Okay, nobody wants to talk about trans women, suicide, and the nonexistence of offline community? Fine, then let's talk about how "Sometime Around Midnight" by the Airborne Toxic Event is at least as pretentious, mopey, and awesome as the best one-hit-wonders' songs in the early eighties, even though the singer is somehow involved with McSweeney's, which leads to my new theory that

McSweeney's is the Duran Duran of the Oughties.

( intense. )

I figured out how to play the keyboard cat song on the guitar! Here is a tab:

e----------------------------------------------
b----------------------------------------------
g----------------------------------------------
d--2-5-2--2-5-2-----2-------2------------------
a-3------3------0-3---3-0-3---3----------------
e-------------------------------3-3-3-3-3-3----

List of chocolate bar brands - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://tinyurl.com/mvwjbb

I only made it to "C" lol!

Did I tell you we are recording an album? We are. Paul, who is the bass player in Sonya's other band (Dead Souls- a Joy Division tribute band) works at Digidesign, the studio where they make Protools. And he is allowed to use their recording equipment when he is not working! Which means that, between playing shows, going on the radio, and helping Sonya and Alicia move to a new apartment in the Mission, we have been staying up late every night, watching me try to play the stupid motherfucking weird guitar part I wrote for "Birdsmilk" for two hours before we all get too tired and go home exhausted failures.

This thing happened twice now where I kept trying to record a guitar part in the big hardwood floor sound room ( where this picture is from )and in the mixing room they're making faces every time I start playing, so I start to get frustrated and convinced that I just can't play the guitar at all, I start to pull off my limbs in frustration, and then they realize that there's a motherfucking delay in the signal I'm getting into my headphones, so everything sounds a half second later than it actually is at which point we fix it and I do some Eddie Van Halen/Yngwie Malmsteen bullshit to save the day. Sort of.

Maybe you have to be there to feel the brutal, human emotion of desperation.

Anyway, I'm not a very good singer, or guitarist, so it's been kind of an ordeal, but things are coming along. I think we're done with eight songs? We have two more to record live, then we've got to master them all, and then I think we turn famous? I think? I'm not sure how it works. I think it would've worked that way when I was in Strictly Platonic, but I moved to Oakland instead of finishing that record.

Y'know, Too Drunk To Cut?

It's probably for the best we didn't blow up all famous with that punk gem.

I made this great REM comp and you know what rules? That song Electrolite. Michael Stipe was like, "I was trying to think of the word for those phosphorescent slimy ocean animals, and it seemed like it should be 'electrolite,' even though it's not. Also, it's about driving over Los Angeles on Mulholland Drive and it's also about the end of the 20th Century."

Which is interesting, because I can say all those things about the Angela Chase song "Shut Up."

PLUS y'know what's annoying? When KRS-One is on an REM song and they're like, "You can talk through the whole song, but you only get two bars at the end to rap, and then we are fading out."

( 'This Fear Thing:' A Pretentiously Titled REM Comp, in case you're curious. )

I don't have time yet to talk about my trip to Sturgis/Badlands and Rushmore BUT I do have time to bitch about my phone service.
I didn't get one text message on my birthday last Tuesday. I didn't think much about it aside from not getting responses from people. Well, Wednesday afternoon when driving in farmland where service wasn't continuous, they started pouring in. All them happy birthday messages that I didn't get and thus wasn't able to respond to when they were sent or when I finally got them because service was really bad along the way to Rushmore.

anyway, i may call ATT and bitch about it...not sure.


Happy I-day! and thank you for the birthday texts/messages.

Oh, um, also, we're going to be on Pirate Cat Radio again in ... about two hours? 8:30 or so, West Coast time. Not sure what we're going to talk about, and I don't think we've mastered anything recently, so god knows what it'll be like, but you can hear my mellifluous voice talkin some kind of shit. If you want.

Alain de Botton tells New York Times reviewer: 'I will hate you until I die'



Alain de Botton, the philosopher and author, has launched an extraordinary internet attack on a book reviewer, telling him: "I will hate you until the day I die".

By Stephen Adams, Arts Correspondent
Published: 8:17PM BST 01 Jul 2009
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturenews/5712899/Alain-de-Botton-tells-New-York-Times-reviewer-I-will-hate-you-until-I-die.html
(with my fave part bolded!)

The outburst followed a poor review of de Botton's book The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, by Caleb Crain in The New York Times.

The author, whose books include Essays in Love and The Consolations of Philosophy, lost his temper during a posting on Crain's blog, Steamboats Are Ruining Everything.

"In my eyes, and all those who have read it with anything like impartiality, it is a review driven by an almost manic desire to bad-mouth and perversely depreciate anything of value," he wrote. "The accusations you level at me are simply extraordinary."

He went on: "I genuinely hope that you will find yourself on the receiving end of such a daft review some time very soon – so that you can grow up and start to take some responsibility for your work as a reviewer. You have now killed my book in the United States, nothing short of that. So that's two years of work down the drain in one miserable 900 word review."

The author, who has written widely about the pursuit of happiness, concluded: "I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make. I will be watching with interest and schadenfreude."

( MORE TO READ... behind the cut! )

Poetry Slam got a nice little write-up extolling its virtues in the most recent issue of the nuttily influential "School Library Journal".

Before it's lists its (five) recommended books on the topic, it offered this brief preface (with links to the PSI site; nice!):

Poetry slam "is the competitive art of performance poetry. It puts a dual emphasis on writing and performance, encouraging poets to focus on what they're saying and how they're saying it" (Poetry Slam, Inc.) And it’s not just for urban kids. As part of their promise to bring more music and art to the White House, the Obamas recently hosted an event that featured James Earl Jones, poet Mayda Del Valle, novelist Michael Chabon, and playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda. A poetry slam is the perfect summer activity for your teens, and the titles below will help get you started.

For the full article, click here:

http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/article/CA6667505.html?industryid=47057

Some folks collect Remains of the Day lunchboxes; I collect editions of JT Leroy books. (Sue me about it. Whatever.) BUT! This seems to exist, in some kind of form, because people have written a couple of reviews of it. Maybe Last Gasp made up advance reader's copies? I sleuthed up the fact that it was announced and then canceled, so I feel a little bit stuck. I can't get ahold of a copy, and it's making me feel a kind of desperation I usually reserve for... I don't know, Christmas or something. Call me Veruca.



(Also: officially: I'm a lot more interested in the JT Leroy hoax and the way it's situated/talked about culturally than I am invested in feeling betrayed. I'm like, really? You read Sarah and thought that had something to do with some kind of actual reality? You are stupid and deserve to feel betrayed.

Uh, no offense.)

Me neither. Apparently we invaded the place and stuff, and finally are withdrawing our troops, or like, most of them—or something.

Stuck in the Desert with Nowhere to Go

US interests have hardly been served by the six year occupation. Apart from defense contractors and a few oil companies it is hard to imagine that anyone sees any benefits.

4319 Americans and at least 90,000 Iraqis killed violently since 2003. At a cost of maybe as much as $5 trillion when all the bills are paid by our grandchildren. Saddam’s secularism has been replaced by a Shi’ite dominated power structure and Iraq’s role as an Arab bulwark against Iranian hegemony is just a memory. The Christian minority, protected under Saddam, has more-or-less fled the country. Iran has benefited most from America’s takedown of Saddam.

And yet there are 130,000 US troops remaining in their fortress-bases outside the cities, there to help maintain order, apparently. Bring them home and tell the Iraqis to use their oil money to hire more police. The whole Iraq adventure made no sense when it started and makes even less sense now.

Cheney is getting a $2 million advance for his memoirs.

Too bad nobody could have foreseen that this wouldn't end up being totally awesome.

bleh...

That is all...

There's a lot of attention in the economics of computer science community on auctions or other economic mechanism design, often with ads in mind. What is under way with respect to mechanism design for cap and trade of carbon emissions? These markets are being set up now, so it seems like this is a great time for research.

For that matter, how do existing proposals for carbon cap and trade compare to the kind of mechanisms studied in, say, ACM Electronic Commerce?

This post brought to you by the recently passed (barely!) federal greenhouse gas cap and trade bill.

1. I feel so complicated about the crew of 18-year-old dykes who just came through the bookstore in rainbow headbands that said Smirnoff, talking about last night's poker game and buying Chuck Palahniuk books. So complicated!

2. I just figured this out, told Alex and posted it to twitter, but since I don't want to do the thing where my livejournal tells you what I said on twitter every day, I'm going to tell you here, too: I figured out that Pride really is gay Christmas because I feel so disappointed, empty, and ashamed of our collective consumerism.