For some years I’ve been wanting to get back into drawing + painting, but never found the time (supposedly). But recently I bought a Moleskine pad and have started again. I will try to fill the pad asap and post my work regardly of how good /bad I feel it is.
You can follow the postings here.
Yep, that’s right, I was asked by SBCC (my employer) to hold a seminar on blogging this Friday. I spoke for about 3 hours to a mixed (mostly older) crowd of people. Fun and easy.
For those who attended the seminar, thank you once again. If you click on “Continue Reading” you can see the full entry and a series of links to all the sites I showed. If you would like the “Rules of Blogging”, drop me a line and I will send it to you.
Last Thursday night I came home from the Los Lobos concert at USCB to find that while away, the pipe on the toilet had just exploded from being old and for over an hour water had been filling my apartment. My bathroom was two-inches deep, the bedroom was soaked, and water was seeping through the floorboards down into the living room below.
I thought I was going to become homeless! But in the end I was very, very lucky. Only a few thrift store records got damaged (and of course the one CD that got destroyed was a public library CD). But for just under a week I’ve been living without carpet, and with industrial fans going 24/7 along with a dehumidifier to get rid of the water.
I did well, as I’m not that messy and not much was on the floor to get wet. And all my computer/writing/business/film/art stuff was in another (dry) corner of the place.
Yesterday, they installed new carpet and today all my stuff got moved back in from temp storage. Phew.
It was traumatic, still, I have to tell you.
Anyone who knows my CD comps knows I have really broad tastes, and love nothing better than to juxtapose, say, DMX with French chanson. So it should be no surprise that my iTunes and iPod are usually in perpetual shuffle play. One reason is that my two favorite radio shows growing up were living shuffle plays: Space Pirate Radio in SB and John Peel’s show on Radio One in the UK.
The other reason is that juxtaposition is a way of hearing things differently and sometimes “new” even when they are old. Today I listening to the opening section of The Fall’s “Hip Priest” right after The Beatles “Eight Days a Week” and believed I heard the same drums. Does that make The Fall more Beatlish or The Beatles mroe Fall-ish? Or was I hearing something new for 30 seconds before the memory kicks in?
Also, and I’d like to hear feedback on this, I think there is a secret shuffle play algorithm installed in both ‘Pod and ‘Tunes. I call it:
THE STEELY DAN ALGORITHM
My iTunes holds 100GB of songs, that’s 30,000 songs so far. There are at most 50 Steely Dan songs in there. My iPod holds about 5,000 songs, of which maybe 20 are Steely Dan (A Decade Of, and bits of Aja and Can’t Buy a Thrill).
Yet every day I get at least one Steely Dan song come up in shuffle. Why is this? The odds are incredible. So I’m thinking that one of the programmers of the shuffle play code has a line in there about Steely Dan. IF “Peg” then PLAY. Or whatever code looks like.
Anybody else have this problem?
Bleary and blurry on a Monday morning after the closing night party. 10 days of working, writing, partying, and, well, go check it out!
Yep, days will now get brighter! Fortunately, we’re southern enough that even our shortest day is bearable.
Well, first of all, we have some semblance of democracy back in this country. Tuesday night I spent with my friend Chris watching films, eating vast quantities of meat, and trying my best to not look the t3h Internets and TV. And then the phone call came from Jon: “Santorum is out of a job.” Yes!
Then later a text: “Dems take the house.” Damn! I slept better that night than I have in a long time, only to find out that that other fukker Rummy had resigned. Wow!!
I treated myself that afternoon to the Borat movie, which had me in stitches, particularly during a certain wrestling sequence. It is, as Jon says, a movie about tolerance in its own strange way.
And then I have been spending most of this and last week reading (and finishing) John Hodgman’s book, “The Areas of My Expertise,” which is the funniest thing since the Onion put our their first compilation book. I have been giggling for some time now.
Okay, that’s me for now.
I really wish I could be publishing my writing for the Santa Barbara News-Press (I have about four to five articles per week these days, bless ’em), but I can’t even access my own stuff with a password. Ack!
UPDATE: I have also been in tears over this Internet meme.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Better cat madness here.
OMG ANOTHER UPDATE LOL: There’s now a blog about all this.
So anyway, last Friday was my last day at my day job. Last Saturday was my birthday party. Kinda a celebration, you might say. I have uploaded the photos to Flickr and the Audio of the birthday party gig is now up in the Audio folder. So you can jump in straight to the embarrassment of hearing me warble, here you go:
SET LIST:
Lust for Life
20th Century Boy
Love Is the Drug
Queen Bitch
Werewolves of London
Laura
Sympathy for the Devil
Yep! Thanks to my band–Jeff Sparks, Mark Getten, Rob Taylor, Zach Madden, my backup vox Diane (see above!), everybody else who went woo-woo at the right moment, and our mystery sax player. Thank you all! You rock!!!
Hi gang, I just got back from the UK after a well-earned week’s holiday. You can check the photos over at Flickr, featuring stops in Liverpool, London, and Essex.
Also, you can see two quick videos from my journey, all in low quality sound and vision. The first is TRAIN, which words better as a loop. The second is CLUBBIN, which details my trip down stairs in a club into an awaiting throng of dancing women, set to an irresistible distorted house beat.
