hep whiteys

This is one of the coolest review-inside-a-reviews I've ever seen. It feeds my Pynchon obsession, in addition to tweaking my punk/jazz aesthetic slightly. Bitchin'.

Long awaited reissue of this classic late 80s collaboration between the 2 sax players in Borbetomagus (Sauter & Dietrich) and Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore. Five extended tracks of guitar/sax/sax improvisational interplay, recorded in NYC in June, 1988. We first issued this as an LP-only in 1990, but it has been o/p for a number of years (a CD version was licensed by Shock UK and briefly available, but has been long o/p as well). "This is one mindfuck of a noisefest. Imagine if Metal Machine Music-era Lou Reed had been invited to Brotzmann's Machine Gun sessions. You're still not close. Likes beasts of burden locked to a single axis, the circles the trinity treads shaft deep, inside which they explode depth charges which reverberate to the core of your being. Now and again one might pull away to release heart piercing shrieks into the foul night. Truly tremendous." Biba Kopf / The Wire.

Liner notes to the album provided by none other than Thomas Pynchon himself!!

"One night Johnson, Coley and I were sitting in the back yard with a bucket of fresh sangria and a few bongloads of some very righteous boo. I'd brought out a box of my live Sonic Youth tapes and we were arguing about Lee Ranaldo's tongue vectors in the third quadrant of 'Society is a Hole' (Folk City, NYC 12/1/82) when one of T. Moore's downstrokes caught our attention. We ran the tape back and listened to the passage a few times. The subtly monstrous and mindless GUSH with which T. Moore hit the 'E' chord made it obvious that his playing was not coming out of a complete spiritual void. this was a real revelation. It meant that he capable of actually unclenching his brain and loosing demons of soul creativity.
Because we hate to see ANYONE lackeyed to jive-ass, pop-structure, white-man a-motionalism, a plan was immediately spun for freeing T. Moore from the shackles of Peggy Lee-descended dogshit that were obviously choking off his TRUE HUMAN FORCE. Deciding which hominid cudgels might be best wielded against these procedural chains was a lead pipe cinch. Who but Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich? These two men are the freest, loudest, swingin'est white motherfuckers to ever jaw-cleave an industrial strength reed. Their work with Borbetomagus has long been a raucous fountain of tonal explosion and aesthetic purity, as well as a black-gloved fist up the diz of all conservative musical architects. If anyone could blow the lock off of T. Moore's creational emo-safe, Jim and Don were it.
The rest was a snap. I had my agent get in touch with all the parties. She explained the points of our proposal in no uncertain terms. The results are
presented here. Two free men meet a slave. Everyone goes home barefoot. Right-fuckin'on.

Thomas Pynchon
Somerville, MA
January 1990"

a simple action

I just experienced a weird act of courage a few minutes ago.  On my part, strangely
enough.
I was walking from my office to the Prudential Center (maybe 4 blocks down Boylston
St.), to pick up a few things from the See's Candy kiosk.  :-)
As I passed by the Boston Public Library, I noticed a man lying on the sidewalk.
I slowed down to check things out, as I wasn't sure if he was a passed-out drunk,
or a homeless guy who'd been beaten up, or someone who'd just passed out, or what.
Maybe some combination of the above.
Anyway, he was laying there, not moving much.  A few seconds passed, and nobody
else did anything.  Being about 5:30 pm, people were heading home, heading out to
eat, to shop, or what have you.
I continued walking toward the Prudential Center.
I'd walked about a block when I decided that something needed to be done.  I am
generally very passive, and not one to speak out much at all.  That's part of the
reason I feel people take advantage of me.  Be that as it may, I decided that if
something were to be done, I would be the one to do it.
I called 911 from my cell phone.  After being transferred three or four times (but
very quickly, thankfully), I spoke to an ambulance dispatcher.  I mentioned that
I say a man lying on the sidewalk by the pay toilet in front of the BPL at Boylston
and Exeter Streets.  I mentioned that I wasn't sure of his condition, but that it
was cold out and nobody was doing anything about it and I thought the matter needed
looking into.  They said thanks, we'll have it checked out.
I then went into the mall and made my purchase.  The whole time I was thinking about
this man I saw lying on the sidewalk.  It made me feel uneasy not knowing what his
condition was.
Walking out of the mall a few minutes later, en route to my office, I again walked
past the library.  This time I saw a Boston Fire Department fire truck parked at
the curb, lights a-blazin'.  But I didn't see anyone lying on the sidewalk.  What
I did see, however, was that same man, sitting on a chair just inside the library's
lobby, with four Boston firefighters talking to him, presumably tending to his needs
or at least assessing the situation.
I thought several things at that moment.  I thought it was great that the people
representing the public emergency infrastructure reacted quickly.  I thought it
was sad that nobody else seemed to have helped this guy out.  Who knows how long
he'd been lying on the sidewalk, or why?  My guess is that he's a homeless drunk,
and he may have greeted today like most any other day.  I don't really know.
And who knows?  Maybe he'll spend a night at Boston City Hospital, or some other
local medical facility, get a bed and a meal, and maybe some form of rudimentary
counseling.  Maybe the local cops, EMTs, and nurses know this guy, know his spiel,
and treat it as a routine evening event: another homeless drunk in a big American
city.  Maybe the firefighters checked him out and, by now, less than an hour after
I first saw the guy, he's back on the streets, sitting on some heating grate in
Copley Square, having convinced the emergency crew that he was OK and needed to
sleep it off.  I'll never know.  I don't know if this has happened to this guy countless
times before.  Did I make a difference?  I can only shrug.
I've seen this kind of thing for years, and I thought I was inured to it.  Every
place I've lived as an adult - Buffalo, Cambridge, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco
- they've all had, and have, homeless populations of varying stripes.  Everyone
has a condition, a situation, a history, a story.  This was just another page in
this man's life.
Maybe it's just me, assuaging my white, middle-class guilt.
But now it has me thinking, really pondering my place in the world.  Thinking about
social inequities, and about the confluence and incongruence of wealth and squalor
in a place like Boston.
And it also makes me glad I finally did something about what I always see and yet
always let myself ignore.
How strange, and also cliched, that I feel this and write this during the hustle
and bustle of the holiday season, in this, the wealthiest and most selfish nation
on earth.
This also makes me think about the values I will pass on to my children.  Things
like: treat everyone with the same respect as you'd like to be treated.  Don't be
afraid to speak out about something you really believe.  And understand the power
of a single action, and understand too that it can be multiplied.
Happy Holidays.

oops, i did it again.

Man oh man, I should just try to set aside 10 minutes every couple of days and just babble with this freakin' thing. All too often I go weeks and weeks without updating this.

Summer has been busy -- some of it good busy. We're about to go to Maine for our 3rd week-long vacation of the season (my job doesn't pay super competitively, especially for the niche I'm in, but the benefits are pretty good; 4 weeks' paid vaca is pretty sweet, especially since I've only been here 3.5 years). No Internet access for 10 days... and that's OK. Books, BBQ, beer... and of course, the baby boy. :-)

Max is crawling! :-) He was a bit of a slug for the longest time, yet in the past 3 or 4 weeks, he's come a long way. He started sitting up on his own (from prone on his back to sitting on his butt). then started crawling a couple of days later. Now he's crawling (hands and knees, but more often, hands and feet!) He can truck across the living room and study in about 30 seconds, which, I figure, is pretty good for a newbie. He's also standing with assistance (tables, sofa, etc.), and just this morning managed to almost-nosedive into the bathtub (Daddy managed to snag him before he could damage his little head). It's at the point now where he either needs to be plopped into his playpen for those times when you need to perform various distracting tasks (dishes, laundry, etc.), or he needs to be hog-tied into his little Fisher-Price seat against his will (sorry, kiddo). I'll bet he'll be walking come October or thereabouts. Ah, locomotion... all he needs now are language and peers, and the Three Stages of Betrayal are complete. But it's all quite exciting.

Our house is coming along. The electrician finished the 'rough-in' wiring, meaning he pulled new wire runs from the kitchen to the panel in the basement. The carpenter is slated to re-do the ceiling and walls (new sheetrock and skim-coating), and the floor (repair the rotten floorboards and re-surface the hardwood. This he's planning on doing while we're on vacation next week, meaning that if all goes as planned (knock on wood), we'll come home just before Labor Day to a shiny new kitchen, or at least a shiny new box of a room lacking cabinetry and appliances. But what a change from just a couple of weeks ago. I need to take pictures of the work that's been done lately (not only by the electrician, but also by us, and our friends Bill and Dave as well), as a before-and-after comparison thing. Pretty cool.

Work is work. I've been mired in network management and monitoring hell, which is mostly boring. And I've decided to put the Cisco CCIE certification on hold, at least for now: I'm simply going for a CCNP recertification, which will be easier to achieve and will afford me another three years to procras--... er, to prepare for the CCIE. :-)


Straw Man

Not much to report in the political rant arena, save for the fact that Dubya's happy little middle eastern quagmire is slowly etching away at his approval ratings. Now he's saying that we need to (as his Daddy famously said) stay the course over in Iraq, if for no other reason than to honor the sacrifices of all the servicepeople who've gone over there and lost their lives for this quagmire in the first place. All that bullshit about WMD, freedom for all Iraqis, the emergence of democracy, yadda yadda yadda -- it's just that: bullshit. And of course, remaining over there for years, fighting a stateless enemy that obeys no rules... this will "help protect 'Murka." What a crock.

miscellany

A couple of weeks ago, our son turned one year old. My parents came into town for this auspicious occasion, and my in-laws, my sister, and a couple of our good friends were also in attendance. Max ate cake, played with cake, smashed cake, and smeared his face with cake. At one point I laughed so hard I started crying and having a gut ache. That, my friends, is a good thing.

Two strong chins, there...

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I read this in today's New York Times:

"[snip] The Post/ABC survey found for the first time that a slight majority of Americans - 52 percent - believed that the administration had deliberately misled the country before the war. That figure has climbed sharply, up 9 points in three months. [snip]"

52 percent... I guess that makes it a fucking mandate, now, doesn't it?

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More house renovations lately. The electrician never showed last week (ugh), so I'm trying to get that under control. But we're slowly patching and waterproofing the cement walls and floor in the basement, and a couple of carpenters are rebuilding one of the basement starcases (we have two).

Here's a neat shot of the new slider door in the bomb shelter we call a kitchen:


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I scared some people when I walked into my office building the other day. I've been listening to some 80's British cheese metal lately (specifically Iron Maiden), and as I entered the lobby, I sang along with the verse then playing on my iPod: "Satan's wooooorrrrrk is done!!!" It turned a few heads. Heh.

boston uncommon

I saw something that made me do a double-take while walking through Boston Common early this afternoon en route to work: a Christian revival tent. Not 'revival tent' as in the one full of paramedics at the end of the Boston Marathon, but 'revival tent' as in folding chairs and a cheesy P.A. system and fire and brinstone and Jesus died for your sins, Hallelujah Amen.

A Christian revival tent. On public property.

Now, I'm no lawyer (I have a modicum of self-respect, thank you very much ;-) . So I'm unclear as to the legality or illegality of a religious entity getting approval from City Hall (I'm assuming) to stage an event like this. I don't know where the 'separation of church and state' notion comes into play here. The whole thing just sort of struck me as odd. Something that wouldn't, I think, seem too out of place in, say, Orange County or Atlanta or Wichita (are these things legal there, too?).

But Boston? True blue Beantown?

Sure, Pope John Paul II held a mass at Yankee Stadium, but I think that's a privately-owned venue.

Now, maybe the notion of 'public property' (somewhat of an oxymoron, eh?) or 'public land' means 'open to all peoples and groups so long as they don't instigate a riot or pee on the rhododendrons.' I'm not qualified to make such a judgment. But it does give one pause. One being me.

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We're celebrating our son's first birthday this weekend. My parents are driving to Boston to join us, and my in-laws will be here as well. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone. I know Max won't quite understand all the hubbub, but it should be fun watching him play with his presents and attempt to eat cake. :-)

I can't believe the li'l bugger's almost a year old. Time flies... and yet it really drags too, sometimes.

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It's not nearly as fucking muggy and hot as it's been for the past several days. It was hazy and sticky and in the 90s for what seemed like a week, only about two months too early for the 'dog days' of summer (picture Matthew Broderick in "Brighton Beach Memoirs," in his full army uniform, saying "This is Africa hot!"). Today's rain seems to have broken the cycle -- the temperature dropped about 20 degrees (Farenheit) and the humidity dropped as well. Which is a good thing. Max was having a hell of a time sleeping (just watching him sit there, sweating and bawling, broke my heart), as were his mommy and I. The window fans we bought helped, but we may have to go the closed windows and blankies route tonight!

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The house deconstruction continues. I'll post pictures at some point.

the only point i have is at the top of my head.

Work has been rather dull of late. Not the usual mind-numbingly, push-fork-tines-in-the-cornea-because-it's-better-than-this dull, but stultifying nonetheless. Mostly software upgrades and little busy-work wank projects my boss gives me (the latest being troubleshooting why a redundant power supply on a non-production test switch won't work -- I mean, please.). What's the point of all this, bill-paying notwithstanding?

I get to feeling this way every few months, when life gets boring/stressful, and I have trouble motivating myself. I also find myself not living so much in the present but rather in a future that could have been, i.e. what if I were still single, or at least not a parent. Thinking that way makes me kind of sad, because it implies -- screams? -- that I'm dissatisfied with my present existence. It convinces me that there's something deeply wrong. With me. With life.

Sometimes, when I get this what-is-my-life's-true-purpose? feeling, I peruse grad school websites all over the country, for various and sundry programs. Documentary film at Berkeley's journalism school. Law at Northwestern. Public Policy at Columbia. Computer Science at Stanford or Cornell. Not that I could ever dream of getting into any of these programs (OK, maybe doc at Cal), but just something different. Something that makes me wake each morning with a wow. (Note: when I was in college, I greeted many mornings with the thought of "oh shit, I didn't get any work done" or "fuck, I have a final in two hours and I don't know where it is" or "why am I sleeping with this person? I can't fucking stand her," ad infinitum. Why ten-plus years and several Major Life Events would really make a difference in the Academic Me is truly a question for the ages. I grow older, but I don't necessarily grow up. And so it goes.)

At any rate, work is boring, but at least it's steady. I vest in roughly a year and a half, and hopefully by then I'll have my CCIE and I'll be more marketable (read: I'll get a more difficult job, hopefully at a higher salary, where I'll be even more prone to negative karmic feelings. Oh boy oh fucking boy.).

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The house deconstruction continues apace. (Note to self: post some of the pix you took of the demo work thus far.) The contractors showed up today, 3 hours late, but supposedly (according to Nadine -- I had to leave for work shortly after they started working) replaced all the basement windows and one of the kitchen windows. Tomorrow (and sporadically, it seems, over the next few days) they're slated to do a bunch more demolition work in and around the kitchen: removing a not-up-to-code chimney; knocking a hole in the dining room wall for a 2nd window (wheeeeeee!); hauling away that ghastly Sherman tank of an oven that's never worked since we moved in... a whole host of things. The plumber (a swell guy, actually), is then going to do a bunch of... well, plumbing. He'll run pipes up through an interior kitchen wall, part of which Nadine and I have to tear down this weekend. He'll spend a couple of days running pipes and installing a temporary sink in the kitchen, and then we 86 the old sink, and the contractor returns to knock out the kitchen wall where the old sick was, and put in its place a large sliding glass door (which will open out onto an as-yet-unbuilt deck). The scope of all this work scares the shit out of me. But I want it done, so I have to face these demons and just get crackin'.

And, of course, there's other work to be done in the house. It will never fucking end.

Life in the 'urbs. Yes... I... am... one... with... the... Home... De(s)pot...

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We registered for the Macworld Conference exhibit halls today. Nadine's office sent her (and ostensibly me) to Macworld in San Francisco in January 2004, but they've put the kibosh on trips for a while, so we'll check out the east coast version (i.e. sans Steve Jobs, that punk-ass beeyotch) for a couple of mornings before I have to schlep the three blocks from Macworld to the office. It should prove somewhat fun in a geeky way. And an outing for Max and Nadine and me. For all the years that Macworld has been in Boston (most of them, except for a couple of years in New York), I haven't been to one here. Strange.

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For anyone in the Northeast (or at least New England), it hasn't rained in something like two whole fucking days. If Boston has nice mountains and a real working ferry system and a huge fascist software company, this could have been fucking Seattle, what with all the fucking rain we've had lately.

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Now to spend the next hour or so in our loud-ass data center, troubleshooting this un-fucking-important power supply issue. Fuck.

chairman of the bored.

It's been a while since I've posted, and for the usual reasons: busy at home (house renovations, child, life in general) and busy at work (network management stuff, switch code upgrades, yadda yadda yadda).

Speaking of renovations, we finally have a contractor penciled in to help us with our kitchen (that should read 'kitsch-in'), and a plumber to help us with the kitchen and basement. I personally can't think of a better way to part with about ten grand, can you? :-P

Speaking of which, I must get Max's 529 plan up and running.

Nadine and I have been doing some demolition work (called 'demo' in the biz) in our kitchen, which, due to financial and logistical reasons, will remain in flux for some time. If you look up 'entropy' in the dictionary, there may well be a photo of our house in it. Just what we didn't want: a fixer-upper. Uppers, indeed...

Work has been really busy, which is mostly good. Unfortunately it's been just this side of reeeally busy (OK, wicked busy, as they say here in Bahston), which drives me a little batty. Nothing super compelling, nor terribly intellectually taxing (always a mixed blessing), but I need to get off my ass and seriously study for that fucking CCIE.

My parents are visiting for a few days around Max's first birthday. That will be nice. They've only seen him twice, with nearly 8 months separating the two visits. I think our trek to Buffalo for Easter really made them miss their grandson (oh yeah, and their grandson's parents too), thereby inspiring them to want to visit him again soon. At any rate, it'll be good to see them. My sister will be hanging out too (she lives about a mile or so away in Cambridge), as well as my in-laws. I'm looking forward to it. And to the boundless criticism that will no doubt ensue regarding the entropic state of the house! ;-)

Max is now sort of sitting up on his own, and when he does sit, he's pretty stable for long stretches. He's been able to pull himself up from a reclining position in his little "bouncy seat," and he does well pulling himself up from the floor to a standing position with only a little help from an adult. He's probably lagging a bit, physical-development,wise, compared to other little kids his age (about a year), but I don't think it's a big deal. He's otherwise very expressive, sturdy (he's about 26 pounds already!), and cute as a button. And him gots 4 toofies. :-) Egads, I love that little boy. There must be a dozen different pictures of him in my cubicle at work, including backgrounds of all 4 of my computers (2 at work, 2 at home).

If I were fifty, there'd be a similar number of... I dunno, boat pictures or Harleys or something? :-) Around this office, that'd probably be the case. I work across from a guy who has one 3x5 photo of himself and his wife (and IMHO I think she's gorgeous), and several pictures of his freaking 22' used motorboat, which he has yet to put into the water himself. Priorities, priorities...

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I'm troubled by the fact that Pat Robertson thinks "activist judges" are a bigger threat to the United States than, say, al-Qaeda. It's one of those "you've got to be shitting me" moments.

Why doesn't anyone have a sound bite of George Bush talking about the Senate filibuster nonsense, referring to the Republecchicans' "nukular" option? ;-) Ah hell, I'll bet Jon Stewart has mentioned it already...

I'm using Google's Gmail primarily for blogversations. I have about 20 messages in my inbox, which is swell. At this rate, I should be good for about 150 years. :-D

OK, back to the paprika groves...