return of the king

i'm not big on having heroes in life. people are notoriously fallible, which makes it a dicey proposition when attempting to place one of them atop a pedestal.

the closest i come to a hero is probably robert pollard. like thousands of other maladjusted white males, the music of guided by voices inspired me to pick up a guitar and write scads of half-baked, lo-fi arena anthems.

uncle bob played a show at the doug fir in portland last night. it was my first time seeing him since i stood in a packed, sweaty club on new year's eve in chicago about 14 months ago and sobbed through the last 10 minutes of GBV's epic farewell show. my girlfriend remarked early on last night that it was weird seeing him in a place so small, and she was right; i'd seen GBV somewhere in the neighborhood of 25-30 times, and last night was probably the smallest venue i'd ever seen bob perform in, which was cool.

some observations:

- bob hasn't lost his fondness for boozing on stage, which was heart-warming to see. the rest of the band didn't appear to be following suit, at least not nearly to bob's level. however, he seemed genuinely comfortable with his bandmates. i wonder how long they'll stick around. will these guys perform on subsequent tours? will they play on the records?

- bob seems to have a prediliction for picking hammy bass players. demos, tobias, and now narducci (if i've got his name right). granted, this guy isn't nearly as skeevy as demos, or as goofy as tobias, but when he slumped all over one of the guitar players during a song, i started having flashbacks.

- GBV shows feature 78% more on-stage hugs than your average indie rock show.

- rich t, former fan club member turned road manager and all-around bob-lackey, was in full effect last night. were i of a mind to think that rich is the kind of guy who enjoys getting face time on stage, i would have had ample evidence to back up that theory last night. he spent almost as much time out there as bob, running to and fro, doing this and that. however, knowing what little i know about rich from the couple of times i've met him, i suspect he's just a fan who's working hard to make sure things go smoothly.

- i'm not big on omens or any such spiritual nonsense. however, yesterday when i went for my lunchtime run, "choking tara" came up on ipod shuffle. the band played it last night. it'd probably been a few years since i'd heard that song.

- i've had the new release, from a compound eye, for about a year now. it was a real slow grower for me; less immediately accessible than the GBV stuff. hearing those songs performed live last night was a revelation. with only 1 or 2 exceptions, they all rocked. hard. however, i don't think anything i heard changed my opinion that "the right thing" is the best song on the album.

- it's interesting to compare this band to GBV's final incarnation. i think one could make a case for saying that this lineup is an improvement all the way around. tommy keane is basically doug gillard without the solos. the first thing i saw him play last night resembling a solo came on the last song of the regular set; i think doug's head would have exploded if he'd ever tried to go that long into a GBV set without a solo or even just a little fill. not that i'm down on doug; i was always a fan. but tommy's style just seems to fit better. the current bass player is likely a wash with slusarenko (who was in attendance last night, rocking from the wings). the second guitar player is definitely more accomplished than nate farley and - with apologies to nate - far less annoying. although i will say that his overall lack of demonstrable on-stage personality had me missing nate a time or two. i always felt that nate had the misfortune of possessing a smile that personifies the expression "shit-eating grin". bob has had some pretty good drummers in his day (fennell, swanson, mcpherson, et al), but it's hard to argue with john wurster's pedigree, to say nothing of his rocking.

- at one point during a solo, bob went over to tommy and tried to do the whole "lead singer exhorting his lead guitar player through a particularly tasty solo" routine, a la plant/page. tommy kindly informed bob that he, in fact, was not the guitarist playing the solo. bob seemed nonplussed.

corporate travel

so i'm getting ready to go on my first work trip for my current company. in preparation, i viewed an online slide presentation that elucidates all the ins 'n' outs of our corporate travel policies and procedures. it was every bit as exciting as it sounds.

at one point during the presentation, there’s a slide with a checklist of items to follow when booking travel. item 1 was “discuss travel with manager”, and was accompanied by the picture you see here.

i’m trying to envision the conversation taking place between the corporate traveller and her manager:

Corporate traveller: So, like, where am I going again?
Manager: Well, let’s just take a look at my handy wall map here....how about South America?
Corporate traveller: Hmm...too latin. Can I go to an orange country? I really like orange!
Manager: No, corporate policy forbids travel to orange countries. You can go to a blue country, a yellow country, or a green country.
Corporate traveller: Wait, there’s no green countries on this map!
Manager: Ha ha! Fooled you!! Seriously, blue or yellow....what’s it gonna be?
Corporate traveller: Corporate travel sucks!

it’s possible i am not making the most efficient use of my time this morning.

go veg

so i'm a vegetarian. and a relatively new one at that (since july of '04). my main motivation was the stories i would hear or read about how animals are treated by the meat industry. but i'm not one of those preachy veggies. hell, i like meat as much as the next carnivore. i just figured i'd feel better and less hypocritical if i removed myself from the barbaric process that brings meat to our plates. case in point: some text i found on GoVeg.com:

Animals on factory farms are treated like meat, milk, and egg machines. Chickens have their beaks seared off with a hot blade, and male cows and pigs are castrated without painkillers. All farmed chickens, turkeys, and pigs spend their brief lives in dark and crowded warehouses, many of them so cramped that they can't even turn around or spread a single wing. They are mired in their own waste, and the stench of ammonia fills the air. Animals raised for food are bred and drugged to grow as large as possible as quickly as possible—many are so heavy that they become crippled under their own weight and die within inches of their water supply.

Animals on factory farms do not see the sun or get a breath of fresh air until they are prodded and crammed onto trucks for a nightmarish ride to the slaughterhouse, often through weather extremes and always without food or water. Many die during transport, and others are too sick or weak to walk off the truck after they reach the slaughterhouse. The animals who survive this hellish ordeal are hung upside-down and their throats are slit, often while they're completely conscious. Many are still alive while they are skinned, hacked into pieces, or scalded in the defeathering tanks. Learn more about the factory-farming industry.

shut up

why should the rest of the world be any different?

Hezbollah Leader to Bush: 'Shut Up'

i'm slowly starting to get freaked out by this whole cartoon thing. i can completely sympathize with the idea that after four and a half years, muslims may be getting tired of being the world's scapegoats. i sort of look at these protests as the watts riots on a global scale. but as a more-than-passing fan of free speech, i just can't bring myself to view an offensive cartoon image of muhammad as just cause for so much violence.

i feel like most americans want to understand and like muslims. we don't like to think of ourselves as being as xenophobic as the rest of the world thinks we are (well, most of us don't). but i think, as with most "foreign" cultures, our liking of them is tied to our ability to see their similarities to us. and when we don't see those similarities - or, more so, when we see the extreme differences - it can be hard for us to get past that. i fear the current situation is just exacerbating that problem.

resolved

i'm a believer in new year's resolutions. i used to think the whole idea was hokey; after all, anything worth doing is worth doing year-round, not just after the new year's.

but then it occurred to me that being a better person generally requires some conscious effort, and it's easy to get distracted by the bs that goes along with just getting through each day. new year's can function as a reminder to set some goals for one's self, however modest.

in that spirit, i decided today (better late than never) that one of my resolutions of '06 is to learn a play one new song on the guitar each day. i was inspired in part by this post by friend and fellow blogger mikeOAT, wherein he runs down a list of all the cover songs that his band has attempted in practice at one time or another. it made me realize that it's a good skill for a musician to know a bunch of songs that you can whip out when the occassion calls for it. i also figured it might provide some impetus for me to play guitar more often, which my natural sense of laziness generally inhibits me from doing.

then i started to think more seriously about the numbers. 365 songs is a lot of songs to learn. i've already missed 34 days of the year, so right there that cuts it down to 331. then, there's the fact that i travel for work an average of 1 week per month. so, that's another 66 days this year (11 more months x 6 days on average that i'm gone) without access to a guitar, bringing me down to 265. i finally decided on 250 songs, 'cause it's a nice round number and it gives me a couple weeks' leeway.

and what will the first song be, you ask? "victoria", by the kinks. for no reason other than that it was one of the first songs that came up on my iPod when i went for a run today (in the interest of full disclosure, it was actually the version by the fall). coincidentally, that song is one of the ones in mikeOAT's list.

i'm going to keep a list of all the songs i learn, along with the chords, since learning 250 songs and remembering 250 songs are two entirely different things. by the time i'm done, i will be a one-man song-playing machine. available for weddings and bar mitzvahs.

the future of film?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060202/tc_nm/leisure_film_mobile_dc

a film made entirely on cell phones. in south africa. i particularly liked this line:

"Kaganof [the filmmaker] -- who ironically bought his first cell phone last year to make the film -- dismissed concerns over quality and said the footage looked 'fabulous' when blown up to the standard 35mm feature film size."

as someone who writes and records songs at home in a manner that is often characterized as "lo-fi", i'm all for stuff like this. if our governments can't be democratic, at least our arts should be.

i finally did it.

i bought a little electronic device last year you may have heard of called an iPod. now, in my defense, i have lecherously coveted an mp3 player for years, long before you couldn't throw a rock without hitting someone with those annoying little white cords hanging out of their head. the main reason i wanted one was because i was enchanted by the idea of being able to carry my entire music collection around in my pocket, which is no small feat when you own somewhere in the neighborhood of 700-800 CDs.

what i was lacking was a computer on which to put all of said CDs. i have a laptop through my job, but clearly i wasn't going to use that, and it didn't have enough hard disk space anyway. in september, when i moved in with my girlfriend, i "inherited" an old dell desktop that she'd had since '01, but that had been sitting in a box collecting dust since '03. i got the bright idea to clean it up, upgrade it (i.e., add more hard disk space), and turn it into my very own "music server" (which is a glorified term for a digital dumping ground for my musical obsessions).

this idea percolated in the back of my head for several months; one can't rush these things. finally, i got up the gumption to visit a local CompUSA, where i purchased (A) an 80GB hard drive, (b) a wireless card, so i go could online and surf porn during the many mind-numbing hours of ripping CDs, and (c) something called a KVM switch, which allows you to hook up multiple computers to the same monitor, mouse, and keyboard, thus saving precious office real estate.

any old way, the installation of the new hard drive was my biggest concern; even though i make my living writing software, my job never requires me to delve into the guts of a computer. the salesman at CompUSA assured me that it would be a task roughly equivalent in complexity to eating a delicious slice of cake. well, on a purely physical level, he was correct; it was pretty easy. the problem was, ye olde desktop didn't allow for the presence of multiple hard drives, so i had to take out the original one before installing the new one. this left me in the position of needing to re-install Windows Me, which is what the desktop originally came with. unfortunately, the CD was nowhere to be found. what i did have was a Windows XP CD, but for some reason, when i tried to install it, the system just sat there with it's arms folded, shaking it's head and saying "no no no no no no NO!" in a bratty voice.

to say the least, i was unhappy. much pouting on my part ensued. i took some time to cool off, then e-mailed a good friend of mine who works in IT for advice. he informed me that you can take a Windows CD and create 3.5" floppy disks out of it (remember those things?) that the computer will recognize when booting up. so, to make long story longer, i did, and it worked. and now, i am sitting here eating my noah's bagel, sipping coffee and ripping CD after CD onto my new music server. just a few more weeks and i'll be done...