Weird day. Started with a sad kerfuffle which [temporarily publicly] exposed one local musician’s kinda disturbingly unhinged hate-mail to another local musician. Ended with gay couples lining up at courthouses across the state to get married.

My straight friends & social media acquaintances were ultra-effusive about the outcome of the series of kind of anti-climactic court rulings that collectively essentially led to marriage equality for NC. My gay friends were somewhat more nuanced in their reactions. ;-)

OMFG YAY NORTH CAROLINA SO GLAD I CAN GET MARRIED TO THE BOYFRIEND I DONT HAVE NOW

— OK McQUEEN (@lazyboneskuehn) October 10, 2014

I’ve been so immersed in the online hate spewed at women in the gaming & general tech industries lately that I guess I’m pessimistic about the power that a court ruling has to change people’s hearts & minds.

At the same time I know, of course, that the real change comes in the months & years after today, in which nothing particularly special happens, except that gay people live their lives & inherit property & visit spouses in the hospital & all that other mundane stuff that straight people have taken for granted. And in so doing, slowly, piece by piece & person by person, their lives hopefully come to be seen as normal & non-threatening.

So yeah, today is a great & wonderful & important first step down a long & winding path to something resembling equality or at least mutual understanding & respect.

I think a lot lately about a guy I know named Darren. Darren lives in Durham; he’s black, gay, HIV+, and homeless. I ran into him the other night & he was talking about some dude who was kind of creepily stalking him & making him afraid to go to the shelter. 

So we have a lot of work left to do. Thankfully I think that, around here at least, everyone’s well aware of that.

Friday night exhaustion – more intense than usual, even – led to an evening on the sofa. Flipped a virtual coin & chose Transparent over Lonesome Dove (both seemingly entirely apropos choices for this particular evening).

Four episodes in, I have mixed feelings about Transparent. Jeffrey Tambor is just absolutely masterful & devastatingly great. But why do all three of the kids have to be such raging assholes? Can’t one of them be a decent human being from the outset?

Still, I always love Gaby Hoffman.

Weird day. Started with a sad kerfuffle which [temporarily publicly] exposed one local musician’s kinda disturbingly unhinged hate-mail to another local musician. Ended with gay couples lining up at courthouses...

Woke up this morning to coverage of the Male Allies panel from this year’s Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. GHC had gotten flak from the get-go for 

1. Having a “Male Allies” panel at all
2. Having the new(ish) CEO of GoDaddy on the panel

So I was already expecting some negative reactions. What I hadn’t realized, though, was that the [white] dudes on the panel were going to talk at the audience for an hour, and not take any questions from the audience.

Protip: Until you’re ready to listen to women talk about the problems they face, and tell you what they want you to do to fix them, you’re not a “Male Ally.”

I had hoped to spend some time in this entry talking about Sean Haugh, and his first/only appearance in a senatorial candidate forum. He’s running for one of NC’s two Senate seats, as a Libertarian, and he was actually invited to participate in the 3rd and final debate, alongside current senator Kay Hagan and her Republican challenger Thom Tillis.

Major problem, though: I couldn’t bear to watch more than about 5 minutes of the thing. Hagan & Tillis spent literally 97% of their allotted time repeating the same pot-shots about each other. Sean actually answered the questions based on his principles & his platform, but it was just too unpleasant to watch the other two go at it.

It’s available to stream from the WRAL website, so go ahead & see if you can last any longer than I did.

Just so we’re clear: I have known Sean for years – he used to be a WXDU DJ, and was married to a friend of mine – and he’s one of the most principled people I know. We disagree on a lot of issues, inasmuch as he’s a Libertarian and I’m a Scandinavian-style Socialist Utopian, or something like that.

So I don’t know that I’ll be voting for him next month, but I’m thrilled to death to see a different viewpoint represented in a televised debate. Or, rather, given how the whole thing unfolded, I’m thrilled to see even one single coherent viewpoint represented in a televised debate.

Side note: I finally bought a Chromecast to stream the debate to my TV, a task that it had some difficulty achieving successfully. But for straight-up YouTube videos which are available for native Chromecasting: The damn thing is amazing. Multi-person collaborative YouTube playlist building, from multiple devices to yr TV, for $35? Bizarre & Jetsonsy. The future. 

Woke up this morning to coverage of the Male Allies panel from this year’s Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. GHC had gotten flak from the get-go for  Having...

Kathy Sierra left Twitter again today, because of other peoples’ abhorrent behavior. She wrote all about it here. If you care at all about the Internet as the modern Commons, it’s worth a read. One warning, though: if you’re not already familiar with the specifics, you’ll probably come away feeling depressed and not a little confused. Because none of it makes any sense to normal people who interact with other normal people via a normal range of means, rather than posting their SSNs online, photoshopping pictures of their kids into porn, and raining down an endless barrage of death & dismemberment threats upon them. Due, essentially, to a difference of opinion.

As a cis-het white male, I’m automatically insulated from a lot of the risks inherent in being [on the internet | alive in America]. Even so, while I speak up frequently about shitty behavior, particularly towards women in the tech community, I’m still afraid to speak too loudly or to poke too deep into certain areas. This despite the fact that I’m essentially nobody of any importance. They don’t care.

Unrelated: For some reason I decided to change my Twitter bio today, which led to me Googling myself, which in turn reminded me that selected freelance pieces I wrote in 1994 are available on the Houston Press website.

If this were Europe I suppose I could use their bizarre Right to be Forgotten legislation to force Google to remove links to that stuff, but where would be the fun in that? Besides, I could list literally hundreds of things that I’m more embarrassed about than that writing, being the type of person who is visited, unbidden, at odd hours by vivid recollections of embarrassing moments from nearly the entire 44 years of my existence on this earth.

But dang, I sure was wrong about stuff.

I had actually been thinking the other day about revisiting some reviews from 1994 – making a list of the records without re-reading the whole things, then listening & re-evaluating them before reading the reviews. But the review I wanted to start with wasn’t in my binder of clips, and anyway, who really cares?

It was a review of the Motocaster album, Stay Loaded, one of many that I screwed up the first time around. Who the hell lets a 24-year-old review records? These goddamn Houston Press clips reminded me that I dismissed Polvo’s Celebrate the New Dark Age, which has for a long time been one of my favorite records. Here, listen to it, how stupid was I? 

I dismissed this fine, fine EP without ever, as far as I can recall, having heard Marquee Moon, even. 

WHO LETS A 24-YEAR-OLD REVIEW MUSIC?

At the very least, 24-year-olds should be restricted to show previews, glowing features, and the occasional laudatory review. Let them think they’re doing real work for, say, 10 years or so before you really give them the keys to something substantial.

It’s for their own good.

Kathy Sierra left Twitter again today, because of other peoples’ abhorrent behavior. She wrote all about it here. If you care at all about the Internet as the modern Commons,...

Big news of the morning was poor pathetic Mark Kozelek trying to convert his recent history of ill-tempered outbursts into some kind of musical/cultural moment. His brand new topical song includes lyrics referring to a writer friend of mine as “some spoiled bitch rich kid blogger brat,” which is pretty impressive considering that she’s only been writing about music professionally for a few years now.

Back in the day I was referred to obliquely in a song or two:

The only response as a critic to stuff like that is … well, I’m still not sure. Is it better or worse to believe that it’s all part of some theatrical performance (which it clearly is – whatever fit of pique inspires a song like that can’t persist as pure emotion through the writing, arranging, recording, etc, etc) which the critic is necessarily complicit in? Are we all winking at each other?

At the time I either took everything totally seriously, or I was just stringing words together in sequences that I found pleasing. I’m not sure I know which it was anymore. And I’m not sure it mattered – I had plenty of people tell me that they read my stuff & never listened to the records or saw the movies I wrote about.

But at a certain point I started to feel like I was occasionally going out of my way to find something provocative to say (and then shortly thereafter I felt like my editors were pushing me in that direction), and not long after that I just stopped writing. Focused my efforts on radio & on generally mostly neutral or intermittently effusive show listings on trianglerock.com. 

I still get people pissed at me but it has been ages since someone wrote a song in my direction.

Anyway. One of my interns last summer was a big Ben Folds fan so for the first & probably only time I actually was able to use that song to my advantage.

The new Deaf Wish single came out today. It’s worth a listen or four. 

Oh! I meant to loop back to the question of people talking during quiet shows, which is [sort of] how the whole Kozelek thing started. Since he’s too hateful to really get behind at this point, how about you go read this blog post by Circuit Des Yeux instead?

After work we went to see Tig Notaro at the Carolina Theatre. It feels so good to laugh. It feels better to laugh when none of the jokes are mean-spirited or at some smaller/weaker person’s expense. Really. Tig’s shows are like a master class in how not to be an asshole comedian.

Big news of the morning was poor pathetic Mark Kozelek trying to convert his recent history of ill-tempered outbursts into some kind of musical/cultural moment. His brand new topical song...

It always takes a little while, at the start of every recruiting season, to calibrate one’s level of empathy such that you don’t wind up passing folks on to the next interview when you know they’re just going to fail it miserably. I feel like that calibration process is actually happening more quickly this year, at least.

What happened today? I listened to the latest YOB and liked it better than the other ones I’ve listened to previously. So that’s at least one metal album that I’m into this year.

The Supreme Court refused to hear a bunch of different appeals of lower court rulings striking down anti-same-sex marriage laws, which means that in those jurisdictions, those laws remain null & void. But what that means for the rest of the country remains unclear. Meanwhile, it’s all but certain that the Roberts Court is going to screw us all over in myriad other ways, including more attempted gutting of the Affordable Care Act.

Dinner was an excellent gumbo at Geer St. Garden. The evening has involved watching computer science lectures on YouTube and struggling with which microphone to use for an online videoconference. All investment in the future; precious little payoff in the present. Oh well. We’ll always have YOB.

It always takes a little while, at the start of every recruiting season, to calibrate one’s level of empathy such that you don’t wind up passing folks on to the...

Sunday Times & comic books. This has been linked 1000x (and the pix themselves have been shown before) but still, Nicholas Nixon’s 40-year photo series of his wife & her sisters is mindblowing & should be linked again.

Other good stuff in the Times this weekend:

• Nice portrait of Andre Braugher (if you want to borrow the complete Homicide: Life on the Streets DVD set, lemme know …)
• This crazy profile of Alan Cumming

Maggie asked me if I would buy actual paper comix if there were a comic book store on the ground floor of our building & I think it’s safe to say that if there were, we’d have a problem. Not a bad problem, though.

But I’m really pretty much a comix n00b, and I have fairly restrictive tastes, so who knows. One thing I know is that it’s long past time for me to branch out from just reading Image titles.

Sunday pre-show listening/reviewing:

• New Alpha Cop
• Old Daniel Bachman
• New Bitter Resolve
• Jenks Miller & Rose Cross NC at Hopscotch 2014

I have a new DJ training with me at WXDU & today I found out he’s a freshman from New Delhi. When I was 18 I thought I was kind of brave to have moved 1200 miles from home to go to college. Heh.

Dinner at Dos Perros; I can’t stop ordering the mezcal-based margaritas on the menu. Given that it’s currently impossible to buy decent mezcal in NC ABC stores, I guess it’s reasonably logical to order these things, instead of things I could easily make at home.

Watched The Central Park Five. As if I needed another data point to verify that cops, and the criminal justice system in general (um, and America in general, I guess), are actively working to destroy the lives of young black men. 

Their coerced “confessions” were videotaped, but the 24+ hours of interrogations leading up to them were not. Thankfully that, at least, seems to be slowly changing, at least in some jurisdictions. 

Sunday Times & comic books. This has been linked 1000x (and the pix themselves have been shown before) but still, Nicholas Nixon’s 40-year photo series of his wife & her...

This is SO AMAZING:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_7ErkQFduQ

original post

This is SO AMAZING: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_7ErkQFduQ original post