Thursday, September 13, 2001
12:39 PM...
long time no blog.
but really, it couldn't have been any other way, could it? what is there to say?
actually, there's plenty to say, but very little would be appropriate. i've regressed to hand-journalling over the past couple of weeks.
at the risk of looking like a navel-gazer, i'm probably not going to comment about current events. yet.
or maybe i will.
the one noticeable thing in dallas has been the atmosphere. it's poisonous. it's as if something sinister has been injected into everyday life, and indeed it has. but i'm not certain that we are responding to it appropriately, or even maturely. it's an interesting thing to watch. people are aggravated and anxious, even when they have no personal reason for being so. the thing about panic and disaster is that it breeds further panic and anxiety about things that are not at all related to the original thing. it's a snowball effect. some people seem to jump at the chance to come undone, as if the tragedy allows them to cathartically release their hold on every other area of their life.
personally, i'm not sure how to respond to the recent events. part of me thinks that i should try to avoid over-exposing myself to the news until i can deal with it more objectively, in order not to become poisoned. because when people (especially people like me) fixate on one thing, it consumes everything else, and we become sloppy, distressed, confused, and vulnerable to a turbulent sea of emotion.
so, i think i'm going to go on trying to pursue my goals, learning, reading, playing, and dreaming, and not so much alter my day to make room for the oppressive sequence of events that is going on at a national level.
Wednesday, August 29, 2001
11:18 AM...
last night sara and i saw the California Guitar Trio (with Tony Levin and Pat Mastellato) at Poor David's Pub. I had to get there at 7:30 to wait in line so we could get a seat when the doors opened at 8:30. It was the perfect venue - a cozy bar, complete with barmaid so we didn't have to line up at the bar to get drinks. There was a pretty large hippy contingent, mostly King Crimson fans who came out to see Tony Levin and Pat Mastellato.
I'd seen the CG Trio last year, and they had Tony Levin with them, but a guy named Jarrod Kaplan was doing hand percussion stuff. Never seen them with drums before. Pat Mastellato was amazing. Effortless. His drumming was beautiful to watch. The whole band was amazingly tight. They did some complex shit, too. Lots of funky stuff in 7/8 or 5/4 time. It was sweet. The addition of drums and bass sort of swallowed the guitar trio sound a few times, which might have caused some to miss the phenomenal stuff they were doing. Surprisingly, the CG Trio was playing what looked like regular guitars, rather than the longer ones with the fanning fretboard. But I do think they had their guitars jacked up to give them an extra octave of range.
One of the highlights was when they played Caravan in the encore. Midway through the song they broke off on an improvisational rant, just making up melodies and passing them around to each other, changing rhythm and tempo and then suddenly all together landing on the one in perfect time and launching back into Caravan. Another highlight was the instruments. Pat actually made playing samples on a drum pad seem cool. Tony had 3 basses, all non-standard: a 5-string, a 6-string, and the Stick - a 12 string. A 12 string bass.
Paul was bummed we hadn't told him about it. I had figured he wouldn't be interested in a bunch of guitar stuff, but it turns out that Paul has a great deal of respect for Mastellato, who played on Crowder's first album, and would have been there to see him in a heartbeat (that is, if he hadn't been in class -- yesterday Paul had his first day of class at north texas, where he is taking 19 hours all on Tuesdays and Thursdays, going to class from (9:30am to 9pm with a lunch break at 3pm).
Tuesday, August 28, 2001
10:40 AM...
i've been slacking off on updating my blog, partly because i've been busier at work, and partly because i'm bummed out about my energy crisis. things have been difficult lately. i fantasize about being alert. a couple of weeks ago i couldn't stay awake in training. i kept blacking out for 5-10 seconds at a time. sometimes as often as every minute. it was pretty crazy. seeing how the medical community hasn't been able to produce anything resembling a diagnosis or treatment, i finally got fed up and decided that i'm just going to start trying everything i possibly can until something works -- even if that culminates in some sort of extreme caffeine or amphetamine habit -- because i'd rather have that than live my life in a subcomatose state. not that i've been on amphetamines. yet. rather, i immediately put myself on a complex cocktail of everything i could possibly think of. i ordered expensive vitamin supplements, like proanthenols with masqueliers and Attend, because i think my fatigue is connected with the ADHD. last night i took melatonin to put me to sleep and was gone by 11:30. woke up at 7, didn't get out of bed until 8. ate granola, drank milk. took a lot of pills: Vitamin C, Calcium Magnesium Zinc, Centrum, Bee Pollen, Proanthenols, Attend, Zyrtec, B-Complex. Drinking coffee at the moment. Planning on drinking coffee all day. coffee seems to help about 50% of the time. the other times, it does absolutely nothing. but a 50% success rate is better than anything else if encountered so far.
Surprisingly, the routine actually sort of worked for the latter half of last week, and i actually had a couple of decent days. yesterday was tolerable, although they ran out of coffee in the afternoon, so i went downhill. so today i brought some instant coffee to work in case we run out of coffee this afternoon, although i just looked at the ingredients and a 19g serving has 10g of sugar, which is probably going to be counterproductive in my case, as sugar seems to make things worse. so maybe i'll end up buying a one cup brewer and keeping it at my desk.
Friday, August 24, 2001
5:10 PM...
seen this morning, a billboard in poor taste:
I scream, you scream
We all scream for pork loin.
Is there anyone for whom this saying does not conjure up, first the image of ice cream, and then second -- the image of pork ice cream? blech.
Monday, August 20, 2001
12:07 AM...
ok. it's done. i know i promised to do it a long time ago, but it's been a real pain in the ass. For all of you who have been waiting for Real Neil's bootleg recording of the Radiohead show in the Woodlands on June 18, it can be located here. track listing is here.
You'll need to use audiogalaxy satellite in order to get the songs. I'm also sharing them on Morpheus (search for Radiohead -RN- Woodlands), but I recommend using audiogalaxy.
Tuesday, August 14, 2001
3:18 PM...
Hmmm, I thought to myself. White marble. It's a square piece of white marble laying on the floor. And they call this installation art? And what about these metal cones on the floor with little sprinkles of rice around them?
running on fumes
Full weekend. Except for Friday night. Friday night I slept. Told Sara I was too tired to hang out. But then I realized I was too tired to make my own dinner so I called Dinah and we had dinner at the new Cafe Express on Mockingbird. It was good. I'll have to go back there. Nice place. Sat on the patio. Ceiling fans, etc.
Dinah's car was in the shop, so I chaufferred her home to get her alcohol and drove her to Taryn's for Sandy's birthday party. I was exhausted, but I would have felt pretty bad if I hadn't gone to the party, so I went in and mingled and had a few drinks, then left, went home, and was out cold by 10:30.
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Might-ay MIDI
Saturday morning I woke up early. refreshed. almost lucid.
The previous evening, Dinah had needed some time to get ready, so I dropped in on Paul at Guitar Center. I had decided that I would buy a MIDI interface, and who better to buy it from than my drummer/housemate who could give me a sweet discount. He was the only one working in drums and had his hands full so I shopped around, looked at keyboards and guitars. I came away with a MIDIMAN USB interface and a guitar video.
So Saturday morning I awoke, cleaned up, setup MIDIMAN, and downloaded a trial version of Cakewalk. I was up and running surprisingly quickly. Honestly, it was a lot of fun. It brought back a lot of memories from days when I was a more interesting person. Cakewalk had made a lot of improvements since its Windows 3.1 days. I'd forgotten how many hours I poured into that stuff in high school, interning with John Wirtz in Valley Ranch, sequencing tracks for folks in high school, sneaking into the Baylor MIDI studio with Matt M and Gena and spending the night there to record our religious rock songs. I remembered that I won a composition contest once and that, at one time, I was sort of talented. And hey - I used to be able to sing. Whoa. I sang in church. I sang in high school. I was tenor section leader. Weird. That was a long time ago. Days of hackey-sacking on top of the roof of the school and leading bible studies underneath it.
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"hi, i'm winston"
I spent Saturday evening with Sara and her extended family. They're a fun group. Very talented bunch. There's Murray, the progressive installation artist who was voted best new artist in Austin this year. Sara's aunt sings with the TI jazz orchestra. Her uncle Larry plays bass in Blues Avatar (we say them at Poor David's on Wednesday. Great vibe). Cousin Mitch is an interesting character. Jaded, angry, but very bright. For being 17ish, he's an amazing guitar and piano player. Really fluid, with an excellent ear. I was struggling to sight read jazz progressions for Sara's aunt, while Mitch effortlessly glided up and down the electric, throwing in very professional-sounding riffs. It was the first time, in possibly 10 years that I'd hung out with high school students who were into things like chess and rubiks cubes and Risk. There were two other boyfriends there. Heidi's boyfriend was a thin, tall Baylor guy who oozed John Piper conservatism. Then there was Sam, wearing a shirt saying "just be glad I'm not your kid" - he was the gothic boyfriend of Abby, the prototypical teenage overachiever cheerleader/yearbook editor. Despite his laughable attempt to look edgy and provocative, he was a nice kid, and clearly a softy who was horribly afraid that people would figure him out. Sam's baggy pants had a 36" diameter at the bottom. After watching him lose to Mitch in a chess game, we adjourned to the kitchen for an epic risk game. As is customary with Risk and drunken dart games, we all got tired and left before the game ended, although Mitch was on the run and I had Murray in my pocket.
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Infant Baptists
My 23 year old brother is engaged. He proposed 4 weeks ago, in Cozumel. underwater. She started crying and had to clear her mask several times. It would have been sad if she'd said yes and subsequently drowned, out of excitement. Fortunately she has a slightly cooler head. Now, having survived the proposal and barely escaping the sea with their lives, it looks like one of them is going to have to go back in the water.
It's going to be a Catholic wedding, and that means facing the pre-marital inquisition. They've already had to take a 160 question scantron test with true-false questions like "My spouse is stubborn and unforgiving", "I feel that I am being pressured to get married", and "I sometimes feel homosexual tendencies that make me wonder if I should get married." They also had to take the "Interfaith Marriage" section because she's Catholic and he's Baptist Etc. And to top it all off, he lied about having been baptized. He said he'd been baptized as an infant, which, not surprisingly, caused the priest to raise an eyebrow when my bro told him he was raised Baptist.
So now my bro, naturally, feels that he should get Baptized, and my mother is very much in favor of that, even though he's just getting Baptized so the Catholics won't sick the hounds on him.
This led to a rather lively conversation at lunch on Sunday afternoon -- a conversation for which I will probably go to hell, and, at the very least, incur relentless lecturing. My mother wanted me to come up with ideas about how my brother could get Baptized. I suggested that the most efficient thing to do would be to go to an evangelical (preferably Baptist) church, pretend to give his life to Jesus, and ask to be Baptized that night -- it was foolproof. She cried heresy. I was making it into a joke she said. No, it already was a joke, I said. Heresy, she said. He can baptize himself, then, I said. There's no law against it. Again, heresy. My brother and I eventually concluded that I would call my clerical acquaintances and ask if they would baptize him in the hot tub in my backyard so that he could marry a catholic. In return for his/her priestly assistance, there would be complimentary beer for all, ps - money is no object. personally I loved the idea. I was condemned.
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wolfgang laib
Sunday afternoon I went to the DMA with Sara and her folks and Murray and Meg. It was nice to go with people who knew things about art. Murray, an artist himself, had some great insights, and Meg, his wife, is going to be teaching art appreciation at Biola in a couple of weeks. And Richard went knew one of the featured artists in the seventies. We went to the Wolfgang Laib exhibit, which Meg and Murray had been telling us was the most professional installation art exhibits they'd seen.
I've got to hand it to Wolfgang. He does some cool stuff. The milkstone was exceptionally cool. All of his art involves a preparatory process or ritual which the museum staff has to perform each day. The milkstone looks like a piece of white marble, and it is, but it also has a very careful depression all the way across it, surrounded by a lip, and is filled with fresh milk every morning. So you're not looking at marble, you're looking at milk. He also does a lot of cool stuff with natural substances, like sculptures of beeswax and rooms filled with enormous amounts of iridescent pollen.
I never would have anticipated how otherworldly dandelion pollen looks.
8:58 AM...
[i wrote this yesterday afternoon. forgot to post it]
so here i sit in Brio training class. next to charles. next to layne (oh yeah!!!). oh but i haven't written about layne and the yogurt yet. i've got some good stories that haven't been told yet. haven't really touched the computer lately.
somehow lammyskins found my page. probably through tom's page. although he didn't mention tom - just said that he found it through a friend's page. hmmmm.
and then i saw layne browsing around tom's page and realized that everyone at work has seen or will see my page. hmmmm.
so much for anonymity. what are the implications of this?
it was nice, a year ago, to write exactly what i thought about things without regard for audience, because i didn't necessarily know who was reading the drivel i was spewing. but now i have an audience, amd my audience is the very people i want to write about. i can't digress about my family because my mother and father probably read this stuff more than everyone else out there combined.
two weeks ago i was scolded for cursing. i'd forgotten that cursing existed.
i'm much more self-conscious about what i write now, and that's probably part of the reason that i haven't written very much lately. the anonymity of the thing was part of its allure. the opportunity to openly express one's thoughts and feelings to the world is a great thing, but it's the anonymity that makes it feasible. now i have to worry about what the people...
Friday, August 10, 2001
9:07 AM...
god i'm tired
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