May 2004, 9 entries

This next month has been dedicated to determining where exactly all of my money is going. So I’m going to use some combination of notes on my phone and Excel spreadsheet at home to capture and analyze such spending. I suppose I could just look at my bank and credit card bills from last month, but that won’t capture all of the spending that happens with money I withdraw from the ATM, and plus, I just like having something to do. Hopefully this process will help me reduce spending just a bit, because I’ve been going a little overboard lately.

Lately I’ve enjoyed buying things, especially things that I don’t think I really want, or which I wonder what people who want them are like. I’ve never purchased a magazine for “Men” before. Until today, when I bought two: Esquire (UK), and Men’s Health. Why those two? Not sure… well, actually, I do: Esquire had a “Voted Men’s Magazine Of The Year” headline along the top of it, and Men’s Health had a headline that said, “Tons of Useful Stuff.” I figure I need a bit of a refresher on what exactly it means to be a man according to the advertisers and the editors.

A few things I’ve learned so far:

• I should wear suits more often than I do (which is never)
• Whistling is OK while at the urinal but not while in a stall
• On the other hand, weeping is okay in the stall, but not at the urinal
• I should wipe my hand before shaking, but not shake with two hands
• The elevator is the most flirtatious place in the office, and I should master 5-second quips (usually at the expense of the person who just stepped off the elevator)
• The out-of-the-office reply isn’t necessary for lunch break
• At the clubs, funny dancing isn’t funny
• Neither is air guitar

And that’s only from the first magazine. I haven’t looked in the other one yet but suspect it to be as (if not more) interesting than the first. I don’t want to make fun of the magazines too much by saying how superficial and stereotypical their advice is, but nor do I want to credit them for at least being a bit entertaining. I think they successfully walk the fine line between the two, at least from my first impression.

Camping was fun. Rode some horses on the beach. Ate some smores. I enjoyed the company of new people. Came back exhausted with no excuse. Took a nap today. Tried to go to yoga but the classes were canceled. Went to the gym instead. Tried to be productive on personal projects but decided to read instead and begin work again in earnest tomorrow. Yes, tomorrow, when I also have to try to acquire a new copy of that business license I accidentally threw away when moving in order to dispute my $2,000 tax bill due to confusion about the difference between me and my sole-proprietorship. I’d like to get new pants too.

A couple weeks ago I said I’d go to a show a week, for twenty weeks, and call it club club, but this week I don’t really feel like going to a show, I don’t know why. Or at least, yesterday and today I didn’t feel like going to shows, and both of them seemed pretty good: the Distillers at the Showbox yesterday and On The Speakers at the Crocodile today. Well, I went to two during week two, maybe I can skip a week. Or make it up next week. I may have to call myself names as are part of the rules that I set out if I missed a week. I feel so lame making goals and then becoming too lazy too meet them… even when they’re as easy as going to a show. I’m making about 3 times more goals than I can keep up with. Other goals created this week: taking motorcycle lessons and a yoga class.

I did have a pretty good day today though, other than that. I did a few simple fun things like I tried out a new coffee shop, Coffee Messiah, the one closest to my new apartment, and found that it has great coffee. Their 16 ounce drinks come with 4 shots! I will have to get one of those next time I’m there. I also walked a different route home. See, I told you simple, but somehow they made my day a bit better.

Finally, in order to compensate for my ditching of the show, I got excited about trying to cut another track on GarageBand. I think it was a mistake. I got too ambitious, bit off more than I could chew, tried to combine too many things into one thing, and then eventually became too exhausted to try and get a semi-in-pitch vocals. Ouch. It hurts my ears to listen… and here I am posting it for everyone else. I must warn you, it will make you wince. Maybe cry. More than the previous ones. Anyway, here’s my attempt at combining Beethoven, Nirvana, and the Beatles into a single song: Good Rocky’s Revival, a cover of Rocky Racoon, one of my favorite songs of all time. I once had a pretend band that only did Rocky Racoon covers, and they were all about this good.

I did go to a good show last week—my co-worker Todd’s band, An American Starlet. It was a great show—the first time I have seen them live. Lots of Amazon people there too. I was a big fan of the keyboards, and liked the songs where the girl sang by herself more than when the guy sang with her.

In reference to this entry, here’s a quick summary of how I’m currently using Movable Type:

• I have this one weblog, and it has separate weblogs in the database for the main content, the Morale-O-Meter, the Camera Phone blog and a defunct “Last Seen” blog that I may revive that takes quick updates from my phone. I’m the only author for these.
• I have a blog at All Consuming for my silly book obsession and one at Man Versus Himself for my silly book. Again, I’m the only author.
• I have one set up for a secret project, and another group blog for a couple friends so we can talk about movies.
• Then I have 7 blogs set up on subdomains of allconsuming.net that I host for some work friends who I introduced to the world of blogging.

All told, 15 blogs and 10 authors. I’ve donated to the cause, and also set up an installation at work that paid for the old commercial license (now that one I don’t think we’re going to upgrade). I’m a Movable Type junkie. There isn’t really a license that would work for me perfectly (I’d either have to get two personal licenses or one commercial license), though I’m assuming that with their newer definition of what a weblog is (one domain), and when they make it possible to get add-ons to a particular license, I’ll end up paying $149 minus whatever discount I get for being on the beta. Which, considering my addiction and love for the product, I will definitely end up paying. I may pay even more just for fun.

I like listening to music that someone has told me that they really like. When I listen to it, I imagine them liking it, and it means a lot more to me somehow. Maybe because it connects the music with an emotional reaction, and encourages my own emotional reaction to compare itself to the other. It’s easier to see something when it is allowed to contrast with something else, similar. Maybe that’s why I’ve been enjoying going to shows that people have recommended to me… simply because I can imagine that they are there with me and we are enjoying it.

I’m enjoying the imagination lately. Running it up against its limits and seeing where it fails and how it fails. And how those problems help figure out the shape of it that I can’t otherwise see. For example, talking with someone and imagining what they are thinking while they are listening is a normal thing to do. You imagine that they are hearing what you’re saying and that they are thinking of something else to say and that you in turn alter your delivery to subtlely affect the reception of what you’re saying. Trying to line things up. When I do that I have the feeling that I’m really in their minds, not just in my own limited model of their mind. Like I mentioned to someone the other day, there’s a big difference betweeen being in a thing and being in an imperfect model of the thing. It’s like going to Paris versus imagining Paris, being in the middle of a song and thinking about the song. Being a person versus talking about a person. If we actually could see the model in our minds for what it was, I doubt we would trust it so much. Flimsy ghost. Just try to draw Paris from your mind, or even your own neighborhood. The entire drawing could probably fit on a 8 by 11 sheet of notebook paper. Plus a few words like “the skyline near Notre Dame” and “that bike path along the Seine” and “that statue people were climbing on after France won the World Cup”. The amount of information that is lost is amazing. Certainly writing it down reduces it even further than what is available in our mind—and in fact many art forms are probably about keeping as much of that shape in the mind preserved after it exits the mind. A different kind of C-section. And yet, you can still tell someone “Paris is my favorite city. I could live there for a couple years easily.” Or you can say, “he struck me as motivated and intelligent, but probably isn’t right for me” after talking to someone for a few hours. From that flimsy ghost of a model.

Another fun game is to try to imagine where you are. Whatever you’re doing, close your eyes and try to imagine what’s happening around you. Can you get your own private space right? Which details are highlighted and which get left out? Temperature and sounds come out for me. I lose colors and textures. Could be because my eyes are closed but my other senses aren’t. If all of my senses were taken away temporarily I wonder what I would remember? I should go to a show and while I’m there record what it’s like, and then, without refering back to that record write about what the show was like a day later, a week later, a year later. See how the memory folds up. Only problem is that you might remember more about what you wrote about the show than what actually happened. So it’s a bit more like telephone than if you couldn’t remember what you had written each time you were writing the next thing. If you can get your immediate surroundings okay, try expanding the sphere to include the nearest person. What’s going on in their head, in their blood system, in their digestive tract. Haha. What would they imagine if they were to close their eyes? It gets tricky when you include people who are talking to one another. It gets too complicated maybe. It runs up (if it didn’t run up a long time before this) against the wall of the imagination. Look out onto a street. There are hundreds of people each as complicated as the next, interacting in subtle ways that even they aren’t completely aware of. How can we look at this scenario and not have our heads explode? Because we simplify it to something as little as “a teeming downtown street.” When a hundred people die in a bomb explosion, what actually happens? Does anybody really know? Does anyone really know what the water is like when it swirls around rocks on a quiet shore? It’s impossible to imagine, our heads would explode. I look at a group of people and wonder how much I would love each one if I knew each one as well as they knew themselves. Or hate.

I want to jump into a deep cool pond. Eat dirt. Put my ear up against the hood of a speaker at a concert. Bite into the bark of a tree. Smash myself into a tiny box and throw myself down a hill. I’m feeling a little desparate and a little confident and a little afraid about things. I think it’s campaign season for the many little groups of little people in my head.

Can anyone recommend a good travel agent that has an office in Seattle? I’m planning a 3-4 (or maybe even 5) week trip in July/August to Slovakia (with a friend who is from there) and surroundings, with stops possibly in Amsterdam, Vienna, Prague, and Irvine, California. I have some vacation time I need to use up, as you can see. Also, if anyone wants to hang out with me in a cafe in Amsterdam early July, please get in touch.

I’ve been thinking about self-explanatory objects. What would it take to write a book that not only was a book, but taught the reader how to read the book, and even before that was able to inform the person that the thing in their hands was a book that could be read. Is it possible to create a real time capsule that you can send out into space and expect the first intelligent being to be able to interact with it in the intended way? Okay, that’s a little ambitious, but is it possible to write a book and send it out into the bookstores and expect the first intelligent being that walks into the store to be able to interact with the book in the intended way? Every piece of art or literature has at least three pieces: the content itself, the language and context of the content, and the simple message that there is a language and a content to find in the object. If you’re missing any one of those three things, an alien that picked up your book would have trouble understanding what it was that they were holding. Even if they knew English, and could read the words on the pages, if they didn’t know that it was a book that should be read they’d be out of luck. Sometimes I feel this way. That you all are aliens. No, I’m not the alien.

Another take. Icebergs, ice cubes, potatoes. How much of a painting relies on things not in the painting itself? How much of the painting is submerged below the surface of the time period that it was painted, the history of the painter, the culture the painter grew up in, the manner in which the painter painted it, the initial audience and reception of the painting, etc? If you cut the umbilical cord of all paintings, packing them into a space ship and shipping them to another dimension where people were identical in all things except context and history, would they sort the paintings into the same order of greatness and mediocrity that we have sorted them into here?

Which things are more dependant on context than others: books, songs, paintings, photographs, jokes, buildings, fashions, wigs, automobiles, ethics, politics, the meaning of life, pizza toppings. And, does it matter? Should I keep seeking the beauty and complexity of context or should I shun it and try to find and make objects that can live outside that life support system?

How differently does a music novice treat Beethoven’s 9th versus a classical music aficionado? Is that gap somehow a measurement of the displacement of context involved in the art piece? Submerge the art into both minds, and measure the difference of appreciation. You think there’s more involved and I would agree but this is an over-simplification. There are some things that become worse the more you know about the context. Lots of movies that fall apart, lots of bands that are really overly manufactured and marketed, lots of books that have pulp disguised as meat. But, take the absolute value of context’s effect, positive or negative, as the degree to which something is rooted in the story around it. Some things are all story/context and are really just empty vessels for shipping interesting context to the hungry in little bite size pieces. Everything you see just because everyone else has seen it, everything you take part in just because you want to relate to the other people who have taken part in it.

Has someone studied context? Not to find out what the context of something is, but to study the phenomenon of context itself. Why we enjoy it, why we build things that attract it, why we do things to support it. What is it called? What are the forces that are involved and what controls their ebb and flow? Almost everything relies on context—the way we dress, the way we design our living and working spaces, the things we find interesting and the things we read and talk about, the way we perceive ourselves and the way we want to perceive ourselves. And yet you can’t cash it it. You can’t eat it or drink it or wrap it around you and stay warm at night. And in the end you leave it behind and it finds someone/something else to feed it.

I’ve been compiling a list of event calendars around Seattle, so that I can keep up on things that are happening that I might like to attend:

• Gold’s Gym Class Schedule, for the yoga classes
• KEXP’s Club Calendar
• The Stranger’s Live Music and DJ Listings
• Pollstar’s Seattle Concert Calendar
• Benaroya Hall’s Event Calendar
• Elliot Bay Book’s Author Events
• Elliot Bay Book’s Book Club Calendar
• Seattle Arts & Lectures Literature Lectures Series

I may try scraping these sites and creatiing a script that automatically adds them to either a public iCal feed or to upcoming.org (which I absolutely love… even though I practically own Seattle in the system). Andy, any plans for an API that allows programmatic creation of locations, events, and subscriptions? Also, having subscribed to the upcoming.org feed for Seattle, I was a little sad to see that events disappeared after they had happened. I suppose that’s why it’s called upcoming.org though rather than upcomingandrecentlyhappened.org. Still, it would be nice to have a way to subscribe to past events too.

I think we’re getting a lot closer to having a truly useful public calendar that works based on location, friend networks, and interests… just a few more pieces to put together. For example, the ability to add permissions to events, so that I can keep somewhat private events online, better integration with mobile phones (even though bluetooth does a pretty good job of this, I’d like to be able to tell my phone to automatically sync up without even asking me whenever it senses an approved device).

Snow Patrol, Carina Round (May 2nd): Good show, very loud. Ears ringing for another day. Snow Patrol’s from Glasgow and apparently they sell more CDs in Seattle than the rest of the country. And this was their first sold out show.

Of Montreal (their name isn’t conducive to Google searches), Terrene, and funny drunk guy who sang on stage (May 3rd): This show was really entertaining. First, Joe, Todd, Todd’s friend, and I encouraged this guy to sing a few acapella heavy metal tunes on stage and he was really good. The audience loved him. He started with Silent Lucidity by Queensryche, then did some Ozzy, Alice and Chains, and my favorite, Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb. Then an ex-coworker’s band played. Then Of Montreal, who were quite goofy. In between songs they did some juggling, interpretive dance, masked song intros, some strange sword fight with feather dusters perhaps (I couldn’t see that one well), and the songs themselves were quite good too. What was the name of that Boston tune they closed their encore with?

I haven’t yet chosen my band(s) for this week (weeks start on Thursday here) but hope to pick up a copy of The Stranger before a bleeding mouth forbids me from leaving my yellow room.

Today I get my wisdom teeth pulled out. I’ve got a few NetFlix movies, an old copy of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, and my new favorite CDs (Franz Ferdinand and Source Tags and Codes). It’ll be a battle of the medias to see which one most closely fits my drugged out, phantom toothed, short attention span mental state.

I posted this in the comments of my previous post, but in case you want to hear more misinformed noodling on GarageBand, here’s my third song: I’m So Tired.

In other news I’ve started paper journaling again—there’s a bunch of stuff going on that I can’t talk about it here, but I’ve gotten so used to writing and thinking at the same time that I almost can’t even think without writing. I’ve got a little black book with my poems in.

My previous goal of club club is off to a great start—I have plans to see shows tonight and tomorrow night (Snow Patrol and Of Montreal). To keep track of everything I plan on seeing, you can take a look at my upcoming.org profile page. I’m loving the new Franz Ferdinand album, and can’t wait to see them in June.

I also cooked my first meal out of my new cookbook, recommended by Jana. Now she has to read a chapter of her CSS/DHTML book (I figure learning CSS and learning how to cook is very similar—some basics, but mostly a bunch of hacks you have to memorize).

The biggest and most exciting event of the weekend so far is my initiation to the world of GarageBand. I got the full tour from Dan Spils yesterday plus he let me borrow his keyboard. I salvaged my long lost electric guitar as well (currently being fixed up at the shop though). If you want to hear the first two songs I put together (don’t have very high expectations at all), you can check out Pathetic and I’ve Got GarageBand Now. I’m still getting used to the idea of thinking in multiple tracks at once, and have used copious samples (thanks to JamPack!) to make up for my own lack of musical talent, but it has certainly been a lot of fun. I remember back in my college days when I used to try to write songs for the guitar that I had a much different perspective on music in general—suddenly every song was taken apart in my mind and I become amazed at how much more talented even the biggest hack is than I. Perhaps that’s why I was so much more affected by music back then than I have become over the years… maybe that extra sensitivity will come back again. Anyway, after messing around for the last day, I’m back in that constant appreciation for all music mode. As a result I instantly became a huge fan of the new KEXP program I heard last night called Sonic Reducer, now every Saturday night, from 9 to midnight. It’s a new show dedicated to punk.

So the three current branches of the Benson betterificaiton project include:

• club club
• learn to cook
• make some songs

I’ve been in hyper mode for the last few days… maybe I’m getting some manic pay-off for all the other stuff I’ve been going through for a while. I’ll take it however I can get it.