Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

Apropos of our recent blogversation about the contents of our mp3 players (Mike apparently plays “air mp3″), here’s an article our paper picked up from the San Francisco Chronicle about how our mp3 playlists, like an Internet Explorer security flaw, may be an unguarded window into our souls. 

To obfuscate, some are placing music onto their players that they never intend to listen to, like buying furniture for a room that you never sit in except when in-laws are in town.  As one guy said:

 Christopher Breen, editor in chief of Playlist, a San Francisco magazine covering the digital-music scene, said he keeps his own library in pristine condition.

It’s similar to when “your mother tells you always to wear clean underwear because you never know if you’re going to end up in the emergency room,” he said. “Now you have to worry if someone sees you have ‘Me and You and a Dog Named Boo’ in your music collection.”

Mike kicked my ass the other day for not posting about the Thievery Corporation show we saw Wednesday night.  We’ve developed a liking for a few of these “downtempo” groups, like Zero7, Massive Attack, Supreme Beings of Leisure along with Thievery Corporation. They tend to have original tunes and lyrics layered over a sometimes-dubbed, sometimes live rhythmic groove.  Their forebears number Portishead and the French group Air. It exists, I believe, to create a chill atmosphere to accompany substance abuse more than to grab you by the lapels and stimulate your intellect.

Similarly, Thievery Corporation put 13 - 15 musicians on the stage, including two drummers, bass, a guy playing an electric sitar, 3-man horn section, 6 different vocalists and the two DC-area founders, Rob Garza and Eric Hilton. The show was at a new venue for us, Premier on First Avenue South, and it’s nice - newly remodeled and spacious - unlike a lot of local music venues that seem to be merely real estate in transition, just waiting for the gentrification reaper.  They played one long, generous set plus an encore, and we danced and sweat and went away happy.

I had my camera, but the battery was dead when I tried to use it, so I took a quick lesson in how to use my wife’s camera phone (mine won’t take pictures.  They end up looking kinda arty, but that’s solely due to the technical limitations of the device, and not to any talent on my part.

Thievery Corporation includes a lot of Middle Eastern/Indian influences, most apparent in their cd The Richest Man In Babylon.  These were two guys from Istanbul who played wind instruments on one of the numbers, Facing East, from that album.  One was a sorta double-reed like an English horn, the other a flute-like thing. They only appeared for that number.  You wonder how they can travel with so many personnel and use them situationally.  The show was $30 apiece, though…

This has such a familiar ring - dark horse candidate (Gerald Ford) ascends to highest office upon the demise of larger-than-life predecessor (Nixon), then, with unseemly haste, pushes an agenda designed to enhance/rescue the reputation of said benefactor (pardons the bastard).  Now, if it turns out Ratzinger played football for Michigan…

Kathy at Freshman44 uncorked a Friday meme - Put your iPod (in my case, a Creative Nomad Zen Xtra) on “shuffle” mode, and list the first 10 songs with a color in the title.  This kind of thing is fraught with danger, as it may reveal some really lame stuff with your fingerprints on it.  OK, deep breath…here goes:

• That Old Black Magic - Glenn Miller (Shut up! I like Big Band music)
  
• Green Dolphin Street - Miles Davis (the ‘58 Sessions)
  
• Blood Red River - Beth Orton (Central Reservation)
  
• Ivory Tower - Garaj Mahal (live recording - they’re a west coast acid jazz act we’ve seen a couple of times)
  
• Carmen Ohio - The Ohio State Marching Band (I’m playing on the recording)
  
• Orange Moon - Erykah Badu (Mama’s Gun)
  
• Green Earrings - Steely Dan (Live In America)
  
• Gold In The Air Of Summer - Kings Of Convenience
  
• Blues Part II - Blood, Sweat & Tears
  
• You Blues - Juliana Hatfield (Only Everything)

Bonus Tracks:

• Black Cat - Starlight Mints
  
• Yellow - Coldplay (Parachutes)
  
• Black Milk - Massive Attack (Mezzanine)
  
• Black Cow - Steely Dan (Aja)

Then my fingers got tired.

Thievery Corporation is performing tonight in Seattle.  Mrs. Perils and I have been enjoying their music for a couple of years, and she mentioned last night that they were in town.  We discussed going, but she had a bad night’s sleep last night and was dragging her ass around the kitchen like it was an Airstream about 6, so I figured there was no way. 

She just came into the den and switched on KEXP’s Wo’Pop show, a world music show that lights up our Tuesday nights, and suddenly remembered about the Thievery Corporation show and said, “we should go!”  So, we’re outta here, on a school night yet!  Film at 11 (or 12, or 1).

If you’d been in a coma for ten years and awoke last night to the broadcast of the Mariners-Yankees game, the call in the fourth inning would have had a familiar ring:

• Tino Martinez belts a tremendous shot over the right field wall, driving in Alex Rodriguez from second for a two-run homer and giving Randy Johnson a 3 - 1 lead.

Unreality, and perhaps the vegetative state, would soon set in when our patient deduced that the aforementioned players were wearing pinstripes instead of Mariner…whatever they wear.  Should he remain conscious, he’d learn how the Mariners squeezed the city and state for a lavish new stadium, then unloaded all of their high-priced talent in a carefully crafted descent to mediocrity.  (Lou Piniella almost screwed it up, but they ran him off, too).

Meanwhile, the SuperSonics got blown out of their first playoff game with the Spurs, and lost two of their starters to severe ankle sprains.  That makes it all the more likely that they’ll lose the second game at San Antonio tonight.  As Art Thiel in the Seattle PI said, they’ll have to work hard simply to “ prevent the Spurs from the biggest 2-0 lead since Dolly Parton over Olive Oyl”.  I don’t really care that much about the Sonic, but I had to find a way to use that quote.

This is a test post, more than anything.  My laptop’s hard drive went south over the weekend - more on that in a minute.  I just wanna see if I can post.  I’ve had the box checked in Radio where I want nightly backups upstreamed to the server, and it appears that everything has been restored from the server after some finagling.

I returned to Seattle last night from an (obviously) uninspiring week in Milwaukee. Today, Saturday, we just chilled, and finally got out for our favorite walk down to Gasworks Park and over to Fremont.

At Gasworks, we happened onto a whacked out tribe of croquet players assaying a truly evil layout that must have covered about an acre and involved playing up a pretty steep hill to the final wicket.

Kathy at Freshman 44 has been waiting patiently for me to respond to her meme invitations, most recently the Huffington one which asks us to discuss five people, dead or alive, whose blogs we would have read.  I could respond that I’m quite happy, thank you, with the blogs I read already, and that’s mostly true.  My responses below are not intended to portray myself as finding the rest of you wanting.  One possible faux pas in listing someone here is that the person has actually published extensive memoirs, and I’m too ignorant and/or lazy to find them.  Also, cleaving to the theory of one of my book club mates that authors cannot be trusted to tell the truth about their work, I’m not gonna list any.  They’re writers, dammit, and if a writer won’t write, what’re you going to do?

Okay, here goes:

• Rosemary Woods, Richard Nixon’s personal secretary, who died a month or two ago.  Who can forget (aw, shit, who actually remembers?) her demonstration, impersonating a rubber-jointed Russian gymnast, of just how she might have accidentally depressed the “erase” button with her foot while transcribing the infamous White House Tapes, thus causing the 19-minute gap?  Considering what was on the tapes, just think of all the stuff we didn’t hear.
  

  

  
  
• Roger Maris - during the tortuous 1961 season as he and Mickey Mantle chased Ruth’s 61-homer record.  He was vilified (as Hank Aaron later would be) for presuming to chase the Babe’s laurels, hated the publicity and told of having clumps of his hair fall out as the season burgeoned.  After that season, he continued to play good baseball but never approached the glory of that year.  He died of cancer at age 51.


• Chief Seattle - who as a child in 1792 saw the first Englishmen (the Vancouver expedition) anchor in Puget Sound and, as an adult, guided his people’s interactions with the founders of the city of Seattle.  It would be fascinating to know what life was like before white settlers came to this region I love, and the native’s perspective on the transition.


• My Dad - a lot of family lore died with him last fall, despite both his stated intention at one point of getting his grandmother to tell stories to a tape recorder, and my own urge to get him to do the same.  He was an only child, so he was the end point of several possible lines of inquiry.


• Warren Buffett for obvious reasons.  However, I believe I’ve read that Buffett is even a little shaky using email, so getting him flowing mellifluously with Radio Userland might take some doing.

Has any of you gotten this damn American Community Survey thing from the Census Bureau?  Geez, what a lot of pencil-pushing.  It starts out with a rush of cock-eyed optimism: the “Age (in years)” box allows a 3-digit entry.  The survey seems to be structure-based, as in “what is the living unit (mobile home, sf detached house, cardboard box)” and “what sort of louts hang in this crib?”.  Example:

• How many rooms does it have (not counting bathrooms, porches, closets, outhouses)?
  
  
  
  • No, the coat closet is not a “home theatre” just because you sneak in there with a flashlight and the Victoria’s Secret catalogue.
    
  • Why haven’t you finished grouting the tile in the downstairs bathroom?   Your wife hates sitting on the toilet and looking at the space between the tiles.
    
    
    
    • It is a federal crime to punish your wife for providing us useful information about you.

Then there are all the questions about citizenship and national origin.  I began to feel inadequate about being neither a Hispanic nor hiding one somewhere in the house.

I also wonder what they’ll do in Utah when persons 2 - 7 all check the “Husband or Wife” box for the “Relationship to Person 1″ question.  And in portions of the South, Person 2 having to check both “Husband or Wife” and  ”Brother or Sister”.

Well, I guess I could have some fun with this thing, but, even though I like warm weather, I’m going to try to avoid Guantanamo for as long as I can.