Born/Dead, etc. in Richmond

With all of this talk about MDC I almost forgot to mention that I went up to Richmond the day before MDC to see Born/Dead. Honestly, I hadn’t actually heard any of Born/Dead’s music except what was featured in the Ramen Days documentary, but I figured since it was the end of the semester anyway I might as well head up to Richmond a day early and check them out.

Perennial Richmond openers Are You Fucking Serious? started the show and they continued their trend of being a different band every single time I see them. So far they’ve sounded to me like straight-up early 80s hardcore, classic rock-infused hardcore a la Annihilation Time, neo-crust a la From Ashes Rise and Tragedy and then tonight they added melodic, California-style hardcore to that list. A bunch of their old songs, including their theme song, got reworked slightly to include melodic, Adolescents-style solos and they ended the set with a cover of the “Live Fast, Die Young.” Honestly, I like this style a lot better than any of the others that AYFS? have attempted, but they’ll need to weed some of the older material out of their set if they really want to pull it off.

Born/Dead were up second, and as expected they were a dense, bleak, thrashing beast. However, what I didn’t expect was how much straight-up hardcore influence the band had in their sound; while there was certainly plenty of crust and neo-crust in their sound, there were some riffs that sounded like (if they were reworked slightly and a few settings were tweaked on the amp) they could have come off of anything on Frontier or Mystic Records. Basically, I went into this show expecting some straightforward, unremarkable Discharge worship and I ended up getting a lot more.

After Born/Dead I watched a little bit of Sword, but I really couldn’t take their southern-style thud-rock (especially with the terrible, flat vocals), so we took off before Kylesa played. Plus, it was my friend Brandon’s 21st birthday so we took him out and got him a bunch of licquor drinks from the bar around the corner. Fun times indeed…

Click here to see more photos of Born/Dead

Back

I had an AMAZING time in Richmond over the past few days… the partying was extra-hard and MDC was just about the best thing I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s like like they’re one of my favorite bands of all time or anything, but something about them live just made me completely go off; in fact, two or three songs in I got so stoked that I jumped up on the stage and did a front flip into the crowd, something I’ve NEVER done before and never thought that I would do for the first time last night. I’ll write a full post with tons of pictures later on, though, so I’d better stop writing about this before I get too carried away.

Besides that, not much is going on around these parts. Sooner or later I’m going to have to figure out how to shift into a summer routine in which I get a shitload of work done, and that needs to happen sooner rather than later. However, my students’ final papers are still trickling in, so this weekend is probably going to involve a grading session that’s bound to last at least a few hours. However, then it’ll be all about the 18th century until sometime in late August.

(Almost) Free

Last night around midnight I finally finished the last piece of writing I have to do for this semester; I still have to grade all of my student’s papers (which is a few solid hours of work), but after that I’ll be done for the semester. After that, the semester of reading starts… I have a few hundred poems and a few dozen books to get through in the next three months, so it’s going to take some real discipline to make that happen. Hopefully, though, I’ll still have plenty of time for writing and playing music and going to shows and all of the other crap that I do.

I won’t be doing much of that for the next two days, though, because I’m heading up to Richmond for a couple of shows. Tonight Born/Dead is playing with Kylesa at Alley Katz (though I don’t think my friends are too keen on sticking around for Kylesa), then tomorrow is MD-fucking-C! I’ve been listening to their first album, Millions of Dead Cops, pretty much exclusively for the last week, and since this is the lineup that’s playing the show I think it’s going to be pretty amazing. Direct Control is also playing the show and it’s Brandon’s 21st birthday, so as long as they’re sober enough to make it through their set it should be an absolutely amazing show. I think I might also try and convince some people to head up to Woodbridge tomorrow and go to the Vans skatepark as well, but I’m not getting my hopes up because everyone is pretty fucking lazy about stuff like that.

Damn Me

So last week just before I went up to Richmond to hang out for the weekend I was walking across a parking lot in Chapel Hill and apparently the detachable face for my car stereo, which I had put in my bag for safekeeping, fell out, rendering my car stereo utterly useless. Since Kelly and I are a little low on money right now (what, with the new laptop that I’m typing this on and everything) we haven’t been able to drop $115 to replace it yet, so I’ve been driving around in silence for the past two weeks. While I’ve always viewed driving as “me time,” a space where I could get in touch with my innermost thoughts and feelings, not having any music to listen to has changed the character of this time almost completely.

So, last night, as I was driving home from a friend’s house I was thinking about how excited I was to get home and play with my laptop and my thoughts turned to the blog post I’d written earlier in the afternoon, the one just below in which I posted a screen shot from my laptop and picked it apart, telling my blog’s no-doubt-rapt-with-attention readership about all of the little ways that I’ve hacked and customized Windows. Well, I was thinking about this blog post, congratulating myself for the brilliance of my work both on the computer and on the post, and then I realized something: I’m a giant fucking nerd. Man, I can’t imagine what myself ten years ago would have thought to see me sitting with a computer on my lap, pushing my glasses up my nose as I write a mini-treatise on my ability to customize an operating system. Fuck, I don’t think I even knew what an operating system was 10 years ago, and those of you who come to this blog looking to read about someone who lives a quasi-interesting life full of the woe and pleasure of music and literature were probably either bored stiff or laughing your ass off at what a buffoon I’ve become.

I’m actually so embarassed of the post that I briefly considered deleting it, but instead I’ve chosen the action I believe (in keeping with the spirit of my still-unwritten paper) the closest to the Aristotelian mean. Rather than leaving the post up and letting it stand on its own as a collossus-like representation of my nerddom, and rather than expose my deep-seeded (and perhaps somewhat disfunctional) self-consciousness to the regular readers of my blog by removing the post, I’ve decided to write this, a post that will go just above said piece explaining, qualifying and of course apologizing for it. So, there you have it, folks. I’m a giant fucking nerd, but I’m comfortable with that, and maybe, if you catch me on the right day, even a little bit proud of it.

Nothing Says Slacking Like a New Gadget

That’s right, after much waiting and gnashing of teeth the new laptop arrived via UPS yesterday. Even though I have a crapload of work to do this weekend and I should probably be using my laptop to formulate ideas about Aristotle’s thoughts on music, I’ve had a lot more fun customizing and tweaking out my laptop over the past 24 hours or so that I’ve had it. Here’s a screen shot of what I have so far:

First of all, unless you have a fairly new laptop yourself you’ll probably notice that this screen shot has a different aspect ratio than most screens. That’s because this laptop has a tiny little wide-format 12″ screen; it’s nice, because you really don’t need for the entire screen of a laptop to be gigantic; what you really want is width more than height when it comes to screen resolution. I like the wide format because it allows you to work with multiple windows at once, something that’s also aided by the 1.6mhz processor on this little four-pound bad boy.

The second most obvious feature I’ve installed is a Mac OSX-style animated dock at the bottom of the screen, which functions as a much nicer-looking version of the windows task bar, quick launcher and system tray all at once. The program that did this is called objectdock, and of course it’s fully customizable (unlike the really annoying Windows system tray) so you don’t have to have any icons down there that you don’t want. Objectdock is also responsible for the colored tabs at the left of the screen; when you mouse over these you get fully-customizable menus like the dock at the bottom of the screen. You can set your tabs for whatever you want them to be and then populate the menus however you like. You can also populate them with the contents of certain windows features; for instance, one of the defaults is a tab called “Tray” that contains the contents of your Windows system tray (though the menu is kind of ugly since most system try icons are designed to be displayed very small.

Also, across the right side of the window is my Active Desktop Calendar, which I talked about in an earlier post here. Ever since I found this handy little program I’ve been unable to live without it.

I’ve also been trying to move toward more open-source software with the new computer. The main two apps I’m using for this are GIMP2, which is an open-source image editor that gives Photoshop a serious run for its money, and OpenOffice, an open-source office suite that can finally allow you to get rid of all of the things you hate about Microsoft Office (and OpenOffice still reads and writes files like .doc, .xcl and .ppt, so you can still exchange files with dorks who are still stuck with office). I’m starting to find that anytime you have the inclination to spent a crapload of money on some overpriced software suite there’s almost always a group of open-sourcers out there who are doing something that’s even better than the original. You don’t hear that much about open source on the news anymore, but I think that the movement is just now coming to fruition and producing some really great software.

Another thing that I really like about the setup that I have on the new laptop is that it’s a much more mac-like interface. I’ve always liked macs, but I’ve hesitated to switch to them because 1. they’re really expensive (I briefly considered buying an iBook instead of this laptop, but they’re hideously overpriced given their specs) and 2. I know so much more about the architecture underlying windows that I don’t really want to start from scratch. However, with the combination of programs on this computer I get to take the things that I like about macs (the ability to truly multi-task, animated menus, more intuitive organization, etc.) without having to take the plunge head-first. Now if only my desktop weren’t so slow that it runs like crap with all of these programs going…

By the way, you may have noticed that I’ve christened a new category with this post: computers & gadgets. Even though I have no money I’m still pretty obsessed with this stuff and I’m always fiddling with my various computers in an effort to get them to run more like I want them to. I’m no expert about this stuff by any means, but I enjoy talking about it so feel free to skip these posts if you like.

Ave Maria Here I Come

For some reason or another, this evening I was bored so I spent the evening overdubbing vocals onto the band’s practice/demo tape. This was probably a little ambitious given the fact that I only have the very beginnings of lyrics for four of our six original songs, but, hey, I just wanted to see what it would sound like with something on there. I actually got the guts up to play it for Kelly and she seemed surprised; I just kind of went from the gut and sung like I was trying to puke something up, and it definitely came up in the Career Suicide/Sick Pleasure/RKL vein, but of course not nearly as good (obviously, since this is the first time I’ve actually sang into a microphone!). Kelly said that she thought it sounded good, but it would probably sound a lot better if I had better words.

I’m actually kind of torn about what the words should be like for this band; maybe it’s just because I’ve had DI’s Horse Bites, Dog Cries on perpetual repeat around the house all week, but I’m thinking something minimalistic might do it… just a handful of words for each song repeated several times, maybe with slight variations a la Can. Again, though, if a song is only going to have a handful of words, they should probably be at least half decent words, so this is going to take some thought.

I think I’m going to take another crack at it tomorrow, though, since it doesn’t look like there will be any kind of band activities during our normal Thursday-afternoon time slot. I just found a cool freeware multi-track recorder called Kristal, so that should make recording vocals much easier than it was the way I did it today. Speaking of freeware, I have this idea that I’m going to have no pirated software whatsoever on my new laptop (you know, whenever it gets here). I’m pretty sure I found good freeware office and image editing software, which are the two main pieces of naughtiness on my desktop. Maybe at some point in the future I’ll write a post highlighting some of my favorite freeware apps out there. It’s funny, for all the buzz around freeware and open source a few years ago, it seems like it’s only in the past year or so that there have been some open-source projects that can actually compete with their corporate competitors.

New Songs from the Bomb

In case there are any other big fans of Jeff Pezatti out there, his new band the Bomb has posted two songs to their myspace page:

http://www.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewProfile&friendID=12704165&Mytoken=20050411184242

I remember being a little disappointed with their debut record, Torch Songs, but then again when I got that record I also hated Raygun… Naked Raygun, which I now love (though, unfortunately, my copy is stuck in the car stereo that I lost the face to last week). Even if you didn’t like that stuff, though, this is a wholly new version of the band consisting (if memory serves) of the rhythm section of the Methodones (who rule) along with Pezatti on vocals. These two songs are excellent… they remind me a lot of Raygun… Naked Raygun and if you ask me that’s definitely not a bad thing. I wish the files were encoded a little better, though; I think that the album was recorded with J Robbins so clearly the final versions sound better than these low-bitrate files.

A Retooling Perhaps

So, it’s been almost a week since I’ve written in this thing. Even though I haven’t actually been writing, as always I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about writing. I know that I bitch about it all the time (and it was one of the reasons I started this blog in the first place), but I hate the way that projects, as they become bigger and bigger, take on this life of their own. Maybe it’s just because almost all of the posts currently on the front page of this blog fit this pattern, but I feel like this blog has turned into more of a live-journal type stream of emotional diarrhea rather than (as I envisioned it) a forum in which I could talk about things other than the latest punk and indie rock record releases. Once I relegated my literature analysis to my 18th-century literature blog and vowed to stop talking about teaching (since my students inevitably discover this blog) that left me with surprisingly little to talk about, particularly during times of the year like this when I really don’t have time to think about anything except work. Sure, I’m still watching a bit of TV and making time to listen to old records, but I don’t have any time to process my thoughts on these things; as soon as the needle picks up or I turn the TV off I’ve got my nose buried in a book or my fingers on the keyboard. Hopefully things will get more interesting around these parts as I finish up my work for the semester over the next 2 weeks or so, but I’m scared that it won’t and I’ve just lost the blogging spirit.

I’m not sure why I’m so worried about documenting the life inside my head anyway; after all, this blog is, by its very title, self-indulgent. However, when I get in moods like the one I’m in now I can’t help but question the value of meticulously documenting the operations of one’s mind. Am I ever really going to read this stuff again? Even if I wanted to, would it be healthy?

The one thing that I actually do think is worth documenting is my band. I’ve honestly never seen a real week-by-week account of starting a band like the one I’m writing, and I hope people are enjoying it. I know I would have if I were a reader and not the writer, though I know I’d also be very curious to actually hear songs; however, I’m still way too self-conscious for that right now. Even though I’ve played our sorta-demo for a bunch of people (all of whom claimed to like it) and we’re starting along the road to booking our first show I still cringe at the thought of someone hearing us. I think at least part of that is that we had (at least what I thought was) a pretty terrible practice last week. I don’t want to get too deep into this because this post isn’t in the “Making the Band” section, but we just weren’t together at all and I’ve been getting really frustrated with my inability to write any new songs that amount to anything. I’ve tried various methods to cure my writer’s block, but thus far nothing has actually worked. Last night I actually got kind of drunk and just played bass into a tape recorder for several hours; mostly this just yielded unlistenable noise, but I got about eight decent, distinct riffs that I’m hoping Dennis and I can mold into at least one or two songs. I’m not sure when that’ll happen, though, because we’re not having practice this week and I’m not sure if Dennis and I will actually get together and work on stuff during normal practice time.

Actually, fuck it… the band talk just reached a critical mass, so this is now officially going in the Making the Band section so that I can give leave to all of my thoughts on this matter.

I think that at least part of the reason that I’m having difficulty coming up with any new music is because my confidence has been completely non-existent when it comes to band stuff lately. When I think about the goals I set for myself (playing a show and recording a demo by the time Robert moves away sometime in August) I just feel like an utter moron; we still don’t have a singer (I don’t think my former idea is going to work out), and between Dennis studying in Peru for six weeks and Robert teaching full-time for two months I really don’t know if things are going to keep going. We’ll probably be able to squeeze in two more practices (if that) before Dennis leaves for Peru, then I’m honestly not sure when, if ever, we’ll get another solid string of time to practice. When I think about all that it really starts to feel silly to put any more effort into the band… however, whenever we’re having a good practice and things are going really well I remember that this isn’t about the product (which, honestly, I could care less about… I think that recording and playing live will be something just short of psychological torture) but the process. And when it’s going well, that process fucking rules.

Speaking of processes, I just finished up another draft of the paper that got trashed by the professor I mentioned in the previous post. Honestly, I wasn’t too happy with the previous draft that he saw; I only worked on it for a weekend, and it didn’t really turn out like I wanted it to. However, I’ve been working on it pretty much around-the-clock for the past two days and I think it finally amounted to something. I’m actually kind of proud of this version; I think I have a good argument and I explain it well, so if this one gets completely trashed then it’s going to sting a lot more. Ugh, and now I have to start work on the other paper I have to write for this guy… I don’t even want to think about that right now.

By the way, D.I.’s Horse Bites, Dog Cries seriously makes me want to sell everything I own except that record and a turntable and live in a shack on the beach. I think I finally understood what Kelly means when she talks about how pissed off she is that she didn’t try barbecue or iced tea until college… the fact that I lived twenty-five and a half years of my life without hearing this record just makes my music-listening life up until this point seem like a waste.

Okay, that’s enough yapping for now. I started this post chiding myself for producing so much verbal diarrhea and then I go and produce a hell of a lot more of it than I’ve produced in some time; I guess that I just can’t help myself. I definitely haven’t lost the blogging spirit; if anything, I’m the worst kind of blogging addict.

Highs and Lows

For the last few weeks—pretty much ever since I gave that colloquium talk—I’ve been riding high on a wave of confidence in my academic abilities. However, today that confidence was completely shattered as I hit a giant metaphorical brick wall standing between me and real success in grad school. One of the advisors on my committee from the philosophy department (who happens to be something of a bigwig in classical philosophy) is well-known as someone who will rip papers to shreds, and I just got back my first paper that I’d written for him. While we were corresponding over email trying to find a suitable way for me to get into the Republic (he seemed to think that I was incapable of any real philosophical analysis, so that limited us somewhat) he was shooting ideas down left and right, so finally I just wrote a paper and handed it in to me. Well, I got his comments on it today and they were brutal; he basically told me that I don’t have a lot of reason hanging around graduate philosophy departments and that while my work was quote unquote “acceptable” for an undergrad it wasn’t going to cut it for him. He then also criticized my skills at reading, analysis, argument and writing. While I appreciate that he didn’t mince words with me at all, it was still a bit of a demoralizing experience and it’s left me wondering what the fuck I’m doing here at all. Hopefully I’ll be able to work through this, but those comments really made me realize that as much as I like to play around with it, I can’t really do philosophy.

However, all of that kind of faded into the background when I arrived home to a FedEx containing the test pressings for the Direct Control EP that I’m putting out! Of course I ripped open the package and listened to one of them immediately and it sounds amazing; Aardvark did a great job with the mastering, and it sounds pretty much exactly like the master copy that we sent them. I called Brandon to tell him and he was of course super excited as well, so I had to go to the post office immediately and overnight the band their copies of the test pressings so that we can get them approved and get this record out into the world. By the way, we also finalized the cover artwork a few days ago and that is at the printers, so barring any unforeseen circumstances this record should be out within a month at the latest.

Now I think I’m going to spend the evening cleaning and trying to get back into the kind of zone where I can actually get some schoolwork accomplished.

Oh, and one more thing: I ordered a new laptop! It should be here in a few days, but in the meantime this is what it looks like:

The New York Review of Books: Welcome to Doomsday

The New York Review of Books: Welcome to Doomsday

Just read this article in the New York Review of Books on recommendation from Kelly, and I must say that it was extremely interesting. Growing up in rural Virginia I saw a lot of this sort of apocalyptic stuff, though admittedly most of it was confined to the epic bus rides to and from Norfolk to go to school every day. I guess I had a hard time believing that real-life adults take this kind of stuff seriously, though I guess there is a small but loud contingent who insist that they do.

However, I do find a little bit of fault with Moyers’s reasoning; I just can’t imagine someone finishing off a styroroam container full of coke while driving down the highway in their Hummer nad thinking to themselves “fuck it, the apocalypse is coming” and tossing it out the window. While these people certainly think about that kind of thing a lot, you can’t assume that it annihilates all traces of basic morality from their heads. Still, though, these kinds of attitudes obviously have the potential to be extremely damaging, and I think that those of us who have a voice (either through a band or a classroom or whatever forum) need to know what we’re up against.