hyksos announcement

Back!

Hey, again I forgot about this thing. And all of you dear readers were hanging on my last words waiting for the next transmission.

I've been way into Philip K Dick - I've been slowly moving through his novels for the past few months. Most recently was "VALIS" which was kinda like the ultimate PK Dick book, though it felt a lot closer thematically to Robert Anton Wilson and the 'Cosmic Trigger' books. Now I've started 'Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said' which is incredibly confusing in a really good way.

Most of my time has been taken up by PBT 2008 which has been fun to work on.

I need to start a separate site for my brewing stuff but in the meantime I'm gonna type my latest recipe here before I lose the scrap of paper it's written on:

225g American 2-row malt
150g Aromatic malt
80g biscuit malt
75g British ambert malt
2tsp gypsum
3kg light liquid malt extract
1kg medium dry malt extract
1.02kg clover honey
1.5oz Simcoe hops (12%) @ 60 mins
2oz dried elderflower @ 60 mins
1oz Amarillo (9.5%) @ 30 mins
2tsp Irish moss @ 15 mins
.5oz Liberty (4.6%) @ 8 mins

style is probably a "double IPA" - OG was 1.076, It's probably gonna be bitter as hell, as boiling the elderflowers so long just made it hop-like rather than aromatic. I'm totally psyched about it - used Safale US-05 yeast (3 packets!). I'll probably dry hop in secondary, when I get to secondary.

Some photos of my surroundings

Mom asked me to take some photos, so here they are.

my street:

my flat:









my neighborhood:

some photos i took on the bus today:

October 2007 State of my environment report

Main computer: Apple iBook G4, 1.2Ghz CPU, 768MB RAM. Busted keyboard, laptop casing is cracked and chipped throughout. Discoloured. It's slow!
Browser: Firefox 2.0.0.7. Plugins used: Tab Mix plus, LiveHTTP Headers, Web developer toolbar, Flashblock, del.icio.us.
Terminal: iTerm. Not great; some problems with terminal emulation; good tab support though I wish I could rename the tabs without it reverting.
Editor (code/ascii): TextMate. Love this. Vi (vim) in terminal.
Editor (text): Scrivener. Just moved over from Word, loving it!
Audio tracking: Cubase Sx 1.06. Crashes a bit. Wouldn't mind switching to something else but I'm picky and will probably wait til I get an Intel laptop.
RSS: Shrook. Very happy with it.
Chat: Adium 2.0 with my custom skin to make it a tiny transparent buddy list.
FTP: commandline, but CyberDuck when necessary.
Audio listening: iTunes, I guess, though I hate it. I guess I use it for last.fm support, though I don't know why I bother. VLC is ideal for video but crappy for mp3s. I wish Winamp existed for Mac OS.
EMail: Thunderbird, with SugarCRM plugin to use on my personal CRM installation.
I don't use this machine for BitTorrent or burning discs, though I use Toast Titianium when I do burn.

Second computer: Pentium 4 1.8Ghz, 1GB RAM. Essentially a downlading station as it runs Windows XP (though thankfully with the xoblite interface instead of Windows default). Wish I had a flatscreen monitor for this so i could have more desk space.
Burning: Nero
BitTorrent: uTorrent. Very nice and fast!
Web: Firefox, though Opera is installed. I always say how nice Opera for Windows is, but I never use it. I'm such a hypocrite.
Do I use this machine for anything else? Oh yeah, SlingPlayer.

This blog: Moveable type, though I don't know why. I guess someone has to still use it.
Other blogs: Wordpress mostly (for nplus7.com [abandoned], postcard project [semi-abandoned], txt.notes [abandoned])?
Project Blood Team: still on Excel, though I think I might push myself to write a web-based PBT and get off the Excel format for good. There's no excuse for this being in a spreadsheet and not a database!
New application being developed in: Ruby on Rails. Yeah, it's great.
CRM: SugarCRM 4.5, though I'm anxious to try the 5.0 beta (once they have an upgrade method). Still like many aspects of vTiger better - the RSS reader kicks Sugar's ass (though with Shrook now who cares), the in-place Ajax editing it probably what really wins it for me as my DB server is really slow and running all those page requests on Sugar is really really slow. If only these two open-source CRMs could be combined, then there would actually be a decent open source CRM out there. Ugh.

Hey i forgot about this thing

Just remembered that I started posting my top 50 film list and then completely stopped. Hmmm.

Tonight I'm DJing at The 78, a pub in Glasgow that caters to fancy organic craft beers. Which I dig of course, except that it's usually about £3.50 for a bottle. Tonight drinks are free. And I'm literally DJing right now. They have wireless internet so I'm just sitting here typing on this blog and occasionally changing CDs. Pretty easy.

I guess I'll post what I play and update it throughout the night. I mean, why not?

Tall Dwarfs - "Crush"
Animal Collective - "Chores"
Bingo Trappers - "King in Exile"
his name is alive "summer left your heart behind"
family fodder "film music"
game theory "erica's word"
brian eno "seven deadly finns"
photon band "10,000 buckets of rain"
captain beefheart "owed t'alex"
wooden shjips "death's not your friend"
laura ulmer "amoureux d'une affiche"
arlette zola - "mathematique elementaire"
home blitz - "hey!"
spoils of war "rit yellow of the sun"
major stars "pocket"
roy harper "the spirit lives"
bill callahan - "sycamore"

John Cale - "Andalucia"

Shout-outs

1. Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job. This is the best sketch comedy series I've seen in ages. I can't even explain how truly excited I am by it. I know it's only a matter of time before either a) it jumps the shark or b) I get bored with it, so I am enjoying it as much as possible.

2. Woods - Ram 7". I dug their full-length, At Rear House, because it's simplistic, creepy folk/pop songs burrowed deep into my brain and made me keep re-listening, even though the singing voices are kinda annoying. But this 7" is miles beyond the album - two songs of incredible incredible greatness, hinting at great things to come.

3. John Pilger - A Secret Country. In preparation for my journey to Australia next month I read this, which is kinda like the Australian version of Howard Zinn's People's History. Did you know the CIA supported an overthrow of the Australian prime minister in the 1970's? Did you know just how horrendous the treatment of Aboriginal peoples was even up through the 80s (when this was written)? Did you know just how shady Rupert Murdoch actually is?

4. Easter Sunday. Not that I am a practicing Catholic or anything, but it was a lovely day. First was the Blochairn car boot sale, or flea market' in American terms, where I found an overhead projector and a lovely practice amplifier. (Nothing compared to the Premier drum kit my flatmate got for £30, however). Then it was off to the Isle of Bute with some friends, where we took a tour of a big stately home and saw some lovely scenery.

5. New job hunting - no luck yet, and due to forthcoming personal travel there's no way I'll land a new job before July, yet after posting my CV to Monster I've already had a ton of interest from headhunters (all trying to place me in London unfortunately). I know that when I get serious about it, it shouldn't be too difficult to find something.

New postcard thing

I'm not much of a visual artist but I'm going to be drawing/collaging/etc. postcards as a new project where I'm trying to create one per day. Results will be scanned and posted here - maybe this can be added to the teamforce aggregate blog??

Thinking about the purpose of this blog

Over the past few days I've been wondering what to do with this blog. Obviously I don't post to it with any sort of regularity. And I have unlisted it from google with norobots tags and not publicized it at all - even my partner doesn't know where it is (and I don't think she's even aware of its existence). It originallly had the purpose of communicating to lots of people when I was traveling - to avoid having to send a million emails. When that finished I kept it up, if only to post sporadic rants about sports, film or food.

I guess I've now gotten over my issue with livejournal type culture - that type of emotional exhibitionism is no longer as weird as it used to seem (similar to how it no longer seems weird if people meet/date via myspace or whatever). But I've still kept myself pretty guarded here - not using my real name or the names of my friends, and mostly just writing unstructured, non-personal posts. I like having hyksos announcement as my forum to write without having any fear of being accurate or intelligent - the postings here are sloppy, and I rarely edit for anything besides spelling (though it isn't stream of consciousness). Knowing that only the few of you read this helps; it gives me the freedom to write knowing that there's some audience, though not a large one. It's kinda like how I feel more comfortable doing music now because I know there's a few people out there who are interested, though not really any strangers.

As I've been working full time for the past few months, I've become a real blog junkie - though I don't read any personal blogs beyond the other teamforce members. I love the power of Internet publishing and RSS, etc. I use wordpress on almost every one of my websites as a ghetto CMS, and I've been thinking about starting a more "proper" blog that would be for more reasoned, developed writing. As it is, I've started the N+7 site as an outgrowth of a class I just audited. It's supposed to be about Oulipo literature but (as I'm the only one who seems to be posting to it) I might steer it more towards a site about the general use of constraints in creation. It's intended to be fairly public - all of my classmates have editor privileges - but no one is doing jack shit with it yet.

I think I'm also going to stick a wordpress blog up on icewhistle for posting visual art (as I am beginning a month long postcard project). And I have my dissertation notes blog, which I haven't posted to since September when I finished my dissertation, but I've thought about reactivating (just to post notes on things I've been reading or watching, without any structure or public use). I still have the itch to have some blog on icewhistle for more public writing, either cultural-based or humourous, but I don't know why I couldn't just use this blog. I suspect I will keep hyksos announcement as a somewhat "secret" space for things that I'm not always comfortable posting on my artist site, such as sports rants, food talk, or weird dreams. On occasion I wouldn't mind a larger audience here - for certain posts - so maybe I will find a way to integrate that content into something larger.

But maybe not - maybe I will just sit on this for awhile and just try to use it more frequently before deciding what to do. I really like the feel of the teamforce crew, though I've never been an actual part of the group, and they've been extremely kind to offer me this hosting space back when I needed it, so I would really like to keep a presence here.

Various items of interest Feb. 7 edition

Adjusting back to full-time employment has been OK I guess - I've had more time to troll around on the Internet.

The Post Punk Junk blog is shutting down but as a final post, they compiled a three+ hour "primer" on the Fall, covering the entire career of Mr. Smith. I listened to the first 75 minutes and it keeps the narration brief and the music flowing. There isn't a ton of insight into the music but the songs selection is ace and some excellent B-sides, rarities and live tracks are included that I haven't heard before. One can always listen to the Fall more.

An American consortium (including the owner of the Texas Rangers) purchased Liverpool FC, ending months of speculation that they were going to be purchased by a Dubai investment corporation. My baseball-lovin' bro warns that Tom Hicks is the kiss of death, but with their pledges to respect tradition etc. I'm more worried about having enough midfield depth to mount a serious title challenge.

The excellent, long-running Perfect Sound Forever web magazine published Race, rock and the New Weird America in the newest issue. Written by a Native American, this looks at the appropriation of Native American iconography by Devendra Banhart etc., touching on the general sense of Orientalism in art via Jimi Hendrix and Ota Benga. As someone who's never used the term "New Weird America" without many levels of irony on top, I'm surprised at how seriously it's taken here. It strikes me as odd how people tend to associate these artists together as some sort of 'movement' - and this probably applies to any scene ever, not just 'New Weird America' - but to me, it's all a media construct. (Which is made all the more obvious by the ridiculousness of the 'NWA' moniker). I don't feel like Sunburned Hand of the Man and Devendra Banhart are working together, or even coming from particularly common ground (except maybe the huge umbrella of folk). Of course, what is any approach to writing about art except a media construction? It's a good article anyway, as I've never thought about "freak-folk" before from any sort of race (or political) angle.

Film watch: I haven't mustered up time to watch many films lately except Talladega Nights TWICE (don't ask) and Capote.

Books: I've been trying to get opportunities to give the new Pynchon novel the time it deserves. I'm about 400 pages in and it just kicked into gear for me. The Spoiler-free annotation guide at the Against the Day wiki has been incredible, as has the Chumps of Choice blog - it's made reading this a seriously fun experience.

Bad priorities?

What does it mean when you get called in for a second job interview and my first impulse is to say no, because the interview would conflict with the Spain/Ukraine match?

Illness

I got sick yesterday. It wasn't fun - lots of puking and dizziness, general bad feelings. Plus I was supposed to play a show last night; I wound up only doing one (rough) song. Watched America get their asses handed to them by the Czechs, though I actually slept through the second half. It might be food poisoning - I remember the last time I had it, after eating vegan potato salad at that place Sip that used to be in Shadyside. I retreated to my parents' to convalesce, and I had just gotten the remastered CD of Talk Talk's Spirit of Eden ... I have his really strong memory of lying on my parents' sofa in 1998 listening to the opening of that album and feeling the waves of hot and cold run across my body as the stunning opening of wind instruments and strings danced across my ears.... One of those occasions when you very distinctly remember a time spent listening to music. Sadly this food poisoning experience will be remembered by watching America lose 3-0 in their opening game of the FIFA World Cup.

Today, feeling slightly better (but still pretty crap) I awoke for a job interview with a dotcom. The position is for a PHP developer, and I feel that it's a bit out of my league but I think they liked me and they said they'd bring me back for a 2nd interview next week (though I'm not sure if I want it). It's a pretty fast-paced work environment and I don't actually think I'm capable of doing the coding; plus it's full-time which they were willing to fudge for visa reasons until I finish my dissertation, but then it might become difficult to actually finish the dissertation. They did give me a fun Linux/PHP test, asking me questions like "What will 'wc-l /etc/resolv.conf' return?" and 'What does ext3 mean?'.

Now for France/Switzerland!

World Cup Eve

HOLY CRAP the world cup starts tomorrow!!!!!!!

Past two nights were spent at shows I wasn't particularly interested in; Tuesday I had a Skater in-town that I was hosting and he wanted to go out, so we wound up each paying £6 to get into this show where we didn't actually watch any of the bands. 3 locals, promoted by the local show promoters who make a living off booking shows by doing things like charging £9 to see jack rose and £6 for 3 local bands. One of the bands sounded quite a bit like "One" - the U2 song, that is. 11 people on stage sounding like four, with an array of instruments they weren't using. The best was the last band who sounded like the Cure's first album with 60's vocal harmonies.

Last night I spent the afternoon drinking with a friend to celebrate the end of the strike, then we wound up going to another local show booked by a good friend of mine. His band played. They've played about 6 times and already have tons of major-label interest, because this town is crawling with A&R people looking for the next Franz Ferdinand. They are very good but I don't like the kind of music they play - they are an early-mid 90's DC-style emo band, with some poppy guitar hooks (though non-melodic vocalizing). They remind me of Rites of Spring, Doctrine of the Last Fair Chance, that kinda thing. They will be huge soon. The headliners were called Vialka, a French group that were fantastic, but at that point I couldn't be "arsed" to watch them. Two-piece guitar/drums duo, the drummer this crazy girl who sang French folk tunes through a headset while freaking out while the guitarist played skittery Eastern-European guitar lines. They actually reminded me of Sun City Girls A LOT.

Got the letter today saying I will not be receiving the second of the two scholarships I applied for, so next year's PhD project is officially not happening. It's not worth the money anyway. I could try to convince some sort of publisher to fund the project and just do the research on my own - as my prof said he would unofficially "supervise" any work I wanted to do - but I will most likely apply to some schools in the US with the same project.

oh shit, it's june already.

After a few days of not leaving the house I actually was craving the outside a bit, so I went and helped my friend work on her degree show at the art school. Spending the whole day at the art school is pretty exhausting - painting a room is one thing but having to paint the ceiling really stinks. My neck and wrists are sore and my clothes and hair are splattered with grey paint. Then somehow I wound up back at the art school in the evening, at the shitty bar/club there. I was with good company but the whole experience of leaving the house involved me spending a bunch of money and feeling no more enriched by human company.

The film night series here went well - about 10 people showed up to the experimental night, which is pretty good for two days notice on a Wednesday (and showing pretty difficult stuff). Making people come to my house is certainly a strategy - it's easier and fun to host.

Thoughts: Next time, don't put two silent films right next to each others. 20 minutes of silence is hard to maintain in a situation like that - I think everyone was afraid they would fart. A few years ago they showed a Kurt Kren retrospective at filmmaker's, and i enjoyed most of it, but in particular this structural film he made called "Asyl" that's completely beautiful and amazing. It may not be the most representative of his works but it's the one that left the biggest impact on me ; I had planned to rip it off somewhat for the Land artwork if that CD ever comes out. Anyway, I showed a video version of it and the reception was mixed - I think a lot of people were really bored by it, but I was still amazed (in silence). Ken Jacob's "Little Stabs at Happiness" is a bit too incoherent for me. James Whitney's "Lapis" comes off as hippie drivel now, but I guess I enjoy hippie drivel.

Misc.

I've moved dissertation notes to a new place so they don't have to clutter up Hyksos Announcement. It's really only for me anyway so I don't have to apologize for the messyness of it. I think academic blogging is an interesting idea, though it's really just to help me organize things because my notebook is full of scribbles and you can't cut and paste without scissors and actual paste.

I am getting excited about the World Cup ....

this will be my first one since getting into football/soccer. Duncil's giving me shit about not supporting USA, so I guess I will come out here and say officially that I will be supporting USA as my #1 team even though I don't know any of their players. I figure they'll be lucky to get out of their group stage, against Italy, Czech Republic and Ghana. And even if they do they'll likely have to face Brazil in the first knockout stage. So once they lose I will shift my support to England. Not that I am any great fan of England as a country - but with Steven Gerrard, Peter Crouch, Jamie Carragher, and a few other players that I know and like, I think they get my support. I am curious to see how Aaron Lennon and Theo Walcott develop - and I will be watching the 'B' squad play Belarus on Thursday. Soccer has probably moved up to be my second favorite sport now after American football.

NBA: I'm disappointed that the Spurs didn't last, and more disappointed that they were hardly on TV at all. Luckily the Suns went through, who I like, and I'm hoping to see them v. Detroit in the championship.

It's hard to be self-motivated to just do research all day. I have to say that I haven't been utilizing my time wisely in the past week. All of my self-improvement programs - getting up early, eating better, exercising, learning yoga - have been ignored in favor of sitting in front of Sky Sports News and putzing around online. (As I am doing right now). I have a yoga book sitting here that I haven't even opened. Last summer was my first attempt, where again I didn't actually get into it beyond the stretching/breathing exercises, but even though were wonderful and made me feel great.

Inspired by some stupid roboto board thread I downloaded the first two Galaxie 500 albums which I haven't listened to in awhile. They're so great! The lyrics are mostly stupid, the songwriting is so basic you could almost call it infantile, and Dean Wareham actually couldn't sing so he's buried in reverb. And all of these factors are what makes them great. The simple yet epic instrumental jamming at the end of songs like "Don't Let Our Youth Go to Waste" and "Snowstorm" are just so completely wonderful. How great is "Blue Thunder" even though the lyrics are just "My my, blue thunder"? And the bonus tracks on the box set include their cover of Red Krayola's "Victory Garden".

Anyone heard the new Red Krayola? I really want to hear it. Reviews are saying it's most like "Hazel" which is probably my favorite of their records. I'm downloading it now....

new bicycle wait

I finally got sick of the crappy hybrid bike I bought on ebay when I moved here - it's too small for me, so I had the seat all the way to the top of the post, and a winter of poor maintenance has led to quite a bit of rust, and plus, I should be riding a roadbike, not a hybrid. So I went to The Common Wheel, a weird charity project where bikes are donated and then repaired by the mentally ill.

The leader of the project is this old guy named Neil, who does an impressive job of managing a group of people that all have something slightly "off" about them. He knows pretty much everything there is to know about bicycles, and is opinionated beyond belief. Looking through their stock of beat-up old frames that were donated, I was attacked for a) not wanting mudguards on my bike - apparently that's insanity in Glasgow, though I made it through the winter just fine without them on my hybrid and b) wearing a helmet, or a "plastic hat" as he says - he told me how helmets don't actually do anything to save lives and only idiots wear them. Then when I told him how my flatmate's bike was vandalized and the frame was damaged to the point of being unusable, he told me that it was actually a blessing because anyone stupid enough to buy an aluminum frame mountain bike deserved it. Okay.

This was about ten days ago. I selected a hideously ugly Italian roadbike that had been sitting in their stock for a year. They had no idea what make the frame was, but it was definitely nice. The frame doesn't really accomodate mudguards so that's why it's been sitting in the shop for so long. It takes them a week to prepare a bike because they completely strip everything down and rebuild it. The price seems very, very good too - it's hard to tell since they don't know exactly what make the frame is, but judging from the construction and the components it's a good deal. There isn't really any secondhand bike market here besides the Common Wheel - most bike shops only deal in new bicycles. Neil grew on me though - and I had a good afternoon hanging out with the misfits. It makes me curious to really learn more about cycling so I can do my own maintenance. I'm one of those people that wants to find out everything possible about a subject if it interests me - I hate being halfassed about anything.

It should be done in about two hours, and I am pretty excited to get it. I went in yesterday when it was supposed to be done, but they weren't finished with it yet - but they let me hang around for two hours while they worked on it, showing me the French headset and the way the fork was molded and all of the reasons they felt it was a really excellent bike. I'm not used to riding a straight roadbike (apart from that old Raleigh that we pulled out of the trash back in Pittsburgh, which I rode for a few weeks just for fun) so I will have to get used to the super skinny tires, the shifters down below my center of gravity, etc.

In the post today....

15 May 2006

Dear Mr Fail

FORMAL LETTER OF ADMISSION FOR SESSIONS 2006-07

I am please to inform you that the University of Glasgow is making you the Unconditional offer of a place as a Research student, subject to satisfactory completion of your current MLitt degree at the University of Glasgow.

Programme of Study: PhD ENGLISH LITERATURE (R)
Mode of Study: Full time
Duration of Study: 3 years

Start Date: October 2006
Supervisor 1: DR J COYLE
Supervisor 2: DR DA PASCOE
Adviser: T.B.C.
Research Topic: Consciousness of Constraints: The Oulipo and Structuralist/Materialist Film
Fee Status: Overseas
Tuition Fees for Session: £8,800.00

SO.... anyone have £8,800 x 3 they can give me? I was thinking of writing to some of my favorite atheletes and asking them to fund it. I don't think I have a chance in hell of convincing Steven Gerrard to fund 3 years of research into avant-garde cinema, but I can always take the letters I wrote and submit them next year as a portfolio to an MFA programme.

Podcast, dissertation, etc.

The first episode of "The Double Fade with John W. Fail and Steven Warwick" is now up on my new site, www.icewhistle.com. Give it a listen, but don't ask me for those 24 minutes of your life back.

I whipped out my dissertation proposal tonight:

Unarticulated catastrophe and the invisibility of fear

The literature of disaster is generally characterized by a focus on the disaster itself. However, there are some texts in which the disaster is never clearly articulated; whether consciously avoided by the writer (as in Samuel Delaney’s Dhalgren) or by remaining mysterious to the characters (Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker), these texts rely on ambiguity to emphasize the effects of catastrophe. In the age of terrorism and the “global covert state” (as Paul Virilio defines it), the narrative invisibility in these texts echoes the ominous, often unspoken collective fears of capitalist society and the information age. Through the investigation of works by Delaney, Tarkovsky, Peter Greenaway, Doris Lessing, Maurice Blanchot, Peter Watkins, Thomas Pynchon and others, this project aims to explore the relationship between articulation and security. The project will ideally be presented in a combination manuscript/audiovisual format.

Paris tomorrow, for the Sonic Protest festival. More scenester photos to follow.

Procrastination

I have two papers due on Monday. Each has to be 3,000 words long. I have written the first one, which is about representations of masculinity in the films of John Cassavetes, but it needs to be reworked because it sucks. The second one I am 1,200 words into and it's titled "The Transfiguration of Geography in the Poetry of Alice Notley." I sort of love being an English lit student, but the time is coming to an end. As I have no job except for sporadic self-employment, no musical committments any longer, and no sort of love life, I really have no excuse for not being further through these. Each day I awake and have the entire time to write my papers. Instead I'm taking just about every procrastination opportunity that is given to me.

The biggest mistake was ordering a satellite dish. Now I can watch sports all day, North American sports at that (since I pay extra for the North American Sports Network). My plan is "Oh yeah, I'll just sit in front of a baseball or hockey game and write." Nope.

i must give extended honors to Siltblog which is written by former Banafish contributor Roland Woodbe aka Siltbreeze CEO T. Lax. Be sure to check out his review of the Espers "Weed Tree" EP.

Strawberry-Mango tea smells great, but it tastes like wax.

I decided to scrub the kitchen floor yesterday instead of writing. I didn't have any actual floor cleaner so I used mint-scented shower gel. The kitchen is vaguely mint-scented now, which is nice.

"Grosses Wasser", a later Cluster album, has this one really nice track.

I am kinda sick of Cassavetes, and feminist theory. I fear that my argument (that Cassavetes' films fit the gynandric model of literature) may be crap and the exact opposite could probably be argued.

I rebuilt my ibook because it's getting pretty slow and fucked up - 1.5 years without a hard drive format is too long. Now things seem to be smoother except I took the opportunity to clean out the keyboard and broke two keys in the process. Now my right shift falls off and the tab key is barely hanging on. Replacement keyboards are £50 so I am trying to get one secondhand, though I am tempted to just go into the apple store and steal the Shift and Tab keys off a display model.

I remember what outside looks like. Sort of.

Happy 2006.

2006 began at a nice, small party. It turned into a Lexington-style dance session, booties shaking til 4 AM, with some one-turntable DJing courtesy of yours truly. Playlist: David Bowie "Rebel Rebel", New Order "Blue Monday", Stevie Wonder "Supserstition", Belle and Sebastian "Electronic Rennaissance", Madonna "Into the Groove", James Taylor "Fire and Rain", Dylan "Like a Rolling Stone", Beach Boys "Heroes and Villains", Blondie "Sunday Girls". As much fun as you can have without Sparks or Fleetwood Mac.

Steelers today - probably Jerome's last home game ever. I will probably be crying my eyes out, assuming my tin can internet reception works well enough to hear it.

Have a safe and happy year, everyone.

Online again, sort of

By following this guide, I built a wi-fi antenna and now I am stealing wireless access from someone who lives down the street. I realize that this is immoral, but it's only to last until next Friday when my broadband gets hooked up. I'm not running any torrents or soulseek, either, just checking email and making posts like this. I had to build a cable, and I'm crap at making cables, so sometimes the connection drops. It seems to work better in the morning than late at night. Hmmm.

Films recently watched:
Interview with the Assassin (Neil Burger, US, 2002) - another entry into Kennedy assassination fantasy that works from a documentary premise. The assassin was played well and the first four or five minutes are actually quite believable. Bad acting in later scenes is really the only downfall, but the buildup to the end is great (though the end itself is sort of, well, dumb).

Ovoce stromu rajskych jime (Vera Chytilova, Czechoslovakia, 1969) - aka "Fruit of Paradise". Robert was raving about this film months ago and demanding that I watch it, but I waited until now because I've been wasting my time with stupid comedies and other crap. Anyway, he was right. This is from the same woman who directed the classic "Daisies", and while it maintains the madcap pacing and approach, the setting is a bit more fantastical, and the opening fifteen minutes are a heavily stylized allegory that is absolutely breathtaking. It made me think of both Prospero's Books and Richard Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar.

My shitty job still sucks, especially Monday and Tuesday of this week, when we had maybe three times the amount of normal business. I've started to spend my time daydreaming of numbers, trying to calculate how soon I can quit based on the amount of hours I've worked and when my paychecks will be coming in (I may be able to quit pretty soon, maybe even next week).

Christmas was nice - I had dinner with my flatmate's brother and a bunch of his friends, and meeting new people is always fun. When it was over, we walked home from Dennistoun to Maryhill, which is all the way across Glasgow - it took 80 minutes, and it was freezing cold. This is my first winter with a beard, and I like ice particles form in the cold.

Before bed each night I've been reading Catch-22, which I somehow have never read. It's as great as everyone says it is.

entry for Aaron Rosenblum no. 1

Aaron has requested an update here, and I never want to let down the fellow bearded. I actually haven't had regular Internet access since I moved last week, and our broadband isn't going to be hooked up until January 6th (which will still give me a weekend with broadband to finish my essays with).

The last few days have been spent working my shit job, acclimating to my new flat, and working on an essay about Samuel Delany's "Dhalgren". The essay is basically about how "Dhalgren" fits the classic model for a disaster-text through the way it struggles with the representation of disaster, and how it's metafictional elements reflect and highlight these struggles. Basically it's a regurgitation of the themes dealt with all term, only applied specifically to this book. I have another essay to do in the next two weeks, but I don't actually have any idea what that one will be about. Well, I have an idea that somehow involves urban space, but it's not any more articulate than that.

I applied for a job that looks fantastic - work I am specialized in (UNIX/Linux admin), good pay (I think £7.70/hr or something like that) and good hours. I haven't heard anything yet, and since it's Xmas time I assume I won't hear anything for awhile (or never). It's hard not to get hopeful about that type of thing, especially when working a total shit job at a computer store that I don't care about and actually sort of despise.

Lied Music seems to be reinvigorated after rehearsing the "Double/Tandem Black Cat System," a giant loop utilizing two machines and two people which will hopefully be a centerpiece of the live show/tour we're doing in March.

I am actually thinking about shaving the beard on New Years Day, though then I enter the vicious cycle of having to shave continually, and I think lazyness may win out.

Last night was the Winter Solstice, which I meant to celebrate somehow, even if it was just wandering into the woods with a bottle of wine by myself. The nearest non-urban area is this little stream/canal on the otherside of Maryhill Road, but the last time I rode by there (in daylight) I was stopped by the cops for questioning because they found a body floating in the water that morning. Hmmm. So I stayed in, watched the first half of "I Heart Huckabees" with my pal Giles, and wrote a bit of my "Dhalgren" essay. I guess it wasn't the most celebratory Solstice experience. This is the second solstice I acknowledged since discovering that I am a pagan. The summer solstice was spent with Ellen, Robert, Ellen's mom and Ellen's mom's boyfriend on his back porch in Lexington, surrounded by good ale, fine cheeses, and desserts galore. It was lovely and it's one of those experiences that when I think about it, it makes me sad about being apart from a lot of my friends. But at the risk of sounding like a whiny livejournal I'll cut that out, because there are great people here, and there are great people everywhere, and I can never be around all of the people I want to be around at the same time, unless I can find some way to transcend the space continuum and merge Pittsburgh, New England, San Diego, Portland, Lexington, Louisville, Cincinnati, Glasgow and a bunch of other places into one uber-metropolis. Anyway.

Everyone is always doing Top 10 lists at the end of 2005 and I fell victim to the craze, turning one in to Volcanic Tongue. I guess I'm guilty of catering my list to the audience, as I left off a lot of more mainstream releases, like Animal Collective "Feels", the New Pornographers "Twin Cinema", Josephine Foster "Hazel Eyes, I Will Lead You" and of course the two albums I released, which I wouldn't list out of conflict of interest decency but I totally fucking love, obviously. Looking at the mass of lists just makes my head hurt, and makes me realize why I've spent so much time recently listening to Neil Young, Van Morrison, Dylan, Jimmy Webb and Destroyer.

Especially Destroyer (this week). His new album leaked on the web, and it's called "Rubies" and if it's not the best record he ever made I think it's certainly tied with "Streethawk". It's a bit of a return to form after the experiment of "Your Blues", which I liked a lot but not as much as the other records. Track #2 on "Rubies" is called "Your Blood" and it perhaps has something to do with the last album - whatever it's about, I've been listening to it over and over and I think it might be my favorite Destroyer song now, or at least up there with his other classics like "The Bad Arts", "Helena", "The Chosen Few" and "Destroyer's the Temple".

Additionally I've been listening to the new Weird Weeds EP which isn't even completed yet, but Nick graciously leaked me mp3s, and it's only problem is that it's far too short. It builds up to a cover of "Sweet Thing" from "Astral Weeks" (and it's successful, somehow!), and then closes with a song called "Broken Arm" which is just totally fucking perfect. I predict that this record will be huge when it is released, and Weird Weeds will become the next big sensation. Which they would be completely deserving of.

The Steelers hopes look grim but I'm still clutching my Terrible Towel. Maybe I need to go dip it into the River Clyde to send my fandom across the ocean where it will be more useful? It could be some sort of mystical sports ritual, involving ley lines and Cowher-energy (not "Cowher Power", that's something else), akin to when the guy from the KLF tried to put a photograph of Elvis on the North Pole (see the novel "Bad Wisdom" - they failed because you can't drive to the North Pole).

Last night I had a dream (which I realize I should file in a separate entry under "Subconscious Ramblings") that my parents, my brother, this PhD student here I sorta know, and myself went over to Kris Abplanalp's house for dinner, and then everyone started smoking pot except me, and everyone got totally high.

A "New Morning" morning

Dylan's New Morning is a good way to start the day, 6 November, which I'm pretty sure is four years from the date that I first set foot in this city. I remember that because last night was Guy Fawkes night, and I remember being in Edinboro for that, mere months after 9/11, walking around with Chris Strunk wondering why gangs of children were running around setting dumpsters on fire. (Or as they would say here, wee neds lighting up the skips). The next day we hopped the train to Glasgow, meeting Daniel at the Kelvinhall underground station. And now four years later Daniel and I were supposed to go look at an apartment, er, flat together today but the landlady didn't get back to me in time. Chris I assume is still in Boston though I haven't heard from him in about a month.

The last time he emailed he told me this horrifying story about someone firing a gun into the library where he works in Mattapan - the bullet apparently zipping around and landing just inches from a child's head. He was rattled, and seriously questioning his dedication to his job. Here there are no guns, but a friend of a friend was recently stabbed in an act of random street violence.

I stayed in on Guy Fawkes night, listening to some records (disc 1 of the Invisible Pyramid, David Behrman Wave Train, and the new Alvarius B which has the lovely title Blood Operatives of the Barium Sunset), reading Things Fall Apart for my core seminar, and starting Henry Green's Caught before falling asleep. Outside the city was exploding with fireworks, with official council-sponsored fireworks set off at Glasgow Green at 7:30 (I missed these) followed by hours and hours of amateurs blowing off their own firecrackers. From the way my window faces here in Finnieston I couldn't see anything, but I heard them all night, and it really went well with the themes of the London Blitz that I've been reading about - I felt like I was barricaded in my apartment during a war, with random bursts of gunfire and explosions all night long. Even though I knew it was benign, there was definitely something a bit unsettling about it.

But media can create a virtual defense against false threats, right? Records, books, movies, records, books, movies, the newspaper (I pick up the Guardian or the Independent almost every day), TV news, records, mp3s really, books, articles, records books. Let's see the neds try and break through that. Art as a meditation upon reality, sure, but how about a replacement for reality?

I found Bhel Puri (see previous entry) at a fantastic Indian grocery store on Woodland Rd. Actually, I asked the Bengali student in my program if he knew where I could get it, and he asked his roommate from Bangalore. It's the same package I bought in Kentucky, and I made it yesterday and it was that familiar mix of crunch and soggy, spicy and sweet. I love it.