Second (!!) Anniversary

We had an incredible second anniversary date yesterday. Beanz asked me to plan a day for her, which I found intimidating at first, but once I made a general plan for the day, it turned out to be fun and rather empowering. I realized how often I avoid making a decision or a plan, because I always expect her to disagree with anything I suggest. She wants me to suggest things, to help her weigh options. To me, that feels like no matter what I pick, she'll always pick the opposite.
Anyway, yesterday we had breakfast at out favorite JP breakfast place, Sorella's. It was raining quite heavily, and our rain coats made us sweat like we were being microwaved covered in Saran wrap. We had a wonderful breakfast, and then moved on to downtown Boston.
It was a wonderful change of pace to actually navigate myself (oh, so wonderful). We went to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, which we both love. We had gone there once when we were first dating and she visited me in Boston, and neither of us had been there in many years, so it was a nice change. We almost went to a classical performance happening there, but we decided to spend more time enjoying the art. The amazing thing about the Gardner museum is that it's not only one person's house, but it feels like a home. Some of the room are unbelievable indoor gardens with classical Roman sculptures and gorgeous flower displays, and others are almost folksy quaint little American rooms with a huge fireplace and little china knick-knacks and deer-patterned lace doilies that look like 8-bit video game characters.
Afterwards we went down to the waterfront and walked around, smelling the heavy, cool salty sea-breeze. Later we went to a fancy Italian restaurant I found on Phantom Gourmet (listed as 'Best Undiscovered Gem') I had a lobster diavoli (?), a sort of wavy, wide and thin linguine, with a mildly spicy tomato sauce and lobster, with saffron and fennel (couldn't really taste either one), and Minna had loin of venison (!!!), with mashed pumpkin (!!) and stewed kale (meh...too watery). Venison was incredible! It was moist, tttteeennndddeeeerrrrr, and juicy, ver much like steak, but with a slightly gamier, stronger flavor.

Rebecca

I tried to write about Rebecca last night and would up getting side-tracked, writing about whatever was on my mind lately, namely, the satisfaction I derive from reading as opposed to watching a good film or show.

What I had intended to write about is the nature of suspense in Rebecca. Du Maurier does a truly masterful job of slowly unfurling a mysterious plot. The opening to the novel is like a master-class is showing, not telling. It's quite incredible; from the first line, the narrator provides us with a simple statement of fact that implies a question, and sets up a structure wherein we are given a morsel of information and stay hungry for several more. "Last night I dreamed we were in Manderlay again," runs the first line. What is Manderlay? Why was she there? Why did she have to leave, because clearly she's been cut off from it. The whole story moves that way: we wonder who Rebecca was, what the dark secret in Max de Winter's past is, how he and the narrator wound up together, and just who is the narrator, this mysterious cipher of a girl? The book is just a masterful example of clever plotting that leaves the reader hungry to find out what happens next. I'd forgotten that novels could be pleasing in that way.

That's what I was trying to write about last night.

TV and Books

I've ben reading Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. It's a fantastic book, definitely one in the loooong line of English and American naturalist/realistic books of the late nineteenth and twentieth century about flimsy, uncertain little girls who dream of stepping up into the upper class and do due to marrying into this higher society, and struggle to succeed merely by being blank, by having no affect and allowing other people to project the persona they wish to see onto her.
Rebecca is an interesting twist, though. From the very first sentence, the reader is put into the position of wondering just what is the narrator talking about? She very, very gradually gives us one clue after the last that lets us gradually begin to understand what the plot is and wonder what we don't yet know. Information is made available to us tantalizingly slowly, but just enough is fed to us to make us interested for more.
Lately I've been really impressed with the way TV shows keep the delicate balancing act of a complicated and sometimes convoluted plot in the air, each ball leaping from one hand to the next in a parabolic arc, and really disappointed in modern novels' ability to do the same thing. The novels I've read lately hve been sort of pseudo-intellectual exercises in examining themes that mdoern reviwers say are important, whereas some fo the shows I've been watchign have actually subtlely examined the sam themes, all the while weaving them into complicaed, soap-operatic plots involving multiple characters with realistically developed motivatiosn (all those things they told us were bourgeois when we were in college). For instance, every idea about race ad colnialism that The Darling by Russell Banks crammed own our throats, Battlestar Galactica handled rather deftly. Maybe my expectations of literature are unrealistically high and mine of TV are abnormally low; I'm not sure.

Class

I had my second class tonight and I'm definitely feeling like I can easily handle this class and a more serious job. It's a relatively interesting, more than fairly practical and quite easy, straight-forward class. And there are much worse thigns I can think of then sitting around in a room with a bunch of fusty English nerds talking about what's the best way to say this, and what exactly is this person trying to say anyway? That's more the way I first look at writing anyway, rather than, what does this mean? It's more the mechanics of the poetics of writing, rather than the hermeneutics of writing. I dunno, it's kind of fun! The teacher is so weird. She's a kind of crunchy, spacy but not necessarily flaky English teacher who clearly sees editing as a means to an end, and makes no bones about it.
The only thing is there's this one horrible girl who looks just like Ann Coulter and is equally insufferable. She's the kind of person who says something supposedly witty about her own impressiveness in a loud voice to no one in particular, and then gives a forced little laugh, as if to say, 'That's what you should be doing, laughing at how witty I am.' Just a deeply insecure little person who can't stand to not be looked at and stroked. Actually, there are a few precious little Barbie girls in the class, and a bunch of stuffy old lady grammar geeks, and one guy who I think is a journalist. And me, who makes dismissive comments about people he barely knows.
Sha-zam!

Analog Delay

My dad offered to get me a guitar pedal for my birthday, so the other we picked up an MXR analog delay pedal at guitar center. It's got an incredible, warm, incandescent tone that just...gives me a wicked boner. It's super easy to use, and doesn't have any useless, extra functions like most digital delays. It also, obviously, has a much nicer, livelier tone. But, it has far fewer features, and doesn't have all that long a delay. But, it has all the features I would ever actually use. It also has a modulation switch, which seems to basically just give a mild 'harmonizer' effect to the delayed (wet) tone, which results in a sweet but subtle, chorusy tone that reminds me a lot of Bill Frisell's heavily processed tone, which he frequently uses but never relies on. Also, compared to most of the other analog delays I've read about, it's about half the price (at $150) and seems reliable and easy to use. And it's got this beautiful, piercing blue light that's much easier to see in the dark than the dull, red, HAL-like light your vast majority of other pedals have. Now I've got to get my strat fixed up (replace the input, maybe switch out the pups for higher quality versions, maybe get the intonation and action tweaked. Then I'll get a higher quality trem pedal, run the strat through the delay and trem right into the reverbed clean channel of my hotrod and just get a wicked Marc Ribot hard-on.

First class

I had my first copyediting class last night. It was a strange experience, due partly to the flakey,
one-foot-in-another-dimension aspect to the teacher, partly due to it being from six to nine-thirty, after an eight hour work day, and I didn't get enough sleep the night before and also was shit-ass drunk right before bed.
In a way, it was the most honest, frank introduction to a class and a field I've eve had at any school. The teacher explained, in her round about, meandering way, that she had gotten started as a copyeditor for math and science text books, then gone on to magazines and eventually fiction, now she's a writer, an English and editing professor at Emerson and a freelance copyeditor. She explained that the class is basically just something to be got through so you can say you have a certificate, which you can sue to fake your way into our first job. You'll be faking it because at your first job you'll have a whole different set of rules than what I'll be teaching you, but that's just how it works. As she was talking, she clearly has no particular interest in copyediting as a field it's merely a means to an end, something that allows how her pay for writing and reading and gardening, which are what she actually gets excited for. The whole evening was a far cry from the pomposity and ego-stroking that came with every other school I've ever gone to, or heard about from friends. No mention of notions of purity, no looking down our noses at "ordinary people" who go to "State Schools," (this spat contemptuously from the mouth like a morsel of rotten meat...Sorry, I've been reading Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier.
The people in the class seemed like a bunch of fusty grammar nerds. Which I don't have much of an interest in, but it is a nice change after the vigorously unliterary guys I work with. Some of them are actually really smart (in the mailroom, I mean), like Keith and Russell, but they're just the kind of guys that would consider "being an intellectual" pretentious and self-defeating. I feel a certain duty as an educated, somewhat priveleged person to try to get through to people like that, smart people who feel they have a certain place, and that certain things, like college, are either denied them or wasteful. I feel I have an obligation to let these guys see that most "intellectuals" are interested in making the lives of normal people better, not in looking condescendinlyg at them.

Anna Deavere Smith

We saw an excellent Anna Deavere Smith play tonight. My friend Jane who was someone I wished I had hung out with more when we were in highschool now lives in Boston and is a grad student teaching speech or speech for actors or something (I honestly don't understand how you can spend all day for two years teaching actors how to enunciate) had two extra tickets to this one woman show, which is apparently all ADS does, at the ART so we went after work.

It's a one woman show where she switches back and forth between different characters talking about grace, in terms of the soul and the body. All the text is taken from interviews that she gives. So basically, she asks questions of academics and religious figures and real people who've gone through disease, genocide in Rwanda, and being abandoned by their government and country during Katrina, and so on, and then she acts out their responses to her questions, so she sort of weaves a polyphony (wow! Did I just mix that metaphor, THAT much?!)... composes a polyphony of different voices (mostly she brings this out through the voice, less so through body language) each touching on different aspects of the same subject.

To me, my concept of grace is much informed by Heinrich von Kleist's essay In the Puppet Theatre. To me, grace is the zone where the human approaches the unhuman, the beyond human. Where action or thought or performance loses self-consciousness and therefore performs at a level of effortlessness where human error is erased, where it ceases to feel like a real, live, person doing something and starts to seem like an android, an automaton mimicking a human, but inhumanly perfect.

The play (that's not quite the right word, is it? It was more like a performance art/lecture) was extremely moving, but somewhat unfocused. She didn't at all make it clear (at least not to me) where the connection between bodily grace and vulnerability and spiritual grace is. It's not an essay, an academic attempt to make an argument about a subject and then examine the whys and hows of how she came to that conclusion, and it's not a fictional piece with a narrative (why do people always say 'narrative' when they mean 'story'? Why does the 'n-word' [heh] sound so much more powerful?) that examines an idea from multiple facets, so what is it? What is i trying to say? Why did it have to be made? It's a total cop-out to say, to foster dialogue, to make people talk about such and such. Because it's an elite art piece performed exclusively for ultra WASP Harvard professors in the poshest neighborhood of the poshest city in an elite, ultra liberal state. The point is clearly not to encourage elite liberal white people to voyeuristically glimpse into the lives of poor people.

Voting

I love voting; it's one of the few simple, easy to exercise inalienable rights that I feel fulfilled in
doing as much as people tell me I should. But I hate voting for small local elections, where your choices are between the unbelievably entrenched incumbent familiar face, and the upstart rebel without a cause. In Massachusetts this is almost always the case: you've got Ted Kennedy, or the old townie crank from Hull (where the fuck is Hull? I've lived in Massachusetts over twenty years and I've got no idea where Hull is) who's running not on any platform, or for any particular purpose, but merely running against Ted Kennedy, merely because he's Ted Kennedy, a famous famous with an old name.

Encounters at the End of the World

We saw Encounters at the End of the World by Werner Herzog tonight. It was a very interesting , if a bit unfocused doc about Antarctica and the researchers and explorers who go there, to the end of the earth, as they describe it and why. All of them seemed to be people who had either always or late in life begun to avoid mving through normal normal channels. They are all people who brought themselves to mroe and mroe desolate locales, as if searching for the blankest wasteland, the closest place to a blank page, an empty white spot on the map, perhaps to see themselves better, without the distractions or distortions of normal social life, perhaps to see themselves completely unadorned with pre-exiting social ideas, and some f them seem to want to see the world more clearly by traveling to its most forbidding, least inhabited place, the last place left untouched by human hands, to understand man's effect on the world, and his place there. It's not really clear what his point was with the movie; in Grizzly Man he made a film about a misguided nature conservationist who tries desperately to believe that nature is pure, and inherently meaningful, and ultimately wound up failing to imprint a western, human conception of 'meaning' on something far beyond man's scope. It's not clear if Hezog made this movie because he feels these researchers have a less deluded idea of nature, if they succeeded where Timothy Treadwell failed, or if he is also mocking them. His narration is so heavy, bleak and Teutonic, it always sounds like he's making fun of the person speaking, or perhaps himself.
I love watching movie with Beans, and I love going to dinner, where we can feel anonymous in a crowd, our little conversation made private by the drowning rush of babble around us, and talk about books and movies together at dinner. She's so smart, and not just academically, rigorously smart, but unaffectedly curious and thoughtful. She's just as smart, as educated, as socially-concerned and as disinterested in academia, as me. Intellectually we're on not just a level playing field, but we have the same level of interest in the game: as as enjoyable, cooperative activity.

Devil's Backbone

Saw the Devil's Backbone today--it was more or less satisfying, and extremely creepy. It's a billed as a "spiritual prequel" to Pan's Labyrinth (or maybe the latter is a spiritual sequel to the former). It is to Pan's Labyrinth sort of what Evil Dead is to Evil Dead II, or El Marriachi is to Desperado--not a narrative prequel, but a scrappy early rendition of the same ideas, themes, images and character types, with all the unpainted spots showing.
As in the more famous, bigger budget version, this is a story about tough but innocent orphans running from creepy, but not necessarily harmful, ghosts and an utterly, unambiguously evil man with long floppy black hair, all set against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War. And I do mean backdrop; it's not explored in any way, and the movie has no apparent interest in the history of the war. The characters are just as one-dimensional as in P.L., but D.B. portrays itself as a mostly realistic story with a ghost story element, as opposed to slipping back and forth between a fairy-tale and a gritty "real world" that may not be any more real than the fantastic world, and is seen from the point of view of a child. Because of that, Jacinto is harder to really hate, and the girlfriend victim is impossible to care about and worry over.

Reactionary Psuedo-Conservatism

I find it kind of hilarious and dismaying when more or less intelligent people go searching for ways to debunk global warming. I'm not saying An Inconvenient Truth wasn't alarmist; maybe we won't really be fifty feet underwater in the next ten minutes....So what? Should we all jump in our hummers and start blasting Toby Keith out of our stereos while eating Chik'umm MgNugats and drinking a two liter medium-gulp of Moxie brand cola (now with twice the quinine and aromatic bitters!)? Global Warming alarmists might be alarmist, but they're not a harmful force that needs to be debunked. Especially now, when we have a reformed "hawk" who now votes with the worst president in history--or whatever, maybe making broad generalizations like that is nonsensical, and comparing presidents as if historical context were easy to manipulate is foolish and ultimately unproductive...but does that mean George W. Bush isn't a bad president? Maybe it doesn't make sense to argue about who's the worst president ever, but he's still a shit president who's done more harm than good and defending him out of reactionary contrariness is even less productive than decrying him.
All I'm saying is, eco-psychopaths may be annoying...but they're nowhere near as annoying is fat lazy trustfund kids with enormous egos who contribute nothing to society other than singing elitist rich people muzak to elitist rich people and reading novels about spiders from outer space.

Tombstone

When I die, I want to be cremated, but I would like a tombstone. And I would like it to have this inscription:

"Suddenly it grew clear to him that what had been oppressing him and would not leave him was all dropping away at once from both sides, from ten sides, and from all sides."


It's one of the last lines from the Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy.

The Wire

I have been a fan of the Wire since about halfway through the first season, when I first began
to have any idea what the fuck they were talking about and what was going on beneath the surface. For one thing, this is a show that shows rather than tells in a way that practically none of the fiction I've read recently has. Everything's in the little details, the way Bunk and McNulty gradually begin to see the same details, the missed clues that allow them, wordlessly, to reconstruct the events of the murder that took place in a room, the same murder we've listened to Dee Barksdale guiltily describ, all without uttering a word to one another other than several muttered "Fuck"'s.
What I really like about the show is the subtle use of parallel story-lines between different groups, usually the street drug-dealers and the police. In TV shows they love to use parallel stories, where the big brother learns the same lesson as the little brother, and its always heavy-handed, eye-roll-inducing and forced. Somehow the Wire manages to nail it. While the police finagle their budgets, Stringer Bell takes community college business classes where he learns the same lesson the police are failing to, and applies it not just to his "legitimate business", but to his drug-dealing operations AND city councilor (and later mayor) Carcetti struggles to find a way to balance his budget for both the police, and the business venture he doesn't realize Bell has been involved with.
In season five, which we just started, the show gets just a tiny bit meta, in a was that another show (Six Feet Under maybe) would have belabored to the point of ridiculousness. At the end of episode two, McNulty steels himself to do something he knows is wrong, that rankles his bent but still strong sense of ethics and the greater good, in order to disturb the details of an accidental death to make it look like a murder. It's like a twisted reflection of the scene with Bunk that I referred to above. Wordlessly, McNulty alters the position of the body, implying a story that is totally unlike what they assume really happened, which presupposes that the rest of the police will now read a new story, the one McNulty wants them to, interpreting the details in a totally new way. Everything is a story, and the way you present the details completely changes the way the 'reader' will interpret those details.
Meanwhile, the fourth group, which is new to this season (the drug-dealers, now joined by Michael and Duke; the police, and the city government) are the reporters. There job is to read details they see in the world, find out what happened, the story hidden (on purpose or accidentally) within the details, and then present the same details in the paper so that the reader will come to the same conclusion that they did. The have to balance presenting the facts objectively, with bringing out the story they think is the right one. They spend all their time arguing abut and worrying over the best way to tell a story, the little details of writing.

...
Everyone wants to come to the same conclusion, that the criminals need to be stopped, but the police can't afford to devote all their time to that one project, the government can't "sell" the story to the tax payers, so they can't pay for the police wire-tapping project, the reporters want to report on the developments of the story, but they need the police to continue with the investigation or them to do so, so McNulty bends the rules to create a plausible story that will allow them to get funding to continue their investigation. But, there is of course a real story, a real criminal, but because of all these inter-depending details, they can't unearth the 'real story'--he has to concoct a fake story to make it possible to pursue the real one.

Politics

For awhile but especially now I've been shocked at how many people I've heard say that Obama has the election in the bag. I feel like we need a little refresher curse on the electoral college, and the blue/red state map of the country. It doesn't matter if 49% of the votes are laffy taffy over Obama and 51% is lukewarm for McCain, McCain gets it. I think there are significantly more very conservative people in the country who will vote for McCain just because he's on the right side of the ticket (pun intended) than there are very liberal people who are excited to get rid of the familiar faces of the boomer-dominated political scene.
The fact of the matter is there are only a handful of swing states whose outcome is even in question, and they tend to be filled with blue collar white voters who have taken quite awhile to cotton on to Barrack. And I can hardly blame them: I used to be very excited about BO (wow. I hope no one else takes up that joke...), and frankly I've forgotten why. He gives a great speech and he's on the correct side of the major issues, as far as I'm concerned. Gradually pull out of Iraq, against the war all the way (luck for him he didn't have to make the no-win choice Hillary had), not actively anti-gay marriage, not actively anti-choice, not pushing universal health-care like the world will explode without it. But he's become what I'd hoped he wouldn't be, yet another Democratic party choice--the alternative to a raging hillbilly right-wing crank. McCain's website and policy stances are very cut and dried, and laid out in a concise, easily digestible portions, like an entrée at Chili's, and just as nutritious.

Neighborhoods

We went to a community barbecue this afternoon, which is always a little awkward. The thing is, I just don't really care that much about my little community. My neighborhood is really ncie, but it's mostly thirty something parents with fairly good jobs who own their first condos or little houses, buying up properties because prices are low in this area, since for years this is a black and hispanic neighborhood, and before that it was an Irish and Italian one. I have very mixed feelings about being part of the gentrification of a neighborhood I like: on the one hand, wealthier peoplebring money and businesses into a community, and on the other hand we push the original inhabitants out and to worse places.
At the little shindig in which I struggled to hobnob with lifelong urban gardeners (I exaggerate, but this is a type of tofu-eater I have real trouble communing with. Heh.) a state senator showed up. She's a fourteen year veteran of state politics, logn-standing ties with the black communities, very liberal, seems like a party-line Democrat, very pro-gay marriage, etc. But she's had a few shady accusations about weirdnesses (she "forgot" to register to run, so she had to run as a write-in...), some people say her time has come, she's too entrenched, and she's also the apple-of-my-eye and the cream in my coffee (see, I'm making fun of myself for using a cliché) so a young former teacher is running against her. Our neighborhood is totally for this up and comer (who is, if it wasn't horribly obvious, not black [although she's half Hispanic and half Chinese; it's not like she's a WASP...]). It couldn't have been a more obvious symbol of what our presence is doing in the area. Realty and politics--together at last!

Books

I'm reading The Darling by Russel Banks, which I started as a break from Sophie's Choice by William Styron. The interesting thing is that both books have the same problem for me: they're each written from an entirely interior point of view. They're almost 100% exposition or explanation, which means that a huge amount of both books is telling not showing. Hannah Musgrave drags out this long-wined description of her journey from America to Africa and back again, and tells us what she was thinking at the time, and why certain thigns were meaningful and what they mean. And yet he keeps the story itneresting by constantly teasing us with unanswered questions that the narrator, Hannah, reminds us of as she postpones revealing their answers. The fact of Hannah's relative self-consciousness as a narrator of a story makes us wonder how reliable her explanations are. It's not really the classic Turn of the Screw situation where you're not sure if the narrator is crazy, lying or confused, or if you missed something.
On the other hand, Sophie's Choice has a similar self-consciousness but lacks the same self-awareness. Stingo constantly mocks his younger self, and shows ironic embarrassment at the self-centered waftiness of his younger self.

Sarah Palin's Theory

If in 2004, the Republicans' strategy was to pit the working class against the upper class by reinforcing the illusion that the Democratic party favors the wealthy, then this election season they seem to be pitting the middle class against the poor. Sarah Palin pretends to embody so-called "Blue-Collar small town hockey moms" (if you can afford hockey equipment, you've got some money kicking around somewhere) who actually have lots of money. I read an interesting article in Slate about how living in Alaska, manual jobs such as laying bricks, commercial fishing, etc. can make a huge amount of money compared to doing the same job in any other state. The Palin's apparently made over 200,000 dollars this year. And yet, they perceive their social status as "rednecks". They're like the people who drive a Japanese SUV truck to the megachurch/mall to worship Jesus to the strains of a Christian Screamo band and buy giant stereos to play their Toby Keith mp3's. In fact, Toby Keith or Garth Brooks or Big and Rich, Rascal Flatts, those are the musical analogs to what I'm talking about: utterly mainstream, commercial public figures who pander to a fictitious and vague notion of 'old-fashioned country values'. in order to convince the unsophisticated wealthy that they are actually down-trodden. Yet now that the upper middle class of my generation are all permanent grad students, the educated are now lower middle class, and the people who avoided student loans and went straight into corporate jobs are now upper middle class, the "traditional wisdom" that educated people are wealthy and uneducated people are not no longer makes the same sense.

Mz

I got into an argument awhile back about women using the term Mz ("Mizz"). To me, the term sounds ridiculous, but of course I got tons of flack from the super PC crowd I was with.
I totally understand the idea behind Mz, and in fact I like the theory. Why should women be judged by inherently sexualized terms, and ultimately imply that women have value only in relation to their sexual status vis a vis their husbands. BUT, my whole thing about Mz is that it's like using Life-Partner instead of husband or wife. It doesn't side-step the whole idea of identifying people by their sexual status, rather it replaces the outmoded, offensive (?) term with a clunky, artificially neutered fake sounding lesser version of the 'bad' term. It doesn't sound strong, it sounds wishy-washy. It doesn't say, "I refuse to be judged by my marital status," or even, "I demand to be judged by what I say and think and do, not by whether I'm married or not," it says, "I am asexual."
In a way, it calls attention to how stupid the whole thing is, as in, "Look at what I'm reduced to, using this ridiculous 'safe' term because you insist on looking at me that way," but is that the point?
I would just say, "Call me Susan."

Music Stuff

My work buddy M and my manager R, who is also a work buddy have been talking computer recording programs, computer drum machines and so on. I definitely appreciate electronic music like Aphex Twin and I'm definitely not one of those classic-rock wonks who thinks "It's not music if it's not made with 'real instruments'", but I don't and have never "gotten" lap-top music. It has less to do with the technology and more to do with the difference between writing music all yourself and collaborating with another person. Even though people who really "play" multiple instruments (I can "operate" a few instruments from time to time, but the only one I would consider I can 'play' is the guitar--even bass guitar I'm merely manipulating as if it were a guitar) necessarily approach one differently from another, there's something that happens when two or more people bounce ideas off of one another that cannot happen when one person is writing and playing every part, considering and executing the finished piece.
I'm far from being a classical musician, and I'm sure a music scholar would say that the relationship between a composer and his performers is a totally different animal from the "rock band" notion I'm talking about. Or maybe not. Maybe all compositons are better after they've been "editted" by another composer, and maybe, even in the highly regimented and written down situation of the, say, violinist playing a part written by someone else, there's a certain personal touch that the instrumentalist necessarily brings to his/her performance.
All I really know is that I can always tell when some singer-songwriter has done everything himself--there's something flat, static, something ultimately boring about it. There's no surprise.
There's also something totally separate about being in a live band. When you play with other people, you have to turn off a part of your brain and let your hands perform their part by themselves so you can listen to what the other guys are doing. Often I wouldn't realize what it was I'd been looking for until I heard a recording of practice, say. It allows you to get ideas for harmonies and melodies that just wouldn't ever happen if you had just been listening to yourself. There's something inherently masturbatory about doing all the parts yourself. And even if you're playing bar-band rock or country or blues, there's nothing like a real drummer.

I'm not down with GOP, yeah you know me

I actually watched some of the GOP convention tonight, mainly because I wanted to hear Sarah Palin for herself. She fucking pissed me off. It was kind of hilarious, because it made Obama's least substantive speech sound like an economics dissertation. Ever single aspect of it was, I'm just a small town girl who doesn't like Washington big shots telling us what to blah blah, and John McCain is such a great man, he's the only man who's really fought to protect you, blah blah etc. It's just like 2004, it's all aimed at wealthy suburban housewives who want a strong man to protect them from scary brown people.
I just hope that these PUMA types and other disgruntled Hillary voters realize that if they vote for McCain-Palin, this is the kind of worldview they're voting for. I don't think Palin even thinks her daughter's pregnancy is even really a scandal: she likes the idea of kids getting pregnant early, not using birth control, marrying the first person they have sex with and settling into small town mommy mode right away. You can either vote for a carbon copy of Hillary's policies who won because people like him more (where does this fiction of Obama's arrogance come from? How many humble politicians do you know?! And why do people have so much trouble believing that young liberals don't like the idea of voting for a former first lady who's been entrenched in the same Rolling Stone-vs Brooks Brothers Boomer politics?), or you can vote for a former loose canon (That started out as unintentional. Heh) who's swung farther right than the current administration and who will get to elect two supreme court justices and who has pledged to overturn Roe v Wade and who needs to woo right wing Christian conservatives to pay back his social capitol.
But one of her daughters is hot.

Work

Does what you do for a living have to be what you do that matters to you? Does your day-job have to be what you really want to be doing? My job is a place to put myself for eight hours, a stepping stone to something better, making books for a living, but I feel like I'm cheapening myself by still doing it, by still putting up with the bullshit. I'm sick of feeling like I'm wasting my time by showing up and working hard. I'm sick of feeling afraid to try for something better. Why am I so worried, so afraid of failing? At the end of the month I'll be able to apply out to other jobs within the company, and I'm going to start immediately.

The Rotten Apple

I took a much needed vacation last week. First I took the train down to Pennsylvania to meet my wife and visit her family in Center county for a few days. The train ride was leisurely, uncrowded and spacious. We passed through suburban Boston, urban Rhode Island rural Connecticut and the seashore and into Pennsylvania countryside. This resulted in an odd combination of verdant beauty, bourgeois luxury and the ruins of trailer parks.
Finally I arrived in a very rural nearby town, Lewisburg and we drove back to the house. We relaxed and saw several of Beanz' family members, which could have been awkward since her grandparents' are divorced and her half sister and brother in law are fairly conservative while the rest of us are quite liberal, and the Democratic convention was frequently the topic of conversation.
We went to the county fair to enjoy some carnival food and gawk at country wares. Farmers from all over the state (which I frequently forget is enormous) come and set up fully furnished tents for their whole families for the whole week and show off their prize winning canned foods, fresh grown vegetables and goats, cows and sheep. It's difficult to view these type of events without an ironic, detached, elitist perspective, as in, "Can you believe those hicks?" It's just a totally different way of life from the one I've lead. But I enjoyed it. I ate funnel cake for the first time, which is awesome, as well as a pretty good sausage sandwich and steak and cheese, and a shitty lemonade made of one lemonade, a cup of sugar, a half pound of ice and a cup of water, as well as the dregs of oranges that had wedged the mechanics of the lemon press. We played skee ball and Beanz ruled while I drooled.
Then we took the "Chinatown bus" from State College up to New York to spend time with friends in Brooklyn. We ate some wonderful slow braised and smoked pork shoulder, Domincan sausage, kosher pickles, asparagus and drank gallons and gallons of beer and whiskey. The night ended with horrendous drunken karaoke and vomitting. The next morning may have been in my bottom five hangovers of all time.
We had an amazing meal at our friend J's restaurant where he's the maitre 'D. Japanese-European bistro fusion? I'm not sure if that's at all accurate. There was a sushi menu, as well a variety of fish and flesh with exotic flavors that came plated the way food is on top Chef. Local seasonal ingredients, which I'm glad is all the rage these days. There was a tremendous wild mushroom salad, pork belly steamed in some sort of leaf and a fantastic halibut steak.
We're lucky to have friends who devote themselves so fully to bringing people wonderful, creative, delicious things.