And KNDD served up a Gotye song that I loved and CAN’T FIND. Help me!

It sounds contemporaneous with this track (notice the cool cut-out video):

(If that link dies for some reason, you should be able to find it here: http://youtu.be/Jwekc5qgVeA)

It has moderately distorted lyrics and a sparser arrangement than this. Any ideas? Because sometimes the right music is the only antidote to life that works.

Whole house vacuum, including furniture relocation, corners, and deep crevice extraction: 5 hours

Mopping of all non-fabric surface areas (approximately 900 square feet): 2.5 hours

Deep carpet cleaning for all carpeted surface areas and two large area rugs (approximately 600 square feet): 2.5 hours

Time to recover from cat urine fumes every time I emptied the carpet cleaner: approximately 3 minutes per empty x 4 empties = 12 minutes of my life I’ll never get back

Morale damage when I found my cats getting cozy with freshly cleaned laundry: -24 points, inspiring immediate panic, rapid pulse, and short breath.

Tigerlily is happy!

Ralph is so cute!

Stick with goldfish, people.

David‘s birthday was on Friday, the 20th, and he kindly invited me to tag along for the ride — a day at Cypress Mountain, and then another day at Grouse.  It was my first visit to Cypress, but I can PROMISE you it won’t be my last — if nothing else, I want to go back so I can see this view in person:

Bluebird View from Cypress Mountain

What I saw while I was there mostly looked like this:

When we were done, we did the best we could to squeeze all the rainwater out of our gloves and hats and pants and underpants and retreated to the car.  On the way, we were nearly skewered alive by 40mph sleet, which undid all the squeegee work we’d just finished at the lodge.  In the car, I sacrificed my vintage copy of Star Trek 5 (The Paperback) to soak up the 6 gallons of ice-water that proceeded to dribble from our clothing.

Bottom line: while the slopes themselves were awesome as long as you didn’t stop moving long enough to cool down, the frigid dismount was excruciating.  I consider myself relatively impervious to foul weather; by the time I got in the car, I was on the brink of crying like a little girl.

Also, I did my first black run.  On accident.

It was kind of painful.

That night, we determined that we would do anything we had to do to avoid slush, which is why we hit Whistler instead of Grouse on Saturday…  along with 25,000 other skiers and boarders, 4,000 marijuana legalization activists, 2,500 french language snobs, and a contingent of 1,800 Baptist ministers who had been tragically misdirected on their way to a bible conference in Memphis.

Despite an early start, lousy road conditions and congestion turned the trip into a 2 hour and 45 minute slog from North Vancouver.  Somehow, we ended up behind a white van with a “School Bus” label.  Someone had scratched the words “Fun Bus” into the thick layer of dust and grime immediately below it.   Here’s how the boys from the “Fun Bus” roll:

When you have to go

Although I was initially disgusted by this, I did eventually plow the flex into a snowbank, haul myself over the guardrail, and find a nice patch of virgin snow protected from the view of passing traffic.  It was a euphoric moment, and I suspect I weighed about 12 pounds less when I got back into the car.  Hey, less weight means less fuel burned on the way up the mountain, right?

In Whistler, it took nearly another 2 hours to load my EDGE card, rent my gear, and wade through the long upload lines from Creekside…  but then, miraculously, we were standing outside Raven’s Nest looking down Expressway.  With contented sighs, we exchanged satisfied looks and pushed off.  Aaaaaand down I went like a sack of potatoes.  And again.  And again.  Turns out one of my skis wouldn’t fit properly into my boot so that I could turn left, but not right.  Bad start!  Fortunately, David had the patience to analyze the situation (it was the ski, not the boot) and figure out which adjustment made the difference.  He tightened the length binding by one setting, and everything worked.  It required one more adjustment later in the day, but seemed solid enough to trust, even on moguls.

Whistler truly is a magical place.  On this particular day, there was a curtain of grey cloud over its midsection.  Below that, the village was getting a light but steady deluge of big, wet flakes, and the slopes were just a teensy bit slushy — you wouldn’t get wet falling into them a few times, but you could feel the snowmass hugging your skis.  Above, a high overcast broke occasionally to reveal patches of blue sky, the wind from the southwest was irregular, gusty, and bitingly cold, and the snow was perfect, perfect powder, drifting deep on the fringes of the runs.  Occasionally, coming down, you’d pop through a gap in the cloud layer and and see the whole valley stretched out below you and…  oh, that is magical.  I can’t find a picture online that does it justice.  You can’t fit that much of creation into a 12 or 15 megapixel box and call it anything more than a mnemonic.

After a greasy Village lunch, we barely managed to get back up  the mountain  in time to ski down to Creekside where we were parked.  We had just left Midstation down Crossroads and were just turning onto Franz’s trail into the first direct sunlight of the day when — with a click, clack! of finality — my ski binding flew off.  Which is why  I ended the trip scooting down the last 2,000 feet or so on my butt.  Using one ski as a sled and the other as a hand-rail, I could at least make good time on the steeper slopes, but it was not exactly what I’d call a dignified exit.

Next time, I’ll have my way with Franz.  Until then, I will nurse my bruised buttocks and search for the passport and two phones I lost on my way home =(

Silversun Pickups from god knows when

I’ve really developed a taste for Silversun Pickups. Pay attention especially to the precision of the opening riffs of “It’s Nice to Know You Work Alone”, which are unusually precise by Silversun’s standards. For some reason, this reminds me of some of the alt-rock that flirted with the edges of grunge back in the early 90s, but that could just be senility creeping in.

Brian Aubert Smiles Upon The World!

The one thing I’m a little conflicted about is Aubert’s voice. It seems more limited in register and tone than the band is as a whole. Likely, he’s just an unrepentant negative Nelly like myself, but I like my music to have some frenetic happiness from time to time, to express a complete emotional range, and Aubert keeps Silversun from doing that for me. (Brian, if you do happen upon this — I’m sorry, but it’s generally true!)

But look — despite his Corganesque fugue expression in the band line-up, he can look happy!

UPDATE: Substitution is actually a reasonably cheery song — check out the video here.

This rose actually smells like poo

…it’s hard to stay mad when there’s so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much. My heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst. Then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain, and I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life.

Lester, American Beauty

Seeing this movie in the theater in early 2000 was the first (and last) time I ever had hot tamales melted into my movie theater popcorn.  I loved it from start to finish — the movie, not the popcorn. It was quirky, witty, and able to blend pitch-black fatalism seamlessly with an almost spiritual reverence for the fragility and aesthetics* of mortal existence, the gleaming surface of a troubled planet.  Plus, it featured Thora Birch topless, a cool Eurythmics cover of an even cooler Neil Young tune, Kevin Spacey, and lots and lots of cannabis sativa. In my opinion, the absence of any disembowelment, evisceration, or maiming more than compensates for the part where Lester gets shot in the head.

During my own darker days of the early millenial decade, I often lamented the fact my breakdown was not as pithy, emotionally satisfying, or downright cool as Lester’s was**.

As usual, I digress. My point here is that the world is beautiful — painfully, heartlessly, gloriously beautiful.  It is easy to be enraged by the front pages and the headlines.  It is easy to condemn the brutality of both our own natures and the grander, encompassing Nature of which they are a part.  And it is easy to be appalled by the mean injustices and cruelties perpetrated on all sides, day after day, with the ceaseless and metronomic precision of a chicken processing plant.  What is difficult is to appreciate the beauty of the machinery even as it cuts into us.  We are human mulch for a forest whose scope we cannot fully comprehend or experience; we are aphids wandering the circumference of a single rose-petal.  We compost and nourish the world with our endurance and our structure, our pleasure and our pain.  It is beautiful.

_{*Please note that seeing beauty everywhere in the world does not imply that everything in the world is beautiful. To that end, see my previous post.}

_{**Don’t forget about that bullet to the head, though.}

Idiots in Bad Stage Make-up

Okay, so I made the mistake the other day of googling Gwar. I’m not sure what made me think of it, really, but once it was there I had to look. Surely they weren’t as bad as you remember them! And the pictures — well, they’re hilarious! Nothing wrong with a self-respecting metal band dressing up like fantasy monsters with…  obscene codpieces and drawn-on abs, pracing around on stage, scattering fake body fluids over the audience…  right?

Well, then I checked out a video.  Not some videos.  ONE video.

It was this one.  Don’t watch it if you’re easily offended, like me.  Or if you’re my wife, or if you’re under the age of 13 without the written consent of your parent or guardian.  In triplicate. And please, if you are my significant other, DO NOT WATCH THIS VIDEO.

They are sick bastards. I mean, really, WHY? They’re worse than I remembered. ICK. It’s not realistic at all, but it arouses in me the same visceral nausea (cold palms, cold sweat, descending stomach as my transverse colon contracts in horror) that I felt when I made the mistake of watching the opening sequence from La Terza Madre. This isn’t art, it’s depravity.

I’d like to think that the big, dramatic, glory-drenched flash-mobs would be a perfect antidote…

…but I know too well that at least one of the people sitting at those tables, smiling and nodding as the universe breaks out with a glorious fruit of unexpected order and cooperation, is probably thinking about how best to stage a fake disembowelment at a concert.

So instead, I will cure myself with Goldfrapp and FC Kahuna. That is all.

The charge was stalled by a wooden rail fence about 60 yards from the Southern line.  The intense fire from Cobb’s Georgians splintered the fence, spattered mud in all directions, and decimated those men moving up behind it.  But still, the Irish came on.

A strange and macabre sound was heard above the exploding artillery shells and pathetic screams of the wounded.  The Confederates were cheering and applauding, overcome by the bravery of their Irish foe.  Maj. Gen. George Pickett of Gettysburg fame wrote after the battle to his fiancée: “Your soldier’s heart almost stood still as he watched those sons of Erin fearlessly rush to their death.  The brilliant assault on Marye’s Heights of their Irish Brigade was beyond description.  Why, my darling, we forgot they were fighting us, and cheer after cheer at their fearlessness went up along our lines.”

Cathy and I are watching Ken Burn’s take on the Civil War.  Usually, the romanticized view (if there is any such thing left) is cut from the heart of the events being described.  Every so often, though, a nugget will slip through.  There is something gratifying about the idea: an enemy, doomed by fate, inferior economic capacity, and moral incorrectness, losing control of themselves and being moved against their will to cheer the bravery and noble self-sacrifice of the “good guys.”   Alas, it is all tosh.  All you have to do is go back a few paragraphs in the narrative (currently published in fragments here) to find out that a large part of Confederate general Cobb’s 28th Massachusetts were, like their foes, recently immigrated Irish.  And at this point in the war — a cold, late December in 1862 — any romantic notions about the war had long since been expelled.  For the most part, these were countrymen on unfamiliar territory, fighting for different sides of a fractured dream of opportunity, held in position by the likelihood of being shot if they dared desert.

The simplified version is much more satisfying.

As a lengthy aside, I must say that the confederates offered much more compelling heroes.  There was, of course, Lee, the genteel and conflicted genius of 1860s warfare; Albert Sidney Johnston, who died with his boot full of blood because he had sent his personal physician to take care of some captured Union soldiers; Stonewall Jackson, of course, the originally and absolutely coldblooded Saint of Killers; and Nathan Bedford Forrest, who could have been an inspiration for Neo fighting against a crowd of Federalist Agent Smiths and, after serving as the KKK’s first grand wizard, urged the dissolution of the Klan before the institution had become the monstrous legend we know and despite today.  All I’m saying here is that, if I were playing a video game version of the Civil War, I would generally favor the confederacy.  It was morally insupportable, of course (like Lincoln, who embraced emancipation mostly because of its political expediency!), but much more satisfying on a purely emotional level.  McClellan was a putz, and Sherman lacked Stonewall’s cool factor; I’d prefer not to get a musket to the face serving either of them.

I wrote most of this thinking of the veterans of our recent wars in Iraq (both of them) and Afghanistan (only one, but reaaaaaally stretched out) and thinking about the confusion around how these wars, and their human cost, are painted in modern media.  In years to come, it is possible that the hazy lens of retrospection will cast an aura of subdued heroism over these conflicts.  The sharp edges of meaning and experience decay so quickly in human time; by the time I am on my deathbed, perhaps the world will largely regard these events as inevitable, perhaps even accidentally useful: the aging and decrepit West strikes out in untargeted frustration, and the East awakens from its Feudal Sleep and assumes its proper place in the world…  More likely, some of us will look back and say, whatever happened to such selfless heroism as that?  And the rest of us — whoever we are at that time — will say, what the hell are you talking about?  Those young people died for something that no one, least of all the politicians of the time, understood properly.

Such is history.  Which is why I don’t study it anymore, except accidentally =)

The Mainspring of a Clock

The title is derived from a 1950s era “libertarian” history entitled “The Mainspring of Human Progress.”  I thought it was full of crap when I read it in 1993, but definitely interesting.  As to the specifics of how the phrase worked its work into this, such questions are probably best not asked.

Mainspring

Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman

I remember reading Gaiman’s Fragile Things on an Alaskan Airlines flight between DCA and SEA in late 2007 or early 2008. I was delighted when I saw one of Neil’s titles in the airport bookstore, and by the time I disembarked in Bellingham, I was thoroughly intoxicated. It is too dark for Cathy’s taste, but if you like a bit of morbidity with your fairy tales, you cannot go wrong with this book. And since it’s a collection of short stories (and poetry), there’s a great deal of variety. I strongly recommend it!

One of the ideas that stuck with me after reading this came from “October in the Chair,” which is a ghost story contained inside an allegorical story populated by characters representing months of the calendar year. I though it would be absolutely awesome to get a few people together around a fire and take turns reading October-spirited short stories — a little King, a lot of Bradbury, and definitely some Gaiman. It doesn’t have to match the canonical “ghost stories around a fire” trope, a la the opening of The Fog, but a little bit of that wouldn’t really hurt, would it? Sadly, October’s weather and my schedule have been equally inconvenient for making this happen.

To compensate for this failure, I have recorded myself reading “October in the Chair” and I have added campfire sound effects. It’s a pretty crappy amateur recording job, I’m afraid. But if you like Neil Gaiman, or you like ghost stories, or you think you might enjoy listening to my voice in the dark… give it a listen. Running time, 24 minutes and 21 seconds; file size, 44.5 MB.

October in the Chair

Note: my office is woefully inadequate for any serious recording project — too many hard, refractive surfaces.  Also, you will here many instances of my cats mewling in the background.  And Cathy talking to them.  All mangled by my noise filters

I Am the 2%

My Father is with the 1%

99% of us died in the making of Episode VI

Although, obviously, it’s done plenty of that.  I approve of this movement because, if you peel back the thin layer of frivolity and pseudo-anarchist revelry that reflects back so much of the media light thrown its way, there are some truly novel features underneath. This movement has a sense of ambition I haven’t seen in public protests in my lifetime: they want to occupy EVERYTHING! And not just occupy it; they want to humanize it, make it serviceable, and to declaw and domesticate the systems they perceive as preying upon the masses. The confused but consistent impetus towards fundamental social and economic transformation in this movement is really quite quixotic. And quixotic is charming!

I have not slurped the delicious milk of humankindness for a long long time and I'm going to make sure you know it, punks

One of the hallmarks of the Occupation movement to date has been its vagueness about what, exactly, is being occupied, what exactly is to be accomplished. I must admit that I doubt the possibility of “success” in the terms an activist might paint them: the banks and moneyed interests will probably not be overthrown, recessions will probably prove immune to political exile, and the Universe will almost certainly not become a fundamentally kind and gentle place. Most likely, nature will remain not only amoral but generally damp and clammy as well. Even worse, regardless of innovations in antimalarial technology, mosquitoes will definitely continue to thrive somewhere on the planet.

However, I also doubt the movement’s detractors’ implicit claim that talk is cheap, useless, or even dangerous. We should talk about things, and at great length. And working together to make the world a better place isn’t just something for college students to theorize about between liberal arts classes: it’s an obligation of every major thought system the planet has ever seen, including capitalism. Experimentation is part of the imperative of our humanity in just the same way that self-improvement is a mandate of the gods of our mothers and fathers. On these precepts, any voice that says or implies “put your heads down and work” should be rejected. The work of free people should be done with heads up and eyes open. And any voice that says “be quiet, you have no right to speak” should be reviled. Speech is our birthright, and silence is death.

If the occupation has done nothing else, it has occupied our collective thoughts for a while — and that is, perhaps, the only important thing. May the Occupation remain thought-provoking.