It was ~60F and misty all day today. Downtown felt deserted – hardly anyone at Old Havana for lunch, and the same at Dos Perros for dinner. People joke about southerners & our inability to drive in ice & snow, but half the problem there is that we’re out driving in ice & snow. 

A Seattle/London style dim damp, on the other hand, and we fuggin hibernate, apparently.

Posted the following to Facebook & Twitter: “That thing where dudes who are like barely even 30 want to go ahead & make dad-rock. I mean, way to get it over with, I guess?”

No response on Twitter; 84 comments on Facebook. I guess everyone was hiding out from the damp at home, itching for a discussion. 

I didn’t define “dad-rock” (and I probably couldn’t, really, if truly pressed to do so) and the conversation kinda circled around that. johndarnielle engaged fully, as he is wont to do (if he’s gonna engage at all, he’s gonna engage fully), saying “like seriously if that’s your yardstick, who is presently the most dadrock band on the planet? Joy Division. Dads around the world can’t shut up about Joy Division, and dads with access to the press reserve their praise for bands who emulate Joy Division. Or Wire. These are the present-moment cornerstones of dadrock. The other stuff is easing into grandpa rock.”

Can’t dispute any of that. Who’s to say what dads like? Whether there is a separate genre of music that ONLY dads like is perhaps another matter.

I was just using it as lazy shorthand for what my old friend James Adair summarized thusly: “Sensitive/white/paunchy …. above average harmonic sophistication, and exquisitely curated influences = dad rock”

I was also inventing a trend out of two songs by one band who shall remain nameless, because that’s what you do on a cool misty Sunday afternoon in the South when everyone’s afraid to leave the house.

Finished Transparent. In addition to its various other flaws, it sure plays like an HBO/Showtime half-hour dramedy. Like Six Feet Under with more trans people and fewer corpses.

As a corrective, I ordered a DVD of Myra Breckinridge. Will file a full report once it shows up & we watch it. I saw it once before, and I recall it as memorable, although I don’t really remember it.

It was ~60F and misty all day today. Downtown felt deserted – hardly anyone at Old Havana for lunch, and the same at Dos Perros for dinner. People joke about...

Saturday. It’s hard to give myself permission to do nothing on the weekends, because lately the weekends are the only days when I feel like I have enough time to work on extracurriculars. 

A few months ago I moved most of my recording gear into a rack at WXDU, with two goals: 

1. Less time loading in & setting up for live [music] shows
2. Being able to train other DJs & then turn them loose to do their own live recording/production/on-air stuff

And then I promptly stopped booking bands. Or maybe I had already stopped booking bands & had formulated this plan as a strategic attempt to nudge me to book bands again.

I’ve had slow periods before, so I’m not particularly concerned, but it has put more of my mental focus on #2. Which is how I found myself sitting on the sofa on a lovely Saturday afternoon, writing documentation for a bunch of studio gear – documentation aimed at complete novices, which means I’m actually writing a beginner’s how-to guide to studio production.

This could take a while.

After lunch we walked over to the new Central Park Cohousing building across the way from us, and took a tour (it was one of the stops on the AIA Triangle tour this year). The apartments are lovely spaces. They made an interesting choice to design most of the apartments with at least one windowless bedroom, so as to maximize windows in the spaces occupied by non-sleeping people. Our old apartment had one windowless bedroom & I liked how quiet & cavelike it was (well, except for when the girl directly above us came home & vomited at 2:30 a.m. on the reg). But M says she’d literally never be able to wake up & get out of bed without sunlight.

As for the cohousing components, definitely not my thing, but more power to them. Love all the art hanging in the hallways. The average age of the residents we met seemed to be somewhere in the 50s; I wonder if they’ll be able to backfill vacancies with younger folks, or if they’ll all wind up caring for each other until they can’t anymore.

Tried Blu Seafood for dinner for the first time in years. We were easily able to get a table at 7:00 on a Saturday night, and once we’d been there for a few minutes, it felt like that was because they have about 2x as many people crammed in there as is really comfortable. 

Also, memo to the chef: Unless you’re cooking at the restaurant of the same name, it’s time to get the chipotle off the menu. It’s 2014.

Still: It’s hard to fuck up good raw oysters.

Came home, watched 4 more episodes of Transparent. The flashback episode was a wonderful piece of television, although my enthusiasm for it was also due to the fact that the asshole kids weren’t in it (as their adult asshole selves, anyway). 

It seems like part of the goal of the show is to illustrate how difficult & painful it can be for a parent to come out as trans, but I feel like that would carry a little more weight if the kids weren’t so shitty to begin with.

Here is a thing that I saw on the internet. It is fascinating, and more than a little adorable, and I find it so sad that literally none of the things cited by the people in the video as reasons for voting are actually going to be remotely changeable by voting in an election in the US in 2014:

Saturday. It’s hard to give myself permission to do nothing on the weekends, because lately the weekends are the only days when I feel like I have enough time to...

This is important, y’all. The SCOTUS refused to block the new law banning out-of-precinct provisional ballots, so it’s vital that everyone either vote early, or be triple-sure of their precinct.

This is especially critical for get-out-the-vote organizers, so if you are one, please attend this meeting:

Our vote is at stake in this election

Provisional ballots can make or break Democrats up and down the ticket

Join the Attorneys from Forward North Carolina’s Voter Protection Team, Kay Hagan for Senate Political Team, and the North Carolina Democratic Party for a discussion on our plan for voter protection during early vote and on Election Day

WITH SPECIAL GUESTS:

PRATT WILEY, NATIONAL VOTER EMPOWERMENT DIRECTOR FOR THE DNC

DEMOCRATIC HOUSE LEADER LARRY HALL 

DEPUTY DEMOCRATIC SENATE LEADER FLOYD MCKISSICK 

When:  Tuesday, October 14, 2014

5:15pm until 6:30pm

Where: Durham South Regional Library

4505 S. Alston Avenue

Durham, NC

Please email aensley@kayhagan.com to RSVP.

This is important, y’all. The SCOTUS refused to block the new law banning out-of-precinct provisional ballots, so it’s vital that everyone either vote early, or be triple-sure of their precinct....

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,...