feeling vaguely cut off here in this sea of computers and air-conditioning. i'm not having any luck reaching rebecca (where has that blasted thing got to now?) or ester (hay you, drop me a line.) todays two portentious (or something) e-mails - from alyssa and rae (respectively businesslike and joyful in tone) have been duly responded to. and rather than sleeping like i should given the still airborne state of tomorrows plans, here i go seeking stimulation from borges (fewer than 20 pages left in the collected fictions, after two summers worth of work and wonder at them) and scrabble (this has me on the brink of addiction, and my eyes on the brink of giving out.) signing off.

…off the hook now
(we never had what it took)

a couple of funny dinner groups lately:

friday evening dan had a gig with black sea salsa at hampton beach, a resort town on new hamshire's tiny stretch of coastline. we drove up with the van and dogs, and after the show (i probably wrote something about them last summer - it's a funny hodge-podge of latin and armenian and other world/fusiony influences) we hung around to go on the town a bit.

the group included flautist lance, the band leader and his involved wife, along with a couple of others - i won't take the trouble to describe them all, but it was a bunch of characters. also amusing; sound guy (ex-notable intern) brian with his dad and sister, she a recent valedictorian headed to college next year in bio-medical engineering.

that information turned the topic of discussion over clamshack dinner (i just had a big bowl of chowdah) to a variety of vaguely-related subjects which she couldn't really enlighten us on much (mad cow, genetic engineering, etc.) and sort of smirked off. so they talked vegas instead.

walking back along the strip, stopped for ice cream (i had a rare hankering for hot fudge sundae) and then skeeball. we stayed to close the arcade, then slowly made our way home, listening to the rest of "pynched/promised" (that tape's gotten some good mileage lately) and part of the second portishead record (which is just downright unpleasant, at least next to the first one.)

the next night, dinner was japanese with an old friend of dan's (they hadn't seen each other in about a decade), with his wife and two blond kids: 6-year-old holden who was advertised as noisy but seemed pretty well-behaved, and11-year emily, a classic achiever (good in school, plays a dozen instruments, bright and polite), who rolled her eyes and made her concessions to immodesty in a knowing, teenager-ish, too-mature way that kind of annoyed me for some reason.

dad (long-haired at bearded, though apparently he'd been clean-cut back in the day), whose new involvement in marketing-nintendo-games-through-free-sample-plays-in-refitted-ambulances-in-public-places brought them to town, was enjoyably sardonic, obviously very smart but subtle about it - reminded me of my dad with a more biting sense of humor.

that meal ended with ice cream too, the delicious offerings (in my case, ginger and pineapple) at the local best-of-new-england joint, rancatore's.

to continue with the dinner talk (days are confined to the studio, mostly: today with mixing matt seckler's jazz album; yesterday with brandon doing vocal recording and so forth, admittedly after an adventure at ihop - by the way, the côte d'ivoirean reggae band that was supposed to be here all week obviously isn't, due to a visa snafu),

last night was leftover thai plus delicious new swordfish and beans, in front of the sunday-night hbo (my first time seeing "six feet under," which was quite intriguing, and "sex in the city," with which i was unenthused. and some other show too, about cops and gang members in balto or dc.)

and tonight was japanese once again, in a the porter square exchange, which is jam-packed with japanese shops and restaurants. daifuku too, mm. but enough about food.

if all goes well (especially if rebecca breaks her recent uncharacteristic uncommunicate-with-able streak) i'll be going to cape cod tomorrow for a few days, with rebecca, petar, and, (perhaps?) skelly. that would/will make me quite happy; i think we could be a very successful, though unlikely, fab foursome for a summer adventure.

other stuff: there are relationship-type issues around, the sort of stuff i am out of practice writing about here, and not sure whether i should or want to. a number of my good friends are in relationship-transition phases, including (but maybe not most-importantly, actually) me. heck, most of you readers probably know all about stuff anyway.

on second thought, i won't be a gossip-monger just yet. let me make a few e-mail enquiries to see if this stuff is blog-approved. then i'll get back to you, if i still feel like writing about it.

magic christians chew the rind
'cause bad girls are always bad girls

so, i continue to continue. i worked into quite a rhythm at this last time, let's see how it goes.

Monday 22 July
martha's 17th birthday. my present was as asked for another mix cd. on the bus to ny it occurred to me that a lot of the song titles include easily illustratable nouns (first few songs: "this little ukelele" "cigarettes and chocolate milk" "vegetables" "heavy metal drummer" "blimps go 90" "buggin'" "ms. fat booty.") so rae and i (mostly her) worked throughout the day when we had a spare moment on the cover art. but we didn't finish in time. oh. last track: "what a nice way to turn 17" by the crystals. title: "nice! way to turn seventeen!"

we listened to call and response on the drive up to saranac with my cute parents singing along the doot-do-doots.

the group at saranac: all gravitzes except zoe, dan and mami and dogs, and mike and dede. some of them had gone to see peter yarrow the night before, and even sang on stage with him (lily and bobby)

lily is about 2.5, she is talkative and ineffable; ella is 8 months, and a bit shy. she has funky toys.

we went swimming at the boathouse; swam out to dog rock and just sat in the sun. aah.

lunch; guideboat (with bobby) - i think that's where i got this sunburn that's now finally going away. i played "martha my dear" on the boathouse piano, and we jumped off the roof.

bowling in the late afternoon (martha's getting really good) i did okay until my concentration was ruined after rae and i discovered an electronic jukebox with blondie, hank williams, soul coughing, lou reed, and salt 'n' pepa. i won an extra song.

then lobster dinner (although i opted for haddock and a crab cake instead) which, with our large group is always an event. mountain mist was out of soft-serve for some reason.

and charades afterward ("i got it bad and that ain't good," which i somehow miraculously guessed in about five seconds, "leopard skin pillbox hat," "the misfortune of the unattractive".) oh, all these traditions piling up. big family funtime. the reunion will be a good time too, i'm looking forward to it. okay, on with this.

Tuesday 23 July
after a perfectly typical day of knollwood activities, this was a perfect wanakena day, even better because we didn't have to travel anywhere for the first day in a while. it's always nice to have someone new to share these places with (and i so often do) - it's easier to appreciate, for instance, family when i can see it through a newcomer's eyes. it allows me a bit of psychological distance when i want it, the power to be an observer as well as a participant in the shenanigans.

what did we do? not much, or maybe a lot of things in a very relaxed manner. we got up late (post noon), sat around reading and eating breakfast. we took the obligatory walk around the island, which turned into a stroll to the ranger school at the end of the road. more relaxing, and then a little paddle up the river to the bridge and back, singing dylan. my folks went to star lake for much of the day, so we mostly had the place to ourselves.

rae and i made dinner: artichokes, tofu/mushroom/broc stirfry, and some colorful salad. then a game of oh hell.

and then the really terrific part, which just made the whole trip: rae and i took a midnight sweat and then a lengthy dip in the moonlight, in the misty river, which (after the sauna) felt amazingly luxurious, warm and slightly viscous, even after it seemed like it should have worn out. even getting out, i hardly felt wet or cold. perfect ending (along with a game of scrabble and marc ribot) to a lovely week.

Wednesday 24 July
the return trip. so that i could accompany rae for as much of the drive as possible, we planned to meet dan at an exit off the northway, at 1:30. i drove the whole three and a quarter hours and got us to the meeting spot precisely on time (dan got confused about exits, understandably since apparently all of them have a stewarts on the right.)

we stopped along the way for photographs and 15 cent root-beer popsicles at the meat store of the north. that shall be a tradition, i decree, every time we go through warrensburg to get there.

more misadventures once we had met up, trying to find a legendary diner in latham. excellent onion rings (one of rae's two new foods for the weekend, along with artichokes.) and they had those cool mints too.

somewhere in between dan's dozens of personal cellphone calls and brian eno's "nerve net," i fell asleep on the way back, pausing for ben and jerry's white russian at a rest stop on the pike. mmm.

it was getting to be concert time, with only one ticket more or less confirmed (dan as a +1 through a guy who worked for bose) for the sold-out los lobos concert, so we headed down to the paradise shortly after returning to boston. we managed to chat up one of the guys from opening act quetzal (whom i'd seen open for ozomatli), who agreed to put me on the guest list too. the odd one out was mami, but she got too upset and tired to want a ticket even when we found a scalper for her.

dan had to wait for his bose pal before he could get in, so he and i waited on a stoop eating ramen with a young friend (skavoovie sax player) and talked about be-bop and film scoring. david hidalgo was hanging out outside of the tour bus so we went up and talked to him (dan asked about getting him to play on something.)

it got to be nine (scheduled starting time for the wolves) so i went in. quetzal were wrapping up their set (better than i remembered) and i was easily able to make my way through the crowd to the second row. it's a neat venue - wide rather than long, with the wide rounded stage jutting out into the crowd and audience on three sides, so lots of people can be in front.

the audience was older than any show i've ever been to (except maybe john hammond at the tin angel, but that wasn't really a rock show.) i was right next to a group including a guy who reminded me of david siegel, with whom i talked about fave lobos albums and side projects, and his bubbly dancing wife donna who tried to make friends with everybody around, and said she would name her fourth child after me and that she thought the drinking age should be twelve.

nice mix of pre-show music (wilco, morphine, soul coughing, some bluesier stuff) as the tech made a file right by me to load equipment off the stage.

eventually the band got on - tons of cool-looking guitars and percussion. steve was sort of ensconced in a back corner with his saxes and keys, and i couldn't hear him too well. cesar is bad-ass, wearing his shades just like on his album cover and barely moving at all when he sings and plays. both he and david are just sick guitar players, and louie got some awesome guitar solos in too, although i was less impressed by his drumming.

they opened with "down by the riverbed," from the neighborhood, a good-but-not-great early 90s album that i had almost forgotten about. then, after (similarly kick-out-the-jams rocking "don't worry baby") two more cuts from that album - "i walk alone" and "emily." i was not expecting that. they didn't do many more tunes that i recognized, oddly enough (nothing off colossal head or this time, and nothing more off the first record.) a lot of it, of course, was from the new record, but they must have dug out some old obscure stuff too from the one or two discs i don't have, since it was pretty much the whole set. i kept thinking they were going to play "evangeline" or "cumbia de la raza" or something but then it would turn out just to be another song that sounded really similar.

finally, most of the way through the set, they played a few tunes from kiko (for those who don't know, one of my absolute favorite records of all time - definitely check it out if you don't know it): "angels with dirty faces," which they did a great job of reproducing the odd percussion textures on, using the audience to clap on every '4' to fill out the groove. and then "peace," one of those nice little rockers tucked away at the end of the album. those two songs were worth the whole night, in my opinion.

not that the rest of it wasn't great too - they were in fine rocking form, and the new material certainly seems worthy. set ended with "cumbia raza" and a few members of the opening band back onstage for mediocre solos.

but then, to really pump things up, they came back to encore, first with (apparently a local boston r&b stalwart) barrence whitfield, who took lead vocals for fantastic covers of "my generation" (ded. to entwhistle) and "hey joe" and then the lobos' own "georgia slop," from that same record. and then another encore, covering "not fade away" into "tequila" into "bertha." cool. rae and i were just singing "not fade away" too.

good show. definitely a nice fan community too - we talked with some folks at a pizza place after the show, before snagging a taxi home...

so this catch-up business is taken care of now. thanks for reading if anyone actually read all this. even though this site is so self-centered, i feel like it's a big link back to all swat buddies. so i write about myself to feel connected to other people.

vamos a la playa
aqui podemos correr desnudos
porque nadie nos puede ver

now. i'm in the studio, handling the meniality of backing up all the audio files of a recently recorded classical saxophone album. this means burning a lot of data cds (bach disc 5 of 6 currently being verified), which means there's lots of time for me to go webtrawling, and it's a good opportunity to begin the necessary (perhaps) recap of the past week. i'm also listening to an album by "dead cat bounce," the regular band of a jazzer who was here this morning to discuss mixing of an album he just recorded in new york with heavies like curtis fowlkes and pheeroan akLaff. cool stuff.

so, i'll try to drag myself away from the pleasures of perusing developments that have gone down in my absence (in this case, almost in my presence) long enough to date y'all up a bit. i'ma try really hard to avoid the boring details (we got on the subway again) and only get bogged down by the interesting details.

Thursday 18 July
rebecca and i left at noon - chinatown bus (not fung wah) left late and took nearly six hours to get to ny, but at least it gave me some time to read my book. and watch some (only sometimes subtitled) kung fu movies.

rae's room in astoria (take the N or the W, ride all the way to the end) is full of everything that was in it in the barn, and is maybe even bigger. dropped my stuff there (impressively managed to fit a weeks worth of stuff into my one backpack - conveniently forgetting shorts) and went into the living/dining/bed/organ room to meet friends: sarah, jeremy, sam.

grape leaves and coconut soup with wine for dinner, all of which i enjoyed in spite of myself, and lots of talk of folky music - sam is working for jorma and is way into all that stuff, while rae, she'll reluctantly admit, is reading a "biography" (apparently there's a stigma attached that genre?) of dylan/baez/fari–a.

we really wanted to go dancing, like we've always said, but age laws, ignorance of clubs, the hour, the deadness of thursday, and general fatigue conspired to unmake that plan even as far as on the subway platform.

instead rae and i took frozen confection in a back garden-patio and walked home to a mountain of dishes. retired after a mellow day, but there was better to come.

Friday 19 July
first of many swattie sightings came early today - cindy leger also purchasing nj transit tickets at penn st. ours was ill-timed, so we detoured through a koreatown grocery and munched on seaweed all the way down to south orange.

mama solomon met us at the station and welcomed into her happily spacious and well-lit suburban home, complete with tuna salad and newspapers and cowboy junkies on mountain stage. my lyric-fodder/makeshift-phone book liked it too much. there we were able to contact matt+elena, who it turned out were only 15-20 min. away, but we drove back to the city separately.

the drive back to queens (to the accompaniment of side one of "def pie 98," always a fun memory trip) was fine, as was a mad scramble for housekeys before disembarking - what was less so was that only minutes after i got on the subway for brooklyn, it started to pour. i knew this because more and more of the people getting on the train were more and more drenched.

me with little more than skimpy shins-shirt and birks for protection from elements, i was as wet as i was going to get after the short (initially misdirected) walk from the f train stop to prospect park bandshell. but whatever. it meant there was a much thinner crowd than there would have been otherwise, and i was able to meet my party (matt in family man mode, with tireless e, the "fabulous maddie" and a friend of a brother with a trail of dead tee and a positive outlook in tow) most easily.

they had two umbrellas to share between the five of us - enough but pointless except maybe to hold in some of the heat in a situation where everyone is going to get soaked regardless and they'd just better not care too much - but perhaps worth it just to shield my remarkably warming $3 plate of rice and beans from the water.

it would have been better if nobody had umbrellas, because they just made it harder to see - by the time the brooklyn celebrate crew had gotten past rain-induced fears and technical difficulties to allow the show to actually begin (a pre-show talk by the man billed as "a brookyln positive rapper" was scrapped), the number of people had considerably increased - by so much as to include mike camilleri, and others.

zap mama were tight - three singer/dancers including a hildebrand lookalike and the ringleader mama with big cloak and goofy accent, plus a funky multi-instrumentstress and a perfunctory dj (as in "zap mama dj project") who dropped that beat from "I Know You Got Soul" (what's that sample again?) and moved the group's sound marginally closer to hip hop, which i thought it was fairly close to before. sweet harmonies, and just funk, like you're going to need if it's raining that hard in a brooklyn park and you've got several hundred attitudes to perk up.

more delays before the event - talib kweli in full effect, happy to be there and really convincing me of his prodigy. i've always liked him on record, but seeing him spit live, and really being able to focus on some of his lyrics - which are perhaps the most consistently intelligent i know of - took my appreciation to another level.

the show was fast-paced, mixing in faves from blackstar ("dedication," "brown-skin lady," "respiration") and his solo record, some from hi-tek and some great new (to me?) stuff (especially one great song about his 5-yr-old son - "how'm i supposed to tell him about this f*cked-up world" kinda thing), and lots of interaction with the crowd (who knew most of the words of course), and sharing the spotlight with the band - consisting of two back-ups singers (one a jazzyfatnastee) and an amazing dj (chas i think was his name) who took one of the best beat-matching/scratching breaks i've ever witnessed. matt unfortunately left midway through, before the blazing encore of "for women" (what a song.)

but probably the best part was even after that, when the last encore tune ended and talib was up there with the dj: "hey, can we play some stevie wonder records for you people?" [crowd goes wild and the dj slips on the opening notes of "Don't Worry About a Thing," and we all sing along.]

talib says "every boy grab a girl, every girl get a boy" and, wonder of wonders, there's a girl - all alone next to me, red tank top and yellow hair, and dj chas and talib are pumping out a steady stream of 70's soul and disco hits, dropping out the choruses for us to prove we know our stuff.

it ended too soon - my partner said to wait for her while she got a drink, but never returned; they dropped "billie jean," toyed with the intro for a while then just let it play out - but for a few minutes it was a magical summer rush, especially after the failure of danceplans to gel the previous night - to unexpectedly find myself at a brooklyn dance party with nothing particular to do but whatever i wanted.

of course, the night was far from over. the rain had stopped, midway through kweli's set, and the crowd that slowly moved out of the park and towards the subway had swelled accordingly. the weirdest of familiar face sightings - alli (dan's production assistant, whom i had seen not three days earlier) was there on the platform, with some friends down on the chinatown bus that afternoon for the show.

so i made my way to the village, and after an initial rebuff made it (albeit sublegally) into rae's joint, cafZ creole. i didn't have to entertain myself long before a macktet-ish jazz quartet started up (first short set including a smith-style "let's stay together") and some friends and tangential friends of rae's dropped by as well.

first jenny and andrea - that i could deal with, but then stephanie and a whole troupe of others started coming in, ordering mai tais and blue martinis and so on. no matter, of the bunch (ten or more) that i followed out onto mcdougal and beyond (rather than sit and wait for rae to finish her shift four hours later), only one (jenny) was really a first-hand friend, and several were unknown even to her (making them friends of friends of a friend of my friend.) but most, i gather, were, at one point, brown students, which makes them all likable and relate-to-able, i guess, in a kind of way.

there was, again, discussion of going out dancing, and various locations were mentioned, but we (at least the sub-group i, rather arbitrarily, ended up with) opted again for something more homely.

after stopping at the lime tree market for a six of miller high life, jenny (reminiscent of that girl michelle who's always at rsdn dances) and i joined stephanie (reminiscent of katie [la chance] from hartwick, and also somewhat of hanna mcd. those soft curly features..) and andrea (not particularly reminiscent of anyone, but a good person, you can tell, when someone slips into her bedroom to feed the fish and put on forever changes.)

i have a theory that the older you get, the more people look alike, because the more people you have already met that other people might remind you of.

i like being with the friends of friends - as long as it doesn't feel too much like a makeshift and oddly dependent situation with weird obligations - it's a pleasant way to interact with strangers with whom (not uncoincidentally) one often finds some compatability.

anyway, these were nice people - they shared their couch, their beer, their frosty water mug, and their mens and womens magazines (for analytical comparison of images. question: why do both mens and womens magazines have women on the cover? answer: because women are hot! [don't remember who said this]) gq had a bit on elvis c's top ten of the moment (including ghost world, a temptations album i've never heard of, and "my watch." and "my friend's book."

and, john, who finally showed up a while later, from an asian film society screening, even offered me a ride back to the bar. where i waited for rae to get off and tried to ignore what threatened to become a minor brawl.

the n got us back to queens as the sun rose, to the realization that our plans to meet early for breakfast in brooklyn were ill-founded.

Saturday 20 July
but we rose anyway and arrived at john's spacious but poorly-configured apartment in park slope, still proceeding according to the vague plans that nobody else seemed to be holding much stock in anymore.

found some kick-ass cheap mexican at uncle moe's (mole poblano enchilada with beans, rice, chips, and a sweet tamarind drink for under six bucks) which served as late breakfast, and then hopped the train to coney island, diverted on the way by a magnificent cemetary, strangers playing hangman, and roofs that would make perfect skateparks.

the incredibly impressive thing about coney island is that it hasn't turned into another shiny modern amuseplex, as one could so easily envision having happened. neither has it shrivelled to a lifeless shell of its former self, of more interest to history buffs than pleasure seekers.

the "they don't sleep anymore on the beach" guy on the godspeed record says "now it's shrunk down to almost nothing," and i guess that might be sort of arguable if you compare it to the sleekness and brash bombastic excess of much of modern america, but i can hardly imagine it was any more bustling and majestic in its purported heyday.

i mean, coney island is brash and bombastic. colorful and gritty and non-pc and all that. i mean, you know this (but maybe you don't know it's still like that - i assure you, go check it out sometime.) it's that old-timey american summer thing again - different, but perhaps not all that different, from what i described in my cedar point entry a few months back.

certainly, though the paved part of the pleasure park (on the opposite side of the boardwalk from the beach, where the music was set up) was thronged on this particular day with white college kids, all dolled up in their indie finery, one easily got a sense that it would be plenty crowded even if it were any other hot summer day, from the masses of folks on the beach and boardwalk who had i'm sure never heard of sleater-kinney: families and couples, black kids, latino kids playing in the waves, the great swelling in your heart of america, the big apple, a day by the seashore.

but i, of course, was there for the music. at least mostly. our initial foursome arrived on the scene around 2:30, and wandered noncommitally, just taking it in. a few tunes by the von bondies (noisy straight-up r'n'r, good or bad), then back to the other side to catch a bit of, i guess, pretty girls make graves. then back again, an abortive shot at getting close for les savy fav.

to nobody's real surprise, at least not after a while, we ran into countless swatties; at least one every half hour or so while we were walking around. the usual olde club crowde: matt and elena w/ sister, christy and jason, jessie colman and amalle and elinore, priti, catherine gaffney, dave mccandlish and erik and kate (oooh, erik and kate), blair and pt, and, reportedly, nick jarrett.

all these semi-chance encounters; i wished i could have taken the time to hung with (at least some of) them for longer than just the initial hey! moment, particularly after rae took off early to get to work, but it didn't quite work. they were going the other way, or i couldn't get away from my current group. oh well. guess i'll see them at school.

les savy fav (matt: the best live band in the world) couldn't quite put out the kind of energy they did in olde club, for all their manic stuffed-animal throwing, and even though i now knew the words (this show sounded a lot more like the record, i think). at least, they couldn't to me, standing 150 feet away because even this early the crowd was that packed. i mean, tim harrington even trimmed his beard, looking nowhere near as much like a homeless guy as he ought. what fun is that?

so we took the opportunity to ride the cyclone, with a lively bunch of greenshirted friends of jenny's. it's a bit steep ($5), but cool that you can pay for rides individually rather than the whole park. the standing offer, which they pitch when you get off, is to ride again for $4. but somehow we managed to talk them down to $18 or so for the eight of us (it wasn't quite precise.)

oh, man! that is a quality coaster. i have to say it rivals the millenium force for my best coaster experience of the summer. first of all, there was no wait at all. nothing fancy - just an old-style wooden coaster, not too jerky. great, great, non-stop action ride. the kicker is one hill, in the middle of the ride, where you zoom up at high speed. that catches you by surprise. so. cool.

after that rae and i went off to play in the ocean, frollicking happy in the waves, though glancing back nervously at our unprotected bag on the shore. and the plastic palm tree spraying water. whee.

we had to push our way to meet back up with jenny and john, though they were quite far back in the crowd. the yeah yeah yeahs were on stage ("our friends the yeah yeah yeahs. . .are on top of the world right now" , john had said the night before.) it was poppy and catchy and i dug it - probably would have been pretty into it if i were close enough to really see and hear, but from my vantage point the lead gal seemed a little too perfect a chrissie hynde clone.

as their set ended and another great readjustment began in the crowd makeup, rae unfortunately had to take off. andrea had recently arrived as well. it was time for the serious concert-attending to begin.

following my lead, the current quartet was able to push up to center right about four rows from the fence dividing us commoners from the disproportionately spacious press section about twenty feet in front of the stage. relationship of command played and i shuffled my shoes.

stephanie, there with another gal from the night before - laurie - and her sister, i think her name's debra, was only one row back from the fence, waving aloft proudly her new bunny, pastel jelly-beans on his bowtie and green ribbon. when i got close enough to ask her a while later, i learned she had not one this but been indirectly given it by mr. harrington.

a respectable pause (and a trio of costumed can-canners) and the announcement of albequerque's finest, fresh off the cyclone with their sheepish songwriterly negative-stage-presence intact from the last time i saw them open. no alarms and no surprises. james lost his glasses.

they aren't the tightest band around (the drummer, for his inventiveness, has sucky time), but the songs, the songs, people. a nice handful of new tunes which made me excited for a new album, whenever they may get around to gracing us with it. the new ones are maybe a bit rockier, i can't tell. no "new slang" but otherwise a fine set. i wonder if they convinced many newbies though.

the donnas. i was pretty disappointed that they didn't play "40 boys in 40 nights," or much else from that record (their most recent.) of course, all the older and newer stuff sounded just the same, but it's always nice to hear the ones you know. they did open with "are you gonna hit it," though, so that was nice. and of course, "…it's easy to see that you write about me in your diary" (couldn't resist.)

their stage presence is fun but kind of awkward, like overgrown 13-year-olds trying to pretend to be sexy but forgetting how. head donna (i don't know their last names) is a little too earnest for it to work ("okay! yeah! how's it going out there!" after, like, every tune.") the bassist is scary. the drummer is funny - she holds her right stick in a strange way that looks kind of painful. nice to have seen them though.

by this point i was in the second row of heads, as close as i wanted to be. a gaggle of giggly girls appeared next to us - they introduced themselves as members of kpoww, a womens wrestling troupe from kalamazoo who had performed earlier in the day. the one who talked the most reminded me of laura hirschfeld. if you can imagine her being in a womens wrestling troupe.

another odd 'tween-sets diversion: a duo of bizarrely-costumed performers with circular saws that made sparks shoot out when they applied them to metal plates on their costumes and "guitar." one of the more creative simulated sex acts i've seen. hmm.

and then, yeah, yeah, yeah, the main attraction. (the hoarse-voiced announcer said: are you ready for sleatter-kinney!? are you ready for sleatter-kinney!!?? here they are -- sleeeaaaataar-kinnneeey!!!?) now that's some rock and roll. fine fashion sense too.

my view of janet was somewhat obscured by carrie. but otherwise, great great great. they're so tight. i didn't even know 90% of what they played. a lot of it was new - and great - and they only did two from dig me out, the one that goes "it's not what you want, it's everything" and the set-closing title track, as well as the two i'm most familiar with from ahotb (hey, cool acronym), "ladyman" and "you're no rock and roll fun."

but it didn't matter, not really - it was all that familiar s-k sound. i might have to get some more of their records. punk energy, the whole crowd was in a frenzy. nice. an unbeatable day of fun in the sun. (and not even a sunburn to suffer for it, thanks to some sunblock from somebody sometime)

ahhh. and now what. we regrouped (seven give or take a few stray acquaintances) on the beach. while i sat on my backpack and removed a goldfish from my shoe, stephanie played volleybunny, and john checked his cell messages. "there's no power in manhattan" he reported.

but a minute later it was back on again, maybe. (apparently the outage had lasted for some eight hours, but timed perfectly so as not to affect us.) so we just had to make plans.

silly girls gave in to impulse and rushed semi-nude into the ocean, while a group of blunt-totin' boyz passed by, offering their commentary ("i don't want to see no balls!") the moon shines through scattered clouds. there's my lovely swatties again.

where we ended up was back in park slope, in a diner, with an expanded entourage. i ordered a feta burger and then went into the bathroom to change out of my bathing suit and sandy birks and back into hipkid cords and adidas. over food i silently named the bunny (percy) and the sister debra explained stock market economics to us. fantastic mints. (with filling! orange, green, liquorice.)

i realized the next morning that i must have left my sandals at the diner - nowhere else really made sense, since i know i had them there (to change out of), and i remember having hands free leaving - i would have carried them so as not to get my bag sandy.

it was a bad weekend for those birks. first they got completely soaked in the rain at the talib kweli show. then they got sandy (despite my attempts to prevent it) on the beach, and i spent most of the end of the concert in barefeet, with my two pairs of shoes piled nearby. no wonder they went and got lost, i guess. but, darn, those were good shoes.

already fully exhausted, i soldiered on, hopefully not trying andrea and stephanie's hospitality by accompanying them to their place. we started watching the shining on television, but barely made it halfway through before we were all so close to falling asleep that it was a useless pretense.

so i got the directions and meandered on down to mcdougal, where rae had said she'd be able to leave work early at any point after three. singing elliott smith to myself. no good - she ended up staying there until four and after, so i sat quietly for an hour sipping my oj and watching some 80s zombie movie on the soundless tv.

the night dragged on but the promise of bed before long kept us going, past an articulate wino who melodiously summoned us - "humans don't get drunk. humans only get drunk once every seven years, and then they come out and tell other humans to be themselves. like butterflies…" and he fluttered away, following his butterfly hands. (rae said that had to go here)

also, a special graffito beneath the subway seat, which i'm not going to remember fully now: very very extra special turbo miracle [something] punch - red fish smoked. oh, man, to bed to bed to bed.

Sunday 21 July
yawn. i was in a bad mood, if not right when i got up, a short while later. my joy of imminent wanakena momentarily checked by continuing fatigue, the realization of sandal loss, and perturbation at the lateness of our start. (if we slept six hours we woke at 11:30.)

rrgh. rae, thankfully more cheerful than i despite similar exhaustion, went out on errands (bank and bread) and i called the folks, packed up and cleaned up. we decided to try looking in the diner ourselves, even though the morning crew member i spoke to on the phone had no luck finding the shoes.

that meant delaying our departure with a side-trip to brooklyn. worse, super-rae's supernatural directional powers failed her (when she was little, she used to peruse her family maps and atlases frequently, until one day an atlas that had lain too near a leaky electric outlet fell on baby rae's head, and ever since that day she's had magical powers of direction.)

yeah. we took a wrong turn and ended up going more than a full mixtape side out of our way (and we were listening to tapes of my wsrn shows, so that means 60-minute sides.) and to no avail. (i later called the joint in the evening, and that wasn't helpful either.) at least i got another fine breakfast at uncle moe's (this time with a deliciously light horchata to drink.)

some more minor direction problems, but soon we were on our way, finally, out of the city. hooray! up into the north for my favorite place.

the drive was long - due to one particular missed turn late in the day, it took much longer than it should have - we didn't get in until around 11. but mostly enjoyable.

we listened to rae's tape and more of my radio shows, and talked about music, work, the city, family, and more. i nursed rae's broken heart (a bad case, as it seems from hearing her say it - though it shows little outwardly), tried to help her understand. sad songs help and hinder - we ended up listening to "when you were mine" six times in a row, in different versions (crooked fingers' is truly magical.)

i drove the last three hours, from just beyond lake george where we stopped to call in our lateness report. took a little while to get up to speed (literally) with loose-rules back-country two-lane driving, and a bit of practice with brights operation, but it was great fun to really get behind the wheel for a good stretch.

i turned off the radiotape because of a headache, and we made up the difference for the rest of the trip singing stephin merrit tunes. the charm of the highway strip, if we remembered the words, would have fit perfectly. instead, 69 selections. rae offered thoughts on the self-indulgence or the indulgence of sad songs.

finally we got there. yes. my cute parents (as rae kept iterating.) a new bear (wooden statue. it's fun to pat.) late night again, sort of, doing artwork for martha's b-day present. and a peaceful sleep.

after all these days
on godforsaken highways
the road don't love you
and it still won't pretend to

i've got plenty to say, of course, about this past week, my terrific little seven-day rae-cation. three days downstate, three up, and one to travel in between. summer in the city and summer on the lake: rainstorms and sunburns, outdoor concerts and midnight swims, the kindness of strangers and the comfort of family, music and silence, and. etc. i'll probably do the whole thing up in daily segments, trademark style, but starting tomorrow, not tonight. i'm tired again. (just back from a los lobos show too, which ripped it up.)

i thought that we were just good friends
but it's a possibility…

some things i forgot to mention about the dj shadow concert:

the first thing he did when he got on stage was mix "ideoteque" into the pre-show music, and just let the track play all the way through.

he said "i'm happy to be able to do what i love doing for a living: manifesting music for all of you."

~

i saw blade runner (the director's cut.) i enjoyed it, although for some reason it didn't always hold my attention (the last third seems rather weaker than the first couple.) especially cool - the visuals; also the music, which is hilarious. there's one short scene, around 1:20, in a tunnel, where you hear sirens and static and voices saying "stand by for further," which is sampled on that timo maas/deep dish tune i really like. pretty cool to hear that. a good movie, and by michelle's definition a great one (meaning that i definitely want to see it again.)

~

i got some music (surprise!) haven't really listened to the princess superstar disc yet - my mom called shortly after i put it on. but the kid606 - which inexplicably arrived as a cd rather than an lp as ordered - has revealed itself to be in equal parts moronic, grating, hilarious, and brilliant. unquestionably the best cut is "never underestimate…" (missy/jay-z/a-ha mash-up) to which my first response was "i wonder if i might, under any circumstances, possibly ever be able to play this at a swat party." my second response was "ben is going to absolutely insist that i play this at a swat party."

i miss the innocence i've known
playing kiss covers beautiful and stoned

my long day of toil is nearly at an end. sighÉ i let the massive wash over me. computer hum still, and periodic beeps, but it's clear the sucker is winding down. rebecca is poised in hesitant sleep across the table from me, her wrists bent away from me making it possible for me to imagine them as stumps if i think about too much. okay, i'm going to stop that now, it's creepy.

this work-week, though only three days long, has been much more consistently workful than the rest of my internship thus far. in a good way, for sure. due to a combination of things - a number of tiny intuitive steps i've finally come around to about how it all fits together, studio-wise; me and dan getting slightly fed up with each other and communicating to sort things out; the realization that a sizable chunk of the summer is left and there are still plenty of discrete identifiable goals that we have yet to achieve.

so, each day this week has been quite full of activity. monday there was that cable-soldering business to deal with, along with some other studio-maintenance type things and other ends. yesterday i attended to a number of tasks: checking the mic preamps on the Neve, reracking some midi interfaces, more studio cleanup, and transferring some of mike cantor's old records onto cd. that last one ended up taking rather more time than expected, and has in fact been my project for essentially all of today.

in preparation, yesterday, we refitted my computer to make it all shiny and happy: a new 512 MB ram chip, a new 32-gig hard drive, and all-new software. the amount of MacNerding that goes on around here is unparalleled in my experience, but it certainly has its perqs.

so, to get things started this morning, i recorded four sides of an out-of-print LP Benny Goodman in Moscow into my computer using Peak (about the only program on the computer at that point - my attempts from yesterday had to be scotched because the files refused to open on my retooled computer.) then i edited them, fending off a series of bizarre crashes and system screw-ups in the process, some of which forced me to repeat my work. it took most of the evening (from 7:00 until around midnight - around here, that's "most of the evening") to figure out how to actually make a cd, with separate tracks, with nice smooth transitions, out of my edited peak files - despite the help text making it sound so durn easy to do.

finally emerging successful from that battle (sweet success like zabby described in her entry today - hilarious bit about the knot, by the way), which was trebly annoying because rebecca had been around for most of it, after i promised her that it wouldn't take too long for me to finish my work, i set forth on the next little project, which is only now (3:05) nearing completion - making a mix CD for Martha. Her birthday is this coming Monday (when I will be in Saranac to bestow it upon her), and I've just stuck the Best of the Crystals in my drive to transfer what will be the final track of the mix: "What a nice way to turn 17."

ahh, that beautiful ping! one of the most satisfying sounds in the world. it sounds an awful lot like the triangle part in this mad professor dub, incidentally. okay, so, cd's done. cool! now i'm going to burn some MagFields for Rebecca, even though i could just as easily go to bed.

tomorrow i will take a chinatown bus (fung wah, or another) into new york city. then there will be fun.

fun! (more like a rocket trip and nnnot so much like a relationship)

i've spent the last two hours, almost, reading through old entries (pretty much all of october and november.) it reminds me, over and over, how great life is, how intense and action-packed my days are at swat, and how much i like myself and surprise myself it really is a great memory tool - i can recapture nuances of experiences so clearly because of even a single word.

the purposes of this indulgence were researching some specifics of rebecca's phone comment that i have unusual relationships with a lot of people (and a few in particular), and trying to find examples to back up my pending response to ben's (likewise amusing) comment on my last post. evidence in both cases was mostly unconvincing.

to ben: i think the punchy, jive-talkin' voice is fairly well established in my written canon; popping up particularly in e-mails when i get in a certain mood. it may not manifest on this site much, but reading through the entry again i don't think it's that much of a disjunct. (certainly circuitous semi-narratives like that are the norm, if not so much rambles down mem'ry lane - but i liked that, and i might do more)

as far as what i've been smoking: well, actually i inhaled a fair number of lead fumes today. i spent most of the afternoon soldering cables with dan and nick. a fun combination of meticulous precision and 650-degree heat. and lead fumes. music chat rampant: Nick and I compared Beta Band live experiences, he told me about the Quannum projects crew, dan and I laughed about nu blaxplotiation.

later on we spliced vocal takes and did a rough mix of a song of Brandon's, a pretty 'wrist-slitting ballad' (his description) called "Counting the Paces." watched Pleasantville on TV. life goes off.

Rufus Wainwright, in my head all day, once again, and then Rupture-Dynamics. it's late, but I really want to read some of the Chabon, so downstairs I go again.

when i get back
i will dream in barnes and nobles
you turn me on you turn me on

i have these vivid memories. the day i encountered endtroducing i was sitting in the commons (we're talking sota) at one of those poorly-designed cafeteria tables with stylish green pipes around the edge which made them nearly impossible to clean effectively, probably with karen and maybe emily but more significantly aijung, who proferred this fantastic-looking thing with no words on the cover, just a phat photograph and nice papery texture. and the cd was that awesome green, not recognizably related to the cover art, but still somehow marvelously in keeping with the design. on a little discman, i skipped ahead to "why hip hop sucks in '96," and a minute or so later sated my curiousity that far.

i borrowed it, probably not then, but somewhat later, and it took me at least a few weeks before the bomb hit me and i saw what a total bleeding masterpiece that album was and still is, not like it's my own personal rosetta stone, but just damn, what a discovery, and kind of cool that i came to it myself. i've always been a solitary music fan mostly, so it's funny how few of my records i feel are truly mine. that nearly is, but it's too good for me alone. i know all kinds of folks have that, seems like it transcends at least a bit.

and i was going to say - but no, that was u.n.k.l.e., and maybe actually beforehand (is that right?) - that that was the same disc aijung lent me by way of apologizing for backing out (yet again) on a wanakena venture, along with a couple of other titles, some of which i distinctly remember not listening too: bjork's post (do you believe i was sleeping on that one?), buckley's sketches for my sweetheart..., the unbelievable truth's almost there (still a soft spot), and maybe something else (definitely, there were five. dunno.) that was the same weekend i read east of eden, on crazy amy's rec. inspiration, in a bright blue library binding, cover to cover, from that longer-than-it's-length intro description of the valley to "timshel."

i was thinking about this the other day, and that's still one of the few endings to a novel that really left me satisfied. novel endings are tough, man, it seems like either you're still wanting more or you've already gotten tired (like lanark and rez blues, in recent memory) of the book. it's kind of important.

while i'm on the subject, i want to point out that chapter eight in part four of Kavalier and Clay is one of the most beautiful (quasi-) love scenes I can think of. what could be more romantic than a wee-hour gourmet picnic in a thunderstorm at the top of the e.s.b.? and after all that build-up. oof! (oh sorry, no spoilers here ma'am.)

but, yeah, when i finally bought the album for myself, the same time as I bought Moon Safari (which I had also borrowed from Aijung for at least a year), and a few others I couldn't leave for college without (Kiko, One Trick Pony, um, sgt. pepper). that was two summers ago. endtroducing... isn't my life. but it is a damn fine record. i like it anyway.

so i decided to see DJ Shadow perform live tonight, in the face of that creating problems for the rest of the company. not entirely my fault, and i don't feel guilty about it. it went down like this:

dan, mami, rebecca, i, and janet (from hong kong and edinburgh, i'm still not quite clear on her connection to all this) were wandering around bread and circus, i guess you could say, grocery shopping. and dan's not the best at realizing that for certain things to happen, other things have to happen.

last night there was this i thought kind of touching moment where we shared our knizowledge - i played endtroducing for dan and he actually listened and liked it, and he, er, told me stuff about mixing boards. then he failed again to satisfy himself with that first african track. mastering and remastering and so on. that's how it goes.

(carla never called, if you're wondering - well, we talked last night, and then this morning she again didn't call. whatevs)

up bright (eleven!) and early (o'clock!) for breakfast with dan and mr. brandon patton (hee-yeah!) at that diner. it occured to me to order a raspberry-lime rickey and two sweet-potato waffles. so that's what i did (and not a monte cristo, but remind me to get one next time). that's almost an ideal breakfast. colorful too.

music flows in and around - new looper, unopened $135 south african cds in the bottom of messy van, guerilla (sing it with me now: "i've got a mobile pho-one, i've got a mobile pho-one") and the strokes (cuz of the mug).

Now (it's late late late as i write this) superchunk are keeping me company: Here's to shutting up, damn the torpedoes, is tuneful and delicious. why can't I get into the older stuff?

sorry, you thought this was a narrative? no, just cryptic music commentary that is meaningless except to few.

the upshot being, basically, that i in my favorite indie-boy costume (blue adidas, skinny-wale dark green cords, last year's WSRN 3/4tee) found my way to the roxy (hooboy , now there's a link - you don't really want to follow it) downtown. rabi, are you reading this? just checking. once again demonstrating that it's never a good idea to buy tickets in advance, I picked one up off a scalper-by-circumstance for a few bucks less than the door price. and got in the fast (relatively speaking) line for ticketholders. whee!

a crowded place, but i got close (fifth row of heads? and second row for the encore, after a mad scramble for thrown t-shirts and posters left an opening). man, DJ shadow is just so unassuming. you know he's a white boy, but do you realize just how much of a white boy he is? actually, i never realized that cut chemist was white. Shadow reminded me a little of Wes Sconce. or Eminem maybe. he claimed this was his first show ever rocking the house without a hat on.

also his first time ever playing in Boston. I don't know how I feel about being addressed as "Boston."

he was very upfront with us, sort of explaining how the show would go and then proceeding with his business matter-of-factly, pausing at the outset to show a ten-minute film by his boy B+ featuring some fun footage of beat masters old school (james gadson, paul humphrey, and earl palmer[!]) and new (babu, j-rocc, chemist) doing what they do.

the show, commencing in earnest after that, was interesting - i really wish i knew more about what he was doing, because it was hard to tell. three turntables, two or three of those pioneer cd-scratching things, and a sampler or two. i feel like i need to play around with that stuff for a while, just to get a proper appreciation when i see someone like shad really rip it up. i mean, it was obvious he is talented, it's just rather abstract watching him move his hands, when you can only tell half the time what he's controlling, since obviously large parts of the complex mix coming out the speakers are predetermined.

as he described it, the show was essentially his usual dj-mix style, but using only his own records, for the most part, as a mix source. that meant lots of familiar and recognizable elements from his first record and a half, of course plenty from the new record (which I've only given one full listen so far, and i can dig it), and, happily, lots of unkle too. but hardly in their original contexts! he took vocal tracks from one record and set them over other beats, often completely new ones (to my ears anyway). or he just seamlessly mixed two or more of his tunes back and forth, deftly keeping the audience's expectations on edge.

fantastic visuals too - probably the best of any show i've seen (except maybe enon? or sfa?). excellent use of the three-horizontal-screens format (like at the rock hall), which i really like. making records and speakers. the video clips that he took speech samples from (m*a*s*h, mr. rogers, and omigod I was freaking out, what was that awesome clip at the start of napalm brain/scatter brain with "neptune's elixir"? wow. that tune, the last before encore, was so great, totally danced up - too bad it was like a rock concert and not a dance party) and sped-up shots driving down the highway, including what could only be the pacific coast highway (during "you can't go home again"). that really made me want to be in california. what a great place. i think i'll live there, as soon as possible.

a live drummer came on for the encore. i sat in park street station for around twenty minutes. times like that are when i just wind up composing blogger entries, or snippets for them.

man, i'm taking this short paragraph thing to heart, huh.

i just sent out a rash of jivey e-mails to folks in the new york area and elsewhere, but for the rest of you: siren fest! new york city! etc! it's confirmed now, because rae called. yae! her new e-mail address is really cute, huh.

oh, there are things that will no doubt come up, if not here, well they already have elsewhere. i'm sort of excited about relationships once again becoming a prominent topic (okay, they always sort of are.) just a few vague thoughts on that front:

things really do go in cycles.
the same things happen to people, or else, things that people have done to them they then do and vice versa - not that these things are intentional, or bad, or that i'm talking about you.

i'm wearing my sheet like a sort of toga, it's 4:30 in the morning, and i'm going to have to go to sleep soon, or else i'll have to eat something. right rufus?

just for sticking with me, you get two (2) lyric quotes this time. ciao.

can't expect the world to be your raggedy andy
while running on empty
your little old doll with a frown

and

i'll always love my mama
because she's my baby girl
(that's actually a lyric, in one of those old philly soul tunes.)

ps. [or should that be bs. or, no, pb] well look there, my archives have decided to come back, the real ones not the fake-r ones that i made up in their absence. i'm not sure i trust it though. what's with all this?]

pps. i'm excited about tomorrow (you know, today) because: hopefully this cdhq thing will be more sorted out. i'm going to call my mother. my kid606 and princess supastar records should be arriving from insound (well, they better.) gosh i'm a disc junkie.

i have only a couple of problems with telephones - there's my chronic reluctance to leave messages, which isn't really that strong, and then there's something i've been wondering about lately: if someone else answers the phone, is it okay to just ask for the person you're calling, or do you have to make pleasantries with the person who answered, if you know them? of course it seems sort of rude not to acknowledge them, but it's sort of beside the point, no?

anyway. in general i think phones are good. i've had some good productive telephone calls today; two in the morning with alyssa and rae were striking in their contrast - reminiscent of that part in high fidelity where rob remarks on the contrast between two phone messages. i'm sure most of you remember that.

okay, i lost that thread. dan took me out for, er, breakfast, at 3 or so, to this big empty colorful place where they put focaccia and cheesy-garlic-butter-oil on your table. we got big salads and made lists of things to accomplish, his in long technical descriptions that i only partly understood.

my mind today has been on the future: if all goes well, i can go to new york this weekend (thursday?) for the siren festival, and drive up to wanakena with rae. i called delia to find out stuff (relevant for two reasons) and i think i'd just rather stay at wanakena anyway rather than saranac - it feels nice and elitist to stay at my own place with its peace and quiet and beauty. you're welcome to come too (seriously - sunday through tuesday or thursday or whenever.) hopefully that works out.

the other part, which is kind of annoying, it turns out we don't go to vermont until the 17th of august, which means we could see beck on the 16th, except that now we've found that out (of course i finally had to call delia myself because dan never got around to figuring it out) there are hardly tickets left. rrgh.

but maybe i'll see dj shadow tomorrow night. that seems likely. and maybe i'll see los lobos, cornelius, and american analog set later on. oh yeah, and something else.

my thoughts are scattered, can't you tell? my energy isn't in this.

and further on than that.

movies to comment on: The Majestic is too long and is completely superfluous, but it has some nice boogie-woogie piano. and Jim Carrey reading the first amendment. it's cute. darabont must have just decided to make it as capraesque as humanly possible.

that movie has only one thing in common (length) with Atanarjuat, which rebecca and I finally saw yesternight. man, that's a movie. They should have translated the title as "run atanarjuat run." hee hee. (i need a better blog-laugh). i recommend it wholeheartily if you're interested in seeing a three-hour epic (mythic undertones, like the Arthurian legend, we thought) about inuits. It stands out, i think, because there aren't very many of those. and really, what could be cooler?

after that movie, bec and I walked home, played a few rounds of speed scrabble (good game) and had some iced lollies. Ruth came home with $100 in poker winnings (it turned out all of her opponents were high, but still, with 25-50 cent-1 dollar stakes, that's rather a killing) and let me drive her car back to watertown.

I made a tape for Rae - an Elvis Costello compilation called "The King Sings "Alison" and other Sentimental Favorites by Popular Request." I think I need to make myself a copy too - it's all very emotional material, some of his best singing, and lots of unusual choices, thematically arranged (to make you [melt] on one side and [shudder] on the other.

here are some things that are very high on my list of likes at the moment:
+ Rufus Wainwright (whose second album i've been listening to a lot since i first heard it yesterday)
+ …Kavalier and Clay (almost halfway, and it's big! - It's Ruth's copy, so you'll have to come up here and get it, miss)
+ singleness (in the abstract)
+ tempura ice cream
+ communication
+ Rae (even more so if she can use her car)
+ t-shirt

okay, that was fun. I'm listening to the 3-cd box set "The Philly Sound: Kenny Gamble, Leon Huff, and the story of brotherly love (1966-1976)" right now. Carla and I are supposed to hang out today, but she hasn't called me back.

I am your stupid lover
your wretched goon

one of those summer things where one activity flows into the next, not particularly planned out. and sleeping on a couch doesn't make it seem like a new day has arrived.

so becca met us in harvard square just when (starbucks radioshack shoestore) dan and mami left to take martha to the bus station. we were both wearing grey-green khaki pants and bright pink shirts. we met megumi for some indian, and esmé (whose name i'm sure is not spelled like that) came in in the middle - those two (her friends) were matching too, in plain grey tank tops. nothing to do but walk to rebecca's house (a long discussion of m's boy problems) because a home is a nice thing to be in and there are comfortable green chairs and couch reminiscent of the couch downstairs here.

those two left and we played scrabble (i almost made "phlox" over about three premiums) and talked and pulled out books and went to sleep. in the morning i finished the 60p Phillip K. Dick novella "The Minority Report," which bears only some resemblance to the movie of a similar title.

i did a lot of driving the next day (which was MONDAY) - i've been doing a fair amount of driving with Dan, including my first parallel park and my first illegal u-turn. but i did much more with Ruth, in her saab convertible. lots of highways, etc. my driving ability varies depending on who i'm with - their level of comfort or their expectations of how well i can drive. seems.

from camb. (after breakfast) to watertown to get a few things, then a mall way out for fabric store and sewing machine cord, i sat in the fab. place and read Borges, called cd dupers for notable. Walden Pond, very pretty and a swim is lovely at the end of a day when it's warm. then some greek dinner and About a Boy, which is comparable to the book as i remember it - meaning, enjoyable but specifically not as good as HiFi. some good lines: "tonite on petrescue: a clever stoat keeps people on their toes in sussex" and "shut up, you're wounding my soul" (not in book.) j. mitchell becomes r. flack and snoop dogg becomes mystikal. how about that mystikal track. there was a 12" of it kicking around in upper tarble for a while.

then, um, yesterday. nick, on a year off from bard, just returned from a massage-school/ashram and previously an intern here, was around to help with checking out channels on the board, which we did first with an oscilloscope+wave generator and then with tortoise, stereolab, sly stone, and the beastie boys. pizza for lunch.

japanese again for dinner (not that i'm complaining), this time at new ginza, with an octet - ben+barb, carla+josh plus rebecca invited herself along to keep us company. josh shared his knowledge of diamond cuts and everything else. he's very amusing. interactions between he and benny esp. (the former talks so fast and the latter hears with difficulty)
like so:

j: maximalism…makingJudaismasbigapartofyrlife/as
b: sorry, making what a part of your life?
j: Judsm
b: what?
j: Jdsm
b: what?
j: Jdaism. it's a /religion
b: oh, judaism.

good. sorbet. dump. danny and i watched Pootie Tang, which is very silly and also pretty funny. i approve.

less today; LeRoi and Lawrence LeRock upstairs finished track two of the SeneComp, "Day Glow Hell" by SenKumpa. it's pretty funky now. i'm reading a new book - a big book - at Rebecca's request; the amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon. 100 pages in already. back to newberry st. for dan's haircut allowed me to go back and get those two vinyl singles i wanted. mmm. maybe i go listen to them now. i've been listening to coldcut and the "pyramid song" b-sides. it goes.

how will it all happen, with n.y. and the 'dacks and concerts and all. many people now are getting involved. i got an e-mail from k.duffy saying that r.cochran may be coming to siren. how does she know?

buh-buh-buh-buuh
buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buuh
buh-buh-buh
buh-buh-buh
buuu-buuh-buh (that's "some skunk funk" by the brecker bros.)

that day, july 4th, that was a while ago now. that was thursday and now it's tuesday. there was a barbeque with fairly few but a nice mixture of guests - jim, ben+alisa, autumn+victor, lance and someone, others. we talked about mead and marriage and northhampton and heard some stories. did you know that jim dated dar williams? rae was there - she took the chinatown bus from ny the night before. we played badminton, enough to get pretty good at it.

rebecca showed up at about 8 or 9 with smoothies and her mother. the party got smaller and went to a nearby hill - a golf course, where we were joined on the streets by a crowd of americans, searching for a hole in the fence so we could get inside. we watched the newton and then the boston fireworks from a distance, listening to the simulcast pops concert on someone's boombox. pyrotechnics very impressively coordinated with the music. some kids behind us were setting off roman candles too. and a little girl made friends with oak.

rebecca and rae and i watched mulholland drive. we'd all seen it before, so we talked about it while we watched it. it's good to see a second time. we drove becca home, listening to the oldies radio. i'm trying to remember if the oldies station i used to listen to played dylan much, or much past '67 or '68. (danny?) rae and i listened to that scott walker cd, which i'd been saving up until then. it was late and we were tired. it was weird, as expected. reminded me of kurt weill a bit. i do want to hear it again. but i read during the second half of the record, so as to finish reservation blues so rae could take it with her. only she didn't.

i already wrote about the next day.

then it was saturday. martha was here, and we hung around newberry st. noodle shop. record shops. mostly this one, where i got used copies of an old old 97's cd and a pere ubu cd and a boyoyo boys record, and also some records from a free records bin - laura nyro, keith jarrett, frank sinatra, and the 1812 overture. i'm not really sure why i got the tchaikovsky. the keith is pretty weird - it has a lot of ethnic percussion and flute stuff without rhythmic/melodic structure - but it also has a song called "inflight." good. martha and four little friends were at urban outfitters. i joined back with them and dan and mami and we went to another record store.

problems with record shopping (not exhaustive):
1. i always regret not buying something - in this case 12" singles with remixes of Chemical Bros. "come with us" and Macy Gray "sexual revolution." hopefully i'll go back some time and they'll still be there. only three dollars each, c'mon.

2. i'm often spurred into a binge of internet buying, being reminded by something i saw at the store of something i wanted to get - i finally caved and ordered the Kid606 "The Action Packed Mentalist Brings You the Fucking Jams" album of maverick fukwithit-ery (on vinyl!) and the princess superstar album from insound. i really hope they're both as good as i hope they are, because then they'll be really good. or at least one of them.

yeah, so.

martha came back to the house and we watched mulholland drive, for my third time, their first. i didn't understand much more this time, but i did enjoy it just as much, which is a good thing. it's just an entertaining movie, first of all. martha wanted to meet jim, so we called him up and went out for (guess what?) japanese food. he played us a song he had written and recorded that day, about mix tapes.

hold on. i've got to turn this record over. (duane eddy, tee hee)

do your checks have elasticity?
did they cut off yo 'lectricity?
did you scream and yell explicitly?

yesterday barely happened.

i got up (yes, first at 8, briefly, to give directions which hopefully worked out okay, since rae hasn't called in distress. perhaps she's lost on the mbta because her fare fell through the cracks, or whatever) at around 2:30.

list of activities, which in writing make it seem like much more happened yesterday than it felt like when it was happening: i called some cd duping places for Dan that were all closed on the 5th. read some more simon, and picked up the Borges collected fictions (first half of which i read last summer) again, read through all of The Maker in one sitting. And cleared off some more mp3s from my computer (realized i had accidentally deleted some that i would have rather kept, but oh well.) I spent a long time reading stuff about Mulholland Dr. on the 'net, especially the pieces at salon and pitchfork (the 'fork piece is still the best i've seen - check it out if you've seen the film and are still curious.)

even days that don't exist tend to have evening activities which pull them into reality, so no day can fall away completely. we grilled up some salmon and veggie burgers quick and dashed out to see Minority Report. I enjoyed it as a vision for fifty years in the future - they almost did a good job of integrating mostly believable futuristic stuff with realistic continuation of stuff that currently exists. except it isn't really integrated; its segregated by scene almost as much as gender in Mulholland. Because I'd been thinking about that film so much, I was approaching this like another "puzzle movie." and i was working so hard piecing it all together and keeping track of the details in order to figure it out that it was annoying to have the movie explain everything so neatly at the ending (essentially as i had already concluded.) of course, in this film, predictability is kind of meta.

for the most part, i thought the ideas and themes were interesting and worth discussion, but sometimes the movie was dissatisfyingly unfaithful to them. when big themes get sacrificed for entertaining but pointless humor and action sequences. the ending is like this in that it allows a discrepancy in the "rules" that have been established (the pre-cogs' accuracy) in order to have a happy resolution for the people involved. to make sense, it seems, we have to presume that all pre-visions are accurate up until just moments before the murder, otherwise their fallibility would have been seen in the past. right? anyway - it's worth seeing. the scoring is funny, and the cast is good (tim blake nelson!)

i'll write later about the forth - barbeque, fireworks, darkness, rae's visit. and sometime i should tell you about cars and computers. but now i'm going to pick up my sister. she's at Cheers.

all's for the best and the best and we left so

except this morning, when i was woken by bean, who wandered in a few minutes ago. there's this burt's carrot-flavored lotion here that i've been putting on after shaving, it smells like carrot cake. i just missed the chance to buy the princess superstar record for six bucks on half.

i made a cheesecake yesterday, although i had to wait a while to put it in the oven (went to barb's for takeout thai with benny's girlfriend aleesa and a very funny medical man i didn't know. then to chinatown where they were out of pearls and all baskin robbins close at midnight.)

three people independently said they might come here to visit for independence day, although now one has said he won't, and i'm not expecting another one at this point. but one is here: she's downstairs and maybe i'll go see if she's awake now. and then we can encrust blueberries and redberries in the cheesecake.

oh. happy fourth! the feast of st. thomas jefferson

today is the 4th of july
another june has gone by
and as they light up our town i just think
what a waste of gunpowder and sky (yeah yeah yeah)

i wake up, most mornings, to the phone ringing in this office/bedroom. i let the machine get it, and open my eyes.

monday i woke up with a chorus, melody and lyric, fully formed in my head. "i'm always running down tracy street" was the first line. don't know what it's about. the hook is kind of nice, sort of XTC-ish. my current predilection seems to be for sugar-pop. like this tune in G that's trying to be a cross between Hefner's "I Took Her Love for Granted" and Jason Falkner's "My Lucky Day." i was in a songwriting mood for two days, picked up a guitar and taught myself to play "Andy Warhol" and "Radical Honesty pt. II."

then there was that episode of sushi. with barb, ben, autumn. outside the window, a man took his shirt off and used it to wipe down his girlfriend's legs. tempura ginger ice cream.

it's, like, a heat wave. hot hot and sticky. prompting lots of summer music. early Morcheeba and the Fairways, and Blackalicious. now I'm digging a record by Maldita Vecindad y los Hijos del Quinto Patio. mmm.

Yesterday (Tuesday), Dan said in the morning let's get work done today (specifically) and let's eat lunch at a reasonable time. well, we had lunch at about 3, and dinner at about 11. we spent a lot of time screwing around with my computer in the morning, and later trying to outfit it with a program called SpectraFoo to stand in the place of the old clunky wave generator and oscilloscope intended to check out each channel on the Neve. but to no avail. We brought some speakers up and cranked Gaucho and Paradise and Lunch ("clean" albums) through the board and had some fun with the EQs.

two DVDs to mention: Monster's Ball (last night) and Wet Hot American Summer (monday.) tonight threatens to be Mulholland Drive, round two. Summer was cute and enjoyable (garafolo and hyde pierce make use of their talents, without straining.) I think the great divide between dumb comedy and serious film has become more and more evident for me, to the point where I think of them in totally different ways. I don't think it was always like that.

Monster's Ball is fabulous. Top-notch camera work, and of course acting. Probably some of the more difficult acting challenges I've seen in a while, particularly with Billy Bob's character. I'm not sure I'm completely convinced with his transformation, but it's enough to make the film work. Definitely see it if you haven't. Would have been nice to see more of Mos Def though. or Puffy. not to spoil things, but how about that happy ending?

brb.

set the table those three extra places
one for me
one for your doubts
one for god

pause.

stop. rewind. rewind. stop. fast forward.

Thurs - Chinese takeout and fuunky drummer video. Clyde Stubblefield and Jabo Starks (what is this Jab'o business?) get down with Sco and Medeski and Fred Wesley; offer the invaluable advice to set up your drum kit so that all the drums are within reach. Lovably nerdy indie-guy friend visits.

Friday - the Neve cleaning is finished, the first Senerap track is finished (by late afternoon, which is to say early.) Rather than to NY I go to Dan's gig, 5 hours (from 9 to 1) in the appropriately named Limbo (bar/dj upstairs; jazz lounge downstairs, both inordinately frou-frou or shi-shi or whatever it is, with $10 desserts, etc.) Flute/electric piano/5-string slap bass/drums do George Benson, Janet Jackson, "Kiss" and "Eleanor Rigby." I eat duck salad and fish soup and creme brulee.

Saturday - out of confusion, Mami and I go to a diner in the morning. Show gets on the road about two, and we leave town with WSRN tape; stop at a deli. Two games of bumper pool at Dede's (I win one, Jesse wins one) while waiting for my father to return from his yoga workshop. Then, hurtling off into the apple, past Intrepids and the Intrepid museum. To the knit.

Matt (!) was there, no surprise, in the bar listening to Hot Rats we chat about his gig investigating crimes for Legal aid, living the life. He has plans to see the show upstairs, so after most of JBE's first set (great, with spidey, "love what's gone" and funky stress, plus an improv'd new song "don't set your hampster on fire") we snuck up to the main space.

with M's other high-school indie friends (dissin' the Strokes, diggin' the Spree) in time for:

the Danielson Famil(e/y). how to describe? they wear white doctors outfits with red hearts and their names embroidered, and nurses hats for the girls. weird-ass Christian childrens songs with ringleader Daniel's untenable squeaky scratchy voice and soothing glockenspiel from the ladies. hand motions and singalongs. two drummers. he "called on" audience members to supply verses for "Don't You Be the Judge," and I can't tell if that was real or not. gaah! "I ain't no devil thang."

the Polyphonic Spree: 10 piece choir. 13 piece band (tpt, fl, trb, vln, dr, perc, bs, pnox2, gtr, theremin, French horn + lead singer). flowing white angelic gowns (amusingly, colored hem-swaths not low enough to conceal an array of indie-sneakers, converse, adidas, etc.) big anthemic numbers about sunshine and smiling. entrance muzak "Hey Jude" singalong, and a cover of "Ride Captain Ride." spiritualized meets flaming lips meets langley schools meets sun ra meets a pops orchestra meets the heavenly choir. Impressive if nothing else. wtf. "Suicide is a shame."

after that, it's off to my third diner of the day (the Moondance, where, apparently, Kirsten Dunst works in the movie) for some late-night veggie quesadilla and cheesecake (yeah!) with a strange assortment of distant cousins and total strangers. we're late to wake up of course, and after a two-hour stint at Sam Ash in New Haven (Dan bought some software) I finally get something to eat around 3:00 - back to Reins for reubens and egg creams.

back in town but still late for the dance performance - this is my 2nd cousin Rob Bettman's Blackbird Dance Ensemble, on tour from DC. I really enjoyed the choreography, especially solos done to Frisell and Armatrading, and a ballet-suite to a Corelli concerto grosso. Ballet and modern. Party for the dansers afterwards at Barb's turtle-house (the hostess and I did a little impromptu beat-box and rap in the living room where nobody could hear us.) Hmm.

she says she knows about jokes
this time the joke is on her