Collected Thoughts 06-16-09

• This week I'm driving back to Indiana for a wedding. I get back next Wednesday and jump right into teaching at a summer program. Hopefully that weekend I can sort-out some future writing ideas.
  
  I'm going to be contributing to a couple other sites. I'm hoping to do feature-type pieces instead of the CGT-styled music reviews. Any suggestions?
  

• I never mentioned my Friday night debacle a couple weeks ago. I was supposed to cover Gliss at The Roxy. The Henry Clay People's Rolling Stones cover set at Stories in Echo Park ran late, so myself, Web In Front's Travis Woods, and WIF's webmaster Kenzier Lemmons piled into Woods' car and flew down Sunset Blvd. towards West Hollywood.
  
  We got pulled over somewhere near Fairfax and ultimately the car was impounded. I'm pretty sure the LAPD officer had no right to impound the car based on the offenses. Buzzbands' Kevin Bronson, who did make it to see Gliss, came to our rescue and took us home. I tweeted a pic!
  
  I'm super-bummed I missed Gliss (again). One of these days... It also kept me from making it to The Fuxedoes record release at Spaceland.

• I caught Malcolm Sosa (Rademacher), Sarah Negahdari (Happy Hollows), and Andrew Lynch (Poor Excuses) at Stories the same weekend. All were marvelous. Stories has a really cool thing going on and they make a nice companion store to Origami, in a way. As someone who is thrilled to see the end of brick-and-mortar stores, both places have really impressed.

• I spent the bulk of that weekend with Sosa and Joe Fielder (who was in town), which is to say I spent the bulk of the weekend alternating between food and beer. It was one of the best weekends I've had in a long time. Sosa is the easiest man in the world to hang out with.

• I also got to hear some nuggets of the next Rademacher record. It's going to surprise folks. It's the toothiest stuff I've heard from them. I loved it.
  

• I am sad to have missed the Buzzbands show at The Echoplex last night. It sounds like it was outstanding.
  

• FMLY, a new-ish DIY warehouse space in LA, has a great blog going on.
  

• The Airborne Toxic Event's new "band on the road music video" looks like it could have been taken from when I was on tour with the band. It wasn't, but I swear I've seen all the same facial expressions, manerisms, and body language (on and off stage) a thousand times.
  

• I know The Fiery Furnaces unnerve a lot of people (His Bloggership included), but their new record is a really nice listen. It's closer to the KCRW sect.
  

• An Aquarium Drunkard tweeted this restaurant. Their menu makes me drool.

• I saw Up. A creepy old man with an assault conviction kidnaps a boyscout, flies an unlicensed aircraft through a major metro area post-9/11, then takes the abducted minor to South America, and then they fucking let the guy attend a boyscout ceremony when he comes back?! I call bullshit!

• Boing Boing has a rare recording of James Joyce.
  
  You've read Joyce's delightfully filthy love letters before, haven't you? The same man who wrote:
  
  "Frail the white rose and frail are
  Her hands that gave
  Whose soul is sere and paler
  Than time's wan wave.
  
  Rosefrail and fair -- yet frailest
  A wonder wild
  In gentle eyes thou veilest,
  My blueveined child."
  
  
  Also wrote:
  
  "At such moments I feel mad to do it in some filthy way, to feel your hot lecherous lips sucking away at me, to fuck between your two rosy-tipped bubbies, to come on your face and squirt it over your hot cheeks and eyes, to stick it between the cheeks of your rump and bugger you."

• File under "No Good Can Come of This". Have these men not read Michael Crichton novels?!
  

• Here's a great break-down of the Iranian election protests. Andrew Sullivan and The Lede Blog have been indispensible during this.
  
  It's exciting. Will Mousavi, if he comes to power, be just as terrible? Quite possibly. But this isn't about Mousavi, Ahmadinejad, The Supreme Leader, or the United States' relationship with the Iranian government. This is about the people of Iran who, given the choice between two possible evils, very much insist on their right to make that choice.
  
  Remember this. Remember which conservatives insisted on military action against "the Iranians" when you hear them now bemoan "the fate of the Iranian people". Note also which conservatives actually prefer Ahamdinejad because they value their skewed, black-and-white alternate reality over gray truth.
  
  It's been confounding to watch the news networks attempt coverage. They can't break it down to liberal vs. conservative. They don't have enough visual elements, barely any people on the ground, and the story can't be expressed through two screaming talking heads. CNN, Foxnews, and MSNBC have no fucking clue how to report on a news story like this, one that has the real textures and nuances of real life, and is being played-out in an isolated country and on the digital landscape.
  
  Is it a revolution yet? It's already a technological revolution. The real battle is over digital communications. The Iranian government is shutting down internet and cell phone networks left and right, and the only reason you and I know of these people's struggle is because of Twitter. The international hacking community are the mercs. In the analog, print-and-vinyl world of the 1970s we would not know the humanity of this struggle.
  
  This is why progress and advancement -- "the future" if you will -- are better than the past. The future will only get better and our technological capacity, mankind's ingenuitive brain paired with her compassionate heart, will only liberate us, all of us, in the end.