Okay, so that's not how it happened. Check here. Apparently, the press released what the ACLU gave them, and I quoted them like everyone else. In reality, the recent court decision overturned a small part of the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which the Patriot Act touched on in a small and not particularly relevant way. Those waiting for the Patriot Act to be overturned will have to wait a while longer.
There are, as you might imagine, some strange things in Harlem.
Exhibit A: the elderly white lady in my apartment building with the basset hound. The dog must be at least 10 years old. The woman refers to the dog as "my daughter" and addresses it as "young lady" and takes it with her everywhere she goes.
Exhibit B: the black dude who stands in front of the Greater Zion Hill Baptist Church at completely random times of day. I never know whether or not he's there until I check, but about 50% of the time, he is. He just stands there, facing the church, arms spread diagonally downward, palms open and down, shifting his weight from foot to foot, and talking. Can't for the life of me figure out what he's saying. This is in part due to the fact that his accent is so thick you could cut it with a knife, and partly due to the fact that he mumbles so badly that a Harlem native would be hardpressed to decipher his ramblings. Lately, he's added a bit of a pace to his schtick, and when it rains he comes over to my side of the street to stand under the construction scaffolding. Apparently, whoever he's talking to has been having trouble hearing him, because he's upped the volume quite a bit in the past few days.
I'll post more oddities as I come across them.
I have discovered the Ultimate Bad Candy Website. These guys deliberately seek out, well, bad candy, and review it. Most of it is Mexican, but there is are least one European and one Asian candy up there. Saltidos, for example, come from Mexico, and a single serving contains 398% of your recommended daily sodium. That's just under 10 grams. That's a hell of a lot of salt. The there's Indy Dedos. Tamarind has actually been ruled unfit for human consumption by the FDA. Which just goes to show you the kind of things they eat down there.
Jeff Harrell has done a brilliant fisking of Markos "Screw Them" Zuninga's (link on Daily Kos sent down the memory hole) excerable piece in the excerable Guardian.
Money quote: "For all his talk about "getting out the message" (ugh), Markos never acknowledges the key idea of this election season: The more Kerry campaigns, the worse he does in the polls. The more he "gets out the message," the more his numbers tumble. After a massive Kerry ad buy in swing states over the past month, it's to the point where Kerry is trailing Bush by a significant margin in every single unweighted tracking poll."
This is brilliantly funny stuff. And makes my upcoming vote for Bush less and less about either him or Kerry, but more and more about pissing off guys like Markos Zuninga.
The Patriot Act is the law that every liberal loves to hate. I've long thought that sure, it's bad, but it's not that bad, and there are indeed some things that it provides that need to be there, like information sharing between government agencies. There are, however, things that I have never been comfortable with, especially the short-circuiting of the subpoena process. But, I always said, that's why we have courts. If it really is as unconstitutional as the scaremongers say it is, then the first time it gets challenged in the courts it will be overturned. And that's what happened.
People use their computers for lots of different things. Some people write. Some do email. Some use insanely expensive programs to manage the entire revenue stream for Fortune 500 companies. I use mine as a space heater. That's right: the heat my computer gives off effectively raises the temperature in my apartment by at least a good 10 degrees over the outside air. The current temperature outside is about 65. I swear it's at least 75 in here.
And now two additions to the list of things about New York I could really do without.
1) Roaches the size of Montana in my sink (think a peanut still in the shell). Gross.
2) Air pollution. I don't know if the all air is just poison or if it's because contractors have been digging up Manhattan Ave. for over a month, but when I leave my window open with the fan running, this nasty, gritty black film covers everything within about six feet of the window. Also gross.
In other news, I had my first exam today. I was pretty nervous about it. I'm more nervous now than before I took it, because it only took me about 15 minutes, and the professor asked for my name as I walked out. Yikes.
First of all, I did my first shift as a volunteer at the ED at New York Presbyterian Hospital, but I'll write about that later. For now, I'll just say that it was about damned time I did something like this: I had been wondering why I was borrowing $90k and killing myself over menial titration experiments. Now I remember.
For tonight, not only is Crooked Fingers playing on 10/19, but Death Cab for Cutie is playing on 10/22. This just keeps getting more fun. And if I'm in town, The Decemberists are playing again on 10/16. That could be one hell of a week.
Last night I went to Webster Hall and heard Norfolk and Western and Lou Barlow of Sebadoh open for The Decemberists. I showed up abotu half an hour after doors, which was about an hour before the first set. I was right up by the stage, leaning on the stage-right extension into the crowd. Excellent view.
Norfolk and Western was pretty unremarkable. Adam Selzer plays guitar and sings, and Rachel Blumberg plays the drums (she's also the drummer for The Decemberists). Not all that much to report. Pretty forgettable, I thought. It wasn't until the end of the set that the room was half full.
Lou Barlow was a little more interesting, but only for a while. It was just him, his guitar, and a synth machine, which he periodically used to good effect. However, the crowd was starting to get a bit restless during his set, and by the end only about the first ten rows of people were paying any attention. He knew this, and we knew he knew it. By the end of his set, the room was full, and you could hear the buzz of conversations almost as well as you could hear him. His first song was pretty good, and contained the line "I want to be the one you fell and would fall for," which I liked. He ended with a song about a stray "kitty" that he adopted. Yeah. Now with 50% more sap for your listening pleasure.
Then, right at 10:30, The Decemberists took the stage. You could immediately tell the crowd came for them. Barlow actually said "Thank you, Decemberists audience" as he left the stage. This was not an overstatement. Nor was it entirely inappropriate, as the move away from suckage started by Barlow was completed with all the fixings by The Decemberists. The lyrics have a nineteenth century flavor to the point of being downright Dickensian. Not in terms of the actual poetry - we have moved beyond that, praises be - but the vocabulary and content matter is quite self-consciously archaic. I mean, come on. How many pop bands can you name that feature an accordian? A few I'd wager, but not very many.
The band is obviously better live than on their albums (aren't they all?), but the sound was pleasantly similar. They didn't take massive departures from their recorded material, which was kind of nice. They upped the tempo in "Leslie Anne Levine", an obvious crowd pleaser featuring a twelve-string guitar for fullest-sound goodness, and it rocked even more than it does on the album. They played a few songs from their upcoming album, which they finished recording last week. The song "The Sporting Life" is about playing soccer in a YMCA league at the behest of one's parents and being humiliated by the expeience. The album's not due out till March, unfortunately.
For the encore, which took quite a bit of cheering to provoke, featured just Colin coming back out. Then, for what would be the last song, "I Was Meant For the Stage", the rest of the band came out one by one and joined in, until everyone was back out, rocking. Then, just as they finished the lyrics, they went nuts. Colin took his guitar, ran out to the extension I was leaning on, and started writhing around, strumming with his feet, contorting himself and making a lot of noice. The girl playing the keyboards or accordian was sitting on the floor, blowing into one of those little keyboard/kazoo thingies. The bassist had his string bass lying on the floor and was alternately tapping the body of the bass with his bow or actually striking the strings with his hands and bow. The rhythm guitarist was grinding the strings over another instrument, making noise with both. I don't know what the hell the drummer was doing. Then they were done. Cool.
Next up: Wilco, 10/5, at Radio City Music Hall. Awesome. After that, Crooked Fingers is playing Maxwell's in Hoboken on 10/19. Rumor has it that certain Chattanooga folk are going to be in town then, so it looks like we've got plans.
Today was a real beast. Didn't sleep well last night. Worried about chemistry: exam on Wednesday, lab this afternoon. Little time to study, as most of tomorrow will be spent either getting my ID for or starting to volunteer at New York Presbyterian Hospital on 168th St. Made it through calc and chem lectures, dead tired. Headed down the hill for a nap. Slept for half an hour, felt better, rode back up to campus for lab. Realised I'd forgotten my keys. Can't do lab without them, nor can I lock my bike to anything. So, 5 minutes before lab starts, head back down the hill. Am now locked out of my apartment. Track down the building super, who is able to jimmy the lock on my door, as I hadn't completely locked it (no keys, right?). Get my keys, get back up the hill. Have to print something out for lab. Some chick is printing a pdf, which takes forever. Make it to the lab lecture 30 minutes late. Quiz is already over. TAs say they need to decide whether or not I can take it. Head upstairs to run the lab. Instructions are pretty unclear. I think I got it all. Don't really know. Don't know how I did on the last lab either. Am starting to get pissed about that. TA decides I have 10 minutes to take quiz. I realize I don't know jack about error analysis. Hand back quiz after guessing on several questions. Damn.
All is not lost, however. The Decemberists are playing Webster Hall, and I have tickets. So after my Chinese dinner gets delivered, and I eat, I head down to E14th St to hear Lou Barlow of Sebadoh, Norfolk & Western, and the Decemberists. It's a good thing too. Otherwise today would have completely sucked.
Since moving to New York, I have become significantly more aware of things of which I previously took no notice. Things like network television. As opposed to last year, when there was a TV with digital cable in my apartment, I now have no TV. But if you walk around outside or, even better, get on the subway, you'll see dozens of ads for current and upcoming network series. I can't really name names, because I don't have a TV and wouldn't be watching network television if I did, but they're everywhere. It makes sense. Put a bill up somewhere outside New York and you'll get about 1% of the attention you do here.
Something else: people complain that New Yorkers don't have much sense of the world outside the city limits. I've found this to be somewhat true, but it's not snobbery or arrogance. It's just that there's at least as much going on in this town as there is outside of it, and a lot of the things that affect the rest of the world happen here. I mean, we've got over 8 million people living in the five buroughs alone. That doesn't count anything in Jersey, or most of the suburbs in Long Island. There are only about 6 million in the entire state of Tennessee. The sheer amount of news generated by that many people living that close together doesn't really leave much space for anything other than major, top-of-the-fold headlines. I mean, sure, stuff happens elsewhere, but not nearly as much, and not nearly as quickly.
Another thing: public transportation is really nice. Through a combination of my feet, my bike, and the subway, I can get anywhere I need to go in less than an hour. Shopping is only 3 minutes by bike. And anything I can't carry home will probably be delivered. When I was home in August after being here for a week, I found myself the tiniest bit annoyed that not all the stores I wanted to go to were within throwing distance. It only took ten minutes to get there, but I still covered fifteen miles, so if I hadn't had a car, I would have been royally screwed.
One last observation: I like trees. Real trees, not ones planted to brighten the place up a bit. I also like actual terrain. Sure, I have to up a freaking big hill every time I go to campus, but there are so many buildings around that you never get a decent view of the landscape. The only real vista I've found is looking east from Morningside Drive out over Harlem Plain. You can see a long way - over into Queens and the Bronx - but it's flat that way. No rolling hills, no clouds playing with the folds in the ridge, nothing like that.
This is a short by director Michel Gondry, of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It's a time-lapse record of a road trip from LA to NY.
Even though you can't see when he crosses the Mississippi, it's fairly easy to tell when he does: all of a sudden there's, you know, terrain. The American South and Mid-west is full of a whole hell of a lot of not much. Gimme the Appalachians any day.
I went down to Loews Theater at Lincoln Center with high hopes. I saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind last night, and tonight I had a choice between The Forgotten and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. "The Forgotten is about memory right? After seeing Eternal Sunshine, this could make for an interesting contrast," I naively thought to myself, "and besides, it's got Julianne Moore in it who, aside from possessing more than your average level of attractiveness, tends to make pretty good movies. Right?"
Well, kinda. The first thing I did when I got back was hit up her IMDB site. She certainly has done quite a few good movies in her time, but she's also been in some real stinkers. This is what you call Julianne Moore slumming. Most of the time she works with fairly brilliant directors, but she'll also work with guys like this.
I won't give away too much of the plot, because it's supposed to be surprising. They certainly don't advertise the movie in a way that suggests anything to do with the actual plot. They bill it as a psychological thriller, in which a woman has to deal with her own memories of her son while everyone else denies he ever existed. Okay, that's a cool premise for a movie. The director, Joseph Ruben plays with this for a while, but then he hints at a direction that just made me laugh out loud. All I'm going to say is that the phrase "I'm having a National Enquirer moment" is used in the film. Then he tries to convince you that he's not going to go there, and then he does. Which sucked. It would have been a lot cooler if he hadn't. Not to mention a lot less unintentionally funny.
To sum it up, it's pretty much devoid of any human emotion, and for a film that bills itself has having to do with a woman coming to grips with memories of her lost child, this is depressingly absent. The plot twist isn't one of those, "Oh, I did/didn't see that coming," but, "You gotta be kidding. Please tell me you're kidding. You're not kidding. Cut that shit out."
The film did have a few interesting effects, and one or two genuinely creepy moments, but we're talking Butterfly Effect kind of quality, without the obvious cheap emotional shots and exploitative plot devices.
Final analysis: I'm glad Columbia offers discount tickets.
Cool New York style bonus: somebody outside Loews was recruiting people to see an advance screening of Ray next week. How cool is that? So now I've got plans for Thursday night. I love this town.
One more post before hitting the library.
Paul Berman has an article on Slate in which he decries the elevation of Che and his legacy in the upcoming movie The Motorcycle Diaries. Money quotes:
"The cult of Ernesto Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of our time. Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster."
"He was killed in Bolivia in 1967, leading a guerrilla movement that had failed to enlist a single Bolivian peasant. And yet he succeeded in inspiring tens of thousands of middle class Latin-Americans to exit the universities and organize guerrilla insurgencies of their own. And these insurgencies likewise accomplished nothing, except to bring about the death of hundreds of thousands, and to set back the cause of Latin-American democracy—a tragedy on the hugest scale."
Berman is the author of Terror and Liberalism, a book which is now at the top of my reading list.
Last night I went up to campus for the weekly IV undergraduate large group meeting. I skipped the praise band, and was treated afterwards to forty-five minutes of a high-school speaker rambling incoherently about I'm not exactly sure what. But after the meeting, I learned that some film club was showing Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and just had to go. I enjoyed it even more than I did the first time I saw it. The DVD comes out on Tuesday. I'm so headed downtown to get it that day.
The fact that Columbia can completely sell out an 11:00 showing on a Thursday night for a movie like this is really cool. The fact that they were showing it at all is even cooler. I love this place.
Catherine Seipp had an article in the Sept. 3 edition of the Wall Street Journal in which she points out the nonsense inherent in the assertion that right-wing Christian fundamentalists are just as dangerous and evil as radical Islamists. The article takes quite a while to make this point, and will seem for quite a time to have completely changed the subject, but it'll make sense at the end. It's short, but worth the read.
Alec Hanley Bemis has a feature in the LA Weekly in which he holds for that 1999 marked the end of pop music as the RIAA knows it. He argues that the introduction of Napster and similar technologies rapidly and permenantly changed the way we buy music. Instead of buying what is marketed to us, we buy what we like. The article is rather lengthy, but quite in depth, and well worth the read.
Essentially, Bemis argues that instead ofa dozen or so multi-million album blockbusters, the industry can now expect dozens and dozens of quarter and half-million album hits.
Case in point: in 1999, the top 25 selling albums included the Dixie Chicks’ Wide Open Spaces (10 million records sold), ’N Sync’s ’N Sync (10 million), Britney Spears’ Baby One More Time (12 million), Backstreet Boys’ debut (13 million), and Shania Twain’s Come On Over (17 million). In short, the nadir of manufactured pop.
In 2004, the fifty best selling albums as of June 5, 2004, list only a single album with 5 million in sales: OutKast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, and that's really only got half that, because as a double-album it counts twice. Number three is by an emo band. We've got Morrissey, Modest Mouse, and Franz Ferdinand on the list too. [I'd post a link to the data, but Billboard.com charges for that kind of info, so no link for them.] In short, indie bands are selling better than they ever did before, while we aren't really seeing mega-hits.
I think this is a tremendously positive development, and can only hope that the big 5 labels have to file for bankruptcy before they sue anyone else.
Mesh responded to my RFC with a post of his own, arguing that while the blogosphere seemed to serve a useful purpose in this case, there is a useful purpose that the MSM serves that is probably irreplacable. Well, INDCJournal, one of the blogs that was a principal instrument in breaking the Danron scandal, had this to say. Essentially, Aaron isn't the only one who thinks that the end of institutional, hierarchical, established media outlets is a bad thing. At their best, they bring professionalism, insight, vast investigatory resources, and years of experience to problems by which the general public could easily be but need not be confused. Which is basically what Aaron had to say. Which doesn't surprise me much, because Mesh tends to be awesome.
Well, I learned the advantages and disadvantages of RAID0 (aka "stripe") this afternoon. Advantage: demon-like speed. Throughput several times normal IDE drives. Disadvantage: a data error screws the whole drive because each file is "striped" across two or more discs, so if you get a few bytes off, that's it. Well, I came up with a "cyclic redundancy error", and upon restarting, about 90% of the data on my RAID array was gone. The rest was pretty crispy. Fortunately, I just backed up my audio, so the only data I lost were a few bins and cues I can download again at my leisure.
Moral of the story: RAID1 may not be as efficient a use of space, but it's a hell of a lot safer.
It seems that the blogosphere has done such a thorough evisceration of the memos presented by Rather that his reputation has been reduced to this. For a summary of what's been happening in the past week, read this.
Mesh, I'd be especially interested in your comments, seeing how you're now a professional journalist and all.
In case anyone's wondering, I'm breaking between calc problems to keep up with Rathergate and blogging. I ran across these on "Allah Pundit". I like the one ones that have Che and Reagan.
I and others have been saying for a while that the music industry's business model - selling copies of things - is outdated and irrational. The advance of technology, particularly the internet, has made such things irrelevant. Well, it looks like the same is happening to "legacy" press institutions. Jay Rosen of NYU's Department of Journalism has a blog entitled PressThink and a recent essay entitled 'Bush to Press: "You're Assuming That You Represent the Public. I Don't Accept That.'", suggests that the internet - especially the blogosphere - has made traditional media outlets obsolete.
This is something I've been expecting. I haven't ever used a traditional media outlet as a source of information. I hate watching televised news - way too little bandwidth - and newspapers are by definition a day out-of-date (though the Wall Street Journal is still worth the read a lot of the time). I get all of my information from the internet, most of it from blogs of various descriptions. MetaFilter. Slate. Slashdot Politics. Andrew Sullivan. Glenn Reynolds. Hell, even Fark has a higher percentage of quality content than CBS/ABC/NBC/CNN/FoxNews/PMSNBC. And given the strikingl left-liberal bias evidenced by the vast majority of media insitutions and the disgustingly obvious slant of Fox, I'm really not sorry to see any of these antiquated, self-important, arrogant, condescending dinosaurs get the boot.
I'm much more concerned with free markets than democracy, as it turns out. Take, for example, South America. The two most prosperous, most stable, and safest countries there are Chile and Argentina, both of which have been ruled by military dictatorships for a few decades. The "democracies" of Peru, Columbia, Bolivia, and Venezuala, and to a lesser extent Brazil, are wracked by abysmal economies, ungodly inflation, and rampant crime. There are certainly civil rights abuses in Chile and Argentina, and you have to watch what you say or scary men will say bad things to you. But in the northern continent, the same is likely to happen, only you don't have to say anything to get kidnapped, and you probably can't make a living unless you're crowing coke. Yeah. That's great. All this by way of saying that there really isn't anything inherently morally superior about democracy. Any government that respects the rule of law and allows its citizens economic freedom will do just fine, thanks.
"...The True Legacy of 9/11". That's the title of an essay by one Naomi Klein, a progressive activist type. Her main thesis is that after 9/11, the US has effectively adopted the policy of the Likud party in Israel. She is not suggesting as the conspiracy theorists do that the US has somehow suborned its foreign policy to serve Israeli interests, but that "[we] are engaged in the very same war, one not against Palestinians demanding their right to statehood, or against Chechens demanding their independence, but against 'the global Islamic terror threat.'"
She goes on to detail some of the necessary implications of such a view, which she obviously doesn't like. But like most progressive liberals, she has no viable suggestions to the contrary. I believe she has seriously underdiagnosed the severity of the Islamist problem. And though that does suggest a fairly unpleasant future for the US - Israel operates under the Likud doctrine and isn't a fun place to be - I'm not seeing a lot of alternatives, and she certainly doesn't offer any.
Here's the thing: she seems to want to say that people who deliberately slaughter children at their first day of school need to be reasoned with. Umm, no. The correct response to these people is not a sensitive dialog, but the immediate use of lethal force. I don't care how righteous your cause or how miserable your situation: you do not target civilians.
First, Shaun of the Dead. Tagline: "There comes a time in every mans life when he has to get his ass of the couch, visit his mother, make up with his girlfriend, and kill some zombies." Also, "It's a romantic comedy. With zombies." What's not to love?
Second, I ♥ Huckabees. Not sure exactly what the hell this is supposed to be about, but it looks like they're making fun of continential philosophy, which is always a good thing.
Also, The Motorcycle Diaries, a film based on the memoirs of Alberto Granado, the man with whom Ernesto Guevera made a 5k motorcycle trip across South America long before he became known as "Che". Now, I'm not one of those bohemian idealists who is obsessed with Che as some kind of redemptive existential figure (it's hard for me to get very excited about any Communist revolutionary), but it's a story about a kick-ass road-trip. I'll be disappointed if they try and make him seem larger-than-life, which they probably will, but I'm going anyway.
On a side note, this isn't a movie, but it was on display in the theater on the way out. And I saw this guy performing in the Times Square subway station. I love New York.
I saw Maria Full of Grace last night. I'll get the obvious out of the way right off and point out that it wasn't only grace she was full of most of the time, but hey.
Maria is a downright precocious Columbian teenager who, in short, just can't deal with being Columbian. The movie, which I will wind up giving about 8 of 10, is full of her making decisions and choices that are far more North American than Latin American. She wants the sky, and shows remarkably little of that capacity for flourishing amidst adverse circumstances for which Latin Americans are renowned. Normally, or at least stereotypically, a Latin American wouldn't think twice about contributing their paycheck into the general family expense account. That kind of thing is expected. But Maria doesn't like it, and dishes out copious amounts of crap to her sister and mother when they ask her to pay for medicine for her ailing infant nephew.
She has, at one point in the film, the opportunity to stay in the town where she grew up, be married to a decent enough guy, and essentially live the life her ancestors have been living for generations. This, as it turns out, is not good enough for Maria. She wants more. She doesn't want to be treated like a Third World menial laborer at work, so she quits the best job in town. She doesn't want to be married without romance, so she turns down the father of her unborn child. She is not exactly sure what she does want, or at least such is not detailed in the film, but I'm suspicious that what she wants is essentially a "normal" American lifestyle. She wants to be a consumer.
The tagline for the movie says something about her using her trip as a mule to get her to the US, which is what she's always wanted. It's not that straightforward (though it never is, is it?). Maria has no plan. She stumbles on her job as a mule by accident. Which is certainly realistic enough: I'm sure there aren't all that many people who go looking for opportunities to swallow half a kilo of heroin. But this was actually a move more out of pique than desperation. Her sister was giving her crap about not having a job. Maria doesn't seem to partiuclarly care whether she has a job or not, but she does care about being able to show up her sister by having money. Making a life in the US is, as far as I could tell, nowhere in view here.
In short, I found the character of Maria spectacularly annoying. When given an option, she consistently chooses the stupid but easy or romantic option over the smart but difficult boring option. This is consistent with her character. Which, I must admit, is probably how most of the young women recruited to be mules fall into that line of work: they want the world, but aren't willing to work for it, and before they know what's going on they're in over their heads. Maria also happens to be a compulsive liar, which doesn't tend to help things, you know?
The cinematography felt a little cramped to me. I would have liked to get a better sense of place, especially in the scenes in Columbia. As it was, I felt like a few wider-angle shots would have helped more firmly anchor us in Maria's life and personality. Anyone who doesn't already have a pretty good understanding of what conditions are like in Columbia will probably feel a little lost at points. But if you aren't already pretty familiar with conditions in Columbia, you're probably seeing this as a film buff and not out of any interest in the region, so that's a wash.
It is the film's portrayal of how young girls get mixed up in this kind of thing that makes me give it as good a rating as I do. As much as Maria's character annoyed the snot out of me, she was an incredibly well-constructed individual (even if the other characters weren't). The cycle of oppression, longing for a better life, and getting in over your head really quickly is quite worth seeing. No one gets up in the morning and thinks, "Hmm, what do I want to do today... I know! I'll swallow the equivalent of two hundred times the lethal dose of heroin!" Stuff has to happen for anyone to get to that place, and it's this kind of stuff. A chance encounter at a dance, a family feud, and the temptation of ready cash. As far as that goes, this may as well have been a documentary, it rang so true. I found I enjoyed the "non-fiction" part of the film a lot more than the actual story. It's hard to feel sympathy for someone who makes so many obviously bad choices, but it's a lot easier to feel sympathy for the real young women who get caught up in drug trafficking.
So the building super shut off the water to the apartment upstairs. He did this because the tenant up there is apparently not all up there and refuses to open the door to either the super or the landlord.
In slightly related news, I tried to go to a Tenants Association meeting last night. I say "tried" because I went, but the guy who organized the thing didn't show. He was apparently there about ten minutes before the meeting was scheduled to start, but no one was there, so he went out for a few minutes and never came back. I met the Association's lawyer, a represenative from some legal aid outfit. Normally I don't approve of government spending on social causes, but I think this is probably a good thing. The people who showed up - essentially the tenants who really truly live here, not students like me, were a pretty sheeplike bunch. The lawyer, a youngish black lady who seemed to possess an infinite amount of patience, kept explaining the same things in very slow, short, clear phrases that a lot of the tenants just couldn't understand. I asked a semi-relevant question and her eyes lit up for a second.
Basically, the Tenants Association has filed a lawsuit against the landlord and his corporation for overcharging rent due to work on the building that he calls an MCI (Major Capital Improvement) but was really just bringing the building up to code. There have apparently be several rent strikes in the past few years. If it weren't for things like legal aid and people like the obviously dedicated lawyer I met last night, the people in this building would be out in the cold. The things she was describing are pretty basic and as long as you have a clear understanding of the principle of ownership and renting, you'd be fine. A lot of the people in the building are fairly simple, and anything like a sophisticated legal obstacle frightens and confuses them. So the landlord can throw up a legal hurdle that is obviously bullshit and they'll fly into a tizzy, not knowing what to do. I'm told this kind of thing is exceptionally common.
The good news is that I found this great fish market where I can get seafood cheap. Hello fish chowder.
The bad news is that my ceiling is leaking. Not sure why. The building super is mucking about upstairs trying to fix it. Rejoicing does not obtain.
I showed up at the Roseland Ballroom (located here at about 6:00PM last night, about 45 minutes before doors. I was actually just planning on finding the place and getting something to eat, but the line was already halfway down the block, so I jumped in and stood around for a while. Next to the Roseland was a theater showing a version of "Little Women", but as the gathering crowd was composed of mostly young, mostly indie/punk types, I figured I was in the right line.
The Roseland is big. I'm estimating that at least 1000 people were at the show last night. The ballroom itself (which used to actually be a ballroom, and it shows from the architecture) is vaguely rectangular, and the stage was at one end along a shorter side. The venue has two different levels of VIPness going on, neither of which applied to me, I'm sad to say. The first was on a stage along one of the longer walls, and the other was on the Mezzanine, a balcony that wrapped around the two sides of the room without stages.
The first opener was The Futureheads, who while arguably pretty good, are a bit too punk for my taste. Their album is okay (or rather good, but not to my liking), but the best part is the vocals, which were largely obscured by the thrashings of the guitars. The crowd wasn't very enthusiastic about them, and it showed. Oh well. Onward.
Next came The Delays. These guys didn't introduce themselves very well, or indeed speak hardly at all during their set. So I didn't figure out who they were until after they were done. I really enjoyed the set. They sound quite a bit like U2, if U2 were less pop and more rock. The vocals were also really interesting, as the lead singer tends towards the upper ends of the male range. I got their album, but it sounds quite a bit different than their live presentation, which was disappointing.
Then came the main event, Franz Ferdinand. I and a few dozen other fans actually saw them before the show started, because they stuck their heads over the edge of the building to look down at the line. That was kind of cool.
Something I realized before I went was that they were probably incapable of playing a two-hour set, like Wilco has been known to do. They're a band early in their career, and if they played their whole album plus a few B-sides, which is what they did, the set only comes to about an hour, tops. But that isn't the only reason they probably tend to keep it short. They are incredibly energetic on stage, which anyone who has heard their album could probably have guessed. By the end of the set, the drummer and lead guitarist were pretty much soaked with sweat. I'm sure the lights had something to do with that, seeing as there were several dozen of them, all bright, but the room at large was pretty mild. Whatever company installed the air conditioning at the Roseland did a bang up job. No, the real reason they were so exhausted after the show - and you could tell they were - was the fact that their energy is just indescribable.
I do want to take the time to talk about my reaction to the song "Michael", a fairly explicit homoerotic number about seeing two guys dance/get it on at what the band has described as a "pretty debauched party". This song bothered me a little but, but until last night it wasn't anything more than say, the songs of Stephen Merritt or some of the raunchier pop numbers you hear on the radio - a little off-putting, but nothing that would prevent you from enjoying the song. However, hearing the song live changed that a bit. The subject of sex takes up a lot of space in pop music any way you slice it, more straight than gay, but ample amounts of both. But most of it is about either enjoying something the lyricist thinks is wonderful (regardless of orientation) or dealing with the consequences of what was either the wrong thing to do or a good thing gone bad. I may happen to disagree with them about their assessment of sexual activity, but the emotions and sentiment in general are something I can understand and approve of. The same is not true for "Michael". In introducing the song, the lead singer, Alex Kapranos, said it was about doing something you think you aren't supposed to do and enjoying it. This is not an entirely foreign concept to any of us, but a lot of the time in pop music there is some kind of conflict or moral indecision involved. Not so here. In fact, part of the point of the song is enjoying something forbidden simply because it's forbidden, and not feeling guilty about it, but rather reveling in the deviance of the situation. This is different than the kind of thing Merritt is doing, for while most of his love songs are about men, he doesn't have a problem with this. It's not viewed as being inappropriate, and even if I disagree with his choices, it's only on that level, not in the enjoyment of something in spite and because of knowing it's wrong. This isn't something I want to deal with, and I felt uncomfortable hearing the song.
Other than that, the concert was pretty amazing. The started with "Cheating On You", ended their first set with "Darts of Pleasure," and closed out the encore with "This Fire". I got out of the Roseland about 10:30, which was kind of nice, because I could catch the subway without having to wait half an hour.
Next up on my list of shows: The Decemberists, Sept. 27.
I just got back from the Franz Ferdinand show at the Roseland Ballroom, about which I will blog in the morning. For now, take a look at The Fiction Bitch. Money quote:
"3. Doesn't negative feedback discourage rather than nurture the creative process?
Yes, and that's precisely the point. The Fiction Bitch doesn't want to encourage new writers. She wants to weed out terrible writers before they go on to bore millions of innocent publishing house interns to tears. If you suspect you are a lousy writer, the Fiction Bitch can remove all doubts, thus freeing you for other, more productive pursuits."
In the meantime, The Delays opened for Franz Ferdinand tonight, and I really like them. They're not partiuclarly profound or enduring, but they do know how to rock.
A little while ago I was pretty ambivalent about the upcoming electon. I don't like either Bush (a financially irresponsible jock) or Kerry (a smooth-talking, two-faced political snake). Then I stumbled across this. Yes, you read it correctly: anyone who wanted to protest the DNC convention - as thousands of people in NYC did, much to the delight of our ever-unbiased media - had to do so in a cage located well away from the convention. Or be arrested. Your choice. The judge on the case, who ruled in favor of the cage, had this to say:
"I, at first, thought before taking the view [of the site] that the characterizations of the space as being like an internment camp were litigation hyperbole. I now believe that it's an understatement. One cannot conceive of what other elements you would put in place to make a space more of an affront to the idea of free expression ..."
You got that right people. The Dems may be railing about the dangers of the Patriot Act, but it was their convention that witnessed concentration-camp style restriction of the freedom of expression.
Thus ends any antipathy I may have harbored for this next election. These people, the ones who run the DNC and its allied organizations, must never, ever be allowed to take power again.
And I have to go up there every day from Harlem Plain, which is only a negligible amount above sea level. Carrying my newly purchased textbooks, which not only cost the net GDP of several small African nations, but officially weigh in at way too damned much. This is gonna be fun, I can tell already.
I learned to like my neighborhood a little more this afternoon. I had to go to CVS to pick up some antihistimine, and wound up heading three blocks east into Harlem. It still wasn't Harlem proper, as I would have had to go east and north about twice as far as I did, but it was definitely moving that direction. I found that when the streets are more crowded and you get towards non-vacant retail locations I get a lot more comfortable. I found two really cool things on 116th between Malcom X Ave and 5th Ave (here). one was called something like the "Malcom Market", and featured several dozen vendors somewhere between street vendor and shop merchant. They were mostly selling Africana, which doesn't exactly go with my decor seeing as I don't have one, but it was still neat. Right next door was a fish market/seafood diner. There were actually stacks of frozen fish. I love being in a port city. The fish were pretty cheap too. Some were only going for $1.25 or $1.75. Even $4.95 ain't bad for a fish that would probably feed three people. This may be something I'll have to look into trying.
I'll get used to this yet.
Wired has an article on a new, or rather rediscovered nuclear reactor design that has many advantages over the current custom-built, multi-billion dollar facilities we have in the US and Europe. The Chinese have improved over an existing design that was canned in the 1940s in favor of the now dominant fuel-rod design. Apparently the Navy wanted fuel-rod reactors to power their subs, so the PBMR (Pebble Bed Modular Reactor) was shelved.
Now China's Tsinghua Institute and MIT are collaborating to perfect the old design. China plans on using them to build dozens to hundreds ot small nuclear reactors to produce 350 gigawatts of nuclear energy, as opposed to the 300 produced worldwide today.
This is cool.
Smile, you've been kicked in the nuts..
I can kind of tell why this never made it to primetime.
Well, my loan check arrived at Columbia yesterday. What this means is that I am now officially way in the hole. No turning back now...
Tonight, I went downtown to see the director's cut of Donnie Darko while it's still in theaters. Seeing as how the showing was at 10:00PM and I don't really have much to do for a while, I went downtown early to wander around. I found this great bookstore called Strand. Think McKay on freaking steroids, including the ability to search inventory and, get this, place standing orders for books. I snagged The Quiet American and The Information Economy and American Cities.
But then there's the movie. I mentioned to a friend that I was going to see the director's cut tonight and she asked, "What's the big deal about a director's cut anyway?" I said that this generally includes different footage that brings it closer to the director's original vision for the film but, generally due to studio/producer constrains, footage that lands on the cutting room floor. I mentioned that the DVD had about 20 minutes of extra footage, and apparently the director's cut includes most of that.
Well, it does. I was expecting basically an extended version of the film with an extra scene here and there. Hooooly-shite. This is a different movie. And it's a lot better. There's a huge difference between the original release and this new cut, mostly in the way that now the film actually explains what's going on. On the DVD, you could browse a few pages from the book "Grandma Death" wrote, entitled The Philosophy of Time Travel, but in the original movie you never really learned much about it. It's now an absolutely integral part of the film, and several selections from the book are used as inter-scene transitions, almost like chapter headings. There's also some pretty freaky imagery, including what I could have sworn was a kernel dump from a Linux installation. That's freaky enough as it is, but when it's superimposed on an extreme closeup of an eye reflecting flames and a storm front, it gets downright creepy. Oh, and then there's the death bunny. Got to love the death bunny. Think some combination of this and this.
So, unlike certain other films I could name, this director's cut is a vast improvement on an already stellar film. I'd like to say I'm excited to see what Richard Kelly will be doing next, but apparently it's a comedy/musical starring Sarah Michelle Gellar that ends up in a 4th of July block party. You think I'm making this up, but I'm not. So much for that. Anyway, if you do get a chance to see the director's cut, take it. It's good.
