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June 15th, 2009
07:17 pm
Is there music that makes you angry? If so, why?
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June 2nd, 2009
11:06 pm
My album is out!
yayyyyyyyyyyyyyyy
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May 4th, 2009
02:27 am
Q: How many people live in Brazil?
A: A brazillion!
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April 22nd, 2009
11:32 am
I put some songs up on last.fm. Have at it!
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April 21st, 2009
12:53 pm
I have been setting up the requisite new media vectors.
I feel sort of corny about joining twitter, but whatever. Recently I've been toying with the idea of moving to twitter + blog as a replacement for livejournal. I like livejournal despite its flaws because it seems to be the only thing that gets the balance right, being a journal with just enough social networking doodads to be convenient and not distracting. But I don't like the ad creep lately, and my writing here has been having an identity crisis for a little while anyway, so maybe it's time to bifurcate. Twitter for the instant gratification and keeping up with people, and blog for the more substantive stuff that takes actual effort to read and write.
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April 17th, 2009
10:01 am
Man, Gary Numan was pretty great, wasn't he? This video of Down in the Park where he's rolling around in a Dalek chair pretty much sums it up for me.
Apparently he makes really generic industrial music now? That's sort of depressing.
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April 15th, 2009
09:35 pm
My music might be on the radio tomorrow 3/16 at 11am PDT! Pianist/sound designer Aron Kallay is going to be interviewed on KPFK. Aron is an awesome guy who helped me realize my piano & electronics piece White Mass, and might play an excerpt of it sometime during the interview. He's also going to talk about PIE, our new secret project.
(Yes, apparently my projects are secret even if I talk about them and they have a public website.)
Anyway, it should be an interesting show regardless, Aron is a fantastic performer who has recently been playing just intonation piano pieces by Kyle Gann and Ben Johnston, which is probably what the bulk of the interview is going to be about. You can listen to KPFK here: http://www.kpfk.org/listen-live.html
[ EDIT: Or if you miss it, it should show up here tomorrow: http://archive.kpfk.org/parchive/xml/gv_john.xml ]
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02:57 pm
Ghosts and The Locked Room (New York Trilogy, Auster) - also great! I really liked the mounting parallelisms that pile up between the three stories. The Locked Room is my favorite of the three; Ghosts is a little predictable and City of Glass is kinda meandering in retrospect. The final confrontations in each story are all great too; they're suitably climactic yet resolve nothing.
Parable of the Sower (Butler) - pretty good. The semi-post-apocalyptic future is a more and more common trope these days (not to mention more and more plausible), but this book handles it well. And for a book narrated by a teenage girl who makes up a religion, it is surprisingly not (very) preachy and there is a minimum of convenient coincidences. You know she's going to have to leave her neighborhood at some point, but about half the book takes place in the neighborhood, which I think was a good move. A lesser writer would probably put her on the road sooner, but that would have made the journey mean less. On the other hand, the book ends without much being resolved. It feels more like a prelude than a complete book, but it's at least intrigued me enough to read the next one in the series at some point.
I also didn't get the character of Bankole -- the way he acted and the way other characters reacted to him didn't make much sense to me, in a book that was generally careful to provide complex, realistic motivations for people's actions. But maybe he was supposed to be a cipher?
Anyway, next up is probably Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke. I have Perec's A Void in front of me but I am sort of intimidated by it.
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April 9th, 2009
12:08 am
City of Glass was great! I don't know why it took me so long to read Auster. This book pushed a lot of the right buttons for me, dealing with the fantastical in a rigorous and inventive way (Calvino and Borges also do this right).
I guess I am finally fed up with science fiction after reading new trendy sci fi like Charles Stross and Iain Banks and M. John Harrison, not to mention watching the execrable Battlestar Galactica finale. They all have great ideas but seem to suffer from piss-poor, sloppy execution, inconsistent characterization, insufferable preachiness, etc. There's the disconcerting/infuriating sensation that the authors don't seem to understand their own material. I got tired of it.
Next up is Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, let's see if she can redeem the genre.
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April 6th, 2009
09:19 pm
Dinner: pineapple tofu curry with indian eggplant, baby tomatoes, carrots, green onions, ginger, garlic, cilantro, basil. Dessert: dark chocolate ice cream with a little bit of cuantro.
YUM
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April 4th, 2009
02:52 pm
Note to self: read Georges Perec, Paul Auster, listen to Don Pullen
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March 21st, 2009
March 10th, 2009
09:59 pm
I am coming down with something feverish and sore throaty. I was feeling weak and lightheaded earlier, and needed something protein-rich and very easy to assemble for lunch, and this is the sandwich I ended up making, with ingredients from bottom to top:
-english muffin (half)
-leftover roast chicken
-fried egg
-cracked pepper
-cream cheese
-lingonberry jam
-english muffin (half)
While I was making it I was all "what the fuck am I doing" but a little voice kept urging me on going "no no no just listen it'll be great" and lo and behold when I ate it the consensus was something like "omg this is so good" and also "omg this is so wrong." An unholy success! It was like a turkey/cranberry post-thanksgiving sandwich, but crossbred with mcmuffin stock.
I need a name for it, though. The Ikean? The Gustaf? The Midwestern Slatherbeast? The Constitutional Monarch? The Edible Yeti?
I dunno man.
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November 5th, 2008
10:04 am
Perks of still being registered to vote in MI:
I get to vote for expanded stem cell research. Yay!
I get to vote for medical marijuana. Wheee!
Disadvantages of not being registered to vote in CA:
I didn't get to vote against the ban on same-sex marriage that passed.
I'd like to be happy the morning after the election but Prop 8 is like a bad hangover.
Okay. Let's reverse this in 2010. Clearly I need to do more. Get registered in CA, donate money, do some phone banking. What else?
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September 24th, 2008
03:41 pm
So I guess a big part of this $700 billion is "psychological," to get investors to feel good about investing again. I have a better idea. Why not hire a motivational speaker instead? It would be much cheaper and possibly more effective. Tony Robbins? Hulk Hogan? Someone must be up to the task.
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August 12th, 2008
11:47 pm
I wrote this tongue-in-cheek synopsis of the new Batman recently but I got stuck. Maybe you can help me finish it? Spoilers and potentially wanky cultural criticism ahoy.
( Read more... )
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July 9th, 2008
12:39 am - one sentence all caps album reviews
Miles Davis: Kind of Blue
MORE LIKE KIND OF OVERRATED AMIRITE
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June 22nd, 2008
03:38 pm
I played a short set at Sean and Katia's BBQ yesterday. Here's me doing a duet with a mannequin head:
And here's a new track, Smokescreen, an instrumental.
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June 12th, 2008
04:03 pm
GO HABEAS CORPUS WOOOO FUCK YEAH
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June 7th, 2008
07:46 pm - terrorists 1, yuppies 0
There was a bomb scare in the Westwood Whole Foods parking lot today, when a homeless person left his suitcase there.
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