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March 29, 2004
random crap day
March 27, 2004
amon tobin extravaganza
Hey Joe here's a handful of Amon Tobin tracks on empeethree...I picked stuff that was my favorite, and also tried to give a sense of the scope of what he does. There is a fair amount of variety between some of these tracks.
I'm going to leave them up here for only about a week, for obvious reasons. (Bandwidth, lawsuits, etc.)
From Permutation:
From Supermodified:
From Out From Out Where:
From Bricolage:
And some links:
Ninja Tune, Amon Tobin's Label
A mini
preview of the show I went to in Seattle Weekly, also with a hilarious review of
Metallica's modern career.
A bunch of links to Amon Tobin
Reviews
Amon Tobin's own kinda lame site.
That is all. Enjoy.
March 26, 2004
mind your own business
Sometimes the way I operate works.
If I'm mad at someone, or think their behavior was not good, even by the person's own standards, I often try to give them the opportunity to defend themselves, and explain why they acted the way they did.
What's good about this is that a lot of times I learn what the person's rationale was, or I learn some factors that I didn't know about. Then instead of having harbored resentment for a long time, I know what the score really is, and the person feels like I dealt with them squarely...without a twist.
Or they just apologize, or say that they just didn't consider it that way and that they appreciate the insight.
Sometimes it doesn't work.
I end up sounding self-righteous and like I'm "pointing out the speck in someone else's eye before romoving the plank from my own".
The person gets defensive, and I realize what a jerk I was, I and I end up ruining that person's trust in me.
As I've gotten older, I think I've gotten a little more wise. I actually do try to let people make their own mistakes, and only say something when they have broken some kind of committment, or crossed some kind of boundary with me personally...then I feel a little more like I have a leg to stand on.
But what do you do when you can hardly look at a friend, because you feel so much animosity about the way they've treated other people? Should you bite it down and just let your friendship drift away? Try to generate some kind of understanding?
When do you say, "Look, you're my friend, and the way you treated someone else, and the way you're operating seems really odious to me, and as your friend I just want to give you some feedback and a chance to explain yourself."
I guess anything can be said if it's said properly, but sometimes if something's really stuck in my craw, it's tough for me to keep my cool in the heat of the moment. So there I am...not trusting myself enough to say something for fear of lashing out, and feeling really grouchy at the person and not knowing how to feel close to them again without communicating.
It's a bitch!
March 24, 2004
tobin show
Going out tonight to hear some Amon Tobin wit my mans Ben and Nate. Tha Girls are having Girls Art Nite. No doubt we will get some pics of the art tomorrow on Loverzan.
Who is Amon Tobin and why am I bothering to see him? He's a producer Deejay guy who writes interesting music with beats (ie. not the same damn beat for 8 minutes with a pause where some bombastic black lady sings "Gonna shake yo asssss off").
His signature style is to pick some audio sample from some cheesy movie, and build a sonic vibe around it. Maybe tomorrow I'll drop some empeethrees up here for those who have never heard 'em.
But not tonight...I can't even wait for the upload. I gotta go.
March 22, 2004
she, buns hole
Hey, go check out my complete refurbish of I, Asshole. A great blog, now with a sweet high-contrast design for your eyeball pleasure.
She had all kinds of little weird requests (like a ripped paper design, a little pop-up box for the 'about' link, and some other little javascript widgets) that were fun technical challenges. I like to just listen to someone's design vision and then be able to make it happen technically.
March 18, 2004
80's bands who rocked the geek
If you're not an old-school computer person, you may not realize that a hard drive was not always something that came with a home computer.
When you turned on a Commadore 64, or a TRS-80, it just loaded up the entire operating system into RAM, and there you were, faced with a fresh system that looked exactly like it looked the last time you turned it on...no matter what you had done with it last time. I think my phone has more memory than my first computer.
I typed many many many basic programs into the computer for literally hours, watched their 10 seconds of output (OMIGOD! IT'S A CRUDE PICTURE OF THE SPACE SHUTTLE! AND IT ONLY TOOK ME 14 HOURS TO TYPE FROM RUN MAGAZINE!), and then they were gone forever when I turned them off.
Even having removable storage, like a disk drive, where one could SAVE programs for later was considered an incredible luxury to most home computer users.
But, the earliest computers had a way to read and write data: sound. You could shoot a program out the speaker jack, and read a program via the mic jack. Meaning you could store programs on...cassette.
Yes, cassette. I had games like the insanely hard (and really quite spooky) text adventure BEDLAM. The TRS-80 also had cartridges too...not sure about the C64.
So it's no surprise that some bands in the late 70's and early 80's got fascinated with the streams of clicks and beeps (most people know this well as the sound of connecting via dial-up), and the possibility of including them on an album, and making the data itself part of the album.
Suddenly, artists no longer had to be satisfied by including satanic messages backwards in the background...now they could encode computer programs that displayed things like this on the screen:
(Code in the song 'Thank You' on Scottish band Urusei Yatsura's 'Everybody Loves Urusei Yatsura' album, released on their own Oni records.)
And how did one get it on their computer? You had to tape the track on cassette and then figure out how to load it.
Anyway, this whole blog entry is really a neophyte's introduction to Kempa's really astoundingly cool and well researched post about computer programs on vinyl. By the way, I think I should say it's via Xblog.
March 17, 2004
something good gonna happen
Coming from northern Illinois, I got used to the fruits of a large Italian community. Inexpensive, hearty, warm, loud pizza joints. As much as I bitch about the politics of my old Rockford friends, I sure miss going to get $5.00 large sausage pizzas at Pino's where they cut it into squares, and inhaling it over Dungeons and Dragons and Dr. Pepper.
Pizza. Pizza that has a lot of cheese, and isn't paper thin, and doesn't come with sun-dried tomatoes. It isn't that easy to find in Seattle. I was beginning to think there wasn't a regular old pizza and pasta place in the whole city until I moved a mile away from one.
In a city where it's easy to spend almost $30 on one large frou-frou pizza with several toppings, it's nice to get a real pizza for $20 instead. They don't deliver...but if ya can't get off your lazy ass and go 8 blocks, I guess ya deserve Pagliacci's.
The place is called Santorini's Pizza and Pasta. Gino runs the place, and obviously knows half the people who come there by name. His son and daughter work there, too. Both, good looking kids.
They don't have a website. Go figure. I wanted to order ahead one day and I didn't have their menu, so I tried to look it up on the web. I had a hard time even finding their phone number.
So that day, when we were there waiting for our pizza, I asked Gino son they'd ever thought about a website. "Nah," he said, "we're not computer guys."
"Well, I'm a computer guy, that's why there is computer guys," I said.
"We might be moving anyway...we don't need a website."
So I went home, but I thought, 'Hey, I'd like a website just so I knew the pizza menu...maybe I'll offer to throw up something simple for them for free...they don't have to do anything but say it's okay.'
So next time I came back I asked the son, figuring maybe I could talk some sense into him. I offered, but he refused. "I got a wedding coming up," he says, "I'm too busy for anything extra. Plus, we might be moving."
"That's the nice thing about websites," I say, hardly ever knowing when to shut up, "you can change it easy."
Finally he got a little sick of me. "We don't need a website," he says, gesturing to the restaurant, "We got our own people!"
I figured they were both sick of me, but then when Gino saw me at the gas station he hailed me heartily, as only an old Italian guy can, "Hey! The website guy!" He asked me how business was and slapped me on the back. It reminds me that even if I'm a web application developer and an interface designer and and and information architect...I'm still The Website Guy to an old Italian guy. It made me proud to be the website guy.
He told me that they might be losing the property, and that they'd been there for, like, 20 years. They weren't even sure if they were going to open another place before they had to move. For some reason the thought of no Santorini's on the corner of 35th and 110th really bummed me out. Not just cause I'd miss the pizza.
I hadn't been by in a while but I went to Santorini's tonight, after an argument and a vicious craving for tortellini. It was late on St. Patricks day and there were a couple of small groups of old italian guys...old hardened Italians who said motherfucker a lot.
They walked out, and Gino gave me a nod. "How's business!?" he yelled across the restaurant. "Good!" I yelled back. I smiled. It had been awhile, but that man is in the business of recognizing faces.
Suddenly it really bummed me out...seeing them there...thinking of what that place meant to me. I was forcing down the last few bites of my tortellini (stomach says stop, mouth says go!) when the waitress lays a glass of chianti at my table. "It's from my dad," she says, as she probably has one thousand times before.
I drank the wine, took the pen from the check, and started to write this blog entry on my bookmark. When I left, I waited for Gino to come out the back room. I said hi, but wasn't sure what to say. I asked him about the move and he seemed real heavy about it right away.
"I dunno. They want to build here. We might have to leave...October....November. I don't know. "
He paused.
"I got a feeling. Something good gonna happen."
March 11, 2004
one more tiny blogger!
My awesome swamp girl Jezebel used to send out an incredible Email newsletter called the 'Jesi Monthly'. It was basically a long once-a-month blog entry and was always worth reading. For a long time I prodded her to let me start her up a blog.
Finally the other day, she Emailed me and said:
Okay, I'm Ready.
So now y'all get to read her awesome blog:
March 8, 2004
just for steve
For my slightly neanderthal friend over at Refractional Darkness (at least, until Salon makes me take it down.
