lick my SCOTUS

the latest issue of vanity fair has a long investigative piece about the 2000 elections... this thing is comprehensive: from what was going on in the florida districts to mass voter disenfranchisement to suspicious touchscreen voting to new insight on what was happening inside the supreme court (SCOTUS, what a dirty sounding word) while they deliberated the bush v gore. even a substantial number of law clerks from scotus gave interviews for the vanity fair piece. and it doesn't reflect well on the either the supreme court or the bush campaign (or his brother jeb).

vanity fair has no website (get with the program people) but goldsteinhowie.com has PDFs of the whole thing. with permission even!

Dirty Shame, A

drbmd and i are going to see A Dirty Shame tonight! this promises to be john waters's filthiest movie in years so i'm excited.

i've been in a big movie mode recently, buying dvds aplenty. yesterdat at costco i got the new director's cut of thx 1138 and the star wars trilogy dvd set. before that i'd bought at least a half dozen other dvds in the past month or so. and tomorrow eternal sunshine of the spotless mind comes out on dvd, though i might just wait a week and get it when fahrenheit 9/11 comes out on oct 5.

one odd thing about buying dvds at costco: longboxes. if you were buying cds in the early '90s you'll remember longboxes: they are "long" cardboard boxes (around 12"), inside which is the normal dvd or jewel case for your disc. for those who're packrats or collage artists like me, they can be kind of cool, because some of them are very pretty and feature expanded cover artwork. i saved the front of the longbox for van halen's "carnal knowledge" cd for a long time (though it's long since hit the trash by now). and the thx 1138 longbox has a larger version of the dvd cover, which i think is beautiful. basically, well-done longboxes can be kind of cool because they give back some of the art space that was lost after we shifted away from LPs and laserdiscs.

of course they're also a tremendous waste of resources: all that cardboard, thrown away for no good reason. originally longboxes were created because record stores all had shelves designed to fit 12" records in, and standard jewel cases (only about 4.6" tall) were just too short. using longboxes, a store could simply divide a 12" shelf in half and make two rows of cds. of course, record stores have long since replaced their shelves or switched to reusable plastic anti-theft brackets, and public outcry convinced the industry to phase them out many years ago.

so why does costco still use longboxes? (i believe sams club does too, though i haven't been there in some time.) the obvious answer is theft prevention, since a 12" long box is trickier to slip into your pocket. but it seems like they could just affix yet another RFID or anti-theft tag (or use the brackets like at record stores) if that were their only concern.

what's worse is that you know the manufacturers and/or distributors have to go out of their way to provide longboxes just for costco/sams/etc. most dvds are in ugly generic boxes (with holes to display the real dvd cover) but all the dvds i bought there yesterday have custom boxes. i plan to use both the thx and star wars boxes in future collage work, but 99% of customers most likely throw that shit away... why costco why?

(note: this is my first blog entry using blogThis. i know i'm behind the curve on this extension, but so be it...)

bloggadocio

i wrote this hours ago, but srn was suffering from yet another bout of chronic unscheduled downtime, so i've been unable to actually post...

so yeah, i've been reading more blogs the past few days, because just browsing headlines at sites like google news or buzzflash isn't really using the power of blogging to its full advantage, right?

so the other day i came across a link (probably on dailykos) to an analysis on mydd comparing the top right-wing and left-wing politiblogs. there are some interesting conclusions there about why/how the right-wing blogs have been more effective at pushing stories into the mainstream media (see "memogate", for example). there's also some interesting stuff about "stickiness":

The lower the stickiness of a blog, the higher the relative traffic value of a link from that blog to the blog being linked. In other words, a blog where there isn't much to do besides visit (no comments, few or no special pages, short articles), will cause a higher percentage of its traffic base to visit a blog that it links than will a blog with high stickiness (diaries, long articles,
polls, comments, arguments, many special pages, etc).

i like comments, and stickiness. it's very nice to see people commenting on my posts, even if the posters tend to be from a small subsection of my circle of friends (there are exceptions, like when the great white hype replied to my post about him or the guy who seemingly posted a comment to my "rev moon coronation" post simply to pimp his book on the subject).

another nice thing about the mydd analysis is that it lists/links to the top 7 politiblogs (on both the right and the left, in terms of traffic), so i've taken the opportunity to browse through all seven progressive blogs, a couple of which i hadn't been very familiar with.

that's a lot of stuff to read, since some of them (especially dailykos) have quite a lot of content. one of the most interesting phenomena at sites like dkos are the "open threads". these are threads where the actual poster doesn't post any content at all (!), leaving it up to the commenters to take control of the discussion and see where it leads. these aren't small threads either: some have 200-300 comments or more! that's a lot of stuff to wade through: some of it's very high-quality, but wow, so much material...

on one of those blogs (i thought it was atrios but i can't find the post) linked to this site, which lists a bunch of progressive blogs organized by state. naturally, indiana is colored in pink to indicate the strong hold that the GOP has over all the rednecks and corn farmers here.

i went through some of the indiana blogs and stumbled across a blog by one of my co-workers (at least she works for the same parent company, in the same building) where there was a nice post about the awful "auto-flushing" toilets here in the building, which constantly
malfunction.

speaking of malfunctioning, i noticed on steph's blog that she was a member of a few webrings: indianapolis blogs and indiana blogs. the links didn't work in any logical fashion (sometimes clicking next or prev would take you to the same site, and the random link wasn't very random) but i browsed through some of the indiana blogs for awhile... i found a few progressive blogs, a few more conservative blogs (highlight: andrew sullivan is a "traitor" for daring to back down from his once-fawning deification of bush), and countless "day in the life of a college student" blogs.

that's a lot of blogreading, & i haven't even gotten my friends' personal blogs (tfy, quahogs, your girlfriend, &c.)

more on the horrible threat posed by cat stevens

hoo boy

According to government officials, Islam, 56, was red-flagged by a computer system that analyzes passenger data before international flights enter U.S airspace. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection's National Targeting Center matched Islam's name on the passenger list for the D.C-bound United jet, then relayed the information regarding a possible terrorist match to the Transportation Security Administration. The TSA, in turn, requested that the plane land at Bangor International.

The Washington Post reported that Islam is identified as "Usef Islam" on several government watch lists, including the no-fly list. According to some print and broadcast reports, Islam's name is on the lists because he allegedly contributed funds to groups supporting terrorism.

However, he was allowed to visit New York as recently as May for a charity event without incident. No immediate comment from the feds on why he was permitted to fly then and not now.

danger danger! don't let that man on a plane or else he might whip out his checkbook! let's hear what reuters has to say (as reprinted in wired):

Homeland Security spokesman Brian Doyle said Islam would be put on the first available flight back to Britain after his Washington D.C.-bound plane was diverted on Tuesday to Maine for security reasons.

"Why is he on the watch lists? Because of his activities that could be potentially linked to terrorism. The intelligence community has come into possession of additional information that further raises our concern (about Islam)," Doyle said.

A law enforcement official who asked not to be identified said the United States had information Islam had donated money to the militant Islamic group Hamas.

Islam was denied entry to Israel in 2000 after the authorities there accused him of supporting Hamas. The former pop star strongly denied the charges and said his charitable donations were for humanitarian causes.

so homesec has no answer except the vaguest of allegations. okay then. it's not like he has friends in the higher echelons of western democracy, right?

In Britain, Muslim groups also decried the deportation of Islam, who heads a trust that oversees Muslim schools in the country. He has met with Prime Minister Tony Blair, Home Secretary David Blunkett and heir to the British throne Prince Charles.

"This incident comes only to confirm the farcical and ultimately draconian standards and practices exercised by U.S. immigration authorities," said Anas Altikriti, a spokesman for the Muslim Association of Britain.

tony blair? prince charles? are they in the habit of hanging out with islamic terrorists?

there's a thread on dailykos suggesting that kerry should adopt a cat stevens song for his campaign. there's even a poll to vote for which song would be the best (i haven't voted).

like i posted on imn, this is a PR disaster any way you look at it:

option 1: he is innocent. the TSA and the govt look like chumps for preventing an innocent, world-famous celebrity and peace activist from entering the country.

option 2: he supports terrorists or is one himself. his name is on the watch list but this wasn't discovered until he was on the plane and the plane was already in the air. if he had somehow snuck a bomb on with him, he could've blown the whole plane to the promised land and the govt would look like chumps for failing to enforce their security watch lists.

although i suspect the truth is option 3: he's innocent, & the govt looks like chumps both for denying him entry and for not noticing he was on the watch list until it was too late.

the most astonishing thing is that i checked the "quickvote" poll on this cnn story and right now 56% have voted yes that "the singer formerly known as Cat Stevens be denied entry to the U.S. on national security grounds?"

where the fuck do these people come from? i know his music is annoying, but...

he should've taken the peace train instead

the only thing i really remember about cat stevens is that i hated his music the last time i had to listen to it. i thought it was the most annoying kind of hippy music. but i would still let him into the country!

i thought i was a music snob, but apparently the us govt is a harsher critic. today, cat (under his current name, yusuf islam) was on a plane to dulles when someone noticed that his name is on a government terror watch list. his plane was then diverted to bangor, and the peace activist/muslim teacher was refused entry into the united states.

the jokes come easily on this story but the whole thing is so ridiculous that no joke you could make would be as absurd as the story itself. of course, it's not the first time the us has refused entry to an allegedly pacifist muslim scholar, but it's the first time that scholar has had top 40 hits to his name.

(thanks to prnewswire, dailykos, and others for spotting this one... i've been reading a lot of blogs in the past couple days: maybe more on that to come)

six feet photosculpture

if you've been watching six feet under as i have, you might've been intrigued by the art pieces featured in the final two episodes of this season: photo collage work where macro photos are taken of a subject's face, then torn up; the pieces are then pasted back together to create a collaged face mask, which the original subject wears while portraits are taken. that description might not be very clear, but these are some badass photos.

in the plot of the show, of course, this is claire's art (no more spoilers here). but who is the real artist responsible for this work? i even went to hbo's six feet under site hoping to find some of the images for download, but couldn't find them anywhere. mercifully, salon has a feature about artist david meanix, creator of the photos, along with a link to his website, with nice jpegs of his six feet under "photosculpture" along with a lot more of his work. thanks salon!

all in the family

the new unauthorized biography the family: the real story of the bush dynasty is out and if the excerpts online are any indication, it's juicier than wrigley's gum.

the mainstream media has gone into attack mode against the book instead of bothering to actually research any of its claims like you'd think journalists would want to do (logic would dictate that if many of the allegations in the book are false, at least some of them would be fairly easy to prove wrong). matt lauer on the today show turned out to be an aggressive interviewer for once, though he himself ended up caught in a lie (or at least a bit of prevarication):

Kelley: “Matt, you play golf with the former President Bush?”

Lauer: “I have never played golf with him.”

Kelley: “You know that he's is a gregarious man. He's gracious. That's a very, very nice thing. That's in the book. The reason this looks so negative to people is that for years and years and years, we've had a very crafted public image. It looks like ‘The Donna Reed Show.’ Now we've got a little bit of ‘The Sopranos.’ Every family has got negatives and positives.”

(uber-right site newsmax actually tries to count this as a blow against kelley, but if they had done 15 seconds of research on google they would have turned up not just a story, but pictures and video of lauer and poppy bush in a "putting contest"... perhaps not a full-on 18 holes, but surely "playing golf" by some definitions [akin to saying "we never played basketball; we played HORSE"]... not that i really expect anyone on a site like newsmax [or even much of the mainstream media] to actually do 15 seconds of real research about this book, lest they turn up something true.)

so far the most explosive allegation (or the only one many are bothering to repeat) is that georgie and one of his bros (neil?) snorted some rails of coke at camp david, during poppy's presidency.

One of Kelley's sources -- and the only one on the record -- was Sharon Bush, the deeply aggrieved ex-wife of W's younger brother Neil. She is now in strong denial mode, even though her own publicist, who was present at a lunch where she told Kelley the story, confirms the accuracy of Kelley's account. Nonetheless, Lauer produced the Bush divorcee after his interview with Kelley to repeat her denials.

(i believe the publicist's actual quote was "i can't deny this account", but he's her f'n publicist so if there were any way he could deny it, he would. the fact that he won't proves, if not that bush was damaging his nasal passages as late as 88-92, that sharon bush did at least say so to kelley.)

but that's not even the only damaging drug-related claim in the except online at msnbc.com! that excerpt also claims that laura bush used to sell pot (not that i'd hold that against her), and... well, just read the excerpt, at least.

this isn't just some rambling screed or the unibomber manifesto. kelley's book is thoroughly researched, annotated, and was vetted by four different lawyers at doubleday. the us media is neglecting its duty by attacking her without at least poking their noses around into some of her allegations. like kelley said to salon:

It's interesting, from talking with the media today, the European media is much less intimidated than the American press. The Americans are all saying, "Well, why should we listen to you. Look at the books you've written." Well, excuse me, those books have stood up, I stand behind everything in those books, they've stood the test of time. And this book will too. So I see how this media spin is working, and I'm not surprised. You'd think the media would look at my book and follow up on it -- all right, she says here they instituted drug testing in the National Guard at such and such time, let's call up and find out if that's true. But don't beat me up just because I've come to you with almost a thousand sources. You know, I've gone through four sets of lawyers, because I'm dealing with a sitting president.

like kelley said to lauer about sharon bush now denying the coke david story, "Matt, I have three independent witnesses to what was said between me and Sharon Bush. That's good enough for a court of law. It should be good enough for you and me." this book is no joke, and the us media is doing you and me a disservice--and perhaps worse, doing the story a disservice--by not treating it more seriously and following up. of course, some of the allegations might turn out to be false. but no rational person could really believe that all of it is false. if even half of it turned out to be true, it would be quite damning. which is probably exactly why they aren't following up too much.

i'm pretty tempted to run out and buy this book... the "director's cut" of thx-1138 just came out on dvd so i've considered running off to borders to buy them both. but i wouldn't get to start reading it tonight anyway (it's comic day after all), and i still haven't come even close to finishing cryptonomicon or the other books in my "to-read" pile, so maybe i'll exercise some restraint over my capitalistic urges for once. or more likely i won't.

finding memo

i could post dozens of links about the "memo" non-scandal, just page after page of people (many of whom have no clue what they're talking about, but some who know quite a lot) arguing about kerning and curly quotes... these were fascinating to me in a sense, as someone who has to deal with such issues in my job (but by no means a document expert or knowledgeable about 70s typewriters). but this salon link is the last one i will post:

Upset by renewed attention to President Bush's disputed service in the Texas Air National Guard, White House communications director Dan Bartlett insists the new revelations about how strings were pulled to get Bush into the Guard, as well as to get him out, are part of "a coordinated attack by John Kerry and his surrogates on the president." There is no evidence to support that claim. But there is clear evidence confirming that the same conservative operatives who have been busily promoting the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth smears of Kerry are now engaged in pushing the story that CBS's "60 Minutes Weeknight Edition" aired forged documents in its Wednesday night report on Bush and the National Guard.

Creative Response Concepts, the Arlington, Va., Republican public relations firm run by former Pat Buchanan communications director Greg Mueller, with help from former Pat Robertson communications director Mike Russell, sent out a media advisory Thursday to hawk a right-wing news dispatch: "60 Minutes' Documents on Bush Might Be Fake." Creative Response Concepts has played a crucial role in hyping the inaccurate, secondhand Swift Boat allegations, with Russell serving as the group's official spokesman. A company spokesman could not be reached for comment.

Throughout the Swift Boat smear campaign, the veterans involved asserted they had no political agenda and were unaffiliated with any political party. But Creative Response Concepts, which was obviously paid some undisclosed amount for its Swift Boat work, has many links to the Republican Party and the conservative movement. Among its clients are the Republican National Committee, National Republican Congressional Committee and National Republican Senatorial Committee. Its client list also includes the Christian Coalition, National Taxpayers Union, Media Research Council and Regnery Publishing. Regnery is the firm that published "Unfit for Command," the SBVT screed against Kerry's military record.

more evidence that something shady is going on with the "fake memos" allegations.

but by even discussing this as i have, i have also fallen for their frame of this story. it's not about whether those four documents are "real". the story is whether the content of the cbs story is true. did bush somehow use his connections to land a cushy spot in the reserves instead of active duty? multiple sources have come forward saying he did. did he fulfill all his obligations to the reserves? it looks like he didn't.

us news & world report did an analysis of bush's public military record and it didn't turn out good:

A review of the regulations governing Bush's Guard service during the Vietnam War shows that the White House used an inappropriate--and less stringent--Air Force standard in determining that he had fulfilled his duty. Because Bush signed a six-year "military service obligation," he was required to attend at least 44 inactive-duty training drills each fiscal year beginning July 1. But Bush's own records show that he fell short of that requirement, attending only 36 drills in the 1972-73 period, and only 12 in the 1973-74 period. The White House has said that Bush's service should be calculated using 12-month periods beginning on his induction date in May 1968. Using this time frame, however, Bush still fails the Air Force obligation standard.

Moreover, White House officials say, Bush should be judged on whether he attended enough drills to count toward retirement. They say he accumulated sufficient points under this grading system. Yet, even using their method, which some military experts say is incorrect, U.S. News 's analysis shows that Bush once again fell short. His military records reveal that he failed to attend enough active-duty training and weekend drills to gain the 50 points necessary to count his final year toward retirement.

similarly, but seemingly less noticed, salon points out how a bush document leaked to the drudge report to back up republican spin actually demonstrates that he didn't live up to all his commitments. look at point h:

Satisfactory participation during my membership in the Air National Guard of the United States will be attendance and satisfactory performance of assigned duties at 48 scheduled inactive duty training periods and 15 days' field training (active duty for training) annually, unless excused therefrom by proper authority. It also includes successful completion of on-the-job upgrade training.

as already demonstrated above by us news, couldn't even live up to the standard of 44 days, let alone 48.

what liberal media?

i haven't done much political or news blogging recently... there's just so much to keep up with. but this is a story about blogs, so...

a month or so ago, the "swift boat veterans for truth" came out with a campaign ad accusing john kerry of lying about his service in 'nam. "i know, because i served with him," they say in the ad. of course, this was all fairly easily debunked by bloggers, more "legitimate" news outlets, and even the daily show (which pointed out that when the veterans say "i served with kerry" they simply mean "i was in the military at the same time). but despite this, the story "had legs" as they say & we had to hear about the swift boat buddies day after day for at least a month, with only the occasional story acknowledging that the swift boaters had yet to make a single allegation stick against kerry. the allegations were fed into the "great right-wing echo chamber" because, true or not, they were damaging to kerry, & that's all that really matters to them.

last week, 60 minutes aired a story featuring former texas politico ben barnes, who confesses that he personally pulled strings to get bush into the natl guard (this in itself is not a new allegation, but not one that's been covered much because barnes had been reluctant to talk to the media). the story also referenced four memos cbs says it acquired from an impeccable source:

The first memo is a direct order to take "an annual physical examination" – a requirement for all pilots.

Another memo refers to a phone call from the lieutenant in which he and his commander "discussed options of how Bush can get out of coming to drill from now through November." And that due to other commitments "he may not have time."

On August 1, 1972, Col. Killian grounded Lt. Bush for failure to perform to U.S. Air Force/Texas Air National Guard standards and for failure to take his annual physical as ordered.

A year after Lt. Bush's suspension from flying, Killian was asked to write another assessment.

Killian's memo, titled 'CYA' reads he is being pressured by higher-ups to give the young pilot a favorable yearly evaluation; to, in effect, sugarcoat his review. He refuses, saying, "I'm having trouble running interference and doing my job."

damaging stuff, to be sure. but this time around, the right-wing echo chamber, from freepers and bloggers at the bottom straight up to limbaugh, drudge and the like at the top, were not trying to hear that. so within hours, the allegations start popping up that these memos are fake. their argument: the memos could not have been written on typewriters of the time, and were most likely composed in MS word and then repeatedly photocopied to give the appearance of age.

according to IBM, the idea that the memos couldn't have been made with typewriters of the era is "just totally false"... but that didn't stop many, many people from running with it, and within hours the focus in the media had shifted from the content of the story to whether those four memos had been forged (despite the fact that everyone pretty much knows the story is true, regardless of the memos' authenticity).

bob novak, who so proudly stands by his "journalistic integrity" by refusing to say who leaked cia operative valerie plame's identity to him (setting off a major scandal and govt investigations), was quite happy to insist that cbs should name its confidential sources because... well... it's damaging to kerry, and that's all that really matters. he was not alone in this, but he was the only one to be quite so hypocritical about it.

quickly, other stories in the media focused on the power of bloggers in affecting the news so quickly:

"The mainstream press is having to follow them," said Jeffrey Seglin, a professor at Emerson College in Boston. "The fear I have is: How do you know who's doing the Web logs?

"And what happens when this stuff gets into the mainstream, and it eventually turns out that the '60 Minutes' documents were perfectly legitimate, but because there's been so much reporting about what's being reported, it has already taken on a life of its own?"

even blogger.com has a prominent link to a story that uncritically compiles all the stories alleging that the memos are fake... because, hey, this is good PR for blogging services, right?

to be fair, though, blogger also links to the daily kos, which has been diligently debunking the so-called debunkers. hunter at the kos points out most of the stuff people claim was impossible was extremely possible using IBM typewriters of the time, as well as points out the virtual impossibility of proving anything definitively using such cheap copies of the memos (you will note that most experts cited will claim that they can't really authenticate using such copies, but that doesn't seem to stop the other "experts" who say they "know" the memos are fake).

is it possible that the memos are fake? sure. is it also possible that they're legitimate? yes, of course. some are saying this story proves the power of blogs... but it seems to me that it only proves the power of right-wing blogs, because the blogging community had also thoroughly (arguably more thoroughly) debunked the swift boat veterans, but that story was still played out ad nauseam for weeks, but nobody seemed to notice...

boom boom booze booze

so the day before the terrorfakt show, i saw a post advertising an evening of HOUSE and TECHNO (emphasis not mine) at club fusion on 9/11. having just had two other shows cancelled or postponed recently, my immediate reaction was that the club had double-booked & that our show was going to get fucked over. i was a bit upset about that idea (three cancellations in two weeks?) but then i heard back from the promoters that our show was to be in the second room, the techno was to be in the main room, & all was fine.

turns out i had no reason to be concerned, because the techno night was a total flop: the main room was virtually empty all night, while the much smaller second room had a decent crowd the whole time. take that, techno! we should've been in the main room, but oh well...

i somehow got lost on the way to the venue, despite having been there at least twice before. but no matter: when i arrived there was still no dj equipment hooked up. i hung out, chatting with n8 & unszene as well as some other people in attendance. eventually the dj coffin was up & i started spinning. i was already fairly drunk by now and didn't really keep track of what i spun, but i spun a bunch of good power noise and breakcore: celluloid mata, shizuo, donna summer (jason forrest), drop the lime, venetian snares, scorn, to name a few. it was great to be able to hear the stuff over a loud PA.

then terrorfakt vs manufactura played. apparently the two headliners consolidated their set into one, for whatever reason. they rocked it hard, & had an interesting video display with lots of 9/11 & similar related content, although the screen was in a strange position so not everyone could see it.

at this point my memory begins to fail me. i had been drinking rum & cokes (dangerous for me, especially on an empty stomach, but fusion does not have cider so if i wanted to drink, it had to be mixed drinks). i remember terrorfakt vs manufactura playing, but i do not remember them actually finishing their set. nor do i remember vomiting at the club, though i'm told it happened. even worse, sealed in silence then performed and i don't remember that either. maybe i was in the toilet up-chucking during their whole set. or maybe i was standing right there watching them. either way, i was too drunk to remember their performance. don't be like me, kids: know your limits.

dr butcher m.d. mercifully insisted on giving me a ride home. i remember that. but i don't remember getting a glass of juice and vomiting into it, nor getting some of that vomit onto my computer keyboard.

i spent most of yesterday hung over: nothing too terrible, but the familiar sensation of poison coursing through my veins, periodic headaches, and that awful mixture of nausea and hunger. i'm pretty much over it now.

but other than that, it was a good show! plus we kicked techno's ass, which is always good. i even ended up with a new dvd that i don't remember acquiring. i assume someone gave it to me. i'll probably watch it tonight: looks like political industrial videos.

no such thing as a free sample

from the US department of utter unenforceability:

today a federal appeals court ruled that musicians must pay for all samples they use no matter how fragmentary or transformative. never mind that the fair use doctrine, which has been part of copyright law pretty much since the beginning, says exactly the opposite...

by my estimation, according to this ruling, virtually every single piece of music i have created since 2000 is totally 100% illegal! (2000 marking the release of _the fezzuck_, only about half of which was illegal.) i'm an outlaw, buddy! gimme some of that illegal shit!

the heart of the case was NWA's "100 miles and runnin", which includes a pitched-down three-note guitar sample from george clinton (who else?). naturally, clinton hasn't owned his own copyrights for awhile, so he is not involved in the case. but master p & his "no limit films" division got pulled into this mess by including the song (which was many years old by that point) in the soundtrack to the film i got the hook up.

While the lower court said that the riff in Clinton's song was entitled to copyright protection, it said that, based on analyses, the sampling "did not rise to the level of legally cognizable appropriation."

"After listening to the copied segment, the sample, and both songs, the district court found that no reasonable juror, even one familiar with the works of George Clinton, would recognize the source of the sample without having been told of its source," the appeals court said in its opinion.

On Oct. 11, 2002, the lower court ruled in favor of No Limit Films on the issue of copyright ownership.

The appeals court disagreed, saying there was merit to Westbound's arguments that no copyright violation analyses should be used when "the defendant had not disputed that it digitally sampled a copyrighted sound recording."

wait, wait... if "no reasonable juror" could possibly recognize the sample without being explicitly told where it came from, then how on earth could this be enforced? how do you combat an undetectable crime? if a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, how can you cite the tree for improper logging procedures?

the sheer ridiculousness of this, and the fact that the case was basically decided on a technicality, did not stop the appeals court from passing sweeping overbroad judgments:

"If you cannot pirate the whole sound recording, can you 'lift' or 'sample' something less than the whole? Our answer to that question is in the negative," the court said.

"Get a license or do not sample. We do not see this as stifling creativity in any significant way."

obviously this is a big blow against all appropriative artists working (or distributing) in the states. but it looks like an even bigger blow against the champions of citation. because it would seem that NWA's biggest mistake here was not in the actual sampling, but in admitting (or not denying) that they had sampled. if NWA had simply denied using the sample, the case would have gone very differently, apparently.

so the lesson here is that if you want to use unlicensed samples, never cite your sources (and it helps to make them unrecognizable). not a very good lesson, but stupid laws call for stupid countermeasures.

no icefest

so it's saturday night & i'm getting ready for the south bend noise fest, scheduled for the following day. i get an email from bobby vomit mentioning that amy from the people bomb is supposed to be spinning at some house party that night (sat), & that the bt crew is also invited to play some records. so i get my shit together & head up to muncie, though by the time unszene, vomit, & i show up, amy has long since stopped alientaing indie rockers with her records. we hang around in the front yard drinking for awhile until bobby vomit decides that he wants to play. so he played for awhile, then i played for a bit until it's 3am, most the party has left, & the people bomb want to pack up their turntables. we return to la casa de vomit & eventually go to bed.

the noisefest was scheduled to start at 5 & we estimated it as being a 3-hour drive, so we left pretty early. the path to south bend from muncie is convoluted: it involves several state roads, us highways (virtually no interstate), & driving through a bunch of small towns.

getting to south bend proves easy. we approach the town with plenty time to spare, yet somehow overlook our exit. the next thing i know, we have arrived at the michigan border. we turn around and head back toward indiana, but by now it's after 5pm and we know that the show has probably started.

we get back to south bend and this time, manage to take the wrong exit. we don't have a proper map, just directions vommy printed off from randmcnally.com. the directions say we want Business US-31 (Michigan St), but don't state a direction, so the first time i see a sign for biznatch 31, i take it... but there is no michigan st to be found. this sets us back 10-15 minutes before we stop at a gas station & bobby v goes inside and checks a map (but doesn't buy one). he determines that we are at the complete wrong side of town, but suggests (among other things) that we should be able to just take bidness 31 south to the south side & find our exit.

it turns out that the two ends of business 31 don't seem to meet each other, at least not that we can find. we manage to get lost, but eventually see main st. because there's a main st on our micro-map, we turn. main st ends and branches off in a different direction. then that main st abruptly ends and we are almost totally lost. by this point mr v is rather upset: by this point we have clearly missed emil beaulieu, who was supposed to play at 5pm sharp.

eventually at about 6 we see us20 & jump on that, which takes us back to where we had first gotten lost 80 minutes earlier. this time we find the michigan st exit (whose signs do not say business us-31, although it clearly is bus us-31 once we get on it). we are home free; the directions from here are clear.

at about 6:20 we roll up on the venue, after more than 4 1/2 hours in the car.



above pic is bobby vomit standing by the door to the venue. the sign says it is temporarily closed by city of south bend, & although it's hard to make out, underneath that it says that the noise festival has been cancelled.

we just kind of laugh at the situation (bobby v is at least relieved that he didn't actually miss emil beaulieau), take a couple pics to prove that we were there, & get back in the car to look for somewhere to eat. we end up going to burger king, then driving back 3 hours to muncie. back at the casa de vomit, we watch belly on vhs and listen to the sound experiment on the radio, then i drive back to indy.

i had asked for today off work, with the option of going in to work in the afternoon if i got back early enough. clearly i was home in time, but when i got up today at 11:30 i wasn't quite motivated enough to get ready in time. maybe i'll go run some errands in a couple hours so my day off isn't wasted.

sf part III: i left my hard-on in san francisco

damn... by now it's been close to two weeks since i left san francisco, so i should try to finish this shit up...

warning redux: all photos are 1280x960 & range ~200-300kb

on friday afternoon we went to see spider-man 2. i had some free passes to amc, connie wanted to see it, & nothing else showing (that they would accept passes for) looked that good, so that's what we went to see (i'd seen it once; connie had not). i enjoyed it, again. after the movie, some kid in the bathroom was asking people what movie they had seen & even asked me to give him my ticket stub, i guess so he could sneak in to see spider-man 2, but he had obviously already made it past the ticket-takers, so he didn't actually need my stub to get in... i didn't bother to explain any of this; i just lied & said i had lost my stub.

after the movie we began our trek toward the somarts gallery for sfemf night 2. connie was pretty hungry so we stopped at a chinese restaurant in the market district. i just ordered some hot & sour soup: even after the waitress warned us it was "a big bowl" i still figured it would only be a serving or two's worth. i was wrong: this bowl was a good 4-6 servings, & on top of that we ordered pot stickers & chow fun. way, way too much food. but it was fairly tasty. we decided we would offer our leftover soup to a homeless person during our walk to the show, but we weren't outgoing enoug, so that didn't happen (i guess i was waiting for someone to ask me for spare change or something).

so we made it to the show only a little late. CMAU was playing. they had several members strewn across the stage, some using electronic instruments, some apparently playing with found objects, & one holding a videocamera: the footage was projected onto a big screen at the back of the stage. their sound kept morphing nicely, & occasionally got fairly dissonant (although later on wobbly complained that he would've liked them to've been more dissonant, that he'd seen them "rock out" more during other performances). here's another blurry no-flash photo.

then came christopher willits. he played using a guitar run through a laptop. the laptop would process the sounds somehow (custom software, according to the program) so it all came out as odd tones and clicks. it was sorta amusing to watch him standing there, guitar in hand, jamming to his music like he was in a club-rock band, but the sounds really didn't change all that much during his performance... after a few minutes it started to get old. not too bad, though, & he only played for 15-20 minutes. here's another pic.

after that came intermission. we went outside so i could have a cigarette, then went inside so i could get some wine. there we ran into wobbly again... he said he was feeling much better than he had been the previous day (when he had pneumonia) & we chatted for a bit about the sfemf & his views on "academic" experimental music (like the fact that academics these days seem terrified to use even a hint of rhythm in their work, & how he felt maybe there wasn't enough variety in the sfemf lineup: too much drone). he asked about my true data 12". when i said that i hadn't brought any copies with me to sf, connie suggested that i could send him a copy. and really, we were there that night because he had put us on the guest list, saving us $30, so shipping his one 12" was the least i could do...

after the intermission came krystyna bobrowski. she had an elaborate setup. first she played a solo piece on a big water jug, playing the edge for awhile, then dipping her hand in the water & changing the timbre of the tone. that piece was very short. then three more people came onstage for her main piece. she had four custom glass tubes, each four or five feet long, set up on a pivot. inside each tube, apparently, was a speaker, and each speaker, so i hear, played a different track off of a multitrack recording. the speakers were attached to some kind of long string, and the players would pull on these strings, moving the speakers inside of the tubes, which would make all kinds of subtle changes in tone and timbre of the sounds. this was when the fact that i'd been taking slow-exposure no-flash photos really paid off, because i got a couple really nice ones with motion blur (see also the first link in this paragraph)

last for the evening was keith fullerton whitman (also known as hrvatski; he goes by his "real" name for his "serious" work). he sat in front of his laptop & also had a pretty nice video, with slow cinematic landscapes as well as twitchy digital-looking footage. wobbly had told us that he plays "drones, just drones" but it wasn't all drones. there were some clicks, and at the end he got very noisy (the noisiest and most dissonant i'd heard at the sfemf, probably). because he was in a dark corner & the video screen gave off so much light, i couldn't get any good pictures of him but here is another one anyway.

after the show, we took the 9 bus back home & made delicious choco/peanut butter milkshakes.

saturday afternoon we hung out for awhile watching more upright citizens brigade. then we caught a bus up to "the haight" to go back to amoeba... ostensibly so i could do some record shopping for humdrum (who had supplied a list of records he was looking for), although naturally i bought a few more things for myself while we were there. for dinner we went to some cafe (don't recall the name; it was an odd name). it was a breakfasty kind of place with lots of crepes on the menu. i had a croissant sandwich (like ham & eggs on a croissant; tasty but huge & a little messy). this time we were more assertive with our leftovers and immediately gave them to a homeless couple who were seated nearby the cafe entrance.

from there we caught another bus to the market district to go to bootie, a monthly mashup/bootleg event. i had never been to such an event, & connie had never gone because it's not in a good neighborhood & she's nervous walking around there alone. on top of that, it was the one-year anniversary for the monthly, so it was a special event & they were giving away free mashup cds w/each $10 admission.

we showed up around 9 (when the doors were supposed to open) but the doorman said they were behind & wouldn't actually open for another 20 minutes or so. we decided to hop a bus back to connie's house for a quick smoke (& so i could drop off my big bag o' records, which i didn't feel like having to carry around all night at the club). by the time we returned to the club, the doors were open & things had started happening. we snagged a table near the wall, but with an okay view of the stage (except we were off to the side). there were "fun size" candy bars on the tables, so we got our snack on too.


pretty quickly i noticed that the PA did not sound very good. it was very muddy sounding, making it hard to hear the vocal track clearly sometimes (not good for mashups). maybe it sounded better directly in front of the stage, but it sounded pretty bad where we were.

after awhile, smash-up derby took the stage. they claim to be the world's first (and only) mashup cover band, a somewhat novel concept. at first, i commented to connie that i couldn't really tell if they were any good or not, because the PA sounded bad. but it didn't take me long to decide. the idea behind a mashup cover band is fine, but to truly pull it off (so that it sounds at least comparable to the studio tracks) would require an outstanding frontman (or even two or three), with versatile voices and broad range of styles. smash-up derby does not have such a frontman. he was off-key and did not have half the range i would think such a band would really need. maybe the rest of the band was fairly competent (hard to say with a bad PA), but the frontman could not pull it all together well enough. oh well. here's another photo.

the club was really filling up so i tried to take a couple no-flash photos of the crowd. a couple of those came out okay. after the band finished someone started djing for a bit.

a stout, older gentleman (dressed like he'd just left the office; he definitely stuck out from the crowd) claimed the table in front of ours after awhile, & occasionally he would ask me to save his seat while he ran off to the bathroom, or to the bar, or to have a smoke. at one point he accidentally sat on his free bootie cd (he showed it to me, snapped in half) & had to run off to get another one. this guy will become significant later.

the headliner for the event, all the way from fucking scotland, was mcsleazy, mashup superstar. he played a bunch of his hits (a couple of which smash-up derby had covered earlier in the evening). he was at the far end of the stage so getting no-flash photos proved almost impossible. i gave up (this was a jumpin' nightclub after all, a very different environment from the quiet, museumlike sfemf shows) & turned on my flash, but even then i had to get up from my seat & walk closer to the stage to get a photo worth taking.

now that i'd stood up & was 15-20' from our table, i snatched the opportunity to turn around and snap a picture of my precious connie (not the greatest picture, but i have so few of them overall...). our tie-wearing friend at the next table spotted me doing this and suggested that we might like a photo of the two of us together. since there were no "couple" type photos of us in existence, we agreed that such a thing would be nice to have. while i was showing him how to work my camera he managed to pull off one askew unaimed picture (you can see part of connie's blouse & her half-drank cosmopolitan); then he took a fairly decent picture of me & connie.

the name of the night is bootie, so (this time at least), pirate garb was encouraged. i had totally forgotten to take any of my pirate gear with me so i just wore a doormouse t-shirt. connie wore stripes; they were kinda piratey. others had much better outfits, but this dude was the ultimate, bringing what appeared to be an actual live parrot on his shoulder. represent.

but parrot boy wasn't the only character in attendance: they also had go-go dancers! yes, the go-go dancers (male and female) would take the stage while the djs played & shake their slender asses for all to enjoy. some of the sexier audience members would jump onstage with them. i got a bunch of okay-to-mediocre photos of them onstage, (like i mentioned, we were off to the side of the stage, not a good vantage point for photographing go-go), but i did get this nice ass shot of one of the dancers (she was actually offstage standing near us at the time... [here you can see a nice profile of connie with the go-go dancer's ass in the background.] most of my stage shots look somewhat like this [extra points if you can guess the gender of the dancing crowd member in the foreground]).

the club was totally packed, refreshing to see at a mashup event (though maybe it's not that packed every month). now that i was taking flash photographs, i decided to try to take some more crowd shots to prove that the place was full of folks. here's another one.

mcsleazy finished his set, though it wasn't totally obvious he was done until i saw that he was now standing closer to us, near the side of the stage. it was actually easier to take pictures of him there, so here's a shot of mcsleazy bordered by connie's profile, and here's one with less of connie & more of mcsleazy. and here's one of connie, clearly embarassed that i'm taking her picture.

we didn't stick around too much longer, though we were still there when a few people dressed in milkshake costumes came onstage to dance to a mashup (kelis vs ray parker jr), so i got a bunch of horrid photos of them. finally, here's one more pic of connie making her way through the crowd. not long after that we ran outside & grabbed a taxi back to her house.

sunday morning was no fun. we actually had to get up early (after staying up late) to get me to the airport. i was depressed about having to leave, knowing that i wouldn't see connie again until october, & on top of that i was anxious about catching my flight ontime. we walked to the bart station, ate burger king and pizza hut in the airport, & finally kissed goodbye while i waited in the 15-minute line to get through the security checkpoint. SFO makes everyone take off their shoes for the security check. IND doesn't do that, nor does reno. on the flight i read some crytonomicon and listened to new cds.

i had a layover for an hour or two in chicago (at midway, not o'hare). but i had spent the last of my cash on riding the bus to SFO and eating burger king there. i wandered around midway for a bit looking for someplace that might accept plastic so i could get a snack (as well as a restroom that wasn't swarming like a hornet's nest). the food court was crowded & i ended up going to a small gift shop & buying a 20oz coke & a bag of combos with by debit card.

my flight back to indy was on a tiny saab plane (i called it a puddle-jumper), the kind where you have to walk on the tarmac to board. the plane didn't even board until a few minutes before we were supposed to leave. it was small. but we were only in the air for about 40 minutes. when we got back to indy, i went to the baggage claim & picked up my suitcase. barry was nowhere to be found; when he showed up 15 minutes or so later he explained that 38th street had been totally blocked off by cops & he'd had to do some maneuvering, delaying his arrival. (it was brickyard weekend, so i'm sure traffic on the west side had been horrible, although the airport was fairly empty.) we drove home & i had a few hours to adjust before having to go to bed so i could return to work the following morning.

that was my san francisco area vacation. i had a fantastic time. i hope i didn't forget anything too important. i did leave out all the hours of hot sex, though, but for your convenience (or maybe your frustration?).

mms

well my show at mms was eminently disappointing and anticlimactic. turnout was as low as at the non-conference shows i typically play... & i seemingly even drove off half the crowd when i started playing! just like old times... i'm used to that so it doesn't phase me much anymore, but i felt bad for the out-of-town bands like infinite number of sounds, who did a great set & deserved a much better turnout than they got. hell, the INS boys were the only other band (out of 4) that actually stuck around until the end of my set, and i only played until midnight on a saturday! respek.

at least a half dozen people told me they'd be there (or would "try to make it out") but didn't show. which is pretty much how every show i play locally goes, so at least people are consistent. but dan crall from the sound experiment was there, so i had one supporter who wasn't performing.

but overall the mms was good. i got lots of free crap, some decent press (not that anyone noticed, apparently), drank a bunch of free jack daniels, & got to see lots of live music for free... even if the vast majority of that was rock music i typically wouldn't be interested in. and i got to meet a few people in person, people i'd only communicated with online... look out for me to appear on both the listenable local radio shows in the future: the sound experiment as well as the free zone.

looks like i have a couple more show opportunities coming up soon, too; odd considering that neither opportunity really came out of the mss, but i heard about both this weekend... anyway, looks like i'll be djing at a fairly big show on 9.11, & there's another possibility i probably shouldn't comment on until i know more.

sf part ii: no other possibility

okay, quickly because i want to get to the nuvo party for mms (& the liquor is only free from 4-5)

wednesday connie had an errand or two to run without me, so i laid around reading cryptonomicon for a couple hours until she was done. it was relaxing. after she got back, we went out for sushi. we had planned to go to a place called "tokyo go-go" but when we got there we discovered it was closed for a private party. but after walking only about a block, i spotted another japanese/sushi joint called "restaurant yo yo"... such is the magic of san francisco. & yo yo was probably cheaper than go go, to boot.

after dinner we headed down to the odeon bar (connie's favorite bar in the world) to see "ask dr hal". dr hal is a well-known subgenius (he's on the puzzling evidence show on kpfa, right after over the edge). for the ask dr hal show, audience members write down esoteric questions and enclose a small gratuity. chicken john, odeon owner, moderates while dr hal tries to answer every question, typically with a stream of beautiful bulldada and rambling genius. musical accompaniment is provided by krob: perhaps somewhere between djing & live performance? (i had seen a variation of ask dr hall at indyvival 2003, but that was moderated by ivan stang, with no krob, so it was not quite the same.) we also saw a couple short films, one by an odeon regular/employee about how television affects people, the other a new short by stang called "bug porn". good times. after the show they were rounding up people for a bus trip to go bowling in some suburb (daly city?). i like bowling but wasn't too eager to get potentially stranded in some strange town late at night, so we headed home.

thursday was my birthday. instead of the usual "breakfast" of pop-tarts, i decided i'd rather go to st. francis, a soda fountain & pancake house that's only a block or two from connie's house. i had french toast and ham; i think connie had a sandwich. the first time i went there, in december, i noticed that they have a great collection of vintage (or retro) stickers & trading cards for sale: garbage pail kids, wacky packages, & all sorts of other such campy goodness. so i spent more than $20 on wax packs of cards & stickers like yo mtv raps, wacky packages, pee wee's playhouse, and rocky horror picture show, as well as surprisingly lame cards starring the simpsons and bill & ted. we went back home for a few hours, before eventually going back out to get tapas for dinner, connie's treat. i'd never had tapas before: basically like ordering a half dozen appetizers for dinner. some of them were quite good, some were not quite as good. it was also my first time drinking sangria: it will not be the last.

from there we began the walk to the somarts gallery, to see the first night of the san francisco electronic music festival. during the hike i spotted a busted computer lying on the sidewalk (not the first i'd seen, but the most picturesque). so i finally took out my camera & used it for the first time in the trip (after carrying it with me every day): take a look.

note: all pictures are 1280x960 & are like 200-300KB. deal with it.

eventually we found the venue. it was basically some old warehouse space, with a very nice stage built in a back room, & an art gallery in another section. i thought the music was all excellent, but for a ticket price of $15 i was underwhelmed. if it had been $10 i wouldn't have complained; if it had been $5 i would have most likely raved about how great it was. but for $15 it was rather boring: just sitting in a dark room, theater-like, watching some guy stand there in front of his gear.

first up was marcos fernandez. i was in the bathroom for the first part of his set, but what i heard was pretty good avant garde ambient type stuff. (it's been a full week since i saw these shows, so you'll have to forgive me if i can't remember too much detail about what they sounded like; i've seen lots & lots of live music recently.) apparently there was some kind of internet stream going out: whether audio or video i know not. but i didn't see anyone taking any flash photography, so in an effort to not distract the artists, i tried taking some pictures without my flash. it was really dark, meaning the shutter had to stay open for a few seconds, & i had some trouble holding the camera still for that long. at one point i gave up trying & decided to just let the camera jiggle or capture movement. i took several such pics, most of which came out looking like this, but the most abstract one looked like this (i think for that pic, i actually rotated the camera 90 degrees while the shutter was open).

up next came cenk ergun who did some experimental laptop work. it was similarly avant garde and ambient sounding, although i think he got pretty dissonant near the end, which i definitely enjoyed. i only got one pic of him, and it's not very good.

following cenk there was an intermission. we went outside while i had a cigarette. after that, i finally found the bar area & got a glass of white wine. the merch table was next to the bar & picked up a wobbly 12" called multiple pleady. it appears to be a remix disc, with mixes by blevin blectum, people like us, and someone else (too lazy to check right now, & there's little time before i leave).

after the intermission came perkis/wobbly, a collaboration between plunderstar wobbly and some guy named tim perkis. they were a bit ambient, a bit noisy, occasional hints of rhythm... none of the recognizable pop samples that are prevalent in much of wobbly's work, but i'm sure many or all of wobbly's sounds came from plundered sources. here's another photo.

after their set i ducked out to get another glass of wine. while out there i ran into wobbly, who recognized me from when we'd met in december. he was about to rush home, sick with bronchitis. but we talked for a minute & he said he would put me & connie on the guest list for the following night. that was good, because i wasn't going to spend another $30 for two more admissions to the festival, but i was indeed interested in coming back.

last for the evening was joan jeanrenaud, who i discovered was a former cellist for the kronos quartet. i took no pictures of her because, from my vantage point, there was a mic stand that would have been right in front of her in the shot. she had some kind of electronic device (sampler? delay?): she would play a cello part, then loop it electronically while she played on top of it. quite excellent; possibly my favorite performance of the night.

then the show was over. we took the 9 bus home, and laid in bed watching episodes of strangers with candy and upright citizens brigade an old vhs tape i'd brought. connie's cat, girl, was lying on the foot of the bed... at one point connie pointed out the interesting effect of her red room lights and the blue light of the tv screen on girl's white fur. so during a bathroom break i took a few more no-flash photos.

okay, it's almost 4pm, which means i'm off to broad ripple for the nuvo party. coming soon: part 3: friday night (more sfemf), saturday night (bootie), & sunday (my return trip).

when it rains it snows 3

as part of the media blitz for mms, a photo & a short blurb about stAllio! turned up in this week's INtake (this is what i was writing/researching when i was inspired to post about the skinny puppy game).

the online version does not have the photos, so if you want to see those you will have to come to central indiana & grab yourself a copy.

the great white hype lives up to his name

if you follow the news you might have recently heard about a beheading video that was hoaxed... it turns out to have been possibly the most successful media jam in quite some time. thanks to connie for the tip on this one.

turns out the "star" of the phoney beheading video is none other than the avant garde hip-hop artist the great white hype. i first heard about gwh years ago on rec.music.industrial... his first release was a hip-hop parody of coil's scatology, & future releases also dabbled in industrial parody and sampling. but i'd never heard any of his work until recently, when i ended up discussing gwh with connie (living in the bay area [where gwh is from], she had also heard of him but never heard his work. so i tracked it down on slsk and some of it is pretty interesting... at times very lo-fi with clumsily improvised lyrics (and i am an expert on clumsily improvised lyrics), so i can see why some people on rmi & the coil list couldn't appreciate it.

so recently i've been downloading all this gwh stuff (which took forever to find) & suddenly he is all over the national news for this media jam. his label's site (linked above) links to this article in the sf chronicle:

The faked beheading story broadcast on two Arab language television stations and sent out on international news services early Saturday was based on a grainy video that was made by three Bay Area residents as an experiment to find out how quickly erroneous information could be spread by the Internet.

The experiment had a delayed reaction, but when it came, it did so more dramatically than the people who made the video ever dreamed.

sadly, none of the media coverage mentions "the great white hype" by that name... they use his "given name": benjamin vanderford. the chronicle mentions that he is a "musician and video game designer" but that's about it.

gwh/vanderford even appeared on fox news. you can watch a video clip of it online: the host displays the typical fox news arrogant attitude by totally missing the point when gwh tries to explain why they made the hoax video.

gwh's point is pretty clear: to demonstrate that the media needs to be more suspicious before propogating unverified misinformation. the vanderford doesn't even show a severed head, only a blade held up against his neck, AP and reuters picked up the story as true, without bothering to check up on it, or acknowledging that they hadn't.

okay, it's bedtime now... tomorrow the mms begins. don't forget: i'll be playing an mms show saturday night at united states of mind, & i'll also be spending a fair amount of my weekend at the summit, so i'm not sure when i'll get to write "sf part ii" but it will happen.

sf part 1: the coldest winter

multipartite for easier read/write/execute

there's an old saying: "the coldest winter i ever spent was summer in san francisco." this is attributed to mark twain, but one of the first things i learned during this trip was that the quote is apocryphal: twain never said it. who did? who cares?

i left indy on sunday afternoon, 8/1/4. IND airport was crazy busy for some reason. but everything was pretty routine once i got through the ticket line. luckily i had scored the only nonstop flight from indy to SFO, so i just listened to mp3s on my new mp3cd player and started to read cryptonomicon (the first actual novel i've tried to read in at least a year, & a 900+page monster to boot.) my precious connie met me at SFO and we took the bart back to the mission. later in the evening, after some cuddling and relaxing, connie cooked dinner (i don't remember exactly what; sorry honey. i'm pretty sure it was some kind of chicken... hey, how many of you remember exactly what you had for dinner more than a week ago?). and mac and cheese.

monday we slept late and left the house even later (this is pretty much the routine every day). we went to the castro, allegedly the gayest place on earth (maybe i should say "most gay-friendly"). a great place to go if you're looking for gay bars, gay porn, or gay greeting cards. i wasn't really looking for the former two, but we stopped in a few shops and i did pick up a couple greeting cards (for collage-type use): one of a beefcake with a "smiley-face" superimposed over his face (inside is a [cheap] smiley-face whooppee cushion), and the other with a penis, dressed up like a face, wearing army clothes. it's the cutest penis card ever. at some point we went to "lunch" at a nice thai place. it was good.

on the way home we stopped by good vibrations (another "adult" store) and aquarius records, which is a pretty good but tiny record store in the mission, not too far from connie's house. (the same shop where connie once left fliers for unszene's button-making business, & one ended up in the hands of drew daniels from matmos.) i tried not to buy too much because i knew we would go to amoeba later in the week, but i got a couple cds, the doormouse i [heart] rap 12" (oops, originally i wrote "hate" there), a scorn 12" (which i wasn't sure if i had already... turns out it was the one scorn record on hymen that i didn't already have), and a few old dhr records... i found a lot of used dhr records last week for some reason... at aquarius i picked up we punk einheit! (nintendo teenage robots), and shizuo vs shizor, so i was excited about that.

on tuesday, we had a delicious curry for "lunch" at a halal indian/pakistani place, then took the bus up to "the haight" to stop by amoeba. if you've never heard of it, amoeba is an enormous place, the size of a department store, but it's all records & cds (they also have a dvd room). truly amazing, and easily the coolest record store i've ever seen... no question. but with its enormous size, it does give you that disorienting, dehumanizing feeling common in such large, crowded stores: let's call it "the best buy effect" (actual dept stores defuse this somewhat by having cash registers scattered throughout the store; at amoeba you wander around, pick your records, and queue up to enter the checkout farm by the entrance when you're done... quite different from the relatively friendly & hospitable air of a shop like aquarius). i won't even begin to list all the stuff i got there: big bunches of stuff, much of it used, on sale, or just all-around cheap. suffice to say that i learned on my first amoeba visit (in december, at the slightly-smaller-yet-still-enormous berkeley location) that you get a free tote bag/dj bag with the purchase of $200 or more, and i got my second free dj bag that day.

later that night, at home, we made beef stroganoff and brownies (i think that was tuesday, but it might've been monday.) and when did we watch adaptation? i'm not sure; we watched my adaptation dvd one of those nights... it's much easier to recall going somewhere than to remember whether we listened to cds or watched a video while we laid in bed... come to think of it, we listened to cds monday night & watched adaptation on tuesday. but i'm still not totally certain of that.

up next: part ii (i need to sort through my photos & post some before i get to thursday... right now, i have some comics to catch up on, since we never made it to a comic shop)

there can be only one

there was a time, a few weeks back, when i thought i might have big shows in september three weekends in a row. by now it looks like i'll only have one: indytron, a big noise/experimental fest put together by noiseman433.

it's funny: i submitted to two festival-type events at around the same time: the midwest music summit and an event called oranje. i figured that if i had a chance of being booked for either event, it would be oranje... since mms is a huge corporate event where oranje is supposed to be "arty" and claims on the site that it will "showcase the best in progressive music" (extra funny, because of the bands & musicians listed on the site, melk the g6-49 is the only one that strikes me as even remotely "progressive", although to be fair i haven't heard all of those bands, so it's possible that just maybe karl leichty or one of the djs is a little "progressive" [though since they also have "chicago's premier house and techno group", i rather doubt that as well]... why are people who're into experimental visual art & video so mind-numbingly conventional when it comes to their taste in music?).

it turned out to be just the opposite: i got booked for the big corporate event, and the smaller, supposedly progressive event booked a bunch of indie rock bands, "singer/songwriters", and even house music. house music!!!

okay, that was probably my last blog entry before i start recapping my sf trip.

back in the house that jack built

i got home tonight after a wonderful week in san francisco with the lovely connie. the worst part was having to come home... i'm not looking forward to going back to work in the morning (nor my dentist appt in the morning, though that probably won't be too bad).

i plan to write a bunch more about my trip (with pictures!) but it might take awhile; i expect to be super busy at work, plus i have some "catching up" to do at home as well (including lots of new records to listen to).