I'm typing this up on Sunday morning on the F train back to 7th Ave. after de-busing off the Lucky Star bus from Boston.
True to my word, I took the bus up to Brookline last night and stayed at Joel's. His new house is fucking huge, and, using some polite mathematical estimates, he got it for a steal -- I guess because it's a bit run down in some fairly significant ways. Whatever, man. It's got a fucking turret.
The bus ride was great until it got dark -- looking out the window of a moving vehicle is pretty much my favorite thing in the world, but when you can't see anything, you can get kind of button-holed by grim thoughts. I listened to a couple series of The Ricky Gervais show, which helped. After getting out at South Station, I hopped the Red line to Park St. and then got on the Green line, which I'd never ridden before. The trains are much shorter than the ones on the Red line, and the individual cars are tiny, too. And, for a Friday night on a train headed to the suburbs, it was fucking packed with -- from what I could tell -- drunk townies. Halfway along, these two pimply post-high-schoolers got on, each carrying a six-pack. One of them sort of punched me in the chest with his, kind of gripping it like brass knuckles. "Yo," I said. The other, noticing my leather jacket, I guess, asked, "Hey, do you listen to punk music?" "Yeah," I said. "What kind of punk music?" Because I'd been sort of blurting it all week, I came up with "POGUES!" "The Pogues?" said the first one. "Fuck yeah -- that's real fuckin' Irish music!" Did I mention these guys were Irish? They had, you know, real fuckin' Irish faces. Luckily, it was almost my stop, because I was sort of out of things to say. The two dudes, as I was getting off, turned to a couple of high school girls sitting next to me and opened with "Yo, what are you guys doin' tonight? Are you getting fucked up?"
The turret is actually the library room, complete with circular book cases and everything. There's also an outdoor jacuzzi and a fucking bar built into a wall in the basement. The room I was sleeping in had a "secret door" that they hadn't seen when the agent was showing them the place that led into a weird, practically windowless, toothpaste-green room with a bench with an air conditioner above it built into the wall. Joel and Liz surmised that this must have been some kind of rec room, but they really don't know for sure. Past that room was another huge, weird empty room, this one with stairs that led up to an enormous furnished attic whose interior measure was longer than its exterior measure. Also there was a black hole at its center and a howling ghost from another dimension that eats souls just kind of hanging out. Did anyone else read that book? Come on.
We drank wine until 4:00 AM and listened to the new Arcade Fire album. I woke up at 8:00, still kind of drunk, and called a cab to get to the stop for the Green line. I actually got to the meeting in the middle of the first speech this time instead of the fifth. This year it was held in a room at the back of Building 3, which is the one with the columns -- really beautiful.
(Does anyone remember a web site from around 2000 called geekporn.com? It's something else now, but at the time it was a kind of amateur porn site dreamed up some MIT kids that was supposed to feature pictures of men and women of the type you might see in your Computer Science class. Unfortunately, not to make a cliched joke here, that was the reason it didn't really catch on. But there was this really, really gorgeous girl in some of the pictures -- I mean, the rest of the people were, you know, perfectly adequate, but this girl was phenomenal -- and her thing was posing naked in front of Building 3 with a bunch of physics equations drawn all over her body in black marker. I know, you're rolling your eyes. But so now I've been there.)
Gerald Sussman gave the same talk he always gives, focusing on what he refers to as "robust systems" and "paranoid programming" -- pretty much, just that systems should be highly interoperable and flexible in terms of the input they accept and the output they produce. Eh, I think it's debatable. But the innovative thing he brought up this time around was some Scheme syntax he'd developed for writing expression-matching rules. Not just your standard string-matching regexp stuff: These rules performed higher-order speculative matches on Scheme expressions similar to the way ML matches function signatures -- the "/" rule, for example, might match a numerical sub-expression by factoring it. He also indulged in a brief digression based on a description of how a particular species of tropical frog goes through one of its life stages in a strikingly mammalian way (something about the way the way the developing tadpole is positioned relative to the egg) but is otherwise pretty much indistinguishable from other types of frogs. Frogness, Sussman explained, is not defined procedurally.
RMS was in a much better mood this year than he was the previous two years, when he'd kind of slouched into the room and passed out on the table. This time around, he was wearing a button that said "Emacs Loves Every User" -- as opposed to organized religion, I think, don't remember his explanation. He gave a very articulate argument against software patents, bringing up the most convincing rationale I've yet heard, namely: Software source code is more or less acknowledged to be a type of speech and as such it's theoretically impossible and practically infeasible to enumerate the mathematical ideas -- the currency of software patents -- expressed by a program. He mentioned, anecdotally, a case in which the authors of XYWrite (the word processor I used to write practically all my papers in elementary school and junior high) had to send out a downgrade to their users to defuse a patent dispute over automatic word abbreviation -- the patent was later overturned based on prior art found in Emacs. "It's nice to know that I've had at least one patentable idea in my life," said RMS.
Eben Moglen was up next. He's kind of the reason that I've been going to these meetings -- he's an incredibly articulate and charismatic speaker who can go for hours, literally, without consulting any notes or saying "um." He was a bit more brusque than I remembered him being last year and didn't seem to be amused by RMS cheerfully interrupting him at times. As usual, the focus of his talk was on the obstacles facing the world of free software for the coming year -- last year it was patents, this year it's mainly DRM (but also patents) -- and, as usual, he was optimistic. "The breaking point of DRM is nearly upon us," he said. The two main proponents of DRM, he said, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, have an uphill battle ahead of them in terms of making the case for their respective new platforms. Jobs, Moglen said, is hoping that the iPhone is so cool that it won't matter to users that it's completely crippled; Gates is hoping "that an operating system that can be subverted by a 12-year-old to allow him to control his own hardware and destroy everyone else's is a salable proposition."
He discussed at length the provisions in GPLv3 designed to combat DRM, in particular the current peculiar industry practice of selling hardware at a loss and recouping money on subscription-based access to restricted content. Companies like TiVo are going to suffer if and when people relicense under the GPLv3, and they've already attempted to bargain with the FSF -- to no avail -- by offering to remove the encryption on downloaded content as long as the connection to the TV guide service can remain protected. ("You are are under the mistaken impression," Moglen recounts telling them, "that my client is the Free Movie Foundation.") "The tide of DRM is going to turn this year," he said. "If I am standing here next year and it hasn't, you know what to throw at me." RMS piped up from the back of the room: "DVDs?"
As usual, he ended with some rousing bon mots: "You have to be bigger than about a hundred billion dollars a year these days before your CEO doesn't return our phone calls." Then, to the audience, he said, "I ask you to do a thing that has never been done before. I ask you to rearrange Microsoft's patent portfolio for them."
After Moglen's talk, there was a Q & A session with the FSF board members. Thankfully, this year featured fewer people trying to stump RMS with GPL loopholes, just general public flailing over ways of increasing acceptance of Free Software and punishing its detractors. Among the revelations: IBM has 6 full-time people tracking the revisions of GPLv3; there's a good chance Sun might be willing to release Solaris under some variant of the GPL (although Sussman was skeptical: "Humans are so complicated," he mused. "I prefer to deal with machines").
Mako Hill gave a short talk about his draft of a definition of what he calls "Free Culture." I tried to think of reasons I'm opposed to the idea but couldn't get anything articulate together. And that was it for the meeting!
As per tradition, a fair number of people went out to eat at The Middle East afterwards, and this year I joined them. At first I was a little shy, but I was sitting next to Brett Smith and Mako, neither of whom are shy themselves, so the chatter was pretty lively and I got sucked in. Most of the people who come to these meetings seem like they're actively involved in a bunch of pretty important projects -- Wikia, the Linux kernel, Gnome -- and kind of all know each other already, and I'm just this guy who writes a little Scheme and just shows up sometimes. I don't feel like anybody really knows who I am. Still, listening to people talk about all this stuff that we're all pretty passionate about put me in mind of time I spent in college feeling like all I really had to do to accomplish big things was put my shoulder to it and work. Like I said to Eve afterwards, "I want to run away and join the circus. But I think the circus is called MIT."
Sunday, March 25, 2007
Thursday, March 22, 2007
Drawings Of Running And Jumping Men
The weather is finally acceptable. I feel practically optimistic! But not quite.
I'm headed up to Cambridge tomorrow for the annual FSF meeting. Usually I wake up at an obscene hour on Saturday morning and high-tail it over to East Broadway to hop on Fung-Wah, but this time around, I thought I'd be smart and get there on time. I'm gonna head up after work tomorrow and spend the night at Joel's new house in Boston.
Last night I felt like going for a run -- anxious, depressed, in need of endorphins -- but Eve had called and had offered to cook food for me, so I was faced with a dilemma. In a slightly unorthodox move, I decided to jog over to her house instead of around the park. It turned out to be just the right idea -- I haven't gone running in over six months, and the 11 horizontal blocks and 3 long vertical blocks to Eve's place were practically too much for me. I'd brought a change of underclothes and took a quick shower once I'd gotten there. Her shower is more of a powerful misting than it is a shower, but it gets you clean nonetheless. In return for the delicious tofu stir-fry she'd cooked for me and her roommate, Susan, I popped in a new wireless router for her and set it up to replace one that'd died last week.
This evening I swung by The Annex to see Contramano on a tip from flavorpill. The band that opened for them was mopey and shitty, but Contramano themselves were pretty badass. The lead singer is, apparently, a classically-trained cellist from Brazil, and for many of the songs he plays what appears to be some kind of modified cello with no body, only the neck and some pickups. (Update: Squick tells me this is what electric cellos look like.) For other songs, he ditched an instrument entirely and just kind of roamed around the audience dancing with the girls and singing into a wireless mic. The lyrics were not, you know, Yeats or some shit, but he had a nicely plaintive delivery and the playing by all the members was vigorous. They were playing over a fucking backing track, though -- one that had drums, even. What the shit is up with people doing that these days? I feel like a lot of people are doing that these days.
The bartender comped me a second Jameson's and ginger ale for some reason and made it very strong. Usually that's a real pick-me-up, but tonight it just kind of made me sulkier. I was still feeling really drunk when I got home, hours after slurping it down. It's been a drinky week, what with Emma getting unfairly sacked by the Voice. Everyone's been getting loaded.
I'm headed up to Cambridge tomorrow for the annual FSF meeting. Usually I wake up at an obscene hour on Saturday morning and high-tail it over to East Broadway to hop on Fung-Wah, but this time around, I thought I'd be smart and get there on time. I'm gonna head up after work tomorrow and spend the night at Joel's new house in Boston.
Last night I felt like going for a run -- anxious, depressed, in need of endorphins -- but Eve had called and had offered to cook food for me, so I was faced with a dilemma. In a slightly unorthodox move, I decided to jog over to her house instead of around the park. It turned out to be just the right idea -- I haven't gone running in over six months, and the 11 horizontal blocks and 3 long vertical blocks to Eve's place were practically too much for me. I'd brought a change of underclothes and took a quick shower once I'd gotten there. Her shower is more of a powerful misting than it is a shower, but it gets you clean nonetheless. In return for the delicious tofu stir-fry she'd cooked for me and her roommate, Susan, I popped in a new wireless router for her and set it up to replace one that'd died last week.
This evening I swung by The Annex to see Contramano on a tip from flavorpill. The band that opened for them was mopey and shitty, but Contramano themselves were pretty badass. The lead singer is, apparently, a classically-trained cellist from Brazil, and for many of the songs he plays what appears to be some kind of modified cello with no body, only the neck and some pickups. (Update: Squick tells me this is what electric cellos look like.) For other songs, he ditched an instrument entirely and just kind of roamed around the audience dancing with the girls and singing into a wireless mic. The lyrics were not, you know, Yeats or some shit, but he had a nicely plaintive delivery and the playing by all the members was vigorous. They were playing over a fucking backing track, though -- one that had drums, even. What the shit is up with people doing that these days? I feel like a lot of people are doing that these days.
The bartender comped me a second Jameson's and ginger ale for some reason and made it very strong. Usually that's a real pick-me-up, but tonight it just kind of made me sulkier. I was still feeling really drunk when I got home, hours after slurping it down. It's been a drinky week, what with Emma getting unfairly sacked by the Voice. Everyone's been getting loaded.
Monday, March 19, 2007
Some Kind Of Punk Rock Satyr From Under The Bog
Pogues at Roseland; St. Patrick's Day! I'd been in kind of a bad mood all day, but not really for any good reason. I guess I was a little disappointed because some people I'd had extra tickets for had canceled on me, including my dad and Joel and Liz, the three of whom'd been sort of central to my idea of how the night was supposed to go. I suppose it was to be expected -- after all, I had eight tickets, not counting the ones for me and Nina. Why so many, you ask? Well, when it came to my attention that tickets for this show were available, I thought I might snag maybe four. But the page where you say how many you want had two drop-down menus: One for tickets and one, as it turned out, for tickets plus donations to a Hurricane Katrina relief fund. For some reason, this was hard for me to figure out, and, being a generous soul, I ended up getting four regular tickets and four Katrina tickets. (In my defense, I'm a software author, not a software user.) The roster, by showtime:
The Pogues were already on stage by the time Squick and Katharine and Nina and Eve and I got there -- strains of what I think was A Pair of Brown Eyes were wafting through the lobby. The ballroom itself was huge, and complete packed with people, most of them big and fat and Irish. (As per my usual insecure macho boyfriend bullshit, I tried to suss out whose ass I could kick if it "came down to it" -- I estimated no one's.) We got to a place under one of the balconies where we could sort of see the stage and started insinuating ourselves into the crowd. Shane was in a wheelchair -- probably because of the ligaments in his knee that he'd torn a few nights earlier, but maybe, you know, just because -- and he presided over the pit in front of the stage like some kind of dyspeptic, half-comatose monarch. Everyone else on stage looked about twenty years younger than him, except for the roadie who wheeled him, presumably, back and forth from the bathroom / bar ("It's a long way to Tipperary," explained Jem Finer at one point, "but it's an even longer way to the toilets"). I couldn't understand most of what he said besides the names of the songs that he called out, and I think I did better than most people. The songs, from what I can remember, in no particular order:
I guess what appeals to me about the Pogues is that their aesthetic -- the implication that they're a bunch of sleazy, itinerant pub types whose drummer just happened to start playing in double time without taking the cigarette out of his mouth -- suggests that punk rock is a potential branch in the evolution of every musical genre, instead of something that Malcolm McLaren and a bunch of art school dropouts actively cooked up in a clothing store in King's Cross. That is to say, the same way The Ramones are 50s pop "infected" by the punk bug, queered and twisted and made dark, The Pogues are Irish folk "punked," Irish culture itself being maybe a punk version of England's, Shane MacGowan some kind of red-headed Tony Blair rotted out and jagged around the edges. Unfortunately, seeing one of these bands in their twilight years (cf. The Buzzcocks) kind of kills this line of reasoning, because all the dudes in the band are into wearing comfortable clothes and the idea of "putting on a good show" for the "fans." I'm not complaining, really. This is the only way I get to see them.
I should point out that the title of this post refers not to Shane, although it could, but to a dude that Nina and I were standing behind at the show, this weird white-dude-with-dreads guy who was wearing a stitched-together leather jerkin. Nina coined said phrase and also observed that he looked "very Renn faire." So.
I think I'm gonna clean the toilet tonight. Not sure; I'm psyching myself up for it, drinking a too-strong Jameson's and ginger ale.
You guys remember the scary janitor on The Office -- the one who was played by Stephen Merchant's dad? I saw a guy on the subway on the way home who looked like a droopier, crazier version of Ron Merchant. He was kind of rifling through a pile of old newspapers that he was holding between his legs. The papers kept slipping off his lap and the seat next to him where he'd piled them and onto the floor. He leaned forwards to grab them. "Oh, no," he'd say. "Oh, God!"
- Nina and I
- Eve
- Squick
- Katharine and her dude
- Tom
- Tom's friends Eric and Sarah
The Pogues were already on stage by the time Squick and Katharine and Nina and Eve and I got there -- strains of what I think was A Pair of Brown Eyes were wafting through the lobby. The ballroom itself was huge, and complete packed with people, most of them big and fat and Irish. (As per my usual insecure macho boyfriend bullshit, I tried to suss out whose ass I could kick if it "came down to it" -- I estimated no one's.) We got to a place under one of the balconies where we could sort of see the stage and started insinuating ourselves into the crowd. Shane was in a wheelchair -- probably because of the ligaments in his knee that he'd torn a few nights earlier, but maybe, you know, just because -- and he presided over the pit in front of the stage like some kind of dyspeptic, half-comatose monarch. Everyone else on stage looked about twenty years younger than him, except for the roadie who wheeled him, presumably, back and forth from the bathroom / bar ("It's a long way to Tipperary," explained Jem Finer at one point, "but it's an even longer way to the toilets"). I couldn't understand most of what he said besides the names of the songs that he called out, and I think I did better than most people. The songs, from what I can remember, in no particular order:
- A Pair of Brown Eyes
- A Rainy Night In Soho (dedicated to Victoria)
- The Repeal of the Licensing Laws
- The Sick-Bed of Cuchulainn
- Poor Paddy
- The Irish Rover
- The Auld Triangle
- Streams of Whiskey
- Sally MacLenanne
- The Old Main Drag
- Dirty Old Town
- Bottle of Smoke
- Thousands Are Sailing
- Fiesta
- The Broad Majestic Shannon
- The Body of an American
I guess what appeals to me about the Pogues is that their aesthetic -- the implication that they're a bunch of sleazy, itinerant pub types whose drummer just happened to start playing in double time without taking the cigarette out of his mouth -- suggests that punk rock is a potential branch in the evolution of every musical genre, instead of something that Malcolm McLaren and a bunch of art school dropouts actively cooked up in a clothing store in King's Cross. That is to say, the same way The Ramones are 50s pop "infected" by the punk bug, queered and twisted and made dark, The Pogues are Irish folk "punked," Irish culture itself being maybe a punk version of England's, Shane MacGowan some kind of red-headed Tony Blair rotted out and jagged around the edges. Unfortunately, seeing one of these bands in their twilight years (cf. The Buzzcocks) kind of kills this line of reasoning, because all the dudes in the band are into wearing comfortable clothes and the idea of "putting on a good show" for the "fans." I'm not complaining, really. This is the only way I get to see them.
I should point out that the title of this post refers not to Shane, although it could, but to a dude that Nina and I were standing behind at the show, this weird white-dude-with-dreads guy who was wearing a stitched-together leather jerkin. Nina coined said phrase and also observed that he looked "very Renn faire." So.
I think I'm gonna clean the toilet tonight. Not sure; I'm psyching myself up for it, drinking a too-strong Jameson's and ginger ale.
You guys remember the scary janitor on The Office -- the one who was played by Stephen Merchant's dad? I saw a guy on the subway on the way home who looked like a droopier, crazier version of Ron Merchant. He was kind of rifling through a pile of old newspapers that he was holding between his legs. The papers kept slipping off his lap and the seat next to him where he'd piled them and onto the floor. He leaned forwards to grab them. "Oh, no," he'd say. "Oh, God!"
Tuesday, March 06, 2007
In Like A Lion
It's March! And it's freezing. The weather's all over the place. It's snowing right now.
On Saturday, though, it was kind of nice in the earlier part of the day, and Nina and I took a walk out to Bay Ridge by way of the Brooklyn Army Terminal docks where the Water Taxi stops. The light was really great and we took a lot of pictures; you can see the evidence in my photostream. That whole area is kind of dilapidated -- suffused with the slightly foul smell of the water, which reminded me of people (and me) productively fishing on the docks down on Casey Key; but beautiful, full of warehouse buildings with broken blue glass in their windows. The Water Taxi itself -- or a boat with the Water Taxi logo on it -- was moored at one of the piers, abandoned and bobbing gently in the wine-dark river. It looked different than it does in the advertising materials I've seen -- more like some kind of luxury yacht. From there we headed up into Bay Ridge proper and had a really nice dinner at an Indian place called Taj Mahal. I'd forgotten how good mango lassis are: They're so good you practically don't want to drink them because then they'll be gone.
Sunday was cold, cold. I picked up Eve at her house on the way home from Nina's, and we swung by Steve's C-Town to do my weekly shopping and to pick up materials for cooking dinner before the Thermals show (which Nina, knee-deep in Latin American Politics, had to cancel on): We settled on hamburgers with portobello mushrooms, and Eve snagged a six-pack of Kozy Shack chocolate pudding from the dairy aisle, citing an impromptu craving for the stuff. Indeed, she downed three of them while we baked and marinated the mushrooms in preparation for their use on the burgers I sauteed in my wonderful big frying pan. Their combination, along with baby spinach in place of lettuce, was pretty great -- I recommend it if you've got the wherewithal. I had a chocolate pudding myself, finding it kind of uck.
We met up with my friend Squick from work and got into The Bowery Ballroom around 9:30, just in time to hear the last opening act, The Big Sleep. They were no good -- potentially catchy, mostly instrumental pieces, but the band had about zero energy and stage presence. I'm all for nerds on stage, but you can't be shy, guys. Jump around. That's not the real story, though: Eve'd developed a bit of a stomach complaint on the way there, and by the time we'd brandished our tickets and made it to the lounge, she was right nauseated. She took a trip to the bathroom before we headed up to the stage area, and apparently up came the pudding, the burger, etc. Nonetheless, Eve is a total champ, and she stuck it out for the entire goddamn show, retreating to the ladies room to do number two or number... three periodically.
The Thermals were fucking amazing, the epitome of, I don't know, "showmanship", vivacious and unabashedly shrill. I have no idea how they got their set so tight, but everyone in the band seemed to know exactly when to start every song: Hutch Harris would be tuning and muttering something to the audience and then suddenly, without even a gesture on his part to the drummer, the entire band would launch into a song, playing in perfect synchronization, Kathy Foster's hair bouncing in time to the music. The crowd, which had been kind of lukewarm in their reception to the 'Sleep, went nuts. When the band did Pillar of Salt, the entire room, I shit you not, was, as I call it, dancin' around. My regret, other than the fact that Eve was clearly miserable, was that I couldn't really follow suit -- I'd like to think that my laborious digestion of the raw onions we'd mixed into the hamburger had taken the wind out of my sails, but I might just be getting too old to mosh at a show on a Sunday night. Incredible band, though: After they finished their encore and started packing up, we realized that the rhythm guitar player had sprained his ankle or sommat -- he was walking around on crutches -- but he'd been leaping and running around on stage the whole time. Solidarity with Eve, who'd accrued five upchucks over the course of the night. Good thing, as she noted, that the sound in the BB bathrooms is good.
Monday night I watched Out of the Past, another recommendation from Emma, which, I have to say, I liked a whole lot more than Laura. The lighting and the shooting locations in this one were really beautiful, and the whole thing was a bit more interesting, structurally and plot-wise. It didn't hurt that Jane Greer is hot and nasty. I don't get why they cast Kirk Douglas as the scary gangster, though, or why anyone's ever described him as being hard-boiled. He's always seemed a little fey to me.
Spent last night trying to put together some software releases and watching NYCTV (Channel 76 for me), which is actually pretty great. I caught Cool in Your Code, an exploration of the city zip code-by-zip code, and $9.99, a guide to doing stuff on the cheap. Which is, you know, how I roll.
On Saturday, though, it was kind of nice in the earlier part of the day, and Nina and I took a walk out to Bay Ridge by way of the Brooklyn Army Terminal docks where the Water Taxi stops. The light was really great and we took a lot of pictures; you can see the evidence in my photostream. That whole area is kind of dilapidated -- suffused with the slightly foul smell of the water, which reminded me of people (and me) productively fishing on the docks down on Casey Key; but beautiful, full of warehouse buildings with broken blue glass in their windows. The Water Taxi itself -- or a boat with the Water Taxi logo on it -- was moored at one of the piers, abandoned and bobbing gently in the wine-dark river. It looked different than it does in the advertising materials I've seen -- more like some kind of luxury yacht. From there we headed up into Bay Ridge proper and had a really nice dinner at an Indian place called Taj Mahal. I'd forgotten how good mango lassis are: They're so good you practically don't want to drink them because then they'll be gone.
Sunday was cold, cold. I picked up Eve at her house on the way home from Nina's, and we swung by Steve's C-Town to do my weekly shopping and to pick up materials for cooking dinner before the Thermals show (which Nina, knee-deep in Latin American Politics, had to cancel on): We settled on hamburgers with portobello mushrooms, and Eve snagged a six-pack of Kozy Shack chocolate pudding from the dairy aisle, citing an impromptu craving for the stuff. Indeed, she downed three of them while we baked and marinated the mushrooms in preparation for their use on the burgers I sauteed in my wonderful big frying pan. Their combination, along with baby spinach in place of lettuce, was pretty great -- I recommend it if you've got the wherewithal. I had a chocolate pudding myself, finding it kind of uck.
We met up with my friend Squick from work and got into The Bowery Ballroom around 9:30, just in time to hear the last opening act, The Big Sleep. They were no good -- potentially catchy, mostly instrumental pieces, but the band had about zero energy and stage presence. I'm all for nerds on stage, but you can't be shy, guys. Jump around. That's not the real story, though: Eve'd developed a bit of a stomach complaint on the way there, and by the time we'd brandished our tickets and made it to the lounge, she was right nauseated. She took a trip to the bathroom before we headed up to the stage area, and apparently up came the pudding, the burger, etc. Nonetheless, Eve is a total champ, and she stuck it out for the entire goddamn show, retreating to the ladies room to do number two or number... three periodically.
The Thermals were fucking amazing, the epitome of, I don't know, "showmanship", vivacious and unabashedly shrill. I have no idea how they got their set so tight, but everyone in the band seemed to know exactly when to start every song: Hutch Harris would be tuning and muttering something to the audience and then suddenly, without even a gesture on his part to the drummer, the entire band would launch into a song, playing in perfect synchronization, Kathy Foster's hair bouncing in time to the music. The crowd, which had been kind of lukewarm in their reception to the 'Sleep, went nuts. When the band did Pillar of Salt, the entire room, I shit you not, was, as I call it, dancin' around. My regret, other than the fact that Eve was clearly miserable, was that I couldn't really follow suit -- I'd like to think that my laborious digestion of the raw onions we'd mixed into the hamburger had taken the wind out of my sails, but I might just be getting too old to mosh at a show on a Sunday night. Incredible band, though: After they finished their encore and started packing up, we realized that the rhythm guitar player had sprained his ankle or sommat -- he was walking around on crutches -- but he'd been leaping and running around on stage the whole time. Solidarity with Eve, who'd accrued five upchucks over the course of the night. Good thing, as she noted, that the sound in the BB bathrooms is good.
Monday night I watched Out of the Past, another recommendation from Emma, which, I have to say, I liked a whole lot more than Laura. The lighting and the shooting locations in this one were really beautiful, and the whole thing was a bit more interesting, structurally and plot-wise. It didn't hurt that Jane Greer is hot and nasty. I don't get why they cast Kirk Douglas as the scary gangster, though, or why anyone's ever described him as being hard-boiled. He's always seemed a little fey to me.
Spent last night trying to put together some software releases and watching NYCTV (Channel 76 for me), which is actually pretty great. I caught Cool in Your Code, an exploration of the city zip code-by-zip code, and $9.99, a guide to doing stuff on the cheap. Which is, you know, how I roll.
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