Still hate what they’re doing on the Liberty Warehouse site, but fascinated by the fact that the whole parking structure is made of prefab concrete panels brought in by truck.
September 3 – 8, 2015
Anniversaries: I’m turning 45 sometime soon. Plus, near as I can tell, this week marks the 20th anniversary of me joining WXDU. I hadn’t realized until I dredged up that link that my first shift on XDU happened on my birthday. And, according to that email, I apparently spent that birthday doing 6 hours of radio at two different stations.
Friday night we went to see Mistress America, which has been marketed as Noah Baumbach + Greta Gerwig doing an homage to screwball comedy, but which is actually Noah Baumbach + Greta Gerwig doing an homage to Whit Stillman. It has its moments — or at least one devastating moment that should have been closer to the ending than it was — but overall I don’t know that I’ll be reflecting upon it in years to come. And I’m somebody who has seen Metropolitan more than twice.
Over the weekend we watched An Honest Liar, a documentary about The Amazing Randi, and Deceptive Practice: the Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay. I guess this is continued fallout from having seen Penn & Teller in NYC last month. The Randi documentary was terribly edited, but fascinating. Ricky Jay is also fascinating, but he’s also extraordinarily guarded as a person, so you’re left, perhaps fittingly, unsure whether you’re getting the truth.
Monday night we watched A Dangerous Method, which is ostensibly about the relationship between Jung and Freud, but is primarily actually about Keira Knightley’s lower jaw. So if you’re into that, go for it. It’s late-period Cronenberg, which is to say that he’s still horrified by bodies but he expresses it in a somewhat more naturalistic way. And he’s also clearly horrified by minds. I used to really love him, but I haven’t seen his most recent two movies, and this one didn’t leave me feeling compelled to correct that.
Looking ahead, Hopscotch starts tomorrow. I’ve been fairly heavily involved in the planning for the WXDU / WXYC / WKNC day party at Kings on Friday, so I’m mostly looking forward to that. I’m also super-psyched about the lineup for the Orientation in Space VI party at Kings on Thursday afternoon — Daniel Bachman + a couple of local electronic freaks + Asheville psych/krautrockers Nest Egg + the astonishing Guardian Alien.
I bought a wristband, though, so I should probably think about who I’d like to see after dark. A tentative list of where you might find me:
- Lud
- Some Army
- Xylouris White
- SOON
- Wahyas
- Morbids
- Solar Halos
- Silent Lunch
- Lizzo
- Mamiffer
- Forn
- Patois Counselors
- Lydia Loveless
- Naked Naps
- Nathan Golub
- HeCTA
- Escher
- Faults
- New Music Raleigh
- Wizard Rifle
- Nots
- Moon Duo
- Zeena Parkins
- No Love
- Tombs
- Jenks Miller + Rose Cross NC
- Big Ups
- Natalie Prass
- Le1f
- Old Man Gloom
- Blaxxx
- Pile
- Boulevards
- Bandages
- Moenda
- Warehouse
- Ian William Craig
- Drippy Inputs
- Microkingdom
- Hanz
- Sarah Louise
- Cakes da Killa
- Mary Lattimore + Jeff Zeigler
- Choked Out
- Chelsea Wolfe
- Sheer Mag
- Jessica Pratt
- Hank Wood + the Hammerheads
- Zs
None of whom I’m totally over the moon about, but all of whom I’m at least moderately interested in seeing. I’m pretty sure I’ll have fun, assuming that my schedule is off-center enough to allow me to actually get in to the shows I want to get into. I didn’t get a VIP wristband this year, after pretty much never using them the previous 5 years that I did get them.
OK, enough. I need to go work on computing projects for 6 hours.
Grreeeeeennn
Ze Dragonflies
Back yard beaver pond
128GB USB flash drive
Bad Friends
August 28 – September 2, 2015
I’m standing at the Pinhook listening to the 2nd dude singer-songwriter of a 5-band bill. The other three aren’t dude singer-songwriters, at least.
So it’s September. It was like 93 degrees today & is supposed to be 95 tomorrow. I feel like 23 years ago, when I moved here, things weren’t as hot. If only there were some way to keep track of that stuff.
Work is in that brief respite between students leaving and interviews starting back up again. I’ve taken advantage of the lull to migrate to a new laptop, one that is absurdly thin and ridiculously lightweight and I’m still not sold on the whole concept, primarily because I almost never do anything but schlep it from home to car to work to car to home, and it has only two USB ports and no CD drive.
I wish I has a pithy opinion to share about US or world politics, but mostly it all seems like it’s falling apart, everywhere. I’m looking forward to the 2016 elections primarily because things seem broken enough for something really interesting to happen.
I think more about what other country I would move to than what we could possibly do to fix this one. Although John Paul Stevens laid it all out in his book Six Amendments. If only everyone would read it & agree.
We’ve been using the handy Metacritic lists of movies to shape our home movie watching. It has been kind of a mixed bag. ’71 was excellent. A Strange Little Cat was somewhat less so. I wish I could say I was ready for the return of the Serious Movies of Autumn, but honestly they’re just as hit and miss as the supposedly dumb summer stuff. So we’ll take it a week at a time, as always.
OK, the singer-songwriter is done. Back to the parade.
Official Use Only
School of the Environment
