly disregarding their training. Neither do they lose their ability to act freely during those many required years. They stow their willpower away in a flame retardant box and run through the fire. They get to the other side, laugh, and take it out.

Then they control us.

On the other hand...well, that's a post of a different color. :)

apologies to all the car owners i apparently threaten

Ok, seriously now, cyclist friends, what is up with cars rip-roaring past you when the light turns green? Half the time they don't even want your lane. They just want to...prove that (together with their giant, foul-smelling, fuel-guzzling transport machine) they are more man than you are? Are these people really threatened in some way by a cyclist?

"Wow," I think to myself at such times, "that badass just gunned his car up to 40 mph! He must have torn a tendon in his foot, pressing the gas pedal that hard."

squidmaster 2043 reunion tour

Yeah that's right, the squid rises again, run for cover or your flesh will be consumed by my ferocious little beak.

I've been saving my squidmaster 2043 costume from Halloween until I get a workable digital camera. For the last few months it has graced the entryway to my apartment, seated astride a dressmaker's doll that Jake and I found in an alley. It's my version of the lawn jockey.

Anyway, there's a "f*@# valentine's day" costume party in U district tonight. I decided to get squidmaster up to snuff again. At the end of Halloween night, stumbling around in the rain looking for a taxi, the 2-liter bottles which give the mantle it's distinctive shape pierced through the backside. Luckily I still have foam adhesive so I fixed it again. I also added some accessories that I didn't have time for last time around:

• A pair of black bug-eyed goggles.
• A chinstrap taken from a Czech riot police helmet. Surprisingly, it snapped right into the baseball helmet which is the mount for the mantle. As I discovered the first time around, having what amounts to a 3-foot tall windsail on your head can be a bit of a stability problem.

Hopefully someone there will have a camera tonight, so squidmaster can finally rest in peace...though he'll certainly be missed by all *sniff*.

joyful ritualisms

The Neues Rathaus clocktower in the center of Munich is host to a little performance that happens three times daily. Tiny figurines on tracks come out to joust and dance to the chimes of glockenspielen. They repeat their performance with the same vigor and joyousness each time, then once more recede on their tracks into the dark machinery of the tower.

This delights people. Tourists especially. I think at the time I was more interested in watching the people watch the performance and trying to figure out what, exactly, was the appeal for them.

If I were to go back, I know what the appeal would be for me now: jealousy. These tiny figures live their preset lives on tiny tracks which they never deviate from. They perform the same exact thing day in and day out at the same exact times. Happily.

dying man with monochrome terminal

Dream in which I'm outside on a knobby, grassy terrain. My brother has found an enormous moth, a world-record breaking moth from South America with a wingspan in excess of human head size, only its wings are quite tattered..."moth-eaten"...

I discover an old man who seems close to death. We bring him close to the building. He is African, very small with a gnarled grey beard and a socratically bald head. I try to speak to him, but he doesn't understand. I try in another language. No luck. When he realizes he can't communicate in his dying hour a tear builds up and runs down his crinkled cheek.

"Here are his things." Among them is a monochrome computer terminal that displays in brassy yellow. Here are his marks. A scant amount of personal data. There is one file in his home directory, what the hell is it? Someone cats the file and magically we are watching a video in ascii; the machine is slow enough that the fps is just right. Who was this man?