In case you have not yet heard, I have been working on an album with my old bandmates Mike and Jen, and we have 45 minutes of music out, available here.

In the past I think I would have been a lot more interested in going into very great detail about how the music came to be and what the recording process was like, but at the moment that seems to me not only a little self-indulgent but also no better than boring. We did all the composing and recording under some pretty novel circumstances, but I'd rather have the work just stand for itself.

I will say just this much: in the era of the Internet and cheap computers, it's very possible (and I'm not saying I've ever done it) to make music at a level that's indistinguishable from professional productions. People have been saying things like this for a while now, but I'm not sure if anyone really understands what this means in terms of the status of music as a creative act versus music as a vocation. If distribution and production are basically zero-cost, then the only thing that really justifies the existence of the music industry is its ability to convince many people to buy one particular recording instead of another. And the purpose of this, in turn, is primarily to make money for certain media interests, and then secondarily to support the lifestyles of people who want to live off of their creative work. The former is a truism; I don't point out in this instance as a kind of sophomoric, cynical statement, but merely so I don't ignore an obvious thing. The latter is what's more interesting, since I think the current trajectory of technology is making more and more clear how fundamentally untenable it is to sell things that you can digitize, i.e., intellectual property at large.

I guess, in a basic sense, I find it wrong to deny or allow access to the music you make on the basis of a person's ability to pay you. The ethics of it are complicated, and they depend on which point of view you adopt. It's easy to say that we can dispense with all of the excess and spectacle of stardom--which isn't to say that the music is bad, but to claim merely that the economics of it aren't necessary--but then there are lots of hard-working musicians who desire no more than a modest income to do what they love to do full-time. If musicians were able to support themselves only on the basis of selling their music, then I would say that nobody deserves to live off of their music, because it would necessitate all the retrograde contrivances that exist currently to treat music as property. Even if you aren't willing to discard the idea of intellectual property entirely, if e.g. you believe that it provides society with some sort of entrepreneurial incentive, I still think most of the counter-arguments are irrelevant in music, simply because creative work has absolutely no calculable contribution to society in any definition of "progress" you might prefer. In fact, I actually believe in something like the opposite of the incentives argument: commodification of music limits its creative potential, and it limits the scope of what we consider to be acceptable music, right down to the form (e.g. aren't albums and 3-5 minute songs kind of arbitrary?) in which we consume it.

And consider the technical reality I pointed out earlier: anyone can make music, and they can send it to anyone, and all of this occurs with very little investment beyond the time you decide to put into it. In this situation, there is no reason to feel that some musicians deserve to be paid for access to their work, while others don't. Really, I think it's kind of presumptuous to have that expectation in the first place. It's possible that you might resent such a view, because it seems to lead to the claim that we should not have professional artists at all. That's certainly one possible end to this logic, although I'd prefer to focus only on the music-as-commodity aspect. I don't know enough about the economics of it to really know for sure, but one can imagine alternatives: selling merchandise, selling artwork, selling music for advertisement purposes (although I'm not altogether convinced this is possible if what I said earlier about the viability of defending music as property applies in any context, to any extreme), and/or selling admission to live performance. Or if we felt, as a society, that there is a place for professional artists, we could just get together and establish a fund to support them. The point is that defending the professional artist by making creative work into a sellable thing is neither very ethical nor particularly sensible in light of technological advance.

There has been a lot of brouhaha over Radiohead allowing fans to pay whatever they want for their most recent album. I suspect they have no illusions that this kind of mass patronage is a sustainable business model for the long term, or for any band with less loyal a fanbase. About this I felt kind of the way I feel about philanthropy in general--of course we are all better off for it, but we have to see it as something less than true generosity. That Radiohead did it was on the one hand very cool, because nobody else at their level of commercial viability had done it, and on the other hand both very short of revolutionary, since it was kind of half-assed--they only released 128k MP3s, which I'll admit is "good enough", but their reluctance to release any higher-fidelity versions means even they themselves believe that those who pay full price should get something "better"--and still pretty defensive of the essentially conservative idea that people should pay for music in the first place.

After getting the new Beatles remix album LOVE (actually the soundtrack to Cirque du Soleil's newest Vegas show, a fact which inspires some complex emotions, like first a sort of cringing dismissal because it involves new-agey French-Canadian acrobats and seems cheesy, but then an intense curiosity because A) it's the Beatles (and George Martin and his son were commissioned to handle the project) and B) you have to admit, despite all its punguence, that Cirque du Soleil generally puts on a really good live show) I had a chance to rediscover the band a little. It's not that the remixing was all that revolutionary--after all the album's produced for one of pop music's most rabidly conservative markets (i.e., boomer classic rock fans) and really not the correct venue for anything radical or even moderately unfamiliar--but rather I'd more or less been trying hard to ignore to the Beatles for the last year or two. That's something you'll tend to hear a lot from long-time Beatles fans actually: what happens is that you get saturated in the music and after that it's become such a thing of habit for you that you cease to get anything new out of it.

One thing I'd forgotten about was how weird the introduction to "A Day in the Life" was. It starts with a bunch of faux crowd noise that obscures the entrance of the acoustic guitar, and so you're not sure where to place the beat in your head. For a while you're sure the downbeat (i.e., the "one" of a "one-two-three-four" count) is on the down-strum and not the up-strum, but then the piano and bass enter with an extremely strange rhythm and seem to re-assert the downbeat as half a beat after you thought it was, and then you're just totally thrown off until the verse actually starts. For review, try counting "one two three four" when the acoustic guitar starts and see how it feels when the piano/bass come in:

• Actual intro to "A Day in the Life"

Maybe it makes sense to you right away, but for me the piano and bass always sound like they come in on what should be a downbeat--but at that same moment the guitar's doing an up-strum, and so this perfectly contradicts the rhythm I have established in my head up until that point. It's not that the syncopation of the piano and bass are really that sophisticated, but somehow the implicit accents of the piano/bass phrase are lost (basically, I think, because the recording/mix sort of suck--and it's still one of the best songs ever put to tape) and you are left very confused for a few measures before the verse kicks in.

For reference, this is how you should be hearing it:

• Intro to "A Day in the Life" with beats/counts

Here, the piano and bass enter half a beat past the downbeat, which is designated by both the kick drum and the one-count. But what I tend to hear when the piano and bass enter is more like this (try to ignore the first few measures of guitar and wait for the piano and bass):

• Intro to "A Day in the Life" with beats/counts offset by an eighth note

Here I took the same recording and pushed the stringed instruments back by half a beat. You have to really try hard to hear the counted rhythm against the weirdly-offset guitar, but it gets much easier to hear it when the piano and bass enter on the downbeat/one-count. And as it begins to wrap up and transition into the verse, it feels just extremely weird, like there's an extra half-beat in there somewhere. Do you hear how both versions sort of make sense, at least for a little while? Now go back to the original recording and see how it feels to you without the extra beats and counting.

This is the really weird thing about syncopation: in almost the same way you can visualize the above collection of 2-dimensional lines and blocks as at least three conceptually distinct forms (as 1. alternating inset-protruding cubes or 2. alternating protruding-inset cubes or 3. simply as flat lines/blocks), you can take the same set notes with the same gaps of time between them and "hear" them as completely different phrases, mostly depending on what your mental designation of the downbeat happens to be. Have a listen to a bit of Led Zeppelin:

• E-note riff from bridge of "Black Dog"

After a drum fill, you'll hear the same exact phrase in E played three times in a row before the band changes chords back to an A-note riff. I assure you the notes and the time intervals between them are exactly the same in each of the three repetitions. And yet each repetition sounds completely different, because they each start at a different point in your internal rhythmic count.

The example in which this thing is easiest to hear is probably in Nirvana's "Very Ape" off of In Utero (and not incidentally Nirvana were huge Beatles fans):

1. Actual intro to "Very Ape"
2. Intro to "Very Ape" with beats/counts: how you "should" hear it
3. Intro to "Very Ape" with beats/counts offset by an eigth note: how I sometimes hear it if I'm not paying close attention

The reason why #3 always sounds tempting is that we have a tendency to take the first note of a song as the downbeat unless it's really obvious otherwise. When the first note is heavily accented and prominent, as with "Very Ape", then it's a difficult trap to avoid. (BTW, you can hear Nirvana more or less completely ripped off by the Japanese band The Pillows in "Advice". The Pillows do manage to employ this in a much more sophisticated manner in the intro to "Sleepy Head".) Actually, the reason why "A Day in the Life" sounds so screwy is that A) you can't hear the first note of the guitar and B) Lennon's strumming in kind of a lazy noncommittal way, and so there's no reference point to start counting from, and there's always a slight bit of doubt in your head as to where the downbeat should fall--it's not until the first note of the piano/bass entrance that you feel some sense of rhythmic stability, and then that turns out to be wrong. The result of mistaking the wrong note as the downbeat (and theoretically speaking it's not even a mistake at all) is that once the drums start or something else happens to basically force you accept a different beat, you kind of feel like the rug has been pulled from under you, in a really fun and cool way.

Manipulating this kind of thing at the start of the song (intentionally or not), as with what happens in "A Day in the Life", seems to be a kind of lost art in mainstream pop music; you will rarely hear added beats or trick syncopations outside of certain peripheral genres, primarily metal (because of the prog and/or blues influence) and jazz (which, IMO, tends to make it kind of academic and inaccessible and basically takes the fun out of it) and worldbeat (which is just plain difficult to listen to most of the time) and some very trippy strains of hip-hip (and then even only in some really, really weird breakbeats). I'm not sure why this is the case--maybe it relies on a kind of rhythmic instinct that's gotten out of fashion in modern songwriting and beatmaking.

It is also sort of an obscure phenomenon that tends to entertain the musicians (especially theory-savvy ones) way more than the listeners, but the trick isn't so abstruse that it necessarily makes songs difficult to listen to. Some of the most head-fucking examples I can think of come from major classics. Try, for instance, to count out the drum intro to "Rock and Roll". (Honestly I still haven't figured this one out. BTW the Led seems to have been all over this type of thing in IV, "Stairway" notwithstanding. "Misty Mountain Hop" a similar rhythmic ambiguity about the main riff, although the first note of the song really is on the downbeat.)

The most confusing and weird might be the kickoff guitar lick to "Drive My Car", by the Beatles once again:

1. Actual intro to "Drive My Car"
2. Intro to "Drive My Car" with beats/counts: how you "should" hear it
3. Intro to "Drive My Car" with beats/counts offset by an eigth note: how I always hear it

I recently spent about 30 minutes trying to wrap my head around this, and even after figuring out how to play it on guitar, I still find it impossible to hear anything but a one-count on the first note. Technically speaking, the downbeat actually falls on the second note. Fortunately for my musical ego (and I deliberately checked for exactly this purpose), the sheer confusingness of this has not been ignored by the experts either; in the official published Beatles scores (I mean that huge white book done by Japanese dudes that costs boatloads of cash) the intro lick is transcribed as starting on the downbeat and consisting of one measure of 4/4, followed by one measure of 9/8--in other words, transcribed as if the lick were half a beat longer than any composer this side of Schoenberg would have it. This is an extremely weird and almost lame way of transcribing it (really, it's kind of a cop-out...if you're gonna do that, why not just go all the way and transcribe the intro as a single 17/8 measure?). While the book's transcribers get things wrong more often than they should, it's hard to blame them this time around. No less an authority than the brilliant (not to mention incredibly obsessed/deranged) Beatles musicologist Alan Pollack had this to say about "Drive My Car":

This intro has to rank as two measures-worth of the Beatles' most rhythmically disorienting music ever. It starts with an eighth note pickup before the downbeat but the melodic contour of the syncopated guitar part combined with the offbeat entrance of the bass guitar make it virtually impossible for you to find the meter...don't ever forget that it was designed on purpose to keep you from ever groking it without extreme effort.

I tend to disagree with the last observation, because it seems too snobby and jazzy of the Beatles to be so intentionally esoteric. Plus, the drums kick off in such a jammy and rocking way that I have to think the whole thing was just a very curious accident.

Anyway this makes my head hurt, and badly.

There were these kids sitting behind us at the Mew/Broken Social Scene/Bloc Party concert yesterday night. I estimate they were college freshmen or sophomores. I say sitting because we were at the LA Greek Theater and there were real chairs to sit in, and until Bloc Party came on at least 80% of the audience couldn't be bothered to stand. So when we stood up for Broken Social Scene, the kids behind us started to complain vitriolically about how they didn't pay X dollars to see the backs of other fans. They told us to sit the fuck down. At first we ignored them and then they started to throw things at us, little balls of trash and ear plugs. One guy poured his chicken-nugget dipping sauce over the back of my seat.

This was as close to a bonafide confrontation with complete strangers that I'd come in a long while. We argued with them a little bit, but after a point I decided just to sit back down. I thought we didn't really need to stand up to see, and it was sort of silly to insist on our right to stand when we weren't going to convince these kids of anything. The more we resisted the more embarassingly childish it would have become.

BUT:

• In the proceedings of our brief snafu, the flock of undergraduates behind us claimed that: a) we could see perfectly fine sitting down, and b) nobody in our section was standing. These were practical realites but absurd and irrelevant in principle. I submit that it's basically common law that you can stand at a rock concert, regardless of your perspective vis-a-vis the stage and regardless of who is behind you. Sitting is a passive way of consuming music and altogether inappropriate for the spectacle of live performance, the only exceptions being classical music and possibly jazz. You sit when you are more interested in your beer, or the girl sitting next to you. You sit when you are tired, or feel like the music is too loud. Basically, you sit because you don't give a shit.
• The fellow wielding the ranch dipping sauce was wearing a freshly-purchased Broken Social Scene t-shirt and had one of those trendy, gel-assisted dorsal-fin haircuts. His buddies next to him had all the appropriate hipster paraphernalia, as in ratty sports jackets worn over fitted t-shirts, white buttons pinned to black garments indicating their enthusiasm for certain brands, tight denim, courdoroy, &c. &c. When they first objected to our standing up, I thought they were kidding. Then I asked them if it was their first rock concert--that probably came off as condescending, especially since our mutual antagonism was pretty well established by that point, but I was legitimately curious. How do you look like Emo Jack and Twee-pop Jill and then get your panties in a knot over people standing at a show?
• When I first started going to rock concerts I was much shorter than everyone else and I was getting my first whiffs of second-hand marijuana smoke, and while I found it all pretty offensive, I assumed it was my problem that I wasn't used to it all. It never crossed my mind to get angry at specific people. This makes me wonder at what point do people decide to get personal about such things. I sort of suspect it is a power thing; throwing bits of garbage and surreptitiously planting filth on the backs of chairs is the passive-aggressive stock of both children and non-confrontational people, and I have to think that our undergraduate antagonists would have been less willing to make a scene had they not outnumbered us, or if we were physically larger, or, sadly, if we weren't all Asian. It kills me to play the race card here, but I really think it was part of the mix.

AND:

• It's interesting to compare this experience with the Slayer concert I went to exactly two weeks prior, in which I got peer-pressured, basically, into standing about ten feet from the edge of the stage right before Slayer went on. This resulted in many an anonymous physical encounter with rabid moshing shirtless fans and their fragrant Hesher tresses. For all the violence and the visual terror, it is all fundamentally unpretentious and non-personal. The typical scary-looking metalhead is out to make a statement the same as your average indie rock snob, but there's this really refreshing lack of superiority and exclusivity upon which the latter can make no claims. In that sense I think what you see in a metal concert is much more about expression and freedom and humanism than all the I Paid For This Ticket And I'm Gonna Sit Here Legs Crossed In My Sophisticated Pants Harumph Harumph solopsist consumer high-horsing of last night's show.
• Not to seem like I'm too hung up about the fried-food ranch sauce incident, but it's generally depressing and weird to see hot dog stands and seat-mounted cup holders at a rock concert. I'll fly with alcohol, tobacco, weed, and ecstacy, but the presence of Churros and fries strikes me as gross and vaguely immoral.
• This, coupled with the fact that there are indeed seats so remotely-positioned as to reveal tangibly the delay between what you see on stage and what you hear from it, all but confirms a previous impression that the LA Greek is a shitty venue. More generally, it's probably time to be moving past large-scale arena rock shows, since they're always overpriced and about five or six times less impressive than seeing a lesser-known band play a smaller venue.
• Also, going to a show in which your favored band is the opener to a technically less-sophisticated but more poppy headliner is, for several complicated and interrelated reasons, bad news. Avoid it.
• Okay, I realize what an asshole that makes me sound like. But usually I prefer the technically less-sophisticated and more poppy headliner. Really. Just not in some cases is all.

AND YET:

• In context, is it more selfish for us to stand, or for others to demand that we sit? Democracy says the former. [insert here bemused, wordy, and politely inconclusive discussion of the conflict between democracy and liberalism, viz., rights/will of society vs. rights/will of the individual]

It's only a rough demo, but it's something: I put together a semi-listenable demo of a track off the upcoming album. The song is called "This, Your Finest Day".

It took me all evening to record it, which is disturbing. It is also clear I need to find a piano player who is not me. Any bold volunteers?

I have gotten back into my old high-school habit of re-listening one or two tracks over and over, all day, day after day. For a while it was that I had way too much music in my hands and it all bled together and grew hard into a rumbly bog; listening to music was forgettable like driving to work. I always had had the attitude that track-skippers who went straight over the album tracks for the singles were being silly and shallow, and if that made me a music snob well fuck you. But then I've re-considered a little, now that I'm awash in more records than I have time to absorb. What could be more bland and lamely consumerist than to attempt to milk your albums for all they're worth, re-listening and forgetting over and over again, somehow trying to get what you paid for, somehow trying to extract some wisdom out of the B-sides?

Well anyway, here are some songs I have been listening to again and again. They're nothing fancy--they will just get under your skin.

"Phenomena" on Show Your Bones by Yeah Yeah Yeahs

I always sort of thought the Yeah Yeah Yeahs as one of those fashionable bands, mainstream but edgy enough for credibility but then basically unoriginal and could in no way be anyone's favorite band. But here they are, rocking my pants off daily and nightly. This track is pretty uneven and stuttery but it's got a punchy drum beat like "Scentless Apprentice" by Nirvana, and the part where the guitar matches in lockstep with the vocals during the chorus in this sort of Zen-boneheaded pentatonic melody is the best inch of new music I have heard in months and months and months. (While this doesn't apply to your purposes whatsoever, I get a tremendous amount of nostalgia out of this tune because I used to play in a band fronted by a half-Asian girl who sang in a glammy style and wrote really musical lyrics and we had a tune that attempted something like the riffs and structure of this song--even the guitar tone was the about the sort that I'd been going for. Let's move on.)

"Still Crazy After All These Years" by Paul Simon

I think Paul Simon has his moments where he is a songwriter for the ages, maybe even better than Lennon and McCartney. Play his best stuff for a neutered slave farmer in ancient Greece or a spaceman with a robotic heart from Planet Zok in the year 2650, and they will all be diehard fans of Rhymin' Simon. I have listened to "Bridge Over Troubled Water" too many times in my life, but Paul Simon was able to work the same sort of sentimental warmth into "Still Crazy..." all over again, and, I think, in an original way. There are all of these fantastic little gospel devices thrown in there, like the deceptive cadences that linger on at the ends of the choruses and when the bass fools around with the flat-7 of the tonic chord mid-verse. You may have no idea what I'm talking about, but you have heard it again and again. It's amazing to me how much mileage you can get out of tricks like that; in a way it's like 12-bar blues, where you can write a whole culture's worth of music just by stringing those things together.

"Jesus, Etc." on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by Wilco

Out of any Wilco song I think this is the one that could be converted to a jazz standard or supermarket muzak or re-done by Barry Manilow for Vegas. Of course, that'll never happen, nor does this song deserve that kind of mishandling, but I'm saying that the melody is just that comfortable. It is familiar and predictable in the very best way, where you hear the first parts of the song and you know what's coming up next and you can't wait for it. This is like the way the side of your jaw trembles and the top of your throat tightens when you bite into something sweet. This tune has maybe the least sappy string part you'll ever hear in a pop song; there is this hardly-audible violin going down the middle in the last verse that absolutely shatters me. More superlatives: I am trying to remember songs with better lines than "You were right about the stars / Each one is a setting sun" and "Our love, our love is all of God's money" and I can't come up with anything.

"The Party's Crashing Me" on The Sundlandic Twins by Of Montreal

Agreed: this record is over-produced and a lot of it annoys the shit out of me. Dude's voice is carved into the mix at some frequency in between snarky and cloying. But I heard this tune at "indie dance night" at a hipster club in Sacramento and it is just ridiculously danceable. At the time I had no idea who it was, and then the very next day my friend Chris Kang told me to check out this excellent track he was listening to, and I realized it was the same tune from the night before. That's how good it is--usually you can never remember a tune on the first listen, especially with extra DJ beats laid on top, but I'm here today and I lived the miracle. I dig how the chorus is in a key that is basically unrelated to the verse, and the change is pretty abrupt. They're like, "Ah, let's hold this chord out for a little longer and move the buzzy little keyboard part up and up and OH MY GOD WE'VE MODULATED NOW, HERE'S THE VERSE YOU CHUMPS." And you just have to sit there and take it.

I've been going to see noontime concerts on campus this whole semester, but this fall I've missed out on some big names--Arcade Fire, Sigur Ros, Mono--out of laziness, thrift, and shit luck. So I've had this big wad for noisy, sweaty rock swelling up inside me. It's good to elbow your way into a crowd so you can see the guitar player's hands, and get in so close your ears hurt afterwards, to shift around so you can see over the tall guy standing in front of you, to stand until your knees and feet hurt, to whoop and clap along and to admire the well-dressed girls all about. If you were richer and had more time you'd be better off doing all those things a little more.

Once in a while isn't that terrible if that's what you've gotta settle for. So going to see Broken Social Scene last night was a good once in a while for me. I think it might be one of the best shows I've ever seen. Most of the shows I saw in Japan were also Best Shows I've Ever Seen, and I suppose my judgement regarding things like the quality of past experiences is pretty dodgy. But what the hell. They were all the best.

Broken Social Scene were terrific. They had about ten or eleven people on stage for any given song, with horns and violins and synths on top of bass, three or four or five guitars, two drum kits, and a bevy of singers and harmonizers. Usually they get thrown into the post-rock category, but their stuff makes me feel better than the dark and cacophonous stuff that I'd normally associate with that. They made me dance and I had no choice. I'd only take them down a notch for overstaying their welcome a little with the encore, which definitely is a post-rock tendency.

Here's what was extra special about the show: the opener, Leslie Feist, was unbelievable. Before the music started I was telling my pals Dan and Mark about how I wasn't a big fan of openers, since they were only occasionally good, and you always feel a little bad for them because the crowd isn't automatically on their side the way they are for the headliners. Then the show starts and I'm blown away by the first two songs. Every so often I come upon a live performer that is so good that I just want to quit music for good and crawl into a hedge, to stop playing and listening because there'd be no more point to it. For me those performers always seem to be girls. I bet Jeff Buckley or Jonathan Richman might have done the same if I'd seen them, but short of that, I think women have all the advantages. Nature just gives them better instruments. Then there's the girl-with-a-guitar cachet. There's a little sexism right here, because I am somehow always pleasantly surprised when a girl can play guitar really well, and I really shouldn't be. Anyway, the blind-ear test has proven that girls do cooler stuff with guitar, so it's not all bullshit. You should look up Leslie Feist--her recordings turn out not to be nearly as good as her live show, but she'd be well worth your time. Trust me this one time, even if you think everything else I listen to is shit.

Actually I spent the entire afternoon and evening in San Francisco, which was really a good thing but not as wonderful as it could have been, since it meant that I wasn't studying for the microeconomics midterm I took this morning. This may or may not have been the reason I was drawing blanks when I actually sat down to take the exam. In the end I think I did okay, but not before I had a really exquisite test panic that rocked me proper. That's usually just a momentary thing, but it happens to me too often to be healthy. I get to thinking Fuck I Don't Know How To Even Begin A Single Goddamn Question On This And I'm Going To Crash And Burn And Eat Serious Shit And Fail In Life Maybe I Ought To Calm Down But Oh Christ How Do You Do This Maybe I Should Sneak A Look At What The Other Guy Is Doing But I'll Be In Deep Fucking Trouble And Goddamnit Why Does This Feel So Bad This Is Completely Ridiculous Why Didn't I Study More I'm Gonna Get Up And Leave Right Now And I Should Just Quit This Shit Altogether. For me this feeling is so specific and precise and familiar. All at once it is the ceiling crashing down, the carpet pulled up rapidly from under my feet, the sucker-punch, the hoodwink and the short end of the stick, the getting ditched by my friends in junior high, the clawing at the lid of my coffin. I recall vividly some key examples: the end of the second verbal section of the PSAT in 10th grade, the CS61A entrance exam, Midterm 3 for CS61B, about 2 seconds of quantitative section in the GRE, halfway through the first midterm of microeconomics this term, and then the exam panic this morning, which was about as acute as I'd felt it freshman year. That might be about it, but that is also much more than enough. For each case it seems pretty silly in retrospect, but I'm not quite exaggerating the effect either: I actually did copy off of Johann to pass the 61A entrance quiz, and I actually did Quit This Shit Altogether after the third 61B midterm. The former might be sorta meaningless (though I probably can't run for President now), but the latter seems a bit serious. Luckily, that turned out to be the decision I should have made anyway--there were definitely lots of other things going on--but if not it would be pretty pathetic. Really, it's pathetic either way. Nothing so arbitrary should ever be taken to be so important.

On the other hand, I'd say the exams that I take this term have, objectively speaking, more immediate bearing on my circumstances than those instances of the past. I think that is the first reason school has been not too fun for me this term. One ought to take classes for learning's sake only, and here I am at the opposite extreme, making appearances in order to get some place I'm unsure I want to be. That uncertainty would be the other reason I haven't been so happy. Academia has been the key benefactor in my life, but it makes me uncomfortable in a lot of ways. The opportunity costs seem pretty high and I'm having a fair bit of commitment fear regarding the whole project. I'm not even through second midterms yet and I feel the need to get away from it for a while.

The outlet of choice for the past couple of weeks has been to indulge myself in soppy Japan nostalgia. I've been rummaging through my digital photo collection (which I never do), reading old blog entries, lurking silently around the Up Up Down Down and Mie-JETs websites, and emailing old friends from the program. Japan has officially become the gool ol' days. It's an all-too-easy point of contrast, since there was way more guitar playing and adventure and far less worrying about identity and the future than there is today. So you can imagine how weird it was for me when I ran into Wanning, one of my fellow JETs, at the Broken Social Scene concert. That was random.

I suppose, built into all this, is some kind of loneliness, literal and maybe otherwise. I do miss my friends, but just as significantly I feel sort of alone in my predicament, like I'm the only one who hasn't got my shit figured out and who is stumbling around in the dark. That may be a simple reason why school isn't so fun: there's no one running alongside me reminding me that it's okay. It's just me, the old extension student brooding in the corner of the classroom. What's that guy doing there, anyway?

If there's good to be had out of this, then I think it comes in two ways. First, I'd have to face all of these questions eventually, and if I'd spent another year in Japan then it would have just been pushing the issue a year into the future. Second, I'm not taking as much for granted anymore. I used to not miss people, but I do now. I call home these days. I write emails to correspond. I am really looking forward to Saturday when I can see my friends and eat oysters with them at Pt. Reyes.

The story starts again with me getting out of lecture and going for a long walk. I had some errands to take care of down on Shattuck. After that I had about forty minutes until the noontime concert on Lower Sproul, and I got the idea that I could get some lunch to go before heading back to campus and eat it while I watched the show. I stopped in front La Cascada, my favorite burrito place back when I was an undergrad, and I realized I hadn't been there in years. Since I still wasn't hungry I decided I would just hang around at an outdoor table until it got close to noon.

After about two unsuccessful minutes of trying to get myself into a textbook I started to notice some oddly-dressed Berkeley High students milling about. I knew they were from Berkeley High because they all wore red and yellow t-shirts with the words "Berkeley High" on them. At first they trickled in by threes or fours, but pretty soon the whole street was filled with Berkeley High students. More curious than annoyed, I asked one guy standing next to me what was going on and he said it was a school spirit rally that had gotten a little carried away. The guys were dressed sloppy and the girls slutty. They had painted their faces, their shoes, their arms, and their hair. I felt like I was in Pirateland during autumn fashion season. There must have been a hundred of them and they all had the excited swagger you get when you are in a big crowd of your friends outside of school exactly when you are supposed to be inside of the school. Some of them were shouting "Fuck Oh-Six!" and others--I'm guessing the Oh-Sixes--were shouted back "Fuck Oh-Seven!" At one point a bike cop came by and got the attention of a line of girls, probably trying to get them to quit shouting profanities and clear the street. One girl, eyebrows raised, explained that she'd merely shouted "Sucks Oh-Seven!" Then someone in the crowd started yelling "Freedom of speech, freedom of speech!"

That all made me smile. It was an incredibly lame thing to say and also blatantly untrue, but really, it's exactly what you're supposed to say if you're a teenage girl in that position. I was struck profoundly by how silly the entire situation was. How could anyone take themselves seriously at all? The lone cop riding up on his bike can't seriously believe he's going to A) get the high school kids (who are basically doing nothing wrong) to leave, or B) change a foul-mouthed girl's wayward behavior. What's the point? Then again, he can't just ride on by. He sees himself as the figure of authority, so he has to at least make the effort. It'd be equally ridiculous for him to just ride by and say nothing. So everyone ends up playing exactly the role assigned to them: the authority figure butts in when they really shouldn't even bother, the kid gets defensive even though she's done nothing wrong and says something really goddamn stupid, that goes on for a little while, and finally nothing comes out of it. I wonder how much time is wasted when you're young in these kind of pointless exchanges with authority, and how much time you're gonna waste when you're old being the pointless authority figure.

The band turned out pretty good, sort of a poppy Bay Area cross of the Smiths and Interpol, though I thought the band last week was better. I got to Lower Sproul a little early so I got to hear the band do soundcheck. Sometimes this is the best part of the show for me. This is no knock on a band's actual music--it's just me and my fascination for the process. The lead singer had a Telecaster plugged into a Hot Rod Deville and through the PA it sounded amazing. I've always really liked the idea of a good guitar plugged into a good amp turned up way too loud, with no fancy tricks. For lack of money or space or sound insulation I haven't had too many chances to play like that, and I get this vicarious glee when I hear people noodling around on that kind of setup. Soundcheck is also the most musically honest time for a band: there's no posturing or dramatic sweep, just a bunch of dorky guys joking around, fiddling with their instruments, tuning up, and doing silly 10-second jagged-sounding jams. It made me feel pretty nostalgic, or even more than that. It made me want to run home and pick up my guitar.

Lately I get these occasional moments of fear like I won't get to be in a band again. I suppose there are some really good ways of getting around that (starting a band and joining a band both come to mind...), but even if there was a chance to start up again I'm afraid that the best times are behind me, that I'm never going to graduate beyond monthly jams and playing party shows for my friends. More generally, I'm afraid that the commitments I'm getting ready to make will force me to let certain parts of me wither away.

I realized something just now. For as long as I can remember I've always been a secret identity with an alter-ego. By weekday I'm the mild-mannered bespectacled student, good with sums and grammar, but in the evening and the weekends I'm off on some other planet. I think there is meaning to all the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books I read, all the Nintendo and role-playing games I played, all the imaginary people and imaginary worlds I created or destroyed, all the random noise I've made, and all of the silly and lame and irreverent things I've written. These things are all terribly important to me and I think I've tried to make them more legitimate and more tangible as I've gotten older, out of the desire to make them relevant to real life and to share them with other people. The problem is that getting older also means that the day job gets more difficult and more demanding. Honestly, I'm not sure where my loyalties are.

I don't mean to be over-dramatic about it. Maybe this is what everyone goes through in their own private way, and there's no reason for me to feel like I'm unique, or that there is necessarily some grim career triage where I'm forced to kill my creative Siamese twin for the surivival of my other half, whatever that consists of. But still, I'll think about it, and I'll worry about it too.

At least once a week me and the members of our band will gather up in a town called Ise to practice and write new songs. I usually get home from work around 4:45 or so, and if there's practice that day, I'll check my email, have a snack, and then pack my gear up right away. I'm on the train by 5:30. It takes exactly one hour to get into Ise. There's no turnstile there, just a train fellow collecting tickets. Depending on how I feel that day, I'll have only paid 150 yen for my ticket when the fare is actually 980 yen, and hope I can sneak past the guy at the gate. We hop in Ben the Guitar Player's car, head over to the super market, get food which we are technically not allowed to eat in the practice room with all the expensive gear, and get to the studio at about 7:00. Since we have been doing this for about six months now, we have a pretty good system going, and our timing is good. We eat and screw around for about 20 minutes, and then play music for the next two and a half hours. Then there is a mad dash to clean up, pay, and get the hell out, and I am on the last train heading back into Nabari at precisely 10:20.

Friday the studio was booked out for the first hour of our usual three-hour slot, so we had the time to get a real dinner first. Next to the studio there's this weird fusion public house called Shelton King. It's the kind of place you go to once, swear you'll never go again, and continue to return again and again while joking every single time about how you swore you'd never go there again. It has a shady tropical theme and they usually play terrible music at high volumes. The food is expensive and uninspiring. But Shelton King is close to where we need to be and gives us a chance to have a relaxing meal with no time pressure.

Dinner on Friday was the best time we've ever had at that place. It was payday so we ordered one of everything we wanted and two plates of the cream cheese spring rolls. We rejoiced to find the music on the house stereo much better than usual. It was also the first chance for the six of us to get together for a while. Usually we are all business, and while there is much jibing and crude language and silliness in practice, it doesn't quite amount to a relaxed time out with your chums.

There was real conversation this time: we talked about libraries of porn, which lead to a debate about which US state was the most conservative, which lead to the topic of evolution, which lead me to saying "The variety of insect genitalia that has evolved over time is really amazing," which lead Ewan to say "That's the first time I've heard all of those words used in that fashion." Then Mike introduced us to The Game.

The Game, I think, is a UK thing since nobody but Mike or Ewan had heard of it. Anyhow, it's a goodie. The Game is one you're always playing and you can only lose and never win. The idea is that once you are introduced to The Game, you are playing. This means that whoever is reads this explanation in its entirety right now is now playing the game. The rule is that the next time The Game pops into your train of thought, you've lost The Game, and you have to say that you've lost The Game, out loud if you can.

It sounds dead simple, but I think there are must be other, unspoken rules out there as well, for the sake of sport. First, you probably get a grace period of however long it takes you to forget about The Game after the very first time you are introduced to it; obviously it takes some explaining, which will stay in your mind, and you can't just lose The Game the microsecond after you started playing it. Second, if it's possible for you to tell another human being out loud that you've lost The Game, you really have to, no matter the potential embarrassment. This means when you're waiting for a bus, standing at a urinal, when you're in class, in the office, at a job interview, on a date, and so forth. If there's nobody around, then you resort to electronic communication.

The next day I was teaching Jen how to play guitar, and I got a text message on my cellphone from Mike. It read: "You just lost the game." I considered this cryptic message briefly. I am rule-abiding, so I announced:

"Shit, I just lost the game."

"Oh, I just lost the game," Jen replied.

When I first met Mike we only had our general proximity and rock n' roll in common, so we would talk exclusively about the latter (the former would only surface as a discussion topic once we got to know each other and began engaging in your typical homophobic-dudes gay-talk). We talked about The Darkness, which is a recently-popular glam revival band. They are a pure expression of 90s-style camp: they grandstand and invoke a style of music and behavior that we are all ashamed to admit we liked at one point, and they get away with it because they are self-consciously acting silly. However, you also know for a fact that they really do love that kind of music, as earnestly as you would love jazz, The Beatles, or Beethoven. So you have a band playing exactly the kind of music they want to, and they get by through pretending that they don't really take it as seriously as they actually do. I would liken it to Jack Black in School of Rock (or Jack Black in real life, really): the theatrics of stadium rock are funny and dorky, yeah, but seriously, I think he honestly believes they're badass and loves them for what they are.

What's more is that while The Darkness think they are getting away with something by being silly, I think that they may not actually have to front like that--if the fans were honest, that is. I think the listening audience itself feels the same way about the music that the guys in the band do. We sincerely like the big hair and the falsetto and the two guitars playing solos at the same time. Music played as a joke doesn't really last a long time, and though I'm not saying The Darkness is guaranteed to be around for a while, I also don't think everyone who buys their record (10 full tracks, expertly crafted and produced) is doing it to fulfill their ironic jollies.

Let's say music fandom is a car. Everyone listening to The Darkness acts like a hipster connoisseur of camp by carrying around a copy of Permission to Land in the glove compartment. They probably get together with their friends and drive around late at night at high speeds, banging their heads to 80s-cum-naughts ass-rock and singing along with tongues tucked safely in cheek. Everyone's lauging and having a good time. Then one out of the five people in the car says something like, "Shit, this is funny as hell, but I'm glad music like this isn't made anymore." This is what everyone pretends to think but it's unsaid, because for most people in the car, it's not true. Everyone sorta calms down a bit too much and is afraid to look at the other people straight in the eye. The one guy who spoke up probably listens to a lot of electronica and Velvet Underground, and he's along for the ride and the head-banging because it'll make his friends think, hey, here's an easy-going guy who doesn't take himself too seriously. He thinks he's being hip, but the joke's on him: everyone else is glad that the music is funny is hell, because it provides them cover to enjoy it earnestly, albeit secretly.

I think there are many elements of modern-day pop culture that are analogous to this. I would say a lot of mainstream non-otaku appreciation of anime is voiced in the same kind of reverence-masked-in-irony, and I also think the trend of shoutouts to 8-bit gaming culture definitely apply (see the "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" phenomenon for a perfect overlap of these two). Now, I say "modern-day", but as usual, stuff you think is unique to your culture and time most likely isn't so whatsoever; what I'm talking about above is probably just some much-discussed footnote in Appendix C of post-modernism, which itself is at least half a century old. But what I'm talking about isn't just camp as offered by Susan Sontag or whoever. It's not just a "good because it's awful" sensibility. I think copping an ironic attitude or being a fan of campiness as a way of dealing with everyday things has hit the mainstream, and it's hit it Big Time. It's part of the vernacular now.

I've been reading an essay written by David Foster Wallace called "E Unibus Pluram: Television and Fiction". I think DFW is sorta a literary masturbator out to show the world how clever he is, and at the same time I think his writing is a little too sophisticated for my immediate comprehension, but he brings up something that I've been thinking about lately:

One clue's to be found in the fact that irony is still around, bigger than ever after 30 long years as the dominant mode of hip expression...I find gifted ironists sort of wickedly funny to listen to at parties, but I always walk way feeling like I've had several radical surgical procedures...one ends up feeling not only empty but somehow...[ellipsis in text]oppressed."

DFW was talking about TV and its influence on fiction in 1990, but I sincerely think nowadays it can be more generalized to mass media's influence on all forms of expression and person-to-person interaction. Well, that sounds like now I'm the literary masturbator out to show the world how clever he is (well in some ways I am), but lemme bring this back around to rock n' roll. Mike and I were walking around after some other Friday night band practice and I made an observation about the band's song writing process. I noticed how every new musical idea we would bring up in practice would be followed up by a qualifier, usually in the form of a cheeky reference to some other musical great. You hear a lot of this sort of thing in practice: "This is a Radiohead-ish little guitar part here..." and "We need a fuckin' insane hair-band butt-rockin' guitar solo here!" and "I don't know what to do here, so let's all just think WWJD: What Would Joy-division Do?" and "We need a tune with one of those big dumb riffs played only on the E string" and so on and so forth. For the time being I'm doing most of the talking in practice, so I'm the one most guilty of laying down this sort of talk.

I describe it like it's a bad thing. I know I'm not doing it to name-drop or to impress anybody, since I'm self-conscious and I know that would sound lame to everyone. However, because I'm self-conscious, I'm also afraid of being unoriginal. Prefacing or suffixing a suggestion with a reference is thus a defense mechanism. I call myself out for being a hack before anyone else can.

It gets worse maybe. Being ironic and cynically knowing has always been the way to be hip. Much less cool, and much more difficult, is to say earnestly and honestly that you like something, without being afraid of what someone will think about you if you dare open your mouth and express your opinion. When presenting "Robots & Honey" to the rest of the band for the first time, I kept talking about Tears for Fears, the "cheesy" choral part, and the still "cheesier" keyboard part. My decision to adopt this kind of language means I acknowledged--no, I anticipated--that those things would be recognized as "cheesy", maybe for sounding dated and silly. But "Robots & Honey" is my favorite thing that we've done so far. Do I actually think those parts are cheesy? No. Maybe they remind you of a time when people wore ugly clothes and ugly haircuts, but musically I think they're fantastic. That whole song is all about what is played on the "cheesy" keyboards and what is sung with the "cheesy" choral part, and it is, strictly speaking, a cheap and false perversion of my true feelings to talk about it using that word.

A lot of what my band does is self-conscious cornball tribute to our musical heroes. We've recently finished a straight-up disco tune, and I wasn't joking when I mentioned Joy Division and stupid riffs on the low E string--those songs are on the way as well. I don't think it's a serious problem that we're so self-aware, but it is interesting, funny, weird, peculiar, curious. Pick one of those words and give it a slight frown. That's what I think, because we are all doing something I think we all really love and it may be a bit of shame that we aren't more earnest about it than we are. And I believe this lack of earnestness definitely extends to other things. It makes me think past rock n' roll, to writing, to my still-imaginary academic career, to the way I modify the way I act and express myself based on how I think other people perceive me.

Recently I also read another thing that resonated with me. It's not about being self-conscious per se, but maybe it has a little to do with how I perceive myself and my future career relative to the things I like to do and the things I think I am good at (regrettably, the last two are not the same). This one is from Aaron Cometbus, my sage du jour and as earnest a guy I've read in, uh, forever basically:

For whatever reason, a lot of people seem to connect with the things in Cometbus. Not that their life is the same as mine or my contributors, but that they relate on some larger level. I get a lot of letters from different people working hard to express themselves in their own lives creatively, artistically, politcally. A lot of older people who never had the encouragement to really take chances with their life and never had the outlet to develop their talent and show the world all they had to offer. A lot of younger people who are bursting with creativity and idealism but are scared because they have no faith that there's a place for that creativity and idealism in the adult world.

So I spent all this time talking about how self-consciousness (at least of the ironic sort) can be lame and unearnest, but on the other hand it does help me stay honest. It makes me realize that a lot of decisions I make are out of fear and a distinct unwillingness to take chances. It makes me realize that a lot of those decisions aren't really decisions at all but merely procrastination. Finally, and I'm not sure if this is right or wrong or even relevant yet, it makes me realize that the clock is ticking. I think you, my friends and enemies, will be hearing a lot more about this when I stop pretending to be 25 and actualy become 25. I've got two months, and then I get cheap car rentals.

I finished the band's demo over the weekend. I call it a demo here because that's what it is, but we gave it an official name--the Abunai, Baby! EP--and I am trying to get into the habit of correcting people if they call it a demo. Anyhow, I was pretty impatient about getting it online as soon as possible, so you can download it directly here.

I was pretty much half-delerious by the end of the mixing on Sunday night. Shit, I'm still half-delerious. I was shivering from the cold, the late hours, and simply from the fact that I'd spent the entire weekend sitting in front of the computer putting high-pass filters on every track. Mixing is one of those things that is never done--I'm not really happy with the end results--but you just finish because you don't want to work on it anymore. I think the mix I came up with has way too much bass and a lot of the parts sound washed out, even the vocals sometimes. I never did the monkey test, which is where you just take the unprocessed recordings and just make sure they're all about the same volume, and compare that to the mix you did with all the effects and studio magic. I was sorta afraid that the monkey mix would sound better than the one I made.

I took it to practice Monday and some of the other people in band were hearing it for the first time, and they couldn't help but smile at hearing the whole band together on tape. Ever the party-pooper, I couldn't resist pointing out all the flaws in the mix. For me the novelty wore out very quickly. As early as two weeks ago I was already on this downward slide where the tracks just started sounding worse and worse to me and I was just eager to be done with it. On the way back from that practice I was listening to to music and I thought Jesus, the demo sounds like shit next to Kid A. Then I thought maybe I was being a little too hard on myself. After all, I reminded myself, it is pretty exciting.

Chelsea came up with a great design practically out of nowhere, so two days after the mix we had CDs packaged up and ready to be sent out to some live houses, and hopefully it will sell us well enough to get us a few shows before I'm up and out of here. I'm gonna bring a bunch to Taiwan to give to my friends and family.

There's not much to say about Taiwan because it hasn't hit me yet that I'll be there in a little over half a day. I am not particularly ready; my preparation consisted of buying some little gifts here and there and writing down addresses of a few bars and restaurants I'd like to visit; other than that, no phone calls, no reservations, no concrete plans. Anyhow, I'm way too tired to be excited for it at the moment.

One more thing: I got a phone call from an economics professor at Cal and we talked a bit about my plans for graduate school. This conversation pretty much ices the deal: I'm going back to Berkeley in August to take some classes in preparation for grad school. I was reminded of a few things: first of all, I don't need to worry too much about the registration bureaucracy because I just need to show the instructors I can handle it (or really that I simply give a shit), and secondly, it actually does matter where I chose to take class, for the reputation of the school, the rigor of the coursework, and most importantly for the chance to get recommendations from significant names.

Maybe, though, I'm really going back because it's familiar and pleasant. Jim and Dan and Dave, three of my best friends, are around town and I won't be bored or lonely.

Jesus christ I'm going to Taiwan tomorrow. I need to pack.

On Friday I finally get back to school, which will end this very pleasant stay-at-home tack I've been on for the past two or so weeks. I don't welcome or dread it. In fact I don't feel anything in particular about it, which I think means, for better or for worse, my job has become very much a secondary issue in my life. I imagine that while I am in the midst of it I will continue to take myself too seriously and maybe feel guilty about what I should be doing, or what I haven't been doing enough, or maybe I'll think about all the little problems inherent in my situation, but I am getting tired of feeling negative about work. I should just try to do something if I feel guilty about it, or if I don't have the means or energy, I should just stop feeling guilty about it. When I first came to Japan we were sent to orientation after orientation, and though I felt sorta cynical and cheesy about it all (it was like freshman year all over again), it did all result in this ideal in my head of how things should run. Things don't run like that ideal and I get dissapointed. Well, I should just stop moping around about it and get out of the habit of complaining, at least about this particular issue. So I'm not gonna bring it up anymore unless anything particularly bad or particularly shitty happens.

One of my main goals right now is to put together a 4-song demo with my band and that project is well underway. The past two weeks have been a tedious and expensive crash course in digital home recording. We spent a total of 13 hours in the studio last week taping our drummer play the same 3 songs over and over again. Of course, a large chunk of that time was spent dealing with non-music technical issues: getting the mics set up, wrestling with the powered mixer, undoing mistakes in the software, mivng around cables, and the like. Doing drums was initially a bit depressing, as we'd do a take or two, play it back, and scrutinize its problems in detail. That was probably uncomfortable for everyone involved. I decided it would be easier to shift the burden to the "post-production", so we ended up just recording many, many takes with the intention of splicing them together in the sequencer at home. This made good economic sense, since our time in the studio was limited, but that is probably not the main reason this solution appealed to me. "Post-production" in the case of recording our demo is nothing more than me taking stuff home to work on by myself. So it was probably just my instinct to make a group problem my own problem and mine alone. I'm not really sure what that says about my leadership or teamwork skills, but it did result in whole mornings and afternoons being consumed by tedious splicing sessions. But we came out with some nice-sounding drum tracks (as far as demos are concerned) and I learned a lot about working with sound files.

Although we're still in the middle of doing all the other instruments, we had enough recorded for me to work on some preliminary mixes (which, regrettably, you will not get to hear). So I also had a chance to learn about EQ, compression, and the general thrills of mixing. It's really incredible how everything about this process except the actual playing of acoustic instruments is done on computer. At one point I was playing back about 7-8 different recorded sounds each running through a digitally-applied equalizer, compressor and reverb, and the whole mix coming out sounding better than anything I'd ever expected. It was eye-opening to say the least. One of the things it made me realize was that I will probably never buy another guitar effects pedal again. I might not ever need an actual amp again. Everything can be done through the computer, live or post-recording, and straight into a set of speakers, and it would sound the same or better than if I dropped a couple grand on amps and stompboxes.

Of course the thrill of adding Studio Magic to our recordings was pretty fleeting as I started to hear only the flaws in the mix, so I can look forward to many more hours of adding peaks and dips in the paragraphic EQ. At a certain point I need to know when to say enough is enough, because in the end, this is just a demo. Or is it? I suppose we won't have another opportunity like spring break to cut a recording this year, so it might compose the entirety of Up Up Down Down's discography, at least during its Jeff Lee era.

This afternoon I was waiting for a UC Berkeley economics professor to call me, but I think he forgot. He was talking with another one of my professors and heard about my plans for grad school and offered to talk to me. I have to admit I was a little anxious, because I wasn't sure what I wanted out of him except a little affirmation that what I was doing was possible, that there was a well-beaten path to follow. Plus, I naturally feel a little anxious and maybe even a little defensive around professors, even if they are nice people (I am sure this guy is: he never met me and offered to call me long distance at midnight). I think it is because they possess power in my eyes--in theory they have both authority and the intellectual ability to call me out, and it puts me ill at ease. I fear that they won't think highly of me.

But I talked to Dan online and we had a good conversation about grad school and academics in general. We came to no great reassuring conclusions, but it was good to talk about the big picture for once, since recently I've been obsessed with technicalities and overcoming all the essentially irrelevant hurdles of getting into school.

Before that I was out playing basketball at school. They really should pave the outdoor courts, because it seems to me that it rains enough in this area to render the dirt court unusable at least 30 or 40 percent of the time. And there is nothing like getting sand in your eyes when you lift the ball up for a shot. Anyhow, the important thing is that the weather was good enough for basketball at all, and so I played for the first time since I was in California during the winter. I hit most of my shots in the first five minutes and quickly decided that I was not rusty for the long, long layoff. Then I practically didn't hit another shot for half an hour.