Snow

Significant stats on this one:
- 22.5 inches
- Second biggest Philly snowstorm on record
- Biggest December snowstorm on record
- Thunder and lightning (!)
- Actually happened during the Fall (before the solstice)

Who wants 2 inches? That looks pretty and vanishes. It's not fun unless it's apocalyptic! Some of you nordic people will doubtless turn up your noses at this "dinky little storm", but then again, you don't have to live through brutal summers, and you probably don't live in a city this big.

<< Malcolm X Park, West Philadelphia





The wife jumping in the snow drift in front of our house






Abner's is still delivering cheesesteaks! That's reassuring.

Atomium Amplification

Many people who read this site originally found it while looking for help with repairing or modifying an amplifier. I get a lot of messages asking for help with people's music electronics projects, which is the reason I created the "Tech" label for posts. On occasion, when someone is local, I will actually look at their gear for them, and maybe fix it.

I wanted to offer that service more formally and publicly, almost as a "nonprofit" business, so I've officially started up Atomium Amplification. It's linked in orange on the left sidebar. If you're in the Philly area and need music electronics repaired or modified, I can do it affordably and efficiently, so get in touch.

It's not a day job. I just felt that there was a need for someone to do this kind of work in Philadelphia (and particularly in West Philadelphia), since there are so few music stores and/or service places apart from the big chain stores in the suburbs. When I was younger and took my stuff to other people to have it fixed, I was always disappointed at the opacity of the process and that I never really knew what I was paying for. I wanted to know what was replaced and why, how the diagnosis was done, all about how I could do the same kind of work myself. No one -- whose bread and butter is tech work -- is going to give away that kind of information, and it's unreasonable to expect them to.

But since this isn't a traditional business, I'm going to work in a way that's educational, and actually lets the end-user learn something about their equipment. Of course, if you just want something fixed for cheap and don't have the inclination to deal with the details, that's fine too. But I think I can chip in to fill a hole in the resources available to musicians locally, and help them become more technically self-sufficient in the process.

Fall docket

Rosetta is less than a month away from beginning the sessions for our next full length, which is as yet untitled. It may end up staying untitled, along with all the songs. We'll see what happens. Our working titles for the songs are:

1. The Hardcore Song (yes, really!)
2. Barack Obama: Change We Can Believe In
3. Untitled
4. Blue Day for Croatoa
5. Sexultura
6. Crazy Eights (the 8-string song)
7. Why Sempei?

There's also another song we're working on for a split with Restorations for next year.

We used to refer to all of our songs by numbers ("Wake" = 10, "Lift" = 8, "Monument" = 11, etc.), but that was getting unmanageable. Everyone got tired of asking things like "Is this 14 or 15?" at practice. These songs are in general quite a bit shorter than our previous work. It's strange, though; they don't feel underdeveloped. I think they have the same number of notes we normally put into songs, they're just much faster.

Andrew Schneider is engineering this recording for us, and he and I are mixing it together. He has worked with Unsane, Pelican, The Ocean, and a bunch of other bands that are much bigger than we are. Given that it's the first time that we've made a whole recording start-to-finish with someone outside the band, it necessarily creates some anxiety. I'm used to being able to goof off in the studio and do 85 takes if I feel like it, without costing anyone a dime. There's more pressure in this situation to meet deadlines and bottom lines. The upside is that this record will actually come out on time (mixing is in December, with definite time constraints).

---

People who follow me on Twitter have probably noticed my months-long stream of disgusting all-caps song titles, usually made up of a medical procedure + a farm tool, and tagged with "#brutalgoregrind". I've finally created an official outlet for this crass and immature material: Pitchfork Colonoscopy. It is an intentionally lowest-common-denominator goregrind project. It's really more about coming up with funny song titles and making lots of money than it is about music (expression of the shadow self?). I had been thinking about this for a while, but hearing the newest Throatplunger recording (thanks Mahesh!) really tipped the scales for me, as far as motivation for making it a practical reality. I'm doing the "vo-kills" and all instruments except drums. BJ is contributing blast beats... since he actually plays drums (triggered or otherwise) and I don't feel like clicking the mouse 10000000 times to make digital MIDI blast tracks. Everything will be recorded through my PODxt into my computer, and I plan to cheat in every way possible.

PFC will be the Diet Coke of grindcore: "the drinking of nothing in the semblance of something" (Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute).

---

I'm selling my test-pressing of Rosetta/Balboa's Project Mercury 2xLP on Ebay. I can't ever justify spending joint "family" money on musical pursuits, so I have to come up with personal cash for Rosetta through other means --- often by selling things on Ebay. This is the first time I've let something with sentimental value go... yet I find that it doesn't actually have any sentimental value. I don't listen to my own recordings. I have the Project Mercury vinyl in triplicate on both gold and silver vinyl anyway. Who needs a test pressing? Someone else out there will value it more than I can.

I've also got a Fender '72 reissue Wide Range pickup on the block.

---

It's cold and rainy in Philly, prematurely. My house has no heat (we knew the boiler didn't work when we moved in, but I'm only getting around to getting it checked out now). So it's about 48 degrees in here right now (that's 9 degrees Celsius for you non-USA types). Yeah, I know, "waahhh".

Dog days

Our friend Andrew has posted some of his pictures from the European tour. He ended up in the hospital in Belgium with a collapsed lung and it's a relief that he's safe and at home now. I have yet to go through my own pictures from the trip.

I continue to reflect on the tour and what it meant, personally and collectively. It's part of a larger nexus of upheavals this summer that have included buying a house, switching jobs, and my dad having surgery to remove cancer. I haven't tweeted or posted in a while because I'm living in the new house, and currently not working, but haven't been able to have an Internet connection installed. Mostly my days have been spent solitary; installing fixtures, moving furniture, setting up a new home. I did bike out to Wernersville, PA (~63 miles each way) with my dad to spend a couple days at a Jesuit monastery. Sustained silence is unnerving for people raised in the technological/Internet milieu, but it's a valuable exercise. I spend a lot of time craving quiet, living in the city. But when I finally achieve that quiet, I don't know what to do with it, and the noise in my head becomes louder than the usual noise outside.

I have also found that during times of stress and change, it is helpful to paint a room orange:

House

Linshuang and I are buying this house:







I apologize for the "search engine" pictures, but they're all I have right now. We'll most likely be moving in July, after Rosetta gets back from Europe (both of us are going). Now the chaos of inspections, appraisals, mortgage, and settlement begins...

This neighborhood (Kingsessing) is a place I keep coming back to. I taught Kindergarten here during my year off between high school and college, and I lived around the corner from this house for the 6 months before I got married. Technically the place could be considered either Kingsessing or Cedar Park, since it's on the NE side of 52nd street between Warrington and Springfield. You can see the whole city skyline from the roof. We'll probably build a deck up there.

Since it's a 6-bedroom house and there are only two of us, we are actively looking for renters (people we know/trust). If you're interested, let us know.

A study in blacks

"When Metal Dudes Do Laundry"

Updates

A couple things:

1. This site got a minor face lift, which it really needed. Everyone knows that when it comes to actual content, I hold Web 2.0 standards and legibility in high regard. This site does not qualify, though, since it is devoid of any "real" content and exists to perplex more than to inform. So I will make no effort -- ever -- to make the font bigger, label any of the links, or create an appropriate visual hierarchy to organize the "information," although I will tell you that you can ALWAYS find out what something is by mousing over it and looking at the little tool tip that pops up. Just explore, you're poking around in someone else's head anyway. And no, you're not allowed to zoom in to read it.

2. I got a Twitter account. Go ahead, laugh. I wouldn't care about Twitter except that it neatly integrates into the sidebar of blogs, giving a convenient channel for one-line thoughts that don't contain enough to be turned into real posts. It will help clear my head, and I'll post tour blurbs to it too. It also allows me to get headlines and miscellaneous snark easily and efficiently. Follow if you desire. I still refuse to join Facebook, because it's creepy, evil, intellectually vacuous, and dehumanizing. Twitter could be intellectually vacuous, since it intrinsically prohibits depth, but I like to think of it as a challenge of conciseness.

Writing

Generally speaking, I do better with list-making than with actual writing. I would much rather make a list of "top 10 things I would change about myself" or "top five strengths" or "action items" (shoot me, please) than actually write a coherent account or argument to communicate the same information.

I'm not sure whether this makes any definitive statement about the nature of my self-reflection, or maybe it's that in my mind the "task" of writing can't be separated from the academic imperative to create a defensible argument. (This may be of a piece with my wife's blog syndrome.) The main problem is that my written communication can't develop through practice, because false imperatives strangle the possibilities of new modes and new fronts. Part of me wishes I had taken creative writing in college, but another part knows it would have been awkward, mostly due to the inevitably forced display of personal inadequacy. We rarely go into situations where we're required to show off what we're not good at.

I wonder too if the nonlinear process I use (to write papers: I "build" them) might itself be partially responsible for my Germanic and analytical tendencies. Sentences are intrinsically one-dimensional; I think three-dimensionally. I compromise by writing two-dimensionally. With enough revision, there's no penalty on fluency, but certainly some magic narrative element is lost. I don't have the gift of surprise anymore.

I don't experience my own texts because I see them the way an architect (or more properly, a contractor) sees a building. Words then primarily form systems, not stories. Thus the criterion or standard is an absence of flaws, not the presence of some human response or impulse. Again, it comes back to a desire to be unassailable, rather than human -- which might be the opposite, anyway.

(As an experiment, I wrote this on a piece of paper in a single sitting in a restaurant, without revision.)

Clothes

The first fashion article I ever personally related to:

With the recent decline in our security, industry and standing, that nostalgia for a prelapsarian America (and the durable domestic goods that defined it) seems to have settled over the stylish set here at home. "Ironically, it's largely because of overseas interest that Americans can now wear real American stuff," says Michael Williams, a fashion publicist who covers Americana on his blog, A Continuous Lean. "They're recognizing that heritage and quality are precious in our disposable Wal-Mart world." It's as if globalization has come full circle, creating both an appetite for cultural anchoring and a fashion to feed it.
-Authentic Americana, Newsweek, Jan. 31 2009

This seems to be quite a bit different from the "Ted Kaczynski chic" of four or five years ago and the ironic trucker hat and Carhartt jacket fad in Williamsburg. At least, it seems to espouse some kind of sincere admiration and nostalgia for the "strong silent," Cormac McCarthy-ish masculine archetypes, which haven't been in the eye of haute couture since Jackson Pollock. (I would say McCarthy himself, as an artist, is one of these heroic American males --- though in a far more quiet and introspective way than Pollock). After Pollock's self-destruction, the "dandies" took over as taste-makers, ultimately begetting metrosexuals 40 years later. The difference between this newest fashion statement -- born of economic anxiety -- and the hipster "white trash" fashion trend is earnestness.

By choosing clothes that exist for a reason, young urbanites are defying the metrosexual mores of recent years and trying to participate in a testosterone-rich tradition instead. It's still fashion, of course. But it's fashion that fulfills a masculine ideal rather than a feminine one: function over frill. Superficial or not, that shift has come as a relief for men who already spend more time working with their MacBooks than their hands—a sign that they aspire to be as strong and silent as their rougher-hewn predecessors.

That may be superficial, but it's more confidence-inspiring than this. Granted, I won't pay those prices just to 'look like' something that I already am: I don't want just to look like I do skilled manual labor (a simulation), I want to do skilled manual labor. But at least the underlying logic is similar to my own set of criteria -- I select clothing with use in mind. The return to function dictating form is reassuring to me, but I'm also fascinated that this emphasis on functionality seems to be regarded as both distinctly masculine and distinctly American.

Edit 2/11/09: That is, fascinated in a semi-annoyed kind of way. I appreciate and endorse elevating function above form, and the higher valuation of build quality and durability -- but the association of those values with "American masculinity" perplexes me. The Teen Vogue link illustrates the infuriating counterpart -- the association of absurd frivolity with femininity.

Snark = dumb

Looks like I finally got my wish from three years ago.

To wit:
"Being cynical is FUN, and it gets you p***y, but that’s not the same thing as it being an actionable worldview that makes you smart and helps the world get fixed: Therefore, never get uppity while you wax neo-cynical - fatal error right there!
...
For those of you who say Obama is just-like-all-the-rest, some kind of shill for corporate interest: You’re the shill. What do you think all this hipster s**t is? You spend your money on being told what to think until the biggest media empire of all time pays people like Gavin [McInnes, founder of Vice Magazine] in treasure because they so perfectly control you. I don’t think that track record quite puts you in a position to judge shillage."

-Blog post on Street Boners and TV Carnage

"With the election of Barack Obama, Cynicism and Snark are officially passe.Translation: Humor and irreverence are out; earnestness and sincerity are in.

David Denby, The New Yorker film critic, has written a book decrying our old bad habits: 'Snark: It's Mean, It's Personal, and It's Ruining Our Conversation.' I couldn't agree more. Snark is cheap and bad for you. But then, so are hot dogs. I still want one now and then."

-Kathleen Parker, The Washington Post

Holiday meandering

Mission San Juan Bautista & Half Moon Bay
[Some scenes in Vertigo were shot at San Juan Bautista --- although the belltower in the film was artificially added and doesn't exist]

Top ten of 2008 in no particular order:
-Getting married
-Backpacking Patagonia
-Cormac McCarthy
-Australian tour
-Barack Obama
-Phillies breaking the curse
-The Dark Knight
-Building bikes and amps
-Stars of the Lid live
-Hanging out with my smarty-pants wife

Two videos of beauty pageant contestants

CRINGE

A serious post related to this topic is forthcoming... don't judge me just yet.

Woes

"Woe to you who add house to house and join field to field till no space is left and you live alone in the land. YHWH Sabaoth has declared in my hearing: 'Surely the great houses will become desolate, the fine mansions left without occupants...'

"Woe to those who rise early in the morning to run after their drinks, who stay up late at night till they are inflamed with wine. They have harps and lyres at their banquets, tambourines and flutes and wine, but they have no regard for the deeds of YHWH, no respect for the work of his hand....Therefore my people will go into exile for lack of understanding; their men of rank will die of hunger and their masses will be parched with thirst.

"Therefore the grave enlarges its appetite and opens its mouth without limit; into it will descend their nobles and masses with all their brawlers and revelers....Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and clever in their own sight. Woe to those who are heroes at drinking wine and champions at mixing drinks, who acquit the guilty for a bribe, but deny justice to the innocent."

-a portion of Isaiah, chapter 5

If my wife registers to vote as a Democrat

...does that mean we have to listen to NPR and spout centrist platitudes during breakfast every morning?

And for the record, I am so tired of these idiot PUMAs reinforcing stereotypes about "hysterical, irrational women". Now John McCain has given them cannon fodder by picking the hottest woman in politics as his veep. Imagine the visual juxtaposition at the VP debates. Joe Biden might as well show up in a wife-beater with a beer in his hand.

I'm also so sick of Clinton narcissism I could punch someone. But What Would Barack Do?

The characteristic of rambliness

"The characteristic of meaning is that not everything has it."
-Jean Baudrillard, The Lucidity Pact

I've been thinking about this for about a year and a half, and I'm still not sure whether it's true. There are three possibilities: everything is meaningful, nothing is meaningful, or some things are meaningful. Baudrillard dismisses the first two. My worldview dismisses the second (disciples of Richard Dawkins can stop reading here). It's not a question of whether meaning is intrinsic or constructed (or both). The question is, when interpreting the basic events of our daily lives, which is more burdensome: a knowledge that Everything is meaningful, or the task of determining what is and isn't?

Take, for example, our obsession with self-knowledge:

This is the Wordle visualization of the content of this site for the last year. Is there meaning in the fact that the largest word is "people," seemingly incongruous because of my extreme introversion? If I knew that it was meaningful, but could have no grasp of that meaning, would that be worse? And that's only considering one word in the hierarchy...

This is where you call me a loser for thinking about this.

Ideal living is often summed up in trite phrases, like "live every day like it was your last," or, "look for the diamond in the rough," but these don't work in practice because they amount to veiled propositions about meaning. The propositions themselves usually remained obscured and unexamined, so we can never really accept or definitively reject the aphorisms. Of course, now that I've criticized the conventional wisdom, I'm supposed to offer a different spin on the same "truth." But I don't have one.

The reality is that everyone has a set of presuppositions about whether events and things are meaningful, and 90% of the time these presuppositions are not examined --- because to do so nearly guarantees unresolvable internal dissonance and paranoia.

I think this emergent self-examination is what happens to many academics somewhere between their 2nd and 4th years of graduate school. Like groundhogs, most of them see their shadow and run back into the hole (the hole is called "the tenure track"). It usually arises because of a question about whether their epic thesis on a clay pot from a 2nd century Welsh town is truly significant labor.

Yet we can't dismiss significance and meaning out of hand, because we all crave transcendence on some level. Everyone has reached momentary heights of blissful interconnectedness and holistic epiphany --- maybe while listening to a moving piece of music, or experiencing genuine intimacy with another person for the first time --- which tell us that either there is or ought to be Meaning beyond survival. Whatever it is, we want it.

The grapefruit(s) of doom become visible

They paid us a visit in Melbourne.

I've been reclusive lately, building things mostly (when I'm not working on Rosetta mixing/mastering). Usually I say that I'll photo-document my DIY projects and post about them here, but it never happens because I like the building process too much and don't want to ruin it by having to take pictures every 15 minutes. I post links instead.

These are some of the things I've been working on:
"Flexy rack" (a more tasteful variant), passive sealed subwoofer driven by a third bridged-mono amp in an existing active bi-amp setup, supertweeters using vintage 70s KSN1005 piezos, an outboard effects rack for my guitar set up (I will post new maps of that soon), and a DIY power conditioner.

If by some chance you want help working on something similar, don't hesitate to get in touch.

Favorite words

Epic
-adjective
1. noting or pertaining to a long poetic composition, usually centered upon a hero, in which a series of great achievements or events is narrated in elevated style: Homer's Iliad is an epic poem.
2. heroic; majestic; impressively great: the epic events of the war.
3. of unusually great size or extent: a crime wave of epic proportions.

Brutal
–adjective
1. savage; cruel; inhuman: a brutal attack on the village.
2. crude; coarse: brutal language.
3. harsh; ferocious: brutal criticism; brutal weather.
4. taxing, demanding, or exhausting: They're having a brutal time making ends meet.
5. irrational; unreasoning.
6. of or pertaining to lower animals.

Nitro
-adjective
1. Chemistry. containing the nitro group.
2. Colloquial: describes a person, place or thing as being unequivocally, quintessentially spectacular and dumbfounding (UD).

Granola
–noun
A breakfast food consisting of rolled oats, brown sugar, nuts, dried fruit, etc., usually served with milk.
-adjective
A person who dresses like a hippie, eats natural foods (granola), and is usually a Liberal, but in all other ways is a typical middle class white person, and is likely to revert back to being straight when they finish college (UD).

...and, I almost forgot (gasp! thanks, egalitarian-liberated-life-partner!):

SALT
-noun
A crystalline compound, sodium chloride, NaCl, occurring as a mineral, a constituent of seawater, etc., and used for seasoning food, as a preservative, etc.
-interjection
1. expression of distaste or unhappiness about a situation (UD)
2. describing something unfortunate or unfavorable happening, or one's angered mood (UD).

No April fool

Science can explain these things, but it can't interpret them. You have to step outside of time (chronos) and into Time (kairos) to be present to something this powerful. Land and text both want to be read and understood. I felt afraid when I realized this, especially since the realization only came while unprotected, at the mercy of the environment.

Getting married

I'm getting married in two days. I don't feel that I'm losing anything by entering into the institution. It's a kind of death, but one that's desirable, insofar as there's something worthwhile to be gained on the other side. I don't have cold feet or anything, just a sense that an ending is approaching.

(Again, to reiterate: everyone is invited to the wedding on Saturday)

Wedding countdown & usual curmudgeonly ramblings

I am getting married in 12 days. Surreality reigns! If you would like to come, the info is here.

Believe it or not, I am done with my planning work for the wedding, and not particularly stressed about it. Instead, I'm thinking about a string of recent interactions/observations wherein I'm increasingly finding --- in my fundamental disillusionment with both the trappings of corporate globalism and the silly contemporary remnants of the "countercultural idea" of 40 years ago --- that I am not alone. Not by a long shot. I am looking forward to seeing what happens in the next couple of years, and whether the hopeful grouches of our generation begin to stand up and insist that "thinking different" has nothing to do with purchasing another Apple iProduct.

Stars of the Lid

Many of you know how deeply attached I am to the music of Stars of the Lid. It's shown quite dramatically in my play counts, and this blog is even titled after one of their compositions. They are performing live at St. Mary's Church on May 3rd. I can't recommend this highly enough --- I had assumed (as did many others) that I would never have an opportunity to see SOTL in person, but what a gift!

I'm just as jaded about contemporary music as the next person --- this is usually true of people who make music, and I'm no exception. Yet I've been listening to SOTL for many years now and can't seem to tire of them. Their music has been the quiet accompaniment to my reveries, anxious night-watches, joyful solitudes, and "aesthetic expeditions". Their sounds have helped me plumb emotional depths I might otherwise never have known. It sounds like hyperbole, but just as the music itself is intrinsically non-verbal, I'm unable to put in to words quite how it's affected me. I am an overly-rational person, and words are my tool, my barrier, and sometimes my weapon. I don't wear my heart on my sleeve, and it's difficult for me to explore or express emotion without filtering it through reason. The language of my shadow-self, then, is relentlessly non-verbal, non-textual --- and it is precisely this language that SOTL's music speaks, fluently and flawlessly.

I hear:
+The beauty of untouched spaces
+Environments to inhabit becoming equally as meaningful as Programs to be read
+Philadelphia
+The sadness of seeing a loved-one hurting
+The ebb and flow of my memories
+The quiet resolve of old love
+"Nocturnal hum"
+Wonder

It's probably also incredibly redundant to say that the Lid is perhaps the single strongest influence on my own music.


Apreludes (in C# major), with visuals, from Stars of the Lid and Their Refinement of the Decline


Live "cover" of Arvo Part's Fratres

Bethany's bike / Ohbadiah

I wanted to post about this a while ago, since I finished it in early November, but that would have ruined the surprise for Bethany. I built this for her out of Ebay parts and things I had laying around. The best component find was the Miyata 710 frame (in her size, 48cm! wow) for $50 on Ebay. It came as a complete bike, but needed a new fork because of shipping damage, and most of the other parts were not worth keeping.

The drivetrain is 1/8", because that's just what I had on hand, 42Tx16T gearing, flip-flop rear hub. Not a racing miracle, but sturdy and lighter than my old aluminum road bike.

...

Nick wrote a thoughtful response to my post about placelessness among global elites. Talking about these kinds of topics, he presents himself in a much more human way than I do. He also has a picture of me picking apples and wearing goofy-looking cutoff pants. He asked me to post more regularly, though I don't think this entry is as content-ful as what he had in mind.

But here's a thought on that thought:

My problem with blogging is that I'm a slow percolator, and think about one issue for months before I have a coherent idea of something to say on it. My presented hypotheses often start with vague anxiety, unease, or a complaint, which I then feel compelled to internally deconstruct. By a quirk of personality, I subject all of my emotions to analysis that is almost scientific in its rigor (because I feel, ironically enough, that emotion must be validated, or even purified, by reason). This analysis must necessarily cast a very wide net. The ideas and arguments that end up being coherent enough to write something about are usually byproducts of the process, which are then slowly refined in conversation before I ever attempt to articulate them in a formal, organized way.

In other words, it's possible that I only have external insights because I find my own internal life unacceptable.

West coast foray

10.5mm DX, from Mrs. Claus. More later, maybe.

Face smashed

Incredibly, no cars were involved in the making of these wounds. I braked hard to avoid hitting a jaywalking student who was talking on her cell phone, flew over the handlebars, and face-planted on the pavement. My tooth went through my upper lip and then broke off. I have stitches inside and outside, and miraculously, no head trauma or broken bones.

This probably looks like a good argument not to ride a bicycle in a city. But let me say this: the likelihood of this happening is actually far smaller than the likelihood that you will be in a car accident. My injuries are nothing compared to the physical and psychological trauma experienced by my mother and sister earlier this year in a motor vehicle accident which was due to the very same cause -- someone else's carelessness while talking on a cell phone.

Beyond that, think about this: you can compare the energy efficiency of a bicycle with that of a car, by using calories (kcal) as a metric. A healthy human burns 0.049 kcal/minute at 15mph, or 0.139 kcal/minute at 25mph. 15mph is a nice approximation of cycle-commuting, so I use that here. So I, with a weight of 145 pounds, burn 7.105 kcal/minute @ 15 mph as I ride to work or go riding on my lunch break. This equates to 28.42 kcal burned every mile ridden, if I maintain about 15 mph.

A gallon of gas contains 31,000 kcal of energy. If I consumed gasoline like a car, I would get ~1,090 miles per gallon of gasoline! A human being on a bicycle is the most efficient machine in the universe, in terms of distance traveled per unit energy. In my humble opinion, the answer to the fossil fuel crisis is not fuel cells or biodiesel, it's carbohydrates. And if more savvy people rode bicycles instead of driving cars, injuries like the above would become far less common than they already are.

***

Addendum, 12/13/07, as I said elsewhere:

Cars do several things for us.
1. Kill people and animals and plants by polluting the air
2. Kill people by making oil into a political tool that starts wars
3. Kill people by making them sedentary, obese, and lazy
4. Kill people (this is called an "accident")

"Guns don't kill people, son, people kill people!"

Not posting for a while

I am on indefinite hiatus from the Internet. There have been a lot of things I would have loved to post here since August, but I've moved and my new residence has very spotty Internet access.

I now work for these people and these people. It takes up a lot of time. I am getting married on March 1st to this blogger, and planning that also takes up a lot of time. You are invited to my wedding (not joking). It will be in Narberth, Pennsylvania, at the church I grew up in. For the 6 months before I get married, I live here with a family of four. I really like living with them.

Rosetta just released Wake/Lift and is going on tour for ten days starting this weekend. As for future releases, given all the other things going on, everything is probably going to be really behind schedule.

What little free time I've had lately I've spent mostly riding and fixing bicycles.

Fin

Lucy, 1994-2007
The smallest Weed, riotous and headstrong.

The tower

This is the tallest man-made structure in the world. It is in Blanchard, North Dakota. I visited it while staying in Fargo on tour with Battlefields. I waited a long time to do this -- a site which is the pinnacle of a personal mythology, a dream-object, like my own personal Mount Olympus. It is no skyscraper, it is the anti-monument.

New spot

My old ISP host was inoperative more often than not, so I finally gave up and bought a domain name and a real web host. Welcome to AnchorStates.net, I suppose. Hopefully, Stars of the Lid will not be upset with me.

This might mean some expansion into a real website someday...

So, what IS black and white and read all over?

On a lighter note

Here is a picture of my fiancée, or rather two pictures. In real life she is actually very much like the fun cool one and not like the evil cosmo one. But I used to be really scared she would turn into the bad one (see previous post). If you don't know her, she is super fun to hang out with. I like her a lot.

Burning the old life

We burned everything left over from Linshuang's 9 months in New York. Client presentations, business cards, plane tickets, hotel stationery, bank statements. This is our altar, a burnt offering of sorts that recognizes that the final offering has already been made, and that our peace comes only with substitution. It is liberating to destroy the artifacts of the past, while creating an artifact of liberation itself.

p.s.

By the way, I also got engaged.

One hundred

This is my 100th post to this "blog." It was supposed to be a long essay that I could be very proud of, about the rise of Gnostic thought in American consumerism, and about how hedonism degraded the body while true asceticism exalted the body, blah blah blah. But that essay never really materialized, and I haven't posted for almost two months. Maybe I'll finish it sometime, I don't know.

Instead, there are no theses, no solid propositions, nothing organized to say. My mother and sister miraculously were not killed in a car accident two weekends ago. Instead of thinking high-minded academic thoughts, I sit in my room in silence and tinker and build; I employ my hands to root myself in a physical reality, a manual safety --- to take my mind off of the fact that half of my family could have died, should have died, but didn't. I can't explain this in purely rational, materialist terms. I watched my mother try to open her swollen eyes after emergency brain surgery and I crumbled, because all the rational thought in the world is dust in the face of something so incomprehensible. It happens every day, it's average. Yet it seems that no logic or abstraction can give any insight into something as fundamental as fear of loss. This is where the limits of our psychological supports become most apparent.

I remember when I was 18, I knew everything. By the time I turn 24 next month, I will know absolutely nothing. It's a stupid cliché: you don't know the value of anything until you face the prospect of losing it. No one knows the value of human life until they see how easily it may be crushed. You invincible captains of pleasure, epicurean connoisseurs of human sense and drama, cosmopolitans, remember: life is fragile, life is short.

St. Louis

1/1/07, 11:30am
Post-Urbana-evac, prior to 15-hour drive home

St. Louis is an okay place (buildings by Louis Sullivan = awesome), but I had three complaints. First, nobody lives in the city center; it's all hotels and offices, which made me a little sad. Second, as a result of the lack of actual residents, everything closes at 6pm. I couldn't find food after 6 except at a grocery store. Third, Wawa does not have any stores in metro St. Louis.

Urbana 06

Imagine if you had to spend 11 straight days with this person!

Xmas

Here lives the family that is absolutely free to be at peace with itself. 12/25 is its day of renewal.

Back

to 1992.

I found this in a drawer that I hadn't opened in many years. I had lived in Philadelphia for 7 months when it was taken.

Internal space

Crown him the lord of peace, whose power a scepter sways
From pole to pole, that wars may cease, and all be prayer and praise.

Personhood

In the spirit of balance and not always being intellectual or analytical, here are some dumb nerd things I'm excited about right now:

- Fender Telecasters. I got one a month ago and finally have it set up exactly how I want it. The intonation is perfect, it's a joy to play, and the tonal palette is unbelievable. Teles are so... understated. They will never be obsolete; they were the first, and they will probably be the last. I've played Gibsons exclusively until now, and the qualitative change in feel and sound is indescribable. One's not better than the other, they're apples and oranges, and I like it that way. (Did I mention that Telecasters played a large role in the recording of many Stars of the Lid records? Nerd moment.)

- Cold air. I love the fact that it's now slightly uncomfortable to be outside. I like it when I bike to work and my nose gets runny and my eyes are all squinty with little crow's-feet wrinkles on the outside corners. Cold air feels so clean and wonderful. I think that Philadelphia is most beautiful in mid-Fall and in early Spring. And everybody knows that I love Philadelphia more than anywhere else in the world.

- The prospect of touring with Balboa in mid-December, to celebrate the upcoming release of our split record in the Winter. I miss those dudes and I am really excited to hang out with them all again.

- Having a dear older friend (one of my early musical mentors) get so excited about my decision to go to seminary that she just grabbed me and gave me a huge hug. That was actually very reassuring. When people who know you and your weaknesses have that kind of faith and hope in you, it puts challenges in perspective.

- Being commensurately body-tired after a bike commute and a day at work, instead of just brain-tired with an antsy body.

Art history sucks

So it's official. Art is dead; I'm going to seminary. Thanks to the TRANS conference this weekend for putting the finishing touches on my disillusionment with the art academy. High-powered academics are remarkably insecure, exhibiting a peculiar combination of intellectual hubris and adolescent social politics. It's all about status, which is to say, about perpetuating the illusion that your work actually amounts to something more than word games (cf. Derrida, who was cited repeatedly and excessively at the conference), to allay the creeping suspicion that it was meaningless to begin with.

Or more to the point, "The more the words, the less the meaning, and how does this profit anyone?" (Ecclesiastes).


Still, there were some memorable words from the ever-provocative Nicholas Mirzoeff, for whom I have respect because he actually seems to believe in something:

"Visual culture is dead. It's been dead for 15 years. I don't mean the image is dead, I mean the discourse that we invented to critique art history is dead. It's time to get political."

"It's time finally to REFUSE art history. If you don't believe me, go to the store and get a book called 'Art Since 1900.' Then you'll see."

This or that office

(I'd rather work in this office)

I'll be keeping regular hours for ASAM. 12-5pm or thereabouts, Monday through Thursday, in 166 McNeil. You may feel free to visit. VLST is still in ad hoc mode.

I am enjoying the fact that I can still leave my windows open at night and hear crickets. It's cold enough that the locusts are dead, but the crickets are still singing.

On Mondays I am always awake for twenty straight hours.

It is remarkable how many people are lonely most of the time, and how little they do about it.

:
Clear skies
Breeze
Crickets
Turning leaves
Clean streets
Cities with trees

Inner terrain

:
paint fumes
disquiet
twilight
this
mixed feelings

.

הבל

NY911

Walking 100 blocks from the upper east side to lower Manhattan at sunrise on the 5th anniversary of 9/11 --- it was the most humane that ungodly island has ever appeared, to my eyes. No honking, no shouting into cell phones, no inane conversations or pointless arguments. Just thousands of people walking and working in silence. It seems it takes utter catastrophe to wake the comatose from their reverie, to inspire thought beyond self. The problem is that they hit the snooze button and immediately fall back to sleep.

In retrospect, 9/11 did nothing for the United States. We are mostly the same now as we were on 9/10/2001, if not slightly more innoculated to genuine caring, and with perhaps slightly more hubris. We have truly seen it all, and it is all boring. So what is our day of remembrance? A quieter-than-usual morning in Manhattan --- the island where everyone is always talking over each other, but never listening in return. Tomorrow, things will be back to normal.

TMA-1 / General bummed-ness

"Intention alone is sufficient to give noise the value of signal."
-Umberto Eco, The Poetics of Open Work

Here is a really terrible-sounding rough mix of the more experimental new Rosetta track, which will appear in a much better sounding state on the upcoming split with Balboa.

I leave for tour in three days, which is completely surreal. The unifying theme of the last two months has been piling total environmental changes one on top of the other, until the continuous transitioning becomes its own sort of stasis. I'm a little sick of it really. The road may actually provide a semblance of settled routine, which would be a novelty. I will post here as regularly as I can while we're out.

Orange

I painted my room orange. Now everything is truly surreal. This room has looked the same since I moved into it at age 8, in 1991. Along with the loss of everything else concrete in life, now the homeplace becomes foreign. The color's nice and everything (I picked it, I painted it), but the space no longer bears any resemblance to the comforting refuge of childhood. In that sense I suppose this is a proxy for life change, sort of like when girls cut their hair off after a bad breakup.

...

All artifice, no art.

Done

IT'S OVERRRRRRRRR

This is me for the last week:


I'm out of here

Doom party aftermath

Judgment Day, as brought to you by the INTuitron. By all accounts, one of the most outrageous events in recent memory. A true Happening.

Examine the artifactual evidence.

Unfortunately I made a silly mistake and the video sound is horrendous... but those who were there know the wholly new creature which was born: Booty + Doom = BOOM.

The Doom Party

This Saturday at my house will take place the greatest party ever thrown:



Judgment Day on Mt. Zion

Saturday, April 22, 2006
at 329 S. 43rd Street, Philadelphia*

The nonsense begins at 9:30 PM. BYOA. BYOF.**

The dress code is: Absurd. (Any way you choose to interpret that)

Juxtaposing the following contradictory elements:
M. Weed's birthday (old news)
Electro-booty
DOOM DOOM DOOM
Silent video loops
Pre-finals angst release
$1 Polaroids with Francois the Giant Sexopus
Multi-cultural pastiche
Black lights and smoke machines
A straightedge juice bar
Live performance from The INTuitron with special guests James & Emma Sing Country Tunes
The dawning of the Age of Aquarius
And You

*329 is on the East side of 43rd Street between Spruce and Pine. If you can't find it, just listen for the bowel-movement-inducing rumble.
**Bring Your Own Fruit. We'll be making smoothies. Seriously.

----

Note: the INTuitron consists of myself and a couple other miscreants, plus huge amplifiers and possibly a robot or two, improvising an electroDOOM performance piece. Think Sunn o))) with Aphex Twin doing beats and Merzbow making noise, plus weird TV monitor video loops, rooms filled with fog, strobe lights, black lights, and a general aura of impending apocalypse. Please come to our happening, you will probably be glad you did.

Here's to Sunn o))) getting a write-up in Artforum. I guess they're haut-couture now.

Easter lilies

Courtesy of a certain well-dressed paparazzi

At least I can look pretty while I pontificate

While having a caffeine heart attack at 5am

I just had a moment of panic when I realized that one month from today I will be done with college. There's definitely an existential crisis in the mail.

Do we look alike?

Silk City Diner at 4th and Spring Garden is closing as of tomorrow. The Weed clan went to pay our respects last night, on the occasion of my 23rd year of life.


HD thesis stills:

Left: main channel (abstracted carnage)
Right: side channel (stop-motion drawings)

Postcard invitations will be going out soon.

...

I'm pretty much tongue-tied.

Lemoyne

The sound for the thesis installation is finished. Sample it here (7:22, 8.8mb). This is a stereo mp3 clip of the audio, but the actual mix is a 22-minute loop mixed in 5.1-channel surround.

So the show tonight kinda sucked. To the people who were there, I'm very sorry that we weren't up to par. We'll be better next time.

Other than that, today was phenomenal.

The shaft

Yes, well, here's a shout out to your P-ness:

"The INFP may turn to inferior extraverted Thinking for help in focusing on externals and for closure. INFPs can even masquerade in their ESTJ business suit, but not without expending considerable energy."

-Typelogic

T minus

Most likely, thesis work will be done within ten days.

Suggestions for a title?

I can't seem to shake the feeling that I'm missing something huge and I'm going to fail all my classes.

Boiling blood

Finished Rosetta tour poster

It is now the last day of spring break and it seems I am no closer to completing my thesis than I was seven days ago.

Part of this may be due to a certain metaphysical drunkenness and sensate fantasy that arises with the coming of Spring. The earth melts and the air changes. The window is open and some bundle of neurons begins to fire uncontrollably at the smell of the thaw. Nostalgia (the irresistable escapist fantasy of the INTP) becomes the lens for the present moment, and as distinctions between past and present inevitably blur, the sensory now begins to feel dream-like, simulacral. The experience is not that of this spring, or any other spring, but every spring as far back as memory reaches, all at once, amplified. Like déjà vu in reverse and on speed.

It's time for mating and killing. Generally speaking, if we can't do the former, we do the latter.

5/11

Oh man... Mogwai is playing a huge show at the Starlight Ballroom on May 11th, and I will be at Lake Champion that entire week.

ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH

On a more nostalgic note, I was digging through photo archives and found these from last summer's tour with Balboa, taken by Dave P. (for the INTP, the grass was always greener last year).




{
Stars of the Lid - Per Aspera Ad Astra
The Lotus Eaters - Mind Control for Infants
House of Low Culture - Edward's Lament

Train / Isis / Uncle

Last night on the 6:48 R5 train out of 30th Street Station:

I sat down with my bike on one of the bench seats in the back of the train with another bench facing it. The gentleman across from me, middle-aged, well-dressed, and slightly middle-eastern in appearance, pointed to the patch on my bag and said, "My nephew plays in that band."

I had an Isis patch on my bag, so I immediately asked, "What's his name?"

"Cliff, although in our family he's called Bryant." [OMFG THIS GUY IS THE UNCLE OF CLIFF MEYER THE LEGENDARY NOMADIC KEYBOARD PLAYER]

I flipped out. We ended up talking for half an hour; he was one of the nicest people I've ever talked to in a setting like that. He was so excited that he said he was going to "go home and tell my wife that I've met someone who likes Isis!" This dude was genuinely excited that SOMEONE out there liked his nephew's band. I told him that I play in a band with a similar sound, and that early Isis records were instrumental in building my desire to pursue music.

See? Once in a never, there is a well-dressed middle-aged dude on the train, and whether you want to acknowledge it or not, he knows a thing or two about doom metal.


Also:
Tonight @ the First Unitarian Church
22nd & Chestnut Streets, Phila. PA 19103
Racebannon / Gospel / Rosetta
7:30pm / $8 / All Ages

This will be pretty outrageous I think.

{
Akimbo - Elephantine
Sleep - Dopesmoker
Meshuggah - Catch 33
Aphex Twin - Selected Ambient Works Vol. II

Friday starts spring break, i.e. thesis slave week

1. Fast broken with communion and berry/nut pancakes

2. Going to EAT SUSHI

3. Wondering if it's going to shrivel up and fall off / why didn't I realize Ash Wednesday was THIS week?


Also, Rosetta is playing the First Unitarian Church on Wednesday night (3/8) with Gospel and Racebannon, which will be a goood (with three o's) time. You should come.

Hit by a car

Terraform #1 // Subject: Tim F. // 11x14" c-print

Tonight while riding my bike back from my Color II class, I was broadsided by an oncoming car as it turned left at 42nd and Spruce streets. I was thrown against the windshield and then rolled up onto the roof, where I remained for a few seconds as the car continued moving through the intersection. The bike flew all the way across the street. After I regained my presence of mind (I was badly stunned) I jumped off the car roof and immediately started looking for my bike. By the time I grabbed it out of the street the car had disappeared. Five people saw this happen, but no one got the license plate of the hit-and-run driver. Someone asked if I wanted them to call 911, but I said no. Then they said I was "really badass."

I have no injuries to speak of, and nothing I was carrying was damaged. The bike, however, got maimed, and despite being able to repair most of the damage, I will probably need a new front fork and possibly a new wheel. Luckily, this will only require magically conjuring some money out of mid-air.

MBTI Type II

Last Saturday:
I took the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Type II test with several friends. The effort required to suspend that very vocabulary was enormous. Type I had 72 questions, Type II has 176. This is phenomenal.

My idol of self-knowledge (unattainable, I know) appears to be not so much narcissism as an obsession with developing a schematic understanding of precisely how one can have a sense of "belonging" in community. MBTI is particularly useful in standardizing a shared vocabulary with which to encapsulate a particular subset of this kind of information, so it can be communicated more expediently. As such, it helps to move beyond just "you are different from me" to hows and whys of difference, expressed in a systematic way.

This is exactly what drives all the Sensor-Feeler people nuts.


Also, Lent didn't start last Wednesday. It starts this Wednesday. God gets an extra week of self-denial.

Tungsten film = uh huh

1. Midterms are over. Lent starts tomorrow.

2. Call my phone and listen to the greeting. You will be glad you did.

3. Also, contribute to my Johari window which, I suppose, is nothing more than yet another manifestation of the self-knowledge fetish. Speaking of which, I'm taking the MBTI Type II test this weekend. My unbridled glee knows no bounds.

{
Boards of Canada - Geogaddi
Sunn o))) - 00Void
Stars of the Lid - Per Aspera Ad Astra
Arovane - Atol Scrap

Makeout time

While I'm avoiding a rather trivial art history paper:

INCREDIBLE DECONTEXTUALIZED QUOTES FROM THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

"I like nice men."
"Yeah... you're a real hero."
"Scoundrel? I like the sound of that."
"I am not a committee!"
"And then we just float away, with the rest of the garbage."
"Helloooooooooo, what have we here?"
"I thought they smelled bad on the outside."
"Good morning. Nice of you guys to drop by."
"Hey, that's my dinner!"
"Afraid I was gonna leave without giving you a goodbye kiss?"

And the best exchange in cinematic history:
"Stop that."
"Stop what?"
"Stop that. My hands are dirty."
"My hands are dirty too. Whattayou afraid of?"

These will hopefully all be turned into song titles for a semi-ironic (I know, I know) stoner jam band, which will most likely be called Superdupermulletcore.

(Tell God thank you for Lawrence Kasdan)

Meditations of a non-initiator, part 1

Approximately two years ago you asked me in a charming email to go to a rock 'n' roll show with you. I was flattered because you didn't seem like the type who would want to hang out with me. We ate Indian food and you paid for my ticket. It was sublime. I didn't pursue it further, even though it was obvious I should have. You must have thought I was terribly dense, or just a space cadet. Or maybe, I misread the entire situation.

----

Wade Gosselin took these pictures in Maine:

Done

^ What I've been working on... sort of. (video still)

I'm so done. So so so done. Time for xxxmas and some cleaning. One semester left in college, with drastic changes in store, then the unpleasant prospect of growing up.

Bone

1300-page comic books are a warm and tender opiate for the disenfranchised academic. Or maybe after consuming so much existential angst from the dregs of the "art" world, I'm just a sucker for narrative.

Postmodern insomnia

It's almost 4am and I'm wide awake. This evening was the first time I've slept in days. And I have nothing to show for it because the project I just finished got "collected." The weather oddly reflects my state of being, going from unusually warm and sticky to thunderstorms, then to almost frost, in a period of a few hours.

Tim sent me an interesting article on the place of faith in the continuing dialogue over postmodernism (which I am beginning to crassly believe may not actually exist). In a more narcissistic bent, there's also a rather enthusiastic new review of the Rosetta disc on Decoymusic. Oddly enough, we scored higher than The Mars Volta.

After setting the text of Revelation 16-18 in my artist's book, (((Wrath))), Helvetica is officially my favorite typeface ever.

Playing:
Exhaust - s/t
Do Make Say Think - Goodbye Enemy Airship...
DJ Krush - Jaku
Stars of the Lid - Maneuvering the Nocturnal Hum

Read these

Commodify Your Dissent!
This is a collection of articles from the Chicago-based journal The Baffler. An excellent treatise on the "Culture Trust" and it even has an essay by STEVE ALBINI! Yeah, I just crapped myself too.

Chuck Klosterman -- Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs
Hating Coldplay = authority.

Dave Hickey part deux

So, dinner wasn't so bad after all. In fact, it was fabulous. Hickey is one of the most crass individuals I have ever encountered, and as such is amazingly entertaining. He's so anti-formal that I felt perfectly at ease for all 3 hours of dinner conversation (and probably ate a little too much raw eel sushi).

The most memorable thing he said to me was "Given the choice between art and music, I'd pick music any day. Music makes people feel good. Art doesn't." I don't unconditionally accept that statement as true, but I see his point and I agree with him.

He also had a lot of interesting things to say about the resurgence of Modernism since 9/11, and he essentially called out pluralism as a racist institution to "keep black people from going to Princeton." He argues for a kind of holistic assimilationism (my term, not his) which accepts the inevitability that when one culture assimilates to another, neither is the same in the end. So this process is therefore intrinsically democratic...? I'm not sure, but at least it's a new thought in a pretty stagnant and putrid pool of self-indulgent postmodern intellectualism.

Playing:
Kayo Dot - Choirs of the Eye
Isis - Panopticon

Dave Hickey

Art critic/writer Dave Hickey is visiting Penn right now. I was planning on going to his lecture tomorrow, but apparently my thesis advisor Colette pulled some strings and also got me invited to a faculty dinner with him at Pod. I can't afford to even breathe the air in Pod, but this is on the school's dime. I'm also supposed to visit Colette's Wednesday art writing class, which Hickey is sitting in on.

From the introvert's perspective, this whole scene seems rather forced. I love the guy's writing, but I seriously wonder if there's anything to be accomplished by playing the shmooze game for two days with a man who gives hundreds of these lectures every year --- to people a lot more talented than me. Part of my reticence is probably just a Protestant-work-ethic flare-up (Myers and Briggs might say it's the socialized latent J surfacing) that says "networking" is just another word for begging, and that it qualifies as selling your soul to the Man. Or maybe I'm just an insecure stoic and I hate criticism.

Playing:
Meshuggah - I
Mono - Walking Cloud and Deep Red Sky...