TFIF
So it seems I'm not the only one sick and tired of staring at the same shit in the right bar: Kevin "Scoop" Casey, erstwhile news reporter for this site, sent me a new Top and Bottom 5 for the right bar a while back. I've finally posted it. Better late than never, I reckon. (Kevin's a bit of a sports nut, in case you hadn't noticed.)
Other developments for the impending weekend: A rare Friday night Supercast rehearsal tonight, then a rare The Hills Have Eyes show at the
Also in the cards is a second viewing of Donnie Darko, quite possibly the oddest and most interesting movie I've seen since Mulholland Drive. I'm still not sure that it all hangs together, or was even any good, but I certainly couldn't stop watching the thing. So the second viewing will be with the benefit of writer/director Richard Kelly's commentary, trying to figure out exactly what the hell happened and if it all makes sense.
Also checked out Following, the first effort from Memento dude Chris Nolan. Pretty damn good, a really tight, well-done noir in the tradition of (OK, more or less a direct ripoff of) Double Indemnity, with an extra twist or two.
The other movie in the Netflix trifecta was The Anniversary Party, which was both good and bad, but mostly bad. Calling it uneven would be generous, but the good performances by folks like Phoebe Cates, John C. Reilly, and Jane Adams were undercut by implausible and badly cast turns by J.J. Leigh and Gwyneth Paltrow. Just because it was shot on DV doesn't make it indie, either, although it looked damn good for a DV flick. Anyway, enough popping off for me. The weekend awaits. Have a good one. ßßß
Dead Dudes I Have Known, and Other Non-Brushes with Fame
I met that dead Dudley Moore dude once, only he wasn't dead yet.
It was during the filming of Arthur, so that would have made it, like, 1979 or 1980, making me, like, 11 or 12. A friend of the family's was the publicity person for the movie or something, and they were shooting some racing footage at an oval track near our hometown.
We drove up, stood around (memories of the actual day are pretty spotty; I am the proud owner of many, many fewer brain cells now than I was then), and were eventually led over to Mr. Moore's trailer. He came out of the trailer, and I distinctly remember being struck by how little he was. I was in the neighborhod of five feet tall and pudgy, and I probably could have gotten hired as his stand-in. He was very gracious, shook our hands, and disappeared back into his trailer. He didn't appear obviously likkered up, but then again, I was 11 or 12 and might not have noticed.
Never met that dead Milton Berle dude, but I have heard the stories. ßßß
Guest-List Giddiness
Sometimes good things do happen to good people. And sometimes they even happen to me.
Take last night, for instance. Driving home from The Hills Have Eyes practice, rocking out to KALX, as I am prone to do these days. DJ Brother Grimm, the pop philosopher, is holding court, playing good ol' rock 'n' roll. He takes an air break and says he's gonna give away some tickets. I reach for my cell phone. He says he's gonna give away some tickets to see some great Swedish ... I start dialing said cell phone, hoping and praying the Swedes in question are the almighty Hellacopters, who are playing Slim's on Monday ... rock 'n' roll by the Hellacopters.
The phone rings. Yes! I may already be a winner. Then Brother Grimm says over the air that there will be a trivia question involved. I scoff, and possibly even snort. No man alive knows more about the Hellacopters and their catalog than I. I am undaunted.
Then he says the trivia question will pertain to a Swedish film called Together. Oh, fuck.
I mean, I'm a film dork and all, but I never saw "Together," and I have only vague recollections of trailers and reviews. The trivia question, the DJ says, is "In what decade is the movie set?"
Oh, man. OK, lemme think here. "Together." For some reason, Happiness keeps springing to mind when I think of "Together." Ummmm, OK. Something about a commune. Hippies. I'm seeing tie-dye. So that makes it '60s or '70s. I'm going '70s, if and when I get through, that is. I do get through.
"KALX. What's your answer?"
I try and appeal to his human side, in case the answer I'm about to give is wrong.
"Brother Grimm, I sure hope it's the '70s, because I'm the biggest Hellacopters fan there is, and I would sure love those tickets!"
"Yeah. lucky guess. Hold on while I get your name and stuff."
Hell yes. The gods of rock 'n' roll smiled on me last night, saw my lame unemployed ass, knew I couldn't afford to pay to see one of the greatest rock bands of the day, and found a way to get me there anyway. Kick out the jams, brothers and sisters. And thanks, KALX! ßßß
Nope. Still nothin'.
You'd think that after three days off, I'd have something to say. Not so, it seems.
I'll try again tomorrow. ßßß
Seven Lingering Oscar™ Questions
Very. ßßß
Coffee Junkie
Have you ever thought about coffee? I mean, really thought about it? Well, I have.
It's weird, dude. We take this rare bean, grind it up, pour hot water on it to extract its essence, and drink it to wake up in the morning. (Or, if you're like me, drink it throughout the day just to make life bearable.) There are infinite variations on its preparation, from how the beans are roasted to how they're ground to how they're brewed to how the resulting concoction is presented. The preparation and ingestion rituals of the coffee bean are downright arcane, even when compared to the elaborate ceremonies accompanying illicit drugs like heroin and cocaine.
And the ubiquitousness of coffee is so weird. It's just so damn, well, ubiquitous that we don't give it a second thought. What if every Starbucks and Peet's and Mom-and-Pop shop sold cigarettes or opium instead of coffee? That would be odd, no? But they're slinging caffeine instead, the world's most popular drug, which in its ubiquitousness has become inviolate.
Of course, as I'm writing this, I'm consuming coffee as fast as its considerable heat will allow. Life without caffeine is almost unthinkable, and probably not worth living anyway. I did, however, manage to get off the stuff for a couple of years once. Cut out coffee, sodas, tea, chocolate, and even refined sugar for good measure. I was sickeningly healthy and tediously even-tempered.
But getting a real job with a commute and such was all it took to get me back on the stuff. You try waking up "naturally" at 5:30 in the AM and let me know how that goes. Nope, I needed a tall mug of the black stuff just to pry my eyes open enough to operate my motor vehicle. And now that I'm working from home, coffee is still my constant companion. Tired? Have a cup of coffee. Hungry? Don't eat — drink coffee instead! Chilly? Mmm, a cup of coffee would warm me right up. So yeah, I'm a junkie. Not exactly proud of it, but certainly resigned to it.
That's all for now. Gotta go get a warm-up. ßßß
Diversionary Tactics, Continued
Here's more stuff that's keeping me from going completely bughouse while staring endlessly at my computer screen.
I've procrastinated long enough. Back to the proverbial grind, I guess. ßßß
The Occupational Hazards of Contracting
So the thing about contracting is this: while it's great to work from home and all, there are some obvious drawbacks.
Of course, I realize this beats the living hell out of digging ditches. I've dug ditches before, and I'll take tech-writing over ditch-digging any day. Of course, should the tech-writing thing dry up, I'll always have my ditch-digging experience to fall back on.
Hopefully it won't come to that, but if I don't get cracking on this project, it might. ßßß
Diversionary Tactics
This whole "work" thing has put a serious damper on my leisure time. Poring over page after page of impenetrable Javascript isn't exactly my idea of fun, if you get my drift. The things I do in the neverending quest for bling, I tell ya. ...
But here are some of the things that are keeping me sane in my moments of respite from tech writing:
9-10PMMad loot?? C'mon, that's comedy gold!! My hat is off to whoever writes these listings, and whichever editor-type has the cojones to let him/her. Sadly, the listings are several orders better than the shows they describe.
ANIMAL PRECINCT (Animal Planet, TV-PG)
Some people have made mad loot on cockfighting. Of course, they'll burn in hell, but I guess it seems worth it to them. ASPCA agents show how they're trying to bust up the sport.
More fun stuff tomorrow, but right now the bling is beckoning. Over and out. ßßß
Dogs and cats living together ... mass hysteria!*
When did stoplights become optional?
Does red no longer mean "stop"? Did I miss this announcement? Was there a ballot measure that made it a matter of personal choice whether or not to stop at a red light? (We have so many referenda here in California; it's certainly possible I could have missed one. Also, it would be oh-so-Californian to extend our strange ideas about personal expression to the rules of the road.)
I don't know about you and where you live and drive, but recently I've noticed a drastic increase in red-light running in the Greater San Francisco Bay Area. What the hell is going on here? Where are these people headed that waiting two extra minutes through a light cycle is, like, untenable?
Now I drive pretty fast, and I've had occasion to push the yellow-to-red-light envelope now and again. But every time I do, I'll be damned if two more cars behind me blow through the now-completely red light. Anarchy, people. Anarchy.
Actually it's beyond anarchy: it's chaos. Instead of draconian rules and regs, anarchy relies on social contracts to protect its citizens. Social contracts like, when the light is red you stop, you fat bastard in the SUV! Social contracts like "Right turn on red after stop" means you have to stop before you turn instead of blowing through the red and nearly sideswiping me.
But as little regard as my fellow drivers seem to have for traffic signals (and that's practically nil), they pale in comparison to this new breed of urban pedestrian scofflaws. Willful jaywalking, once the province of surly teenage males, seems to be spreading at an alarming pace. People are stepping off curbs and crossing against lights, seemingly oblivious to the vehicles hurtling past them. Are these people possessed of a naive and misplaced faith that their fellow humans won't run them down? Are they just plain stupid? I honestly don't get it.
I've got to go drive downtown now. Wish me luck. ßßß
The man who is his own boss has an idiot for an employee.
Too much to do. Too little sleep.
Plus, if time equals money, then writing this is costing me. Now that I'm my own boss, I gotta keep my eye on the bottom line. And until someone is damn fool enough to pay me to write this thing, I can't be throwing money away.
Honestly, though? I really just don't have anything clever to say today. At least not until I've had lots more coffee. ßßß
#3: Write Blawg
My name is Ian, and I am a to-do list addict. ("Hi, Ian!")
Junkie might be a more appropriate descriptor. I rarely have fewer than four or five lists going at any one time; a couple of paper lists, a shopping list that's gotten too big for its britches and become a bona fide to-do list, one in my Palm Pilot, and, of course, the interminable, insurmountable, and often impenetrable one in my head. One list breeds more lists, hydra-headed: "Item 6: Make new list."
My dresser and desk are graveyards for half-completed lists. Many are rife with archaic references: "Take BetaMax in for repair," or "Write incendiary letter to South African government insisting they release Nelson Mandela." If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, my desktop is a broad thoroughfare headed straight down.
It's not all bad, mind you. I learned early on in my development (OK, not so early maybe) that making lists of the shit I had to but didn't want to do was the only way to get said things done. Otherwise my immediate-gratification-wired psyche would conveniently forget these things and they would go undone. Hence I'd feel guilt and shame in my failure, ergo shortcircuiting the intended pleasurable response. A vicious cycle on which actual drug addiction's got nothin'.
So it's really about the lesser of two evils. Doing some of the nagging, petty, pedestrian stuff we all have to do while feeling somewhat bad about the stuff that goes undone is better than accomplishing nothing and feeling really awful about it. And the feeling of accomplishment one experiences when one crosses off an item from the list is oh-so sweet. And yes, in times of weakness, I've even resorted to post-posting already completed items on the list just to cross them off. Hey, it takes what it takes, right?
But even I, king of the To-Do List, think that the idea of an entire magazine devoted to the idea is ludicrous. Of course, that didn't stop me from wasting an entire afternoon on the site.
Be strong. Learn from the mistakes of those who've gone before you. Shopping lists are the gateway drug to full-blown list addiction. Don't start. And whatever you do, do not visit the To-Do List magazine site. Unless you have an entire afternoon to waste. ßßß
Temporal Economics
After six weeks of being unemployed and answerable to no one (well, besides my wife, of course), being back at work is definitely going to take some adjustment. The value of my time has just changed dramatically. While unemployed I had a massive surplus of free time and very little to do with it, making the value of that time fairly low. But now that I'm working again — and contracting, no less — I have less disposable time and no one but me to make sure I'm spending it wisely.
So no more mornings of endlessly tweaking my entries to get them just right. No more entire afternoons spent designing logo after logo for my various bands. And no more lazy afternoons at the coffee shop with my good friend David Foster Wallace. Time, once again, is money.
It was sure fun while it wasn't, though. ßßß
Back in the Saddle
Funny how stuff works out sometimes.
Six weeks to the day from the day I was laid off — and on the very day my severance pay runs out — I'm back working again. If I believed in synchronicity or karma or horoscopes or any of that tomfoolery, I'd say it was meant to be. But I don't, so I won't.
Instead I'll just be grateful to have been in the right place at the right time and to have friends in high places. Thanks to them, I start work today on some technical documentation for a pretty incredible software product. It's a contract gig and I get to telecommute, which is huge, and it pays a hell of a lot more than unemployment insurance did.
So once again I'm shown exactly how pointless it is for me to waste precious psychic energy freaking out about the future. In the end, it just doesn't matter. Whatever's gonna happen is what's gonna happen. And this is what's happened.
In other great news, Supercast practiced Saturday and Sunday for a total of about 10 hours. We now have a total of eight complete songs, which, as everyone knows, is just enough to play live. So if you need a post-hardcore rock band for your next corporate event, wedding, or bar mitzvah, we are officially ready to go.
By the end of day two, we were running like a well-oiled machine. We radically rearranged one song that had been giving us fits forever, and now it shreds. We also wrote one entire new song from the ground up over the two days, which we've never done before. It just all felt like it came together, and I can barely contain my excitement about this thing. I can't wait to record and play. Hell, I can hardly wait to rehearse again on Wednesday, and I've never looked forward to rehearsing before. Vive le rock.
So things are good. I give myself a day — maybe two — before I figure out a way to screw it all up again. But who knows? I've been full of surprises lately. ßßß
It's a crazy world. Someone oughta sell tickets.*
So my interview yesterday was an exercise in the "it's a small world after all" theory. It went like this.
Speaking of rock, our live-music hiatus didn't even last a week. Tonight we'll be checking out Dead Low Tide, the band that's formed out of the ashes of the mighty Murder City Devils. You can check out an mp3 of the new band here. Good stuff.
Other than that, I got nothing. We will be entrenched in the rehearsal studio all weekend in preparation for recording early next month, ironing out kinks in the new songs, endlessly tinkering and tweaking them until they are perfect rock 'n' roll gems. Or something. In my free time, I'm also teaching myself Flash. How does that go again? Jack of all trades, master of none? ßßß
Good luck. We're all counting on you.
Hey, I actually have an interview today. Gotta go prepare. Think good thoughts. ßßß
Ian Miller: Webmonkey
So yesterday I was kvetching about my complete lack of job prospects, so what did I do? Why, what any normal, logical person would do: spent the whole day developing my band's website and did nothing even remotely job-search-related. What an idiot.
The good news is that the site's up — please to check it out at www.thehillshaveeyes.com. All feedback is appreciated. Oh, and this just in: Dreamweaver is the devil. Give me TextPad any day of the week.
The other band, Supercast, got a new domain as well, but we had to settle for supercastrock.com, because supercast.com, as everyone knows, is "Your link to Die Casters Online!." (sic). Now the only question is can I stay unemployed long enough to do the Supercast site as well. ... At this rate, it would seem so.
In other Supercast news, it looks like we're going to be doing some demos early next month, I think, which of course will be posted here. I'm pretty excited. For those of you who have heard The Hills Have Eyes, Supercast is a lot more rawk — think Led Zeppelin for the 21st Century, or something. Come mid-April I will have actual songs for you, though. Because, as we all know, "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture — it's a really stupid thing to want to do."*
In other news, Six Feet Under ruled, Planet of the Apes didn't, and I think the new Kasey Chambers and Desaparecidos records are good but maybe somewhat overrated. OK, but I really gotta go find a job or something. ttyl. ßßß
We now return you to your life, already in progress.
Whoa. No show to go to last night. Just class, then home, in bed by 10 PM. Eight hours' sleep. Damn, I feel like a hundred bucks.
So begins week six (six!) of my unemployment. Hard to believe. Out of work five weeks, and no closer to having a new job today than I was on January 28th. Not a single interview. Nothing. The good news is that my severance is still in effect, meaning that technically I'm still getting paid by the old company. Also good is that when it went belly up, I cashed out a goodly amount of vacation time/PTO, so I got that going for me. Which is nice.
But still scary as hell. I've essentially done something full time ever since I was 16, whether it was college or work or touring or some combo thereof. Turns out I haven't the foggiest freaking idea what to do with myself when by myself. Looking back over the last five weeks, it seems that I've tried to piece together some type of routine — gym, job search, band practice, job search, coffee shop, job search. And I vacillate between being able to enjoy the freedom of my unemployment and being oppressed by the lack of structure. It's really kind of pathetic if you think about it.
Pathetic to see to what great lengths I will go to avoid being with myself. Pathetic to realize how dependent I am on the framework of a 9-to-5 job. Pitiful, really, to find out how completely terrifying freedom can be.
OK, I think I've succeeded in thoroughly depressing myself, and probably you too. Honestly, I know it's not as bad as all that, and, lest I give you the wrong impression, I certainly haven't been wallowing in self-pity for the last month-plus (it's really just been since I woke up this morning). Blame it on a lack of coffee, if you will. Or the fact that my sick, sick brain is (almost) constantly telling me that if I don't find another job RIGHT NOW, that I will die penniless and alone in the gutter.
Damn that brain. Damn it straight to hell. ßßß
KOTJ/MF
Six days and nights. Seven shows. Countless bands. Noise Pop 10 is behind us. Thank God almighty.
Don't get me wrong: We had a blast. But I'm damn happy I'm going to get my life back. I'm not going to another show ever. At least until Nick Cave plays the Warfield later this month.
So I'm bereft of energy and going on pure adrenaline and Red Bull right now. And I'm fresh out of words, too, as I have used more than my fair share of them chronicling my misadventures over at musicrag. So no real blawg today. Too tired. Be a dear and run over to musicrag.com and read all about it. I'll be back tomorrow, less tired and less tinnitusy.
Kick out the jams. ßßß
Errata
Reviews of day 2 of Noise Pop are up at musicrag.com, so go read it. The site's also had a much-needed facelift and even has comment functionality, so go talk some smack. Reviews of day 3 will be up later today.
The band once known as the Ian Miller Former San Geronimo Untitled Band Project is no longer! No longer untitled, that is. We have a name. And the winner is ... Supercast! What a freaking relief. I think drummer Todd ended up coming up with the name, but thanks to everyone who submitted names here. All submissions were entertained, however briefly. Supercast is coming for your children. You have been warned.
I made a rare pilgrimage to the Big Store yesterday, AKA Costco. Dropped $200+ I didn't have faster than you can say "unemployment insurance." Bought 42 Boca Burgers. Forty-two. That should last me an entire week, if I can ration them effectively. Other key acquisitions included:
Tonight's Noise Pop festivities continue with a once-in-a-lifetime-type collaboration between Neko Case and John Doe. Too excited for words, almost. Tomorrow night is the almighty Big Star and Imperial Teen, but before that we get to go hear Todd Solondz lecture at Cal. Too much culture. Sensory overload or something.
Noise Pop wraps up on Sunday with Guided by Voices and Preston School of Industry. Woo-hoo. Then sleep. Precious sleep.
I believe that is all the information I have to convey at this time. Thanks again for stopping by, and we hope your visit to blawg was a pleasant one. See you real soon. ßßß
Don't miss last month's brilliant insight.
