I'm giving it up and moving to Wordpress. The blogging ceases here and resumes here.

I'm going to be in Beijing for the next six weeks, and I will be writing about it in a new blog:

• As Yet Untitled Beijing blog
• RSS

The blog runs on a written-from-scratch engine that is not nearly as good as WordPress, but at least it's mine. Anyway, I gotta pack.

(link: http://i28.tinypic.com/1zxmj53.gif. Supposedly created by a Jazz fan.)

If you don't love this game, you don't love life.

• "You are not your bookcase" by Megan Hustad, on how one's consumption has become one's identity. Not nearly comprehensive, but important.
• "La Vida Robot" by my favorite Wired contributor Joshua Davis, on a group of high school kids who can't afford college because they are undocumented and poor, but who anyway beat MIT in a robot competition. This is old but no less awesome. Suck it, private school!
• Gabe Pramuk's trail journal. GP was my roommate during the fall quarter and is now hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, which goes from the US/Mexico border to the US/Canada border.
• BS Report in which Simmons talks to Paul Shirley, low-tier NBA-caliber basketball player, sometime in the spring of 2007.

This is an overview of my current Linux/Windows dual-boot setup on my new laptop.

1. Introduction
2. Hardware
3. Step 1: Get a Windows Vista install disc
4. Step 2: Backup recovery media
5. Step 3: Delete pre-existing partitions
6. Step 4: Decide on a partition scheme
7. Step 5: Install and update Windows
8. Step 6: Install Linux
9. Step 7: Setup applications for shared use
   • The share partition
   • Firefox
   • Pidgin (GAIM)
   • SVN working copies
10. ThinkPad minutiae
    • CPU whine
    • No firewire port
    • To do

Introduction

I've had certain pretensions of becoming a Linux user since 1997, but the desktop environments and hardware support have been flaky enough over the years that I could never quite convince myself to switch over from Windows. But with the Linux desktop (especially Ubuntu) roughly reaching par with XP in terms of usability and stability, and with Vista introducing various functional annoyances and its weird visual rubberiness, I think I'm about ready to drink the Linux-flavored kool-aid.

I'm hoping to move over to non-proprietary software entirely within the next year or two, which is not a terribly ambituous thing to do given the current maturity of free and open-source apps. At this point, I can only think a few categories where the Linux desktop doesn't keep up with Windows: music production software (abundant and full-featured in Windows, cute and larval in Linux), games (not too many free options), and platform-specific software development tools (proprietary SDKs and toolchains, and plus I want to learn to write Win32 and DirectX apps). If it weren't for these things, I'd pretty much be ready to ditch the for-profit software industrial complex entirely.

What follows is a brief HOWTO-style schematic of my mostly pain-free experience getting a new-ish mainstream laptop to work under these operating systems:

• Ubuntu Linux 8.04 Release Candidate
• Windows Vista SP1 Home Premium

Hardware

My machine is a 14.1" non-widescreen ThinkPad T61p. Some sundry specs:

• T8300 2.4ghz Core 2 Duo processor
• 1gb RAM, supplemented by a 2gb DIMM from New Egg
• 160gb 7200rpm Hitachi SATA HDD
• 1gb Turbo Memory
• Bluetooth support
• Lenovo 802.11 a/b/g wifi adapter
• NVIDIA Quadro 570M graphics card, 128mb
• Windows Vista Home Premium, pre-installed on a single partition spanning the entire hard drive

There are some hardware- and vendor-specific issues that make the dual-boot setup something less than effortless, but I'll deal with those as they become relevant.

Step 1: Get a Windows Vista install disc

Lenovo typically doesn't ship any install media with their laptops, but as of the writing of this guide, DVD ISO images of the Windows Vista SP1 RTM [?] are easily available on BitTorrent, and you can use these to make complete, bootable install discs. This works for any version of Windows Vista, from Home Basic to Ultimate, although the image comes in two different flavors, one for 32-bit and one for 64-bit. The Vista product key stuck to the bottom of each laptop determines which Vista functionality gets installed.

Since I changed the base hardware configuration slightly by adding more RAM, I was concerned that there might be issues with activating a Vista install that did not originate from factory-provided media. But while I did end up having to activate Vista using Microsoft's automated phone service, I had no real problems with the activation process. Apparently, it is technically possible to extend the OS activation period indefinitely, although this shouldn't be an issue unless you are using a product key that has been disqualified on Microsoft's end.

Step 2: Backup recovery media

One consequence of having no factory-provided OS or driver media is that all recovery operations are conducted through a special pre-installed partition that is invisible to Windows operating systems. This occupies about 6gb of space and an entire primary partition slot, both of which you're probably better off using for your own purposes.

Purely in the interest of good citizenship, I used Lenovo's pre-installed "Make Rescue/Recovery Media" utility to create a backup of the recovery partition. The rescue disc consists of one bootable CD, while the recovery media has one bootable disc (I used a DVD) and two more DVDs' worth of data.

Step 3: Delete pre-existing partitions

At this point, you are ready to bask in the momentary destructive glee of removing all traces of vendor-provided software from your hard drive.

Since the recovery partition is designed to be invisible to Windows (and this includes the partition editor that runs in the Vista installer), you will have to run your favorite third-party partition editor to delete both the ThinkPad recovery partition and the pre-installed Vista partition. I just used the gparted utility, which you can access by booting off an Ubuntu install or live disc.

Step 4: Decide on a partition scheme

There's no need to pre-partition your hard drive prior to installing the respective operating systems, but it might be worthwhile to have an idea of how you want to organize your hard drive space.

Here's how I ended up partitioning my hard drive:

• 30gb primary parition, Windows C: (NTFS)
• 30gb primary partition, Linux root (ext3)
• 4.5gb primary partition for Linux swap. You'll hear different things from different people, but the swap partition size heuristic is usually to allocate a swap space equivalent to 150-200% of your available physical memory.
• An extended partition with:
  • 20gb partition, to be used as a primary data share between Windows and Linux. Ubuntu 8.04 comes with a fairly mature NTFS-3G driver, so you can use NTFS as your share partition and feel safe writing to it from Linux. Of course, FAT32 still works okay.
  • ~70gb partition for music, video, and application installers (NTFS)

Step 5: Install and update Windows

For all of its flaws and idiosyncracies, Vista actually has a much more straight-forward install process than XP and other earlier versions of Windows. You pretty much just create an install partition, pick your timezone, type in your license key, and you are good to go. I sort of suspect this simplicity comes at the automatic cost of installing every last driver and utility that Microsoft bundles with the install disc.

Prior to Vista SP1, if you had an SATA hard drive and AHCI enabled in your BIOS, you had to load Intel's third-party Matrix Storage Manager via USB during the Vista install, or else you would subsequently encounter a highly entertaining and insurmountable series of BSODs during Vista's startup cycle. I know this from experiencing just such a series myself. Nevertheless, if you are using an SP1 RTM install disc, then you have nothing to worry about.

Wifi access for my ThinkPad worked after the initial Vista install, so I was able to get on the Internet immediately to grab hotfixes and drivers. After three or four rounds of visiting Windows Update and rebooting, I had nearly every necessary hardware driver, including an up-to-date NVIDIA graphics driver. The only driver I had to install manually was for Turbo Memory, which for some reason is not included in the Windows Update database, despite the fact that it's essentially Vista-specific hardware (ahem).

I didn't bother installing Lenovo's system utilities, so there's no visual response when I change speaker volume or adjust screen brightness.

Step 6: Install Linux

Depending on which distribution you're using, Linux installations are generally way more involved and way more shall-we-say educational than Windows installs, although Ubuntu 8.04's install is basically painless, so long as you know how you want to organize and mount the various partitions on your hard drive.

This might be due to the fact that I'm installing a days-old version of Ubuntu on what's probably at least year-old hardware, but this was the first time I've ever installed Linux without encountering some kind of catastrophic mid-install failure, or a desktop environment that drops windows and dialogs sporadically, or misconfigured/non-functioning network or sound drivers. In fact, pretty much everything on this T61p worked on the first boot--I only had to grab the proprietary NVIDIA Linux driver, which isn't packaged with the distribution, presumably for legal reasons.

Ubuntu even has its own set of built-in laptop function widgets, including popup displays that respond to changes in speaker volume and screen brightness. The only thing that doesn't seem to work out of the box is the trackpoint's middle-click vertical scroll.

Installing Ubuntu after Vista ensures that you get a friendly GRUB boot menu that allows you to choose between your installed operating systems. If you re-install Windows, you'll most likely have to restore GRUB to access your non-Windows OSes.

Step 7: Setup applications for shared use

Although I plan to use Ubuntu most of the time, it'd still be nice to have a fully-functioning Windows environment. The prospect of manually synchronizing the generic apps (e.g. web browsing, email, and chat) between both OS platforms is none too enticing, but one can get around this by 1) moving to online thin clients (who uses desktop mail UAs these days, except for corporate types who have to use Outlook?), or 2) using software that's smart enough to have environment-independent config data.

This last point is where it's useful to have a share partition between Linux and Windows. The following is how I have things setup, along with some caveats.

The share partition

My share partition uses NTFS, so Vista performs read/write operations on it natively and without any explicit configuration. There are various ways of getting read/write access to the partition in Linux, although the easiest might just be to edit /etc/fstab to have Linux mount the NTFS share at boot with read/write permissions.

If you want to grant write access to all users, use the following mount options:

rw,user,users,auto,umask=0000

Personally, I limit write access to a single user account, and so these mount options apply:

rw,user,users,auto,uid=MY_USER_ID

In either case, with a recent Linux distribution equipped with the NTFS-3G driver, you can mount the partition as ntfs-3g.

If you're using FAT32 to format your share, mount as vfat instead. There's a slight caveat for the mount options if you're using Subversion on the share partition in FAT32, which I'll get to in a second.

Firefox

It's probably worth pointing out that Ubuntu 8.04 comes with Firefox 3 Beta 5. This is somewhat idiosyncratic, and so you'll want to make sure your Windows version of Firefox conforms to this. I just used Synaptic to remove Firefox 3 and grab the firefox-2 package. The latter doesn't seem to create a generic /usr/bin/firefox executable, so I just created my own with a symlink to /usr/bin/firefox-2. This will ensure that your launchers still work properly after you've removed Firefox 3.

At any rate, there are various guides across the Web on how to use a shared Firefox profile in a dual-boot scenario, although the basic pattern is as follows:

1. Place your profile folder in a location that's readable and writeable for both Windows and Linux.
2. Using your method of choice, point Firefox in each respective OS to the location of your shared profile. I prefer simply to edit profiles.ini that comes with Firefox, although apparently there are GUI wizards that help you do this.

Mozilla Thunderbird has a very similar profile structure, and can be shared in basically the same fashion.

But note: one dual-boot gotcha that I discovered is that Firefox's profile data contains some platform-specific file paths that are totally illegible in the OSes that don't support them, e.g. Windows has no idea what to do with /home/jeff, much in the same way Linux has no idea what to do with a path such as C:\temp. What's more is that this can actually break some non-trivial functionality in Firefox.

One instance of this is the default directory into which Firefox stores downloads. My profile was imported from a Windows environment and had MS-style file paths for various download config values. As a result, I couldn't use Firefox's "Save Page As" and "Save Image As" functions from Ubuntu--the options were there in the menus, but no dialog would appear after selecting them.

The way around this is a) not to specify a download directory (which might be an annoyance for you, although I find I actually prefer this), and b) manually clearing all download-related config variables from your profile.

Pigdin (GAIM)

You can share your Pidgin profile (i.e., setup, connection information, and chat logs) in virtually the same way you share Firefox profiles above. Move your profile to a location that's readable/writeable to both platforms, and then replace the .purple directory in each respective Pidgin install with a shortcut (Vista) or symlink (Linux) to the profile share.

SVN working copies

You can keep Subversion working directories in your share partition that work with both Windows and Linux SVN clients, provided that they use FSFS (i.e., they have little .svn folders in every directory...I believe this is default behavior for most clients, anyway) rather than BerkeleyDB.

One somewhat esoteric caveat, mentioned above, is that if you are using FAT32 on your share partition, you need to mount it with the uid option rather than the umask option, for reasons that are partially explained elsewhere. I say only partially, because I've tested the umask mount with an NTFS share partition and it worked fine, and it's not quite clear from the aforementioned link why FAT32 should be any different.

ThinkPad minutiae

CPU whine

One of the bugbears of laptop acquisition of the last many months has been a longstanding and mostly unresolved issue involving non-trivial, high-pitched noises emitted from laptop-based Core 2 Duo CPUs or associated motherboard components, known colloquially as the "CPU whine" or "fan whine". This problem seems to affect C2D-based laptops of all makes and models, some more consistently than others. I did notice this on my T61p, and it's consistent and distracting enough to be a potential reason for returning the laptop (no joke: certain disgruntled and mercenary elements have broached the idea of pursuing a class-action lawsuit over this issue). Happily, I eliminated the sound almost entirely by changing my BIOS settings so that the CPU runs at maximum performance while on AC power. This is a minimally-intrusive and instantaneous fix. I've decided simply to put up with the noise in the infrequent occasions that I'm running on battery power.

Interestingly (or depressingly), I get a different kind of pained, high-pitched, wheezy noise when I run the preview of Ubuntu's (or GNOME's) Colorfire screensaver. I have decided not to think about it.

No firewire port

14.1" T61p laptops do not have 4-pin Firewire ports. The Lenovo catalog claims that Firewire is available on "certain select models", but then fails to specify which models these might be.

To do

I just found a list of T61-specific issues that arise for Ubuntu 8.04 installs, mostly things that I never would have caught on my own. In most cases, the issue is minor, and fixes are available on the internet. Anyway, this helps me round off a list of things that still need some attention, although most are insignificant enough that I don't need to be in too much of a hurry:

• Trackpoint middle-click vertical scroll doesn't work
• Linux wifi driver and/or GNOME Network Manager doesn't locate hidden SSIDs
• System wifi light doesn't work (I wonder if there's the same issue with the Bluetooth light?)
• Installing utils that grant more precise control over fan and CPU

As rare as my blog posts come these days, I'm going to waste this one on the much-dreaded reflection on why I don't blog anymore. In this circumstance it almost comes closer to an obituary than an apology.

After last spring's messy series of entries on being a roadie for a band, I claimed to be on blogging hiatus until I got to Shanghai. At first this was exusable by certain professional obligations I'd had at the time, but by the time I hit Asia, and surely by the time I got back and started school, I really couldn't complain of a lack of time to write, or a lack of material. In fact I can still provide an inventory of at least the following notable things I'd considered writing about:

• Working on a successful and popular video game, which at the time I'd been perfectly willing to casually violate my non-disclosure agreement to talk about
• Visiting three Chinese or pseudo-Chinese territories and/or nations
• One incredibly atrocious haircut
• Attending graduate school, and the lifestyle and protocols thereof
• Writing lots of music in the month of February
• The demise, rehabilitation, re-demise, and tenuous detente of operability of my crappy 1995 Nissan Altima

To be honest, though, I was relieved when I stopped blogging. For one thing, there's an odd kind of tension that comes around when you're trying to base your creative work on the events of your daily existence. I'm sure everyone who blogs--really, everyone who writes--has had this moment of grotesque self-consciousness where you realize you might not so much experience life as collect it, in order to craft some hilarious tale packaged for the consumption of your peers.

But it'd be lucky if the chief pain of blogging were just some kind of existential damper on one's ability to relax and enjoy the air. For me, at least, the real reason that blogging is painful is that I want it to be good, which it almost never is, and besides, writing something that is good is intrinsically stressful and hard. And so of course it is easy just not to do it.

Over the hiatus of the last year, I've gone over some of what I'd written in the past, and I find the vast majority of it cringeworthy. Not astoundingly bad, not totally incompetent, in some places even smeared thinly with interesting residue, but mostly run-of-the-mill shit. What's embarrassing isn't so much the mistakes as the all the pretension, which comes about when you have the ambition to make meaningful statements but lack the discipline to make those statments coherent. Mostly, I've been guilty of trying to have my cake and eat it too: if the writing gets too fancy, it's because I'm trying to make it more than just a retelling of what are really non-unique and mediocre experiences, and if the writing is sloppy and takes too many liberties with the reader, it's because I'm not trying to do anything "serious".

At any rate, it's still true that the blog has been the only somewhat consistent creative outlet I've had since I started it. I've always had the intention of coming back to it, but there's going to have to be some change in the way I go about the writing so that it doesn't feel pointless or lame. What I'm thinking at the moment is that in the interest of being neither here nor there about the blog, I will attempt to be both here and there. On the one hand, I think I ought to try writing more serious, focused essays, not as in humorless, but stuff that isn't merely rambling introspection ad absurdum. On the other hand, I'm severely tempted to get into far less substantial blogging that is essentially exhibitionist, informative, and trivial; that's to say non-introspective and most probably short.

The point would be to expand on both quality and quantity, but not at the same time.

These are the kinds of things I have been thinking about:

• Very soon: something purely technical on how I set up my new laptop.
• Some notes about the tricks I use to study Chinese vocabulary
• An essay on work and being happy
• Daily notes and longer pieces on my trip to the Olympics this summer
• Something political about creative work and whether we should pay for it
• An outline of how I like to format my C++ code

Hopefully you will hear from me again, and soon.

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.

I'm back in LA and I have this ambition of re-doing the entire blog, from the ground up, maybe on a different server with a different programming language even, while I'm still on break. There was some stuff I wanted to write as well, but it'll have to wait until I decide what I'm gonna do. Hang tight.

In spite of having had many weightier and more meaningful ideas and events to report since the start of my de-facto blogging hiatus of so many months, I have decided to briefly interrupt my silence with such an underwhelming announcement as the following: Contra 4, a game to which I have made various significant technical contributions, has been released. And though I a) have a developer's copy of the game, and b) I get a free official copy, I'm thinking this one might be worth a trip down to the local game store for a purchase.

Loath as I am to recycle other peoples' blog content (this for various slippery-slope-style concerns), I think there has been some consistently great stuff coming out of Gothamist's Shanghai spinoff, cleverly dubbed Shanghaist, especially when it comes to cringeworthy spectacle that is the cultural fodder of my generation.

Behold MC强强, resident of Jiangsu:

And some thousand miles away, inmates in Cebu are up to some interesting mayhem:

I might be missing the whole point here, but: critically the enjoyment of this kind of thing hinges on the fact that one can watch these videos and feel, simultaneously, this kind of smug superiority to their general lameness and also genuine appreciation for the moves on display. It's like the slow-motion train wreck you can't turn away from, only the train wreck is not only awful and offensively empathy-inspiring but also extremely neat to watch for its base technical merits. I.e. dude is a fantastic dancer, but then he has indoor slippers on and he is not actually wearing a shirt (this being one of many habits of male Chinese that seems really kind of practical but yet fundamentally unclassy), or his grandmother or whoever is constructing or mending a garment in the traditional manner right behind him. How does he avoid slamming into her? How can she not be watching this guy the whole time? And then I wonder if you could get 1000 cons in the US to recreate the "Thriller" video. I'd like to think the answer is yes.

In Taipei I spent maybe eight days suburban-slumming with members of my extended family. Primarily this time was passed either asleep or on the couch watching American movies on satellite hi-def while avoiding thoughts about work. My cold from the week prior downshifted into a persistent hack/sinus drip that I suspect was not really made better by jet lag (which was intense, believe you me) or air pollution or the general crappiness of subtropical summertime weather.

I stayed in my old room at my aunt's place, to which I've returned fairly consistently over the past few years and it feels not so much nostalgic as sort of routine. Thus it occurs to me that I might be taking it all for granted, since this may have been the last opportunity for me to go back and see everyone in my aunt's family under one roof. Both of my cousins are pretty close to independent adulthood and it's not impossible that one or the other will move abroad somewhere in the next few years. What's relieving is that in spite of the passage of time and my worsening Chinese, I don't think I've ever gotten along as well with them as now.

This blog comes up almost immediately if you were to sniff around the Internet for such a thing as "the best noodles in the world", and yet I dragged my cousin Simon through the heat to their globally third-ranked noodler, a wonton noodle shop on Heping Road, and there consumed a profoundly average noodle meal.

Before I left for Taiwan, my dad wanted me to be sure to visit some relatives on his side of the family and asked me to say hello for him. This was not some mere formality, since I am under this strong impression that my dad never talks to any of them. He literally needs an intermediary. The funny thing is that his family members are equally curious about him, although I am fairly certain that they too have not tried to get a hold of him in a very long time. There's this situation of intense mutual concern and yet nobody talks to anybody, as if each party is too afraid or too ashamed to make the first move. I don't doubt there's probably been some grievous beef of years past that has yet to be overcome and/or forgiven, but it's also just as likely that the longer they go without direct contact, the more awkward and weird the idea of direct contact becomes. Something no simpler and no less profound than that is probably enough to keep everyone sitting on their hands.

During my second or third night in Taipei I went out with a couple of my female cousins on my dad's side. I hadn't really done my homework beforehand and I had to ask one of them what her name was, which I think was awkward and could have been avoided through white lies and my ignoring the matter of names entirely, but I really had forgotten her name and I decided that I would ask out of principle. Later that night we went out for drinks at an expat bar and I gave them a candid but possibly incoherent account of my opinions re: Western guy + Eastern girl relationships, viz., that it's hard to criticize the behavior of consenting adults in any situation, but then despite my heavy self-consciousness about being the de facto loser in some primal territorial battle wherein the Eastern girl is subconsciously my property and the Western guy subconsciously my enemy, I still have this echo of discomfort with the whole thing because of how exploitative (indeed colonial) and dependent on misconception and fantasy it all seems, and how the mutually-consenting adults in question have very different stakes, i.e., the Eastern girl often loses out big-time. On second thought I'm pretty sure I didn't communicate any of that very clearly to my cousins. I just hope it didn't come out sounding offensive.

In Hong Kong I stayed with my friend Carl who I did JET with already three years ago, and he was willing to hang out with me for the duration of the weekend, and we talked about girls and basketball and gossiped about our friends from JET and played Mario Kart DS after dim sum, on the bus, and on the beach. This kind of thing would be considered childish in America but is de rigueur out in Hong Kong, since (I'm guessing) there's far less masculinity/maturity baggage associated with playing video games over there. During my last evening in Hong Kong, we declined to spend it singing karaoke with Carl's platonic but still attractive female friends in favor of watching the Wimbledon final at a bar in downtown Hong Kong.

My friend Liana owns an apartment near the French Concession of Shanghai. Liana says it was an "impulse buy", a claim that I find both ridiculous in concept and also highly believable. She doesn't spend very much time at this apartment and stays predominantly at her boyfriend's place, and so she offered to put me up for the next two months. Her place is cozy by the standard of any city and thus is sensationally comfortable for an Asian flat, and the mere thought of coming back to it after a day walking around outside makes said walking around in the shitty heat and shitty air quality of metropolitan Shanghai a lot less shitty.

Since I have been here for only two evenings and much of my waking time has been spent doing work or attempting to set up work (FYI Liana had mentioned off the cuff that maybe the outlets in China offer the same voltage as those in the US; in fact they do not, and I learned this lesson at cost of the Gamecube AC adapter that powers the hardware DS emulator that I use to do my job, and while it's possible to get an adapter in Shanghai, it's not really that easy to do so. To quote one guy I asked: 你要NGC幹嘛, something to the effect of "What the fuck do you want a Gamecube for?", only maybe a little less strong.), I'm not terribly sure what Shanghai's all about thus far. What I can tell up to this point is that people are much less hostile and angry than the collectively snarling citizens of Beijing, although still very much in the grip of that kind of Asian big city alienation where you don't so much as make eye contact with the person you happen to be sharing an elevator with. And I have yet to have a truly great meal here, but that might take some time.

While in Taiwan I got a copy of Crowded House's brand-new record Time on Earth, which is not even as good as Neil Finn's two prior solo records, and is hurt very badly by its production--NF's voice has the botoxy rubberiness of too much autotune, and that they even had to use it in the first place on such a terrific singer is mysterious and gross and disconcerting. But the only reason I make mention of this is because it's related to a band responsible for such shatteringly good songs as "Fall at Your Feet" and "Don't Dream It's Over", and for the same reason it's easy to just kind of ignore the crappiness and irrelevance of their new stuff much in the same way that comic book nerds ignore whole subplots of their favorite series when they don't like what they see.

Been busy with a million things and wanted to forgo blogging until I got to Asia, but I've been blog-tagged by Grace with the following:

The instructions are as follows: List seven songs you are into right now — no matter what they are. They need to be songs you presently enjoy. Then, tag seven other people to see what they're listening to.

Firstly:

1. "This Is Your Last Chance To Be Famous"
by The Mint Chicks
2. "The Sweat Descends" by Les Savy Fav
3. "So Sorry" by Leslie Feist
4. "Blue Moon" as covered by The King
5. "Metaphor" by Sparks
6. "Everything's Alright" from Jesus Christ Superstar
7. "Marquee Moon" by Television

Secondly, I'm not sure I know seven people who are actively blogging. Let's see: Don in SD for sure. Maybe Emil? I suck at this.

This is absurdly fucking late. Sorry.

A day after the Lit Lounge show and associated near-road rage, Mark was eager to relieve me of the Suburban and test his driving chops with the trip to Asbury Park, NJ due for that evening. In fact he insisted. I felt a little bad about this, partly because I took it as if my psychological fitness as band driver was being implicated, which in light of certain flippings-out was fairly justified. Nevertheless I was pretty apprehensive about dropping Mark cold into the driver's seat, no less to face the unfiltered shitstorm that is commuting in New England. But in the end I worried more about being a dick about it, so I let him drive. All things considered, Mark did a pretty good job, taking us through Newark and navigating the Garden State Parkway through the rain with little to no help from the Suburban's unsurprisingly dysfunctional left windshield wiper or crunched rear-view mirror. That notwithstanding there were a few moments of handle-grabbing terror, that may or may not have been exaggerated by my fundamental unease with letting an unseasoned Kiwi drive on the right side of the road in a car in which I happened to be sitting shotgun (i.e., prime ejection-through-glass territory); these occurred mainly during lane changes and intersection traversals that require you to be used to passers on the right and cross-traffic coming in from a direction appropriate to Western hemisphere motoring.

In Jersey City we picked up a friend of the band's named Maria, a music publicist and manager who spoke Italian and said she was the world's biggest fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation (which is impossible because I know what a bussard collector and a Heisenberg compensator are, and would probably be an instructor for intensive Klingon language courses if I hadn't been forced to attend to college). Then we drove southbound for maybe two hours and wandered around some anonymous coastal suburb of the state of New Jersey, stopping by a gargantuan 99-cent store for directions and a cheap can of regular-flavored Pringles. This put us in Asbury Park around maybe 8PM. The gig was at an extremely cool and yet extremely empty and unpatronized bowling alley called Asbury Lanes, which I remember had extremely weird flushing mechanisms attached to the urinals in the men's bathroom, viz., spring-loaded, twist-action knobs that creeped the hell out of me. While the band wasn't getting paid, the house did comp us free diner-style meals of curly fries, orange pop, and grilled cheese sandwiches, the novelty of which was not lost on any of us, especially after three straight weeks of getting way more drink tickets than our kidneys could handle.

They also let us bowl for free. Bowling for me is like what dancing and singing are for most Americans: a supposedly fun, extroverted activity that is in reality totally terrifying, exactly because you are supposed to be having a good time but you suspect everyone is judging you by your skills, and then, because you're feeling self-conscious, you really are in danger of not having a good time, and worse, looking very obvious to everyone around that you're feeling self-conscious, and in essence seeming like a ninny and/or poor sport. But historically speaking, I am the world's greatest bowling catastrophe, and it takes a great deal of irony and preemptive apologizing for impending gutterballs for me to get over myself. I have a natural tendency to chuck the ball out from my center, as opposed to out from my side, so the ball's trajectory is already bad on release and requires an extremely finessed counter-spin and a good deal of speed to reach any pins at all. What's silly about my concerns, though, is that most of us were varying degrees of awful at bowling. At one point Dan cranked his pre-swing up too far and too fast, and the ball had more inertia than his feet, and so he fell over literally heels over head. We just laughed at him. I'd never seen anything like it. Grayson, however, was some kind of machine at the game, so routinely going for eight or nine pins on his first attempts and then cleaning up the dregs on his seconds that we accused him of practicing (and, I think, demonstrating the world view that one can only be either 1) a shitty bowler or 2) a nerd who prepares his bowling skills to impress and ultimately dominate his friends). I stopped bowling after a point when the first band came on, although somehow I was the only one weirded out by the idea of playing sport like fifteen feet away from a band we were supposed to be performing with; for whatever reason it occurred to me that it was dismissive and nonchalant in a way that hanging out in the green room or at the bar (both typical activities when you are not actually into the bands you're performing with) are not.

When SSM went on stage there were exactly the following people listening: me, Maria, the guy who made us grilled-cheese sandwiches, some people way across the bowling alley in the bar, the sound guy, and the other band plus what appeared to be their girlfriends (some of whom were bowling, although despite what I said above I didn't take it personally or anything). It was a strange show and I suppose a little disappointing in spite of the general coolness of the venue, and the band wrote the gig off as free dinner and rehearsal time.

On the way out the door there was a bit of controversy when it became clear the Mark intended to drive us back to New York. There was this pretty uncomfortable exchange in which Dan told Mark that while it had indeed been very "fun" (Dan's own term) when Mark drove down, it would be "even more fun" if I were to drive everyone back instead. It was extremely well-meaning and conciliatory but also detectably insincere, and so Mark stuck to his guns. Then Maria said flat-out that she didn't feel safe with Mark behind the wheel (something to the effect of "I insist on living!", an ouch-class rejoinder to my prior "I'm not gonna insist on driving..."), which I guess was honest but made me wince, in part because of the directness of it, and also because I felt that as the favored driver I was kind of involuntarily complicit in hurting Mark's feelings. At that point, Mark got pissed off and said he was just trying to spare me some trouble and felt like nobody was helping him out. I insisted that it really was all OK and took an oath of good behavior and no profanity for the drive back up, which after all of that was predictably weird and awkward. Yet again we took a series of wrong turns in south Manhattan and ended up in the wrong part of Brooklyn, and then when we got to the right part of Brooklyn we spent at least thirty excruciating minutes looking for an unadorned stretch of kerb long enough to fit the Suburban. On the way out of the car, Grayson dropped the band phone into a melted-snow puddle of impressive scale and grossness, and then somehow I managed to drop the car keys into the exact same spot, and so we spent a little while fishing around in the puddle with our bare hands.

That night we had no way of getting into Tash's apartment, where we'd been storing the gear, which meant that we'd have to leave all of the band's equipment in the car and furthermore that somebody would have to spend the night in the car as a human theft deterrent. Mark immediately volunteered for the job. After going back to Chelsea's place briefly to get Mark's stuff, Grayson and I walked Mark back to the car. It was a cold night, and when we left Mark at the Suburban and turned back, I was feeling tired and guilty. Actually I think that was rock-bottom for the tour for me.

The next day I got up at the brutally early hour of 9AM to return a borrowed amp. The morning traffic consisted of school buses and loading trucks and taxis and about 10 consecutive blocks of Hasidic Jews darting into the street and standing outside of brick warehouses. Along the way we passed by what was purported to be the childhood residence of deceased rapper Biggie Smalls. After this I left alone to eat with Chelsea in Manhattan, and then I scurried back into Brooklyn in the evening for a loft show that the band had somehow contrived an invitation to play. Really this was the pattern of the rest of the half-week I had in NYC, despite all of our vast and varied ambitions to visit art museums and see the musical rendering of Raimi's Evil Dead and eat loads of pizza (of which I ultimately ate only a single mouthful that I stole from Dan). We'd more or less locked ourselves into a routine of waking up way too late, going our separate ways for what was left of daylight, and reconvening in a rushed fashion to get the gear and car ready for a show.

The loft of said loft show was apparently someone's actual residence and very hip indeed but none of us were particularly impressed, and after So So Modern played we ended up trickling in one by one into the room where all of the bands' equipment was being stored. For a while we shared that room with this one bizarre guy who said nothing to us but didn't quite ignore us either, and so this was awkward and perhaps even a bit creepy. After him was a guy called Matt who was the drummer for a band called The Fugue, and it later came out that he was also no less than the latest drummer for Asobi Seksu, which thus made him the highest-profile musician I met on tour. While conversing with him I specifically avoided mentioning that I thought AS's music was kind of boring and a Category-3 let-down given the amount of indie-media hype over them, and that I thought such hype was almost certainly a result of the lead singer being very ostentatiously a Japanese Female and very obviously aware of what advantage that brought her vis-a-vis an audience all too willing to pass off exoticist fetishism as some kind of aesthetic sophistication (which just stop me right now), although not bringing any of this up was very difficult, because Matt was actually very matter-of-fact and cool about his lot in life and seemed like he saw things for what they were.

Grayson's manager Emily lived in town and had him booked for a couple of solo sets during the stint in NYC,. These shows were ultimately attended by little more than myself and one or more members of SSM and what turned out to be a rather decent-sized (relatively speaking), all-female contingent of SSM and/or Grayson Gilmour friends-cum-groupies (primarily the former, but very arguably the latter as well), and then also a paltry smattering of unrelated hipster riffraff--all in all a weird dynamic. Grayson had a tendency to blow through his sets with a witticism inserted here and there between songs ("You might have heard this one before" was his introduction to his cover of Weezer's "Buddy Holly"), and often ended his songs by smashing his left hand against like ten or so of the low-octave keys--either he'd sorta picked up that he didn't have anyone in the crowd that he really needed to impress, or he's fundamentally self-conscious about all the false drama and gravitas that seems automatically to go along with performing solo piano ballads.

At one point the scheduling of these solo sets happened to conflict with a certain potential SSM gig in Philadelphia. Philly was a geographical long shot, but I could tell Grayson was pretty resistant to the idea of canceling his set regardless. That was understandable, but in any case it made me wonder about the nature of his relationship to the band, given that at present his solo work appears to be both more lucrative and more widely-received than what SSM has thus far been able to achieve. I asked him about it once, and it seemed to not be a big issue to him. The rest of the band barely talks about it, and there isn't quite a 500-pound gorilla vibe that you would expect to see in a situation like that, so I'm not sure what to think.

Among those previously-mentioned NYC friends of the band were Karin (who not incidentally is Chelsea's roommate and whose bed I slept in twice, although not with her but rather once with Dan and Wolf The Affectionately Allergenic Cat, and Mark another time) and Rachel, both of whom worked shifts at the Knitting Factory and had colluded to score SSM a set on a Sunday night. That show ended up being my last for the tour, and it conformed to the pattern of US metro shows played alongside anonymously emo-ish local bands who were, in as kindly objective terms as I can muster, nowhere near as good as SSM. What was neat for me was watching Rachel work the mixing console, from which she would occasionally glower and shake her head at guitar players who'd turned their amps up too loud.

I was running the merch table after the show when I was approached by a blonde girl who I at first believed was very friendly but soon realized was quite drunk. I sold her a CD for ten bucks, and then she kept trying to sell it back to me for five bucks and a copy of SSM's press sampler, and this after she'd removed the liner from her CD and gotten a couple SSM guys to sign it and successfully mangled it with her drunken fingers. It took me maybe a full minute to figure out what she was trying to say to me, and the entire time Karin (herself a true tour-support pro) was giving me that knife-cutting-throat gesture, but what was I supposed to do? At one point the blonde girl said, "Here, this is what I want you to do," and she took a pen out of my hands and drew upon my tally sheet a picture of what I think was a flower with more equally-size flowers growing fractally from its petals. Finally Dan came over and let her take a sampler, and she staggered away. She left a half-full bottle of beer at the merch table. Anyway I found it all pretty scary.

I spent three weeks with these guys:

Aidan Leong is half-Chinese and half something else I didn't bother asking about. One of the prime subplots of the tour was sneaking Aidan into various 21-and-over establishments because until literally days before I left NYC he was not yet 21. As it turns out our tactic was to give him Mark's NZ driver's license (Mark himself could use his passport) and this somehow worked every time; I'll give the door guys in question the benefit of doubt and say that instead of being unable to discern people of fully- and mixed-Asian lineage, they simply did not give a fuck about rigorous enforcement of the US legal drinking age.

Aidan very articulately explains that he is concerned about the incompatibility and potential irreconcilability of his musical concerns and his university degree, which was earned through a semi-vocational program in radiation therapy. He worries that if he pursues music for the next X years of his life, he'll be left behind by the rapidly-changing field of medical technology and thereby rendered unemployable. Apparently this is something the others in the band worry about as well, as if Aidan's Career and So So Modern are mutually exclusive objects, a concern which strikes a third party as both completely understandable and also way overstated, since after all we should not be so narrow as to have our lives dictated by our respective undergraduate degrees.

From what I gather, Aidan thanks people a lot. He is always thanking the crowd between songs and is always thanking everyone who gives him the slightest provocation to thank them. Outwardly he is quiet and sweet. I think he must be the most aggressively considerate of the guys in SSM. Maybe that's a function of him being so goddamn young, although that's probably a little too convenient an explanation. That notwithstanding, Aidan's method of demonstrating platonic intimacy is through dudely uncouthness: the way you know you're in with him is when asks you in post-ironic fashion if you're some kind of fag or homosexual or something, and gives you this extremely harsh and intense look. Apparently it's his habit to disappear for long periods of time wandering on his own, and also to be suspiciously evasive about any potential romantic entanglements of his, and these are traits that were described directly to me by other members of the band and more or less confirmed through my own observations during the tour. When Aidan told me he was going back to Germany after the US Midwest tour, I immediately asked him if it was about a girl, and he only replied, "How is it that everyone seems to know that?"

Daniel Nagles never has a quiet moment; either he is in the middle of cracking a theatrically elaborate joke (often necessitating grotesque full-body gestures) or expounding lengthily on something that he finds deeply profound. Out of his fellow band members he's the only one I'd describe as truly extroverted. He has a particular combination of stubbornness and recklessness and genuine curiosity and raw energy that for all intents and purposes makes him jinxed. That's to say that he is always slightly screwed, either running late or losing his wallet or missing the bus or doing something crazy and possibly illegal in front of bored cops or something.

Despite that Dan's both extremely funny and extremely fun to be around, there are times I think the guys in the band are laughing at him rather than with him. Dan's too-dead-to-be-deadpan soliloquies on history and culture and DNA helices and how it would be cool if There Was A Movie About A Subway Train That Was Actually Some Satanic Species Of Gigantic Snake are semi-coherent and wandering and extremely verbose and often just plain nonsensical to everyone but him, and are thus frequently dismissed and mocked, which Dan himself takes with such superb equanimity that I wonder if he's even aware he's being dismissed or mocked. It might be simpler to say that he just doesn't care either way. But there is something a little sad about not being taken seriously when you are so obviously saying something that you take very seriously, or at least when you are trying very hard to express to others what you have in mind.

And yet I still don't really worry about Dan, because he's easily the most gifted person in the band, viz., as far as I can tell, he is always basically happy. Once I was carrying someone's guitar case or synth case or whatever, to the car or something, when Dan came up to me and said, "Well Jeff, you gotta meet my girl back home." And I said, "Why?" "Because she's great," was Dan's reply. That was the sum of the conversation.

A weird thing about Grayson Gilmour is how he's generally the one kicking people's asses about paying attention and staying on schedule, and how he's fastidious and even skinflinty about the band's finances, but then outside of the practical realm he's the generally least focused on the moment in any given situation. Grayson is distinctly haunted by two things: A) music and B) the prospect of living somewhere where he doesn't speak the language. When we went to museums he would discuss not art but the new delay pedal that he bought; when we passed by all the various sights of New York City, he had his nose in a German language survival guide. And then he has the classic introvert's habit of saying extremely little among his non-familiars, and then being the loudest when he's among his close friends, and also the classic smart-ass's tendency of using humor to express what is in fact his genuine disapproval, as well as to reveal, inadvertently, his own insecurities. Really I felt like I had a lot in common with him.

One night after one of the NYC shows, we headed out to a party where we were meeting Tash, who was supposed to give us a key so we could again stash the band gear at her place. Aidan had already left to meet a friend in Manhattan. When we got to the building where the party was, Mark and Dan immediately took off to check out the party, while Grayson and I elected to wait in the Suburban. We spent like five or ten minutes watching the entrance to the building. After a while we started making up cruel dialogue for the people coming or going or lingering outside. Me, nerd voice: "Look at this fucking tool, he's like 'I'm a graphic designer, I really think New York's a great place to step up my career.'" Grayson, watching a guy walk away from the party, Americanesque grumbling: "Fuck this party, it fucking sucks." And so on and so forth. I guess we were mostly kidding, but if we were laughing, then I have to think it was also a little painful, as with a kind of punk's contempt and punk's envy built into the experience of watching something in which we'd explicitly chosen not to participate and yet found impossible to ignore.

Back at UC Berkeley's I-House, Mark Leong and I turned out to be pretty good roommates, tolerant (at the very least) of one another's music, both fans of comic books and guitars, and similarly prone to laughably uninformed armchair cultural criticism and rampant idealism and self-righteousness (although he in a relentlessly positive manner and me in a depressed cynical manner). I find it strange how he and I are never quite dudes in each other's company; our conversations tend to be dourly epic, always about morals and choices and society and the essence of things, and are generally at least 75% Bullshit, but I think while they're happening we genuinely dig it. If we're joking around, it's never so much silly or relaxed as it is a mutual attempt to be witty. In any moment we're interacting, one of us is either existentially or romantically mid-crisis and clearly eager for the attention of someone who's willing to sit through an over-articulated and self-conscious account of said crisis. Truth be told I sometimes worry that we take ourselves too seriously among one another, since in other contexts we are each shown to be much more crass and dude-like. Does that mean we secretly fear the other's judgment? Or is it just that we are both game to nerd it up at the first sign that a second party wouldn't mind, and we just smell it in each other? Either way, I think it's probably best that in the future we take every opportunity to do stuff like dance together to bad techno--those moments seem to be the ones when we're most uninhibited with respect to one another. I've kept him touch with him for four years, which, in context, is rare and counts as a really close friendship, one of very high mutual esteem, but we seriously need to chill the fuck out.

One semi-intentional consequence of this notion is that I've recently gotten into the habit of affectionately laughing at Mark behind his back with the other SSM guys. So having an identifiable crew of mutual friends definitely helps. In any case it comes from the awareness of the things about a person that both impress us and disappoint us, and also the recognition that those things are pretty much always inseparable, or perhaps facets of the same basic trait. Mark's always been philosophically unified, at least by all outward appearances: he finds moral significance and intellectual connectedness in everything that he reads and the things that he does. Occasionally this rings highfalutin and/or self-contradictory, but it's also exactly what makes me respect and envy him. Despite my best efforts I'll always harbor fears that the path to enlightenment or self-realization or whatever the fuck is jagged and awful and full of disappointment. And it's not that Mark's without his doubts, but it seems to me that he's convinced, deep down, that there's a right way to run one's life, and that he'll find it eventually, and that he'll have a really good time looking for it. I don't nearly have that kind of confidence.

As recently as maybe eighteen months ago I was still deeply uncomfortable with the idea that I wasn't meant to be a rock star other such musician of note. That sounds pretty silly, but that was really much more of an unwillingness to accept the idea that there were generic limits to what I could accomplish with my life, i.e., up until I was 25 or so I basically saw no line between fantasy and true conceivability. Nowadays I thrash slightly less when I entertain the possibility that I won't ever attain certain chimeras such as widespread musical renown and credibility. Partly that's the necrosis of youthful optimism expressing itself, and that's really not a point any young person should ever be eager to reach--I tend to think growing up is an accumulation equally of fear and apathy as it is of reason and knowledge. But the other thing I've come to accept is that vocation and/or avocation don't necessarily equate to a clear identity, and furthermore that clarity of identity doesn't equate to happiness. That's to say that I think it's an unambiguously good thing to realize that A) what you do as a job/hobby doesn't come nearly close to defining who you are, and that B) being able to claim definitively and unselfconsciously that you're a musician or a writer or a doctor or whatever does not, in and of itself, represent satisfaction, self-knowledge, or the passing of other such spiritual milestones.

The SSM tour was then useful for assuaging a kind of guilt I felt about my waning musical ambitions. For one thing, much of the gruntwork of touring is exceptionally tedious and occasionally nerve-wracking, and even when it is stressful, it is still the same shit you had to deal with before, time and time again. The human aspect can also be numbing, with so much audience enthusiasm amounting to so little in the way of real relationships. Having logged three and a half weeks on a rock tour, I feel fairly convinced that my life could be complete without a brutal regimen of performing here and there with a half-ton of musical gear on my back.

But on the flip side, touring also has its oases of acute and very intense thrills (especially if you are the performer as opposed to the roadie), and it is above all other concerns a terrific adventure, so long as you are lucky enough to have the company of people who are your friends. Here's what I've always said, and what I think I can only now say with any kind of true sympathy: it would be good to be a rock star for a year. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be cut out for it past that point.

I have neglected to mention these things:

• Once near the end of the LA leg of the tour, me and Dan and Aidan and Mark went to a music store in San Fernando to pick up some DIs and a snare skin. The place was full of imitation gear, e.g. Fernandez's instead of Fenders, and all these savvy little signs comparing the store's prices to those of online discounters. Just as we were turning to leave, the guy behind the register stopped us deliberately to inform us that his store had indeed been used as a set for the guitar store scene in Wayne's World. He then took us into a back chamber in which he'd erected a small shrine of Wayne's World paraphernalia; in addition to the actual "NO STAIRWAY" sign and the actual "May I Help You?"-riff guitar, he also had numerous Wayne and Garth bobble heads and photos of Mike Meyers that I am quite certain had nothing to do with the actual filming of the movie.


• Grayson's sleeping bag had a large hole at the bottom, enabling him to walk around while wearing his sleeping bag like a full-body nylon condom. This is how he spent his most of his mornings on tour.


• Apparently the Suburban broke down immediately after I left New York, setting in motion an episode of high drama involving parking tickets, tow trucks, and nervous politics with Brit, the owner of the Suburban. As it was related to me, Brit turned out to be unbelievably nice about the whole thing and paid for the repairs himself, and even took the guys to the airport on their last day in NYC. It was further related to me that 30 minutes into that trip to the airport, somebody in the band suddenly realized that they were headed to the wrong airport, which precipitated a frantic re-routing and I guess a ton of profanity.


• The Kinko's on 5th St. (or was it 4th?) in Austin, like other Kinko's around the nation, sucks profoundly. It cost me a full dollar and like nearly half an hour just to print out the PDF plane ticket I had on Dan's USB key.


• Despite the whole myth of rock n' roll being a sexually-charged affair, the tour as a whole was only as debauched as any mundane gathering of friends, and for a fully-fledged Rock Tour and international jaunt it was disappointingly puritan. We gave Mark and Aidan loads of shit for talking to the occasional girl post-show, but I think we were just trying to create some drama. I did have a semi-platonic and low-intensity crush on exactly one of the army of female characters we encountered on tour. I am being discrete and coy about it because if I weren't, it would be so boring as to not even merit my mentioning it; in other words, I am just trying to create some drama in saying so.


• On a side trip I went to up to Harlem to eat at Silvia's, purportedly the most famous soul food restaurant in NYC. As one might expect from the most famous soul food restaurant in NYC, Sylvia's is blatantly self-promoting and basically soulless, despite that it facilitates such near-surreal experiences as my sitting with a tableful of church-going Asian kids expatriated from the suburbs of Los Angeles and Dallas and being serenaded by a MIDI-accompanied chanteuse who patrolled the restaurant singing "Amazing Grace" and asking where each group of customers was from; when we told her we were from California and Texas she said into the mic, "California and Texas IN THE HOUSE!!!", and when some other table told her they were from Norway, she said into the mic, "Norway's IN THE HOUSE!!!", and so and so forth. I noticed with geeky displeasure that she used the same melismatic descending phrase when she sang the names of certain birthday-celebrating patrons during her extended table-to-table run of "Happy Birthday", i.e., she would sing "Dear Daaaaaaaave" with the same basic rhtyhm and melodic content as "Dear Melissaaaaaaa", and FYI that's not very soulful when that happens like half a dozen time in a row.


• I think this is the only group photo I took with the band. Before the shot, I said, "Okay everyone, let's do the humorless rock star look!" which apparently nobody heard or understood:

In Williamsburg, on Havemayer Street somewhere north of the JMZ line, there's this anonymous building that houses the businesses of local medical practitioners, one of whom's named M. Sack. It's probably always a mistake to think that society has come along far enough that some guy with a sharpie and a refined taste for dick jokes can resist using said sharpie to spot out what naughty double-entendres he happens to come upon in public. One case in point: when I was driving to the Oakland Airport last week I saw a one-way sign that somebody had enhanced with a spray-paint "B" so that the "ONE" read instead "BONE". As such, if you're called Dr. M. Sack, you really ought to know better than to post your name out in the open within arm-plus-sharpie-length's reach, because the sad truth is that you're never going to live down the innuendo that you thought you left behind in high school. It's just not going to happen.

I can't really pin down exact chronological figures, but I'm gonna venture to say that we spent the vast majority of our time stalking around Williamsburg. For me this was a really good thing, and here's why: The typical New York Experience is heavily Manhattan- and skyscraper-centric and has for anyone brought up on American pop myth a pretty surreal and unsettling quality--in my previous visits to New York, I would walk by the Seinfeld diner or Carnegie Hall or the spot in Central Park commemorating John Lennon's life/death or the Empire State Building and I would never know quite what to think except something like "Oh, this place is actually real." I sort of think this is the pure tourist's understanding of a place, in which the sites are so objectified and packed with this weird nostalgia for things you've never experienced for real (and yet you still feel nostalgic for) that you can't help but be let down by the real thing, because the real thing isn't the same thing as what existed in your imagination, nor is its physical manifestation at all tied up with all of the cultural baggage that's associated with it. Maybe let down is the wrong word for it. I guess it's more that you really are impressed, but it's the kind of impressed-ness that comes as a result of this feeling like you ought to be impressed by it all.

So the practical advantage of not carting oneself from Impressive Building X to Museum Y and then to Broadway Show Z is that you have a lot of time to walk around in the cold or sit in a cafe for an entire afternoon and basically do nothing. When we were in New York I developed an impulse-purchase habit for semi-junky food and drink like everything-topped bagels with cream cheese (which I kind of overdosed on because they are in retrospect way too salty with all that stuff on it) and cafe mochas and/or coffee products of any kind and doughnuts and the sensational blended strawberry milk sold at this ambiguously Latino bakery called La Bonita.

I recently talked with a former New Yorker about NYC artistic communities, and his account of Williamsburg as NYC's gentrified bohemia du jour had distinct after-the-fall overtones, as if things have gotten softer and less edgy since the passing of some golden era that might be the 60s or 70s or 80s depending on who's doing the wistful reminiscing. Talk like that is always a little suspicious because of how self-congratulating it seems (e.g., "I was there when things were real", etc.), but then maybe you can see his point a little: Wiliamsburg is as pure an example of a Hipster neighborhood that you will ever see. It's kind of hard to pin down an objective definition of what exactly a Hipster is, since the tastes and fashions chance so quickly, but at any given moment it always feels like there's a concrete, pre-packaged aesthetic that everyone's ordering from a catalog and subsequently using to decorate their respective art spaces and record shops and vegan cafes with.

Chelsea and I had a long and rambling conversation about it as we walked through town, and eventually settled on some rough concept of Hipsterdom as first and foremost a form of conspicuous consumption, although I'm not really sure how far we got with that. If nothing else, "hipster" is a pejorative, and so nobody you ever meet will ever self-identify as a "hipster". Conversation while in Williamsburg was rife with sarcastic jabs at hipsters, to the point that Mark actually said something to the effect of "Well, hipsters aren't really so bad", and you just know the contempt is thick when somebody feels the need to apologize for it. But I'm also tempted to believe that making fun of hipsters is itself an identifying trait of a hipster--that's to say it sorta takes one to know one, and that I guess I shouldn't act surprised if somebody accused one of us of being a hipster him/herself. Let's remember that we were, after all, having such fun romping around Brooklyn with our skinny jeans and scarves and variously worthless liberal arts degrees, reminiscing (with infinitely regressive irony) about the 80s and drinking coffee and talking about music and film and how awesome it is or would be to live in Japan or Germany.

As with SXSW, the NY leg of So So Modern's US tour originally had only one show penciled in. Thanks to the free play of networking the likes of which I'd never seen prior, the NY schedule blossomed into some half-dozen sets, plus one or two guest DJ sets and a few sets for Grayson's solo stuff. Partly this was a geography thing, since a lot of the industry insiders that the band knew personally were based in New York, and since the city also happens to have a staggering number of formal and informal venues for bands to play in. I have to reiterate that the success in booking and logistics during the NY stint was mostly the result of people performing favors and other random acts of kindness for the band. I'm not quite sure how to explain it, although I suspect this is the way it happens for any band touring on its own dime.

(It might or might not be worth mentioning the weird expression of gender politics that I think I saw going on: every one of the immediate contacts that went on to arrange things and find stuff for the band was female, and so I'm forced to speculate that the band's charms and NZ cache and/or Commonwealth accents had something to do with it. It may be that that sort of work just happens to be more appealing to females, or that females are just better suited to its core competencies (which are basically to be really patient, organized, high-strung, and hip all at the same time, and to be really nice most of the time but also to be able to flip a switch and kick some ass when it's ass-kicking that is needed), or there's some kind of glass ceiling at work that keeps the ground-level logistics of the music industry a disproportionately female affair. Maybe I'm just smoking crack. Also not as interestingly but just FYI, the people that ended up loaning stuff to the band, i.e. gear and vehicles, were all male, but they'd all been reached indirectly, through said females.)

One huge and potentially tour-saving coup came in the form of Chelsea's friend Brit's beat-up white Suburban, which was loaned to us at minimal cost and complaint. The Suburban had Brit's U of Colorado stickers attached and looked like it had been driven across the length of America and through all of its varied climes and terrains, and several times over. The rear-view mirror on the driver's side had at some point been socked a good one and was more kaleidescope than driving aid. There was an ancient tape-deck adapter with a quarter-inch jack and the sound coming from the speakers had that weird treble/bass imbalance you get when the stereo signal is messed up somewhere along the line. Brit took special pains to instruct me on how to jimmy the rear gate with a screwdriver he kept in the drink holder up front for that specific purpose. There was room for five to sit comfortably and it fit all of SSM's gear more or less exactly. Aside from the assassinatingly shitty mileage and the poor aesthetics of referring to the Suburban as a band "van", I would say it was perfect for our purposes.

Now when I say "perfect" though, I mean "perfect" in a kind of fits-the-experience way, not "perfect" as in chick-magnet and/or Car Practically Drives Itself and/or GPS-navigation with computer-mediated-climate-control or some such nonsense; actually operating the thing took some getting used to and led to some of the more intense experiences of the tour. Note that driving anywhere in the general vicinity of the Williamsburg Bridge on either side of the river is a clusterfuck par excellence, one of one-way streets and concomitant forced turns, and then of extremely creative and unpredictable traffic direction and obstruction by members of the New York Police Department, and let's not forget the tiny unreadable street signs (if it means anything to you, I repeatedly almost missed Bowery coming off of Delancey and vice-versa) and general lack of parking spaces and constant road construction and good lord the derring-do and overall balls of NYC motorists and pedestrians alike. After the three or four days of maneuvering through Brooklyn and south Manhattan in a car possessing roughly the size and demeanor of a triceratops, you're either going to be very competent or very dead. At this point virtually no aspect of Southern California driving scares me, and it very recently amazes me that anyone could have a bad word to say about LA traffic at all.

I can't remember for sure, but I think Day 1 in the Suburban was also the same day that SSM was scheduled to perform their one pre-booked gig, in the Lower East Side at the Lit Lounge, which was a weird juxtaposition of cave-like performance space and frou-frou art gallery. I think Mark could already sense a tension building between me and the car and the streets of New York, and so he bought me a chicken kebab dinner before the show.

The Lit Lounge was fun but also terribly annoying (I thought) from a performance perspective. First of all, the floor plan consisted of a long, skinny rectangle with the stage and the make-shift green room residing on opposite ends, thus requiring before and after the set that we to ferry gear back and forth along the entire length of the premises, and this while it was jammed with patrons. The stage was tiny and one corner of it was actually somehow not attached to the rest of it, and it would wobble perilously and unbalance mic stands and generally terrify anyone within view of the band's feet. Despite this the band seemed to have a good time, perhaps due to Dan's not feeling stoned on antibiotics, and also a terrific crowd atmosphere that I did not at all see except for passing glances while I was shooting the possibly incompetent sound guy the look of death, which I am 100% certain he could not see. Either the owner or the floor manager was sufficiently impressed with SSM's performance that s/he invited them back at later dates for not only another performance but also a DJ set, both of which gigs s/he (the owner or floor manager) subsequently completely forgot about and left SSM sorta high and dry and forcing them to cancel the DJ thing completely and then truncate the second show to like 15 minutes, which, for what it's worth, apparently turned out to be really high-energy and cool.

There was a bonafide dance party after the bands stopped playing that was filled with the requisite goofiness and homoerotic grinding, mostly perpetrated with pneumatic enthusiasm by Dan (and I think maybe sometimes Aidan, because he and his groin are tall) upon basically everyone on the dance floor. Then we loaded all of SSM and Cut Off Your Hands (who'd played IMO one of their best shows that I'd seen of them despite my contempt for the venue at large) and also myself and our new NY acquaintance Rachel to whom we'd offered a ride into the Suburban--all in all, ten people, mostly drunk, and the gear of two bands. For an abstainer who moves frequently in the company of lushes, expats, and most recently rock bands, I am stupendously untalented at putting up with the behavior of drunk people, and I tend to greet all the silly good will with constipated smiles and humorlessness and am pretty consistently a fucking asshole about it, which maybe comes from the fact that I am jealous that I don't seem to be having as a good time and am somehow missing out (now see if that isn't the classic unavoidably self-fulfilling train of thought).

Anyway, the carful of people was actually not so bad and maybe even secretly fun for me; instead I waited until after maybe half a dozen navigational mishaps on the trip home to go absolutely apeshit. I think it was when we were just off the bridge into Brooklyn and I realized we had no way of getting off the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway from the inside lanes of the bridge (which as I later learned were labeled as such, but only past the point where you no longer had the choice, fuck you very much) and I was looking into rear-view mirror trying to change lanes and I couldn't see a goddamn single thing in it, and I proceeded to emit a reasonably coherent stream of mezzo forte profanity, which tirade I think fairly well scared the crap out of the band, and for the rest of the ride they were mostly quiet, a kind of brows-raised Holy Shit quiet. To add insult to insult, no later than 3 minutes after we'd entered Brooklyn, I took a tactically-disastrous forced right turn, which immediately took us back onto the bridge and into Manhattan; had their been tolls involved I probably would have driven the van right through the gate.

I'm hoping to have this wrapped up once and for all in the next post. This is so late it's getting embarrassing!

Alright, so this is exceedingly cheesy: I've been off the tour for a week now and when I wasn't being a lazy asshole I was letting this cold I got in NYC fester into some crazy flu-metastasis that's given me a new and profound appreciation for those all-in-one nighttime pills you take before curling into your gross and drooly bedsheets. The result's that I never got around to finishing, much less starting really, the gargantuan New York City slash mega tour retrospective slash immense bullshitting on the meaning of rock and roll and its relationship to youth blog entry that I've had in emaciated outline form in this textfile on my desktop that's titled nothing more than "BLOG". But I'll deliver eventually. Photos have been up for a while, and I'll give you what I've got so far, which doesn't quite scratch the surface, but really I need to get to bed and soon.

A day or two before we left Austin I was reassuring everyone that New York would be warm and that they wouldn't have to supplement their wardrobes with new coats and shoes. What I didn't know was that a snowstorm had descended upon New England, one that would eventually result in massive airline delays and some pretty unsavory temperatures. When my plane started to land, I was peering out the window and thinking that we were surely still flying over Michigan: as far as the eye could see (which, from the vantage point of a jet, was pretty damn far), the whole of New York was exactly the same shade of white.

Up close it was a different story. By the time I'd gotten to Brooklyn, the snow was already a few days old, and with the temperature hovering a few points above and below Celsius zero (I guess depending on the position of the sun), it'd been subjected to a process of repeated melting and freezing that left it not so much snow as this persistently disgusting and slippery hardened sludge, peppered generously with chunks of rock salt (not really doing its job so well), street trash, the feces of various animals, and other miscellaneous off-colored urban detritus of undetermined composition and source. As it happens it was also garbage collection day for most of South Williamsburg, so the mounds of grimy ice on the sidewalks were also crowned with an unbelievable number of plastic garbage bags, some half-opened and very gradually evacuating their contents into the street. To my relief the same cold that kept the ice from melting also kept the trash from decomposing too quickly. As such Brooklyn didn't smell like shit; it just looked like shit.

Lemme say that I used to or perhaps still sorta have this complex regarding New York City that actually has more to do with my notions of social hierarchy and my own self-worth than it does with the objective features of the city itself. That's to say that I've always thought that NYC was a little too cool for me, which idea is really just a corollary to my deep suspicions toward people in my age group who speak ravingly about moving to NYC and subsequently having The Time Of Their Lives. In the past these people have included older and more experienced peers, the well-dressed friends of friends, graduate students that not so much carry their single-strapped sidebags as wear them, and very prominently certain girls on whom I'd had naive and yet shatteringly dramatic crushes; i.e., such self-consciously sophisticated, intellectual, and blatantly privileged people that I simultaneously loathe and wish to gain the respect of, or even secretly wish to become. Wanting to move to NYC always seemed to me like a kind of posturing that was both lame and somehow disloyal to one's roots; there is probably some overlap between this and the way townies and rural folk (or in my personal case, suburbanites) canonically despise the natty rich city kids. Anyways this is all complicated shit in my head, tied up with my sometimes puritanical and wholly abstract desire to remain "true to myself", alongside deep-seated fears of failure and being left alone.

The point's that none of this has to do with New York per se. I actually find New York to be pretty awesome and impressive on any number of levels (in fact I was pretty much ready to move out to NYC about a year ago when I was considering an grad school offer from Columbia), like how you can get the best bagel-and-cream-cheese you've ever had for two bucks, how there's folk of all classes and colors wherever you look, how it feels like you have direct access to cutting-edge creative work in every imaginable form (despite the potential obnoxiousness of such a claim), and how people actually seem to be doing things in public, and at all hours--this last bit is not to be underestimated, since to me it's what makes NYC the only true City in the US, with Los Angeles and Boston and San Francisco all having varying degrees of almost-but-not-quite, quasi-cityish bustle and density that never really reach what I experienced in many big Cities across Asia (NB: I haven't been to Chicago, but I suspect my hypothesis still holds). I think New York's the only place in America that compares.

So So Modern as a decision-making unit is both pretty inert and a little scattered, and stuff tends to get arranged and resolved at the very last minute, in "true So So Modern style" according to Grayson. I'd position myself on the lower half of the General Shit-Togetherness scale, but next to the band I'd rank like momishly high-strung. Probably every day during SXSW I would very gently nag the band about living arrangements in New York, offering that my friend Chelsea was willing to put us up for a while, and each time we had this conversation we'd arrive at this weird, non-committal consensus that 1) the band had several options for NYC, and 2) that Somehow Something Would Work Itself Out, but 3) in any case we never quite got around to confirming our accommodations with our hosts. And so by the time I got to New York, I knew only that I was supposed to drop by Mark's friend Tash's place to drop gear off. Where we were all going to sleep was still up in the air. SSM's plane got delayed for three or four hours thanks to the fallout from the weekend's snowstorm, and by the time they got into Williamsburg it was something like midnight; when Mark called I asked him where he was planning on staying, he said that they thought, uh, well, they had hoped to stay at Chelsea's, if that was cool. And it was cool, but only because A) Chelsea and her roommates are themselves extremely cool and easy-going and B) Chelsea happens to be vampirically nocturnal and was awake to let us into her place. We'd had all of these opportunities to give Chelsea & co. the word ahead of time, but we waited until literally the night-of to let them know, and all of this made me a little bit uncomfortable. Bands at SSM's level--i.e., those that aren't floated on corporate money--are in essence parasitic and sustain themselves largely on the good will and hospitality of strangers, and I have to think that it's only good metaphysical form not to take any of that for granted. And here I hope I'm not overstating my case: the band are charming houseguests and are effusively polite, but they have a habit of dropping by unannounced.

So anyways, on that first night Chelsea took us out for a very-early morning trek around the snowy trash-hills of Williamsburg, and eventually we found ourselves dancing to a vaguely faggy mix of Euro-ish beats in a dive bar in the Lower East Side, where (in the bar) according to Chelsea there was a couple of unspecific gender in the women's restroom asking fellow restroom-occupants if it was okay for them to "do it right here" and then (presumably) making good on their intentions.

I would evaluate our first few days in NYC as pretty Fucking Cold; as I mentioned before we weren't really expecting low temperatures, let alone snow, so we resorted to such tactics as plundering Chelsea's extensive scarf collection to keep warm. Above, Grayson's doing an impression of an Eastern European peasant, and I think he rather perfectly approximates the odd and ambiguously strained appearance of your average wind-worn continental herdsman or tiller-of-the-soil of any of the last three or so centuries, the kind of look that could either be rustically cheerful or just abjectly stricken and miserable, but you can never quite decide which it is.

Chelsea shares her apartment with two friends, Karin and Beth, and Beth's affectionately ingratiating cat, Wolf. Wolf apparently has a thing for males and was by all indications completely in love with me, but I was completely allergic to her. As in biologically at first, but then later metaphorically as well. I would wake up in the morning with swollen and crusted-over eyes and grossly irritated sinuses and a tingly full-body itch, and so in spite of her advances I eventually took to nudging Wolf away and turning away from her when she walked in my direction. Sometimes I thought she'd taken the hint, but then like a day later she'd be back, rubbing the side of her body against my leg, which left me like simultaneously revolted and terrified and also a little sad that I couldn't pet her.

My sister Justine got up at 3:30AM to see the boys off; we'd stayed up all night after the Key Club show to get ready for the plane flight to Austin. If you happen to catch her freshly awoken from just a couple hours of her night's sleep, you'll find her mute and extremely automatonic and zombie-like, with her eyes narrowed to slits and head pitched at a slightly downward angle such that she somehow miraculously is able to avoid hitting things when she shuffles around without really looking forward. It took us half an hour more to get the van packed up, and when we actually were set to leave I found Justine lying ventral-side down in pencil-dive posture on the kitchen floor, which position I think she must have been in for at least fifteen sustained minutes. It was very nice of her to send us off.

Actually I was scheduled to fly to Texas several hours after the rest of the guys, so I took the band all the way down to LAX, and then drove back up to the Valley to get a couple hours of sleep. As it turns out I probably should have set my alarm for 7:30 instead of 7:45; what happened was that I got up, packed up my stuff, drove to a gas station to fill up the van's gas tank, called my mom to meet me at the Burbank Airport, hauled ass to said airport to return the van, and then my mom picked me up and drove at such a pace that I arrived at the Van Nuys Flyaway (a sort of suburban bus terminal whose buses go directly to LAX) at like 9:30AM, and there was a bus set to leave at that exact time, but as it turns out it sat at the curb for five more minutes and they still wouldn't let me on; this in turn meant that I had to wait 30 minutes for the next bus, which put me into LAX at say 10:40, and I had to wait fifteen more minutes for the bus to go all the way to Terminal 4, and I got into the American Airlines queue and saw that they had a 45-minute cutoff for checking in; I was taking off at 11:45, which gave me a little over 240 seconds to check in, and believe it or not I was swiping my credit card to check in at literally 11:01 and the machine told me I was too late. I made some immediate but still very polite appeals to the check-in agents behind the counter, and the resulting conversation has led me to believe that you will not find more pitiless and mirth-deprived people than LAX check-in agents coming off the graveyard shift.

I thus had to settle for placing myself on stand-by for a later flight. Not that I was in any particular hurry to get to Austin, but not having a flight securely in hand was pretty nerve-wracking, although I took some solace in the fact that the same bullshitty bureaucratic process would surely have some effect on the number of passengers on the flight I was hoping to get on. And as it turns out, I got onto a direct flight to Austin that actually put me in town five minutes earlier than my original itinerary was supposed to.

Anyway, Austin's much greener than I would've thought, though to be honest my previous concept of what Texas looked like was populated with oil pumps, mesas, tumbleweed, Confederate flags, and basically not much else, and thus not at all any kind of realistic expectation, really. Most often you will hear Austin described as the most liberal town in Texas (an "oasis" according some, who I can guess have some concrete judgments on what the rest of the state's about), an info-tech mecca, a college town, and a place where people are very friendly and smoke a lot of marijuana (which characteristics are generally said to go hand-in-hand). Oh and the music scene is unlike anything I've ever seen: 6th St. is bursting with clubs and bars, and I have to think the liquor-license per square-foot figure is higher in Austin than any other place in the nation, and by a long way; then it seems like every local you run into plays the guitar or writes songs or helps out with a friend's band. They actually block off huge chunks of downtown to through-going traffic during weekends, presumably so that carousers can move point to point without drunkenly staggering into the path of a car or being struck by a drunkenly-operated car.

The first night in Austin I was extremely sleep-deprived and confused, and the events of the evening seemed very bizarre and disjoint, like they were orchestrated by Lewis Carroll and Dali if they were Texan and maybe less so trippy than they were just stoned benignly on Mexican pot. By the time I got into town it was 8PM and very dark, and the shuttle dropped me off in East Austin (sort of the requisite ghetto area that rich cities just seem to have to have) in front of an ill-kept and somewhat serial-killerish house whose porch was littered with cigarette butts and the partial skeleton of what I think was a baby cow or a very large canine. The only light came from behind the curtains of a side room at the front of the house, from a neon sign of some kind. Then Aidan, Dan, and Mark sprung from the back seat of an arriving taxi, the timing of which still strikes me as both serendipitous and really kind of strange. After a brief exchange of greetings, the three of them went immediately to sleep.

At that point I realized I was hungry. I had no concept of where I was and didn't want to hunt around in the dark looking for a restaurant, so I decided to order some food. The house was filled with many things, variously arranged and dusty and speckled with white strands of dog hair, but no phone book I could find; eventually I found the number for a pizza parlor off of an old but suspiciously non-empty pizza box sitting under a bookshelf in somebody's bedroom. This pizza I would eventually share with Emma, the house's obedient and extremely hairy mutt, and then with a house resident called Preston, who'd at some undetermined time returned home and taken a shower, all without me noticing. Preston was wearing nothing but a towel around his waist and spoke in an extreme Texas drawl; he explained that he was originally from Houston and that he'd just gotten laid off from his job. After eating three slices of my pizza he holed away in his room (where both the aforementioned neon sign and suspiciously non-empty pizza box were located) to watch NBA highlights on TV. After this, Aidan/Dan/Mark dragged themselves up and went back into town to watch some bands, and I declined to join them on account of feelings of disorientation.

I was organizing my tour photos and (unsuccessfully) trying to find an unsecured Wi-fi connection when two fellows named Bob and Jesse walked in the front door; they introduced themselves as a house resident and friend-of-house-residents, respectively. They worked at a local hotel and had just gotten off for the day. Bob plays in a local band called The Dirty Sound and is earnestly proud and unembarrassed of the fact, and almost right away he offered to demo his band's recordings for me through the speakers of the living room television. While we listened, Jesse asked if I smoked pot, and when I said I'd never tried it, he seemed a little defeated, like I'd implicitly denied him permission to light up right then and there, for which I felt sorta bad about, but I didn't say anything. Then we talked for twenty minutes about how much Bob and Jesse disliked bums. After that, I remember trying to sleep on a couch covered with Emma's hair (BTW which hair I am still digging out of my clothes and crevasses of my laptop keyboard like four days after the fact, and I have no idea how any of it got there) and being awoken or kept awake by a sequence of progressively weirder distractions, like first Emma skittering around and howling in the grips of some kind of doggie paranoia (she was clearly terrified at something that was not there), and then the So So Modern guys gathering their stuff to take into the RV outside (which they were using as a guest-house), and after that any number of house residents and/or friends-of-house-residents shuffling in and out the front door, including some guy who thought I was Jesse, and I know this because he kept calling me Jesse and shining the screen light of his flip-phone into my face even though I was very obviously trying to appear to be asleep while he was doing that.

Actually the house we were staying at had exactly four proper tenants, Andy, Bob, Jennifer, and Preston, but they are very laid-back about having friends and random musical guests infiltrate their living space unannounced and at all hours of the night. They'd quite generously volunteered to billet So So Modern through some semi-official arrangement with the SXSW administration. The Austin locals living and regularly visiting that house--I personally met maybe a dozen or so and I'm sure there must have been more--turned out to be more or less extremely cool and generous and relaxed people across the board. I have to admit to feeling pretty far removed from their lifestyle and worldview, but either they didn't sense the culture gap, or it just didn't matter to them. They had no airs of urbanity and sophistication. I thought they were aggressively friendly and informal, but in a way that was neither judgmental nor self-conscious, and in general I found them way easier to talk to than all of the cosmopolitanite music industry insiders and fans that I met through the festival itself, who as a whole were kind of Hip and Cool and basically incapable of having a conversation about anything except the hipness and coolness of their past experiences in direct relation to bands and/or the music industry at large, which frankly since I am only peripherally related to such things tended to bore the shit out of me. Plus, there's a kind of psychological distance that West/East coasters and city folk (into which group I would place most of festival-goers) keep around themselves that's refreshingly absent in your average Austin local.

Here's Dan expounding his vision for a new tune, and Aidan surely wishing he had a battery-operated synth or a guitar of his own. What little media coverage of SSM I've found tends to cast Grayson as the leader/frontman, and although he has the most bonafide musical credentials and tends to handle most of the group's business-related matters, I think they operate as a democracy, even with songwriting. Actually I'm not a big believer in true democracy when it comes to music (or politics, for that matter)--I tend to think that someone has to very politely and respectfully assume the driver's seat--but thus far it seems to work out okay for SSM.

This is Dan with a real mammalian vertebra, pretending like it's an alien spaceship. I don't have a video of it, so you'll have to imagine him making machine-gun and engine noises while running around with the goddamn thing in his hand.

Here's an NES that saw a fair bit of late-night use (primarily Super Mario Bros. 3 and Tetris, the NES version of which has no multiplayer option, unbelievably enough) during our stay at the house. The tour has been thoroughly suffused with the presence of video games. I would say we've talked more about gaming than visual art, movies, books, or television; the only subject that comes up more is music, and even then video games still occur prominently: a significant number of bands we saw or talked about demonstrated heavy game-soundtrack/8-bit influence, I'd say including SSM itself.

This comes apropos of nothing: Mark's a big-time lefty idealist, but boy is he down with classic American junk food. If rumors of SSM's medium-term relocation to the US come true, one of their imminent challenges will be to keep Mark from blowing the band's resources (not to mention his arteries) on curly fries and pizza-by-the-slice.

So So Modern had only one scheduled performance, which was on the last night of the festival. There were a few promising leads for playing parties, but those ended up falling through, and in the end we had loads and loads of time to drift around and explore the festival. As it turns out, official SXSW performers (which SSM were) are not automatically afforded access to SXSW events; instead, a single SXSW act (SSM counted as just one) has the option of receiving a single (as in for one person) all-access badge, or the paltry sum of $200, which either way seemed exploitative and unbelievably cheap given that A) most bands stay for four days and put a lot of money into the local economy to feed and entertain themselves, and B) SXSW is, as a whole, nothing less than a titanic subsidy for both local businesses and national marketers of all stripes. SSM had been advised just to take the cash, which at first seemed like a huge mistake, but turned out not to be such a big deal after all, since the band had some connections here and there, and anyways many of the cooler performances occurred at free and unofficial venues that didn't fall under the formal auspices of SXSW itself.

And also, we spent a ludicrously embarrassing amount of time hanging out at The Hideout, a cafe on the corner of 7th and Congress that had decent coffee, breakfast tacos (the very idea of which if you are at all a fan of breakfast and of tacos will quite nearly cause you to blow your anticipatory foodie wad), and most importantly completely free Wi-fi. The guys in the band are computer dorks, and great chunks of our time in LA and Austin were spent assaulting MySpace and Gmail en masse in a laptop huddle. My excuse was that I was trying to write something about the tour, but I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't choose sitting in a cafe and web-surfing over walking around looking for live shows like, say, three times out of five. The others claimed to have been doing band-related communications and catching up with assorted family and friends, but I have a hard time imagining what exactly all that entails and why it'd take at least 90 minutes a day, which I think is a pretty generous lower bound for the amount of time we've spent at our computers.

So So Modern's idea of centering a US tour around their SXSW appearance wasn't entirely original, which meant we'd be running quite often into other New Zealand bands heading gradually eastwards over the course of the trip. There was a rather glitzy showcase show sponsored by the NZ Music Industry Commission, but due to not having a label or not being well-connected or not being stylistically accessible enough, and in spite of apparently being quite popular in Wellington, SSM hadn't been invited to play, and in fact they hadn't been placed on any guest list and technically had no way of getting in. Fortunately, we ran into a girl called Joe (or Jo) who, as far as I could tell, was friends with just about everyone in the Wellington scene, and she played the I-just-flew-ten-thousand-miles card with the guy at the door (who wasn't interested in a fight and probably wouldn't have cared one way or the other) and so all six of us got in without a hitch.

Here's Dan, Joe (or Jo), Grayson, and Nick from Cut Off Your Hands.

The NZ showcase had a crowded tent where bands were being given maybe 15 minutes to play, not really enough time for anything significant, but enough for a properly spectacle-ish background to music industry elbow-rubbing. A good portion of the attendees were well-dressed and wielded wine glasses, and I sort of think that the majority of people occupying the performance tent were primarily there because they were standing in the incredibly long hospitality queue (and free food or not there was no way we were waiting in that line), and only secondarily to listen to the bands play. I'll concede that I tuned out a good deal of this party, for reasons of feeling fairly irrelevant to the scene, and also not wanting to insert my nose into other people's conversations. I believe SSM were there mostly to catch up with old friends.

More by coincidence than out of design, we seemed to run into the same bands over and over again, and I got a tiny bit of exposure to the NZ pop scene, about which I knew absolutely nothing prior to the tour.

I'm most familiar with Cut Off Your Hands (formerly The Shaky Hands, until their arrival in the States and subsequent rights conflict with an identically-named US band), since they played a few dates with SSM in Hollywood prior to South-by-Southwest. Pictured here are Nick and Phil, who incidentally own some pretty rad Tupac and The Chronic t-shirts, respectively. Off-camera are Brent the Drummer and Michael the Guitar Player, whom I had a very long and nerdy conversation re: video games with and who was just about the only non-blues guitar player I've seen in the last week and a half who played a Stratocaster, and might I add he actually digs it. FYI the much-maligned Strat is more or less a pariah in 21st century indie rock--basically everyone plays a Tele or some sort of oddball Fender, like a Jaguar or a Jazzmaster. I think that the Strat's association with classic guitar-wanky music (cf. Hendrix, "God" Clapton &c, i.e., guys to whom I pay all due respects, but still) is basically inescapable, and it occupies this weird and profoundly unhip space of being neither classically retrograde nor satisfactorily obscure. It is ubiquitous, but then not quite proletarian or nostalgic of anything particularly cool. I mean, I play a Strat and I can't help but think it's kind of cheesy and square at times. Anyways.

As far as I could tell, The Mint Chicks were the consensus choice for the hottset shit out of NZ at SXSW. Their style is premeditated to be equal parts edgy and Pop, so it's easy to see why that's the case. Kody, the Mint Chicks' frontman, looks like a darker Jude Law and was probably the most glammy guy I met in our four days in Austin, but nevertheless seemed like a nice guy and even remembered my name (I think) after SSM's set a few days later. I don't mean to disparage their songwriting at all, but the best part of the Mint Chicks' live set is Kody's ability to hurl his microphone out bola-style and then toe-kick it back into his hand, a maneuver which must have taken quite a bit of practice to get performance-worthy.

Andrew, the dude from Die!Die!Die!, played guitar with a broken hand, and when I saw them a second time at a party in East Austin he kept jumping and unapologetically landing on his knees, and by the end of the set he'd distributed not a small amount of his blood across the concrete. Similar tactics for punk-rock performance have been around for ages now, and it's hard to avoid thinking that this kind of thing is at least partly an ironic gimmick, but one really has to give proper credit to any actual spilling of blood.

I actually got away without paying a single cover fee for any of the shows I saw at SXSW. That's probably only possible if you're extremely well-connected, or if you deliberately avoid the big-name performances, which is what we ended up doing.

My favorite band that played at SXSW was Health, an experimental noise group from Los Angeles. They're esoteric enough that it hurts a little to try to describe their sound; Mark called them "a hardcore Animal Collective", which I suppose is about right. Their drummer, BJ, was extremely gregarious and friendly and never failed to make the same dick joke (I'll let you figure it out) when he told people his name. I liked them enough that I actually bought one of their t-shirts, which I basically never ever do. It's also worth mentioning that SSM eventually played their set on Health's gear, which Health loaned to them without hesitation.

Mark's friend Maria's friend Helen took us out to a house party one night, and although I was initially kinda suspicious of the idea, it turned out to be the best musical experience of the festival for me. When we got there, there was a band called Yellow Fever playing pool-side. They played slightly twee pop songs with girl-girl harmonies and chords like Nirvana songs, only without the distortion, in other words the kind of music where it just makes sense that there's a toddler dancing in the foreground while the band's playing.

(And boy have I always wanted to play in band with a co-opted and epithetic and ironically naughty name like "Yellow Fever"--my personal favorite's always been "The Slants"--but I can't get over the fact that it'd call attention to the fact I'm Chinese and somehow insinuate that I was trying to make some kind of meaningful social statement through my music, which, uh, not really. More than anything else, I just think it's funny.)

Very close to the craziest shit I've ever seen was the set by Monotonix, a band from Tel Aviv. I earnestly dug what the drummer and guitar player were doing (big-time, hopelessly outdated 70s-style riff-rock with heavy beats), but their lead singer was transcendently insane and completely stole the show from every band playing that evening. They started their set by mounting pouches of paper onto the drum kit and spraying them with lighter fluid and lighting the drum kit on fire. The lead singer subsequently extinguished the fire midway through the first song by pouring beer over the drum kit while it was still being played. Then he sprayed an entire can of Gilette shaving cream (which afterwards I found on the floor and thought about taking with me, but ended up not keeping because it was pretty gross) on his face and jumped into the crowd and charged after individual audience members. I was standing off to the side and couldn't avert my eyes: it was like watching the most hilarious slow-motion train wreck ever. Anyone standing directly in front of the stage must have been absolutely terrified. Then the singer jumped onto the bar, taking random swigs from bottles on the counter and hurling these little paper cones (the origin and function of which I'm totally unaware, but there was a fuckload of them) all over the dance floor. They closed the show with an extended drum solo during which the lead singer took individual pieces of the drum kit out onto the floor so individual audience members could play along; ultimately the drummer was sitting on the kick drum (which was being held up seven feet in the air by the crowd) playing the snare and crash (which were also being held in the air by the crowd). It's been half a week since then and I still don't know how to make sense of any of it.

After four days of waiting around, SSM finally hit the stage at midnight on the final day of the festival. Although the crowd seemed to really enjoy the show, it was filled with a lot of friends and pre-existing fans, and I'm not entirely sure their SXSW appearance will have a significant effect on their reputation outside of Wellington. While it's already pretty hard for me to make any objective observations, I do think their time will come: I'm pretty hard to impress, but I do believe SSM are a good band, really good even, and not less significantly there's a growing market for bands like them in Credible Hipster Circles; they're exactly the kind of band a Pitchfork writer would drool over grandiosely while name-dropping Derrida and campy 1960s sci-fi within the same sentence.

I had my first and only Roadie Moment during the show when the hi-hat fell over and we had to tape it up hastily between songs. After that, Dan looked me in the eyes and said, "Water. Get me some water."

After helping the band clean up their gear, I left the venue more or less immediately so I could get a couple hours of sleep before my plane flight. Halfway back to the house, I realized I had no cash to pay the shuttle driver in the morning, so I turned around and walked back into town to look for an ATM. After that, I again made it halfway back to the house, only to get a phone call from Grayson, who explained that it was impossible to get a cab downtown and so they had no way of getting the gear back. When I made it back to the house, I asked Preston if he could do me a big favor, and instead of suspiciously looking me over or hesitating (which I think would be most people's response), he just nodded and said, "I might say yes." So we took Preston's surprisingly fancy SUV into town, which by this time was a car-and-pedestrian clusterfuck of epic proportions, and hauled SSM's members and gear off a street corner like so many Saigon embassy airlifts.

When we got back I busied myself with various tasks like arranging bags and getting papers straightened and figuring out the logistics of getting to the airport, stuff so menial and numerous that you lose sleep over them without realizing. At one point I asked Aidan to help me sort through the gear in the back Preston's SUV, and a couple of female friends-of-house-residents who'd actually attended the SSM show followed us outside. I've yet to consult with Aidan about his take on this, but I think they were flirting with us, e.g., at one point one of them said that I very obviously had a Los Angeles accent but she nonetheless found it attractive--she seemed cute and cool but I was some combination of very busy, very tired, very shy, and also very uncomfortable with the whole rock star vis-a-vis groupie and/or sophisticated urbanite vis-a-vis local girl power dynamic that I sensed developing (and maybe only existed in my own head, but regardless) and thus I responded with the male equivalent of batting one's eyelashes, which essentially amounted to such a radically uncharming response as "Oh, why thank you." Period. Anyways, I was leaving in two hours.

I'm not sure if I actually fell asleep that night. I made sure to check in to my flight over the internet, and I arrived at the airport with plenty of time to spare. Nevertheless, the unfeeling and humorless and curmudgeonly United Airlines check-in agent nailed me to the tune of $50 for Aidan's synth being 4.5 pounds over the 50-lb limit, which you would think a relaxed Austinite would let fly, especially on the morning after the conclusion of SXSW. One moral of the tour thus far is that one should not fuck with the airline industry, and that if it's not one thing, it's another. Consider yourself warned.

When Mark and I were talking about my prospective participation in So So Modern's US tour, however many months ago, I was pretty adamant about my having some actual, practical responsibilities for the band, especially with regard to live performance issues, but the fact of the matter is that the band doesn't have that many shows scheduled for the time I'm with them, and that they've successfully toured in the past without need for a roadie or a guitar tech. Truth be told I've been pretty self-conscious and wary of the idea that I might simply be a tag-along male groupie. Built into this concern is this assumption that there's a hierarchy of tour-related personnel wherein itinerant fans/groupies are kind of bottom-of-the-ladder and also a little pathetic and lame. I don't mean to say I'm not a fan of the band, but I am really not so invested in their music such that my participation on the tour is sustained by the awe of being among them. But to a certain degree, I think there has to be something like that going on in my head. Sometimes I'll be having a conversation with the guys about instruments or recording or songwriting, i.e., the things that essentially define them as band, and I wonder if I come off sounding ingratiating and sycophantic, like I'm trying too hard to insinuate myself into their milieu, or trying to play up the fantasy that I'm actually part of the band. What's more is that I hardly get to talk to people with as much musical experience as them, and the temptation to ask them sophomoric questions about tedious musical issues is always there. I think as a result of all this I've kind of intentionally avoided trying to satisfy my curiosity, and except for the rare post-performance back-patting, I basically don't talk to the band about their own music at all--for all the reasons above it generally feels kind of distasteful.

So far my practical responsibilities have included driving the band around in my car and helping them set up the gear they've borrowed from me, both of which are only really relevant for the stint in Los Angeles. I've also helped them run the merch table, which I kind of feel is groupie-ish but in reality is probably one aspect of live performance where it's extremely useful to have an extra guy hanging around, to watch stuff and answer questions for passers-by; the disadvantage of this has been that I haven't actually had a chance yet to watch the band perform as a bonafide member of the audience. It'd be good to get a little more familiar with their drum and keyboard setup so I could be more useful during soundchecks, and I have to admit I've got this ambulance-chaser idea in which either Mark or Grayson breaks a string live and so I have to run on stage and perform a 60-second string-change and tune-up (and let's for a minute ignore certain damning contingencies like A) I don't know where they keep their extra strings, B) nobody's got an extra tuner that I could use offstage, and I can't just tune using one of their stompbox tuners while they're performing, and C) one cannot realistically change a guitar string in 60 seconds). All of this wanting to be useful comes less from any sort of restlessness during shows than it does from the simple fear of not feeling or appearing to be useful.

Literally hours before the second (and final) show in LA, we picked up a couple hundred copies of So So Modern's newest release, the seven-track Friendly Fires EP, which is by far their longest record yet and which so far has only been heard by the band and a couple of very generous audience members who attended the Key Club show. If I'm not mistaken, home country fans back in NZ will have to wait until the band gets back, or maybe just until somebody leaks it onto the Internet. I might do everyone a favor and do that myself.

While I took the previous photo, Mark was free-drawing this image of me, which if things keep up as they have been will be the only visual record of me on this tour:

Just before coming to the US, Dan had picked up a classic Gameboy off of TradeMe, which I guess is the NZ equivalent of a Craigslist or eBay. FYI old-school handheld nostalgia is an unbelievable tool for attracting the conversation of strangers male and female, high and low, urbane and parochial. The only requirement is that they be roughly of our generation; let's say anyone aged 21-35 applies. We had a (relatively) decent flow of people stopping by the merch table like hours before So So Modern even got near the stage, and all that thanks to the Gameboy.

Actually I tend to get the impression that the band's arrival in the US was a little underplanned and possibly premature with respect to the release of Friendly Fires. The shows in LA put them in odd venues with odd co-performing bands, mostly disposable and self-dramatic (and, IMO, far less good) Modern Rock bands trying to make it big on the Hollywood circuit. By their own testimony, the guys in So So Modern were happy to get whatever they could get, since after all it was their first time abroad and so the shows had some abstract significance aside from promoting the band's music.

That being said, there'd been some tangible weirdness in playing with mediocre Sunset Strip bands. So So Modern tend to represent themselves as an unequivocally positive musical unit, and if you read their MySpace profile or website, you'll probably pick up a calculated and self-conscious avoidance of overtly self-promotional musical description, for which one might be thankful--bands are generally completely fucking awful at the business of evocative prose. Instead, you get stuff like this:

Hello! Nice to meet you. We are are a four-person collective interested creating a more fun and meaningful future through performance and music. By performance we mean the reciprocal acts of seeing and being seen, and by music we mean the ability to show solidarity around creative aural pleasure. Remember the campfire? Hope you do, cos thats what music means to us. A platform for sharing ideas, stories and gathering. But also a stage for challenges, dialog and what not. Much Love SoSoModern

This is cryptic and playful and I think more than a little savvy and knowing; the rhetorical technique at work here is to A) employ the democratic appeal of music's inclusiveness and catholic breadth, as opposed to making any exclusive claims to individual talent or having discovered some uniquely mind-blowing rock sound that you've never heard before, and B) rely on the fact that inquisitive fans are somehow already aware of the band's sound, either directly or indirectly, since there's nothing said that informs the reader about their music itself--after all, you can effectively demonstrate solidarity through creative aural pleasure regardless of style, whether it be synth-punk, death metal, showtunes, or whatnot.

Anyway, when you talk to the guys in the band, especially Mark and Aidan I think, you will get the sense that they really believe what they say about their mission as a band. But insofar as that's true, I don't necessarily find it to be comprehensively true. For all the high metaphysical talk of music as a unifier, there's a distinct aspect of musical snobbery in their private conversations, and I think they're capable of making negative generalizations of whole genres and eras of music, which (even though I do that myself all the time) strikes me as kind of dogmatic. There's also an overt moralistic tone that the band tends to take towards music, viz., some bands' intentions and purposes are somehow more valid than others, and also a tendency to attribute certain intentions to superficial attributes like musical style; i.e., if your music has the technical attributes of corporate radio rock you're probably going to be accused of having the mercenary motives and artistic vapidity of a corporate radio rock band. I don't say this like it should be surprising or seen as blatant hypocrisy per se, but there's an inconsistency built in there--I don't know if you can talk about music as a "campfire" and then make fun of bands you're playing with (FYI, the photo above is of Grayson and Dan mocking the guitar player of an admittedly bad sissyrock band playing on stage at that very moment). I don't want to overstate my case here: the guys in the band are extremely cool and sincere people, but I have been among less well-spoken and less ambitious musicians who seem more accepting of musical endeavors regardless of motive or style.

But really this conversation is about as old as avant-garde art is itself. Mark opposes such terms "avant-garde" and "art rock" when applied to the band because he's openly (and commendably) opposed to art for art's sake, but I think the term's at least a little bit appropriate when it comes to describing the band's aversion to music as a commercial activity and music that is reptitive and tired and unoriginal. Anyway, if there's a philosophical tension here, it might be result of a kind of post-post-modern growing pains that, if I can go out on a limb here, are being felt by our generation at large--regardless of much lit crit you've read, the 20th-century pomo suspicion towards profit-driven music pretty much suffuses every thought we've got regarding rock n' roll, and now I think there's probably a bit of an awareness that this very suspicion has become an institution and created an exclusivity and elitism of another kind, and hence an intentional repairing back to the campfire. I don't think anyone's got it figured out, but I think Mark and the guys are doing their best.

So So Modern played the final slot at the Key Club. This would be a good thing for a weekend show, but it was a weeknight residency show, meaning the headliner plays second to last, and also that the crowd thins out considerably right after that. After the show we hung around backstage and in the loading lot to chat with some friends, and got a brief but pretty flattering review from the venue's rather jaded-seeming stage manager (if I recall correctly: "Good show. You guys were a pleasant surprise, after all that shit.") On the way home, the band had a surprisingly honest session of debriefing and self-criticism. They actually called each other out by name and said what they thought one guy or another might have done wrong. Lemme emphasize exactly how rare and hard it is to do that: during my own band experiences the best I could do in terms of singling people out for criticism was to tell them their amp was too loud; if there was anything seriously wrong (that is, from a musical standpoint), people losing pitch or rhythm or whatever, I could only use impersonal or first-person plural pronouns, e.g., "Things just don't seem to be working," or "We are kinda losing time at this point, I'm not sure what it is", all of this prefaced by heavy self-effacement such as "I dunno, are you guys hearing this too, maybe it's me that's fucking up", etc. In situations like that, the overlapping fears of conflict and hurting someone's feelings and sounding like an asshole are pretty overwhelming, even (or maybe especially) if you're good friends with the persons you're trying to criticize.

Anyway, after about ten minutes of nit-picking re: the show, the van was mostly quiet--I think only Dan and I were speaking, just talking about America. I couldn't tell if everyone was feeling uncomfortable, or if it was just because they were tired.

Besides some noodling around on the pianos and guitars in the house, the band didn't get to play real music for about four or five days. We'd originally planned on getting some bonafide rehearsal time in a studio, but thanks to certain extenuating medical circumstances we had to can that idea and resorted to converting my living room into a practice space.

Did I mention what a crappy photographer I am? I have basically no capacity to take low-light photographs, so this shot of the band doing soundcheck at Safari Sam's is literally the best I can offer as far as performance photography is concerned. I watched most of the show from off stage-right, but from what I could tell, the band were mostly well-received. The LA shows were a little odd because the band had been inserted sort of randomly into lineups featuring bands that sounded basically nothing like them, which can be cool, although it means that the audience might or might not have biases regarding the style of music. It seems only fair that good music would be appreciated in any context, but then what counts as "good" is more or less a totally contextual and subjective thing in itself, and so you're never quite sure what to expect out of the crowd.

But so anyways, when Dan eats his food, he chews in tiny little bites and occasionally closes his eyes like he's contemplating the texture of it, and then he'll stop to put his fingertips to his jaw. This makes sense from two different angles: first of all he is one of those people who are never in any particular rush and by their nature tend to savor everything. When we went to the museum I think Dan was the only one to stop and read every placard of every exhibit, and I very nearly ditched him in Beverly Hills when the guys jaywalked (or ran) across Beverly Drive to get to my illegally-positioned car (stopped mid-traffic) and I didn't realize he was like ten to fifteen seconds behind. But really I think the eating thing is more due to Dan's having had his wisdom teeth removed prior to arriving in the States and thus having no choice but to savor his food in tiny munches and meditative pauses. He's also been popping Panadol and antibiotics and salt-water-rinsing but appearing unaffected or not wanting to be affected by it.

On Sunday night, after a complaintless and seemingly free-of-jaw-pain meal at a raw-food vegan place in Culver City, we drove over to The Smell, literally a hole-in-the-wall in downtown LA where So So Modern was supposed to play the next evening. Three sets into the night, the sutures that closed the hole in Dan's lower-right jaw where a wisdom tooth used to be apparently started to undo. Dan was spitting blood into the concrete in the alleyway outside. After what was probably too much deliberation we decided that me and Dan ought to go out and find some ice for Dan, and then we spent the next fifteen minutes making a huge rectangular loop around the immediate neighborhood trying to find anything like a purveyor of ice, which was irrefutably a failure. We did, however, succeed in discovering that you could experience a rough capture of the palette of LA demography in that block's worth of space: right down the street from The Smell (full of hipster kids, mostly white and pretending to be living and entertaining themselves below their means) was a massive and exceedingly attractive crowd of yuppies gathered outside of a club (the kind with a nondescript facade and surely extravagant interior, also the kind that provokes (as it did in our case, after the fact) recall to that small but nonetheless meme-level canon of action films about trendy urban vampires that hang out in shitty techno clubs after midnight), and then a bunch of emptied but still-lit skyscrapers, and around the corner and taking up most of the space are Mexican clubs spouting kinda generic-sounding (by my ears, anyway) ranchero music and men in loud shirts and cowboy hats. During our walk, Dan and I semi-coherently tried to reassure each other that Dan would actually be Just Fine and that the air would do him good. We ended up grabbing some ice chips, more congealed than specifically frozen, out of the bottom of The Smell's kitchen freezer and wrapping them with a recycled paper napkin.

At that point Dan claimed that the bleeding had slowed down and that things were back to normal. Exactly how things got worse from there on I'm not exactly sure, since I can only rely on what Dan said, and Dan despite his talents is no doctor. The circumstances might be something like this: Dan hadn't taken a real break from the rock and roll life since getting his wisdom teeth taking out, even though that's normally a procedure that would level your average adult human for a good week. He'd continued to play the tail end of So So Modern's NZ tour, and he gamely jumped on the plane to Los Angeles only like a day later, and then he started to eat some rather intensely solid and not at all soft-and-chewy foods, like a raw-food vegan wrap (collard greens around a combination of tomato, alfalfa, and beans--better than I would have thought really) at the aforementioned restaurant. The real kicker, I think, was that he could feel his sutures coming undone in his mouth, and this led to a vicious temptation-aggravation cycle in which he would prod and probe and rinse the sutures as a way of simultaneously learning more about just what the hell was going on, and mollifying the inevitable oral itch-tickle you'd get from having poky strands in your mouth, and this of course made the pokiness and itchiness worse and made him bleed more and so he was even more curious about what the hell was going on, and before he knew it he was basically yanking bits of blood clot out of his gums. I'm paraphrasing here, both in terms of what Dan said and the order in which these things happened. We actually left The Smell one act early and ended up back at my house in Granada Hills thinking things would be okay, and so I thought all was well and went to sleep, only to have Mark come into my room maybe an hour or two later with a look of contagiously despairing concern on his face. By this time Dan was seated quasimodically in a dining room chair, spitting blood into a progressively less-empty juice glass. Mark had caught me at a bad REM moment and I swear I could not figure out what to do for ten minutes; it wasn't until I was lamely calling what turned out to be a 24-hour crisis line (the kind for the suicidally depressed) that I realized we should take him to a hospital.

So we found ourselves sitting in the emergency room at Providence Holy Cross Hospital (incidentally the site of my birth, but nevermind), me, Mark, Dan and his juice glass, on Sunday morning at let's say 3:00AM or so. The place was mostly empty except for some inebriated dregs who I'm a little ashamed to say annoyed the shit out of me, because I was agitated and my friend was leaking rapidly into a juice glass and I sorta felt like they were all wasting our time. But the triage nurse kicked some ass and got Dan into treatment right away. I took off a little after dawn while Mark stayed behind with Dan; what went on with the treatment I'm not sure of, but I know that they'd had a hard time stopping the blood flow and ended up jamming gauze with clotting agent into Dan's tooth-hole, which although it was prefaced with an application of liquid cocaine was apparently still incredibly painful, and also that Dan progressed through various stages of apoplectic rage and pain-induced dementia of which I know very little, except what Mark said Dan had written down in a little notepad so he could communicate with the doctor--the only excerpt I'm aware of reads cryptically "I'm in pain. 7 AM.", which for whatever fucked-up reason Mark and I found sorta funny. Eventually the doctor shot Dan up with morphine.

(Well while we were waiting for the initial word on Dan, Mark and I flipped through a copy of Adbusters (which actually Dan had gotten at no less a temple of capitalism than Fry's Electronics. Every member of So So Modern is aggressively smart and well-read, and they all carry around a kind of globalized, millennial punk chip-on-the-shoulder: they're all some degree of vegan and vegetarian, suspicious of politics and authority, and intensely ironic and maybe a little smug towards the mainstream.) and talked about the politics of dissent. It was the sort of conversation we'd get into a lot if you got the two of us alone, each of extremely prone to geeking out and basically way in over his respective head re: philosophy and social critique. Mark's basic concern, not in so many words, was that middle-class, privileged dissent in its many modern forms--e.g., eating organic, shopping at American Apparel, straight-edge, PETA, hunger-striking when the university regents cut funding to your marginalized humanities department of choice, &c &c--is either unaware of or unable to reconcile the tension between its Basic Message and its class and privilege, and that the discourse of non-conformity has become a kind of fashion (like, "No-Brand" becoming a brand in and of itself), and that as a result of all that, the Basic Message is cheapened and maybe even morally bankrupt. Anyway, I basically agree with Mark, although the problem is that we've merely dissented against the dissent, and meanwhile big problems are going down around the world.)

Finally, at 7:30AM or so, Aidan and I went back to the hospital to pick up Mark and Dan, the latter of whom was a rag-dollish and sedated mess. He was nowhere near game shape, and it was pretty clear they weren't going to be able to play the show that night. It's to their credit that nobody seemed particularly upset or resentful towards Dan (not that there would've been a concrete reason for that) as a result--I think they were mostly concerned that he was doing okay.

Grayson was asleep the entire time all of this was going down.

The band had a fair bit of free time during their first few days in LA, but sadly I am probably the world's poorest host when it comes to showing people around town. The only thing I'm worse at is taking pictures. Anyway, here are some pictures of me taking the band around town, sorta:

Our house is in Granada Hills, which is the northernmost part of the San Fernando Valley (as in the Valley, of Valley-girl and porn-capital fame); immediately behind our neighborhood there's a county park that primarily consists of near-desert hills which are not super entertaining or challenging but afford a nice view of said Valley and the smog of the Greater LA metropolitan area. Pollution aside, it does help you appreciate how very green much of the Valley is, especially for semi-urban sprawl.

Left to right: Grayson, Dan, Mark, and Aidan.

This is Mark valiantly attempting a 5-minute sketch of the non-descript and haze-obscured Valley skyline.

Mark with my brother-in-law Jason, my sister Justine, and my mom.

Later on that evening we found ourselves in a combination laundry-coffee shop in Culver City, where we discovered a classic multi-game Neo Geo cabinet. Arcade machines are basically irrelevant at this stage in the evolution of video games, but anyone who has a clear memory of the early 90s or earlier is going to get a little recidivist tingle of joy any time s/he sees a working cabinet.

Everyone save Grayson maybe (and he was still pretty into it) was immediately transfixed by the cabinet--Dan had this wide-eyed expression of feral lust for maybe 20 minutes going, surely except for when I destroyed him at King of Fighters ('97 I believe), during which occasion he must have been wearing a face of unadulterated shame. I can't say for sure because I was too busy basking in the warm glow of the victory screen.

Mark and Aidan playing Puzzle Bobble (is that not the same game as Bust-a-Groove?), which they really got into.

In fact Mark and Aidan were so into it that they found a website where you can play it online through some ingenious use of Flash and/or Java, and they were playing it basically continuously except for when they were sleeping, and except for when we we were all dealing with some of the more absurd events of the evening, to be described shortly.

The Guitar Center on Sunset Blvd. has got an overhanging entrance like an old box-officed movie theater, under which are concrete placards with the handprints of rock stars past and present but really mostly past. ZZ Top and Toto inexplicably occupy prime real estate; Metallica's off to one side, and blink and you'll miss Stevie Wonder and Smokey Robinson. There's a display case off to the left with the guitars of Eddie Van Halen and Jeff Beck (which if you really wanted you could steal pretty easily, and so I'm left to believe they're fakes), and on the right they've got a kind of unofficial rock hall of fame with the images of Lennon and Orbison and Bonham and Hendrix, who I guess were guys that died before they could leave their handprints in one of the blank squares in the floor. Inside, you can find Clapton's "Blackie" guitar rotating in a columnar glass case, and further back you can buy 1950's-model Strats for like Fifty Grand or so. The whole concrete thing is a riff on Graumann's Chinese Theater's movie star foot- and handprint thing--I think the place has got to be the biggest guitar store in the world (I don't see a need for anything bigger, really) and is clearly aware of the fact.

The guys needed to take care of some shopping--Mark and Aidan needed keyboard stands, Grayson wanted a new delay pedal, Dan basically needed just about everything--so I thought Sunset's GC would be a fun place to go. Of course, they're way too ironic to take any of the music nostalgia at face value. I figured the fun would be in the novelty and the extravagance and the corniness of it all. Rock instrument retail is basically very trite and conservative and potentially irrelevant to what's actually progressive and interesting in rock music, only you have to buy picks and instruments somewhere. But isn't it strange that anybody who plays guitar is playing on some design that was basically figured out and institutionalized four or five decades ago? Isn't it strange that stompboxes don't really get any better or cheaper despite that computers and cars and TVs and basically anything that has electric components have all gotten radically neater and more affordable, even in the last five years or so? And then when you walk into GC or whatever music store of sufficient size, it's always the same basic assortment of guitar-wanking riffraff and sales personnel--just about the only recent development I've noticed is that a lot of places are adding ambiguously slutty-hot female staff to man the front doors (pretty weird and remarkable actually--it's like a secretary complex or something). And also the marketing is utterly ceaseless. You buy a pack of strings and the guy at the counter asks for your complete address because for whatever reason the central GC database forgets you every time, but then you'll get a card in the mail whenever there's a holiday sale or clearance, and this is so consistent you can set your watch to it. Guitar Center is basically a drag.

After and hour and a half of much tooth-sucking consumer angst, we came out of GC with just a set of drum sticks, and also a two-level keyboard stand that Aidan actually bought at the Sam Ash across the street (of which much the same as GC can be said, maybe minus all the self-anointed center-of-the-rock-universe crap). Then we took a hard slog through LA traffic to get to the Fry's in Burbank. On the way the band guys were taking turns playing DJ on iPods, but eventually they settled on singing and chair-dancing along with songs from their new record. There's probably analogies to this in most creative activity: listening to your own stuff is always very weird and self-conscious but IMO one of the most exciting parts of making music. Most musicians are quick with the modesty, claiming that they'd gotten so sick of writing/performing/recording their music that they can't bear to listen to it, but this is convenient because it spares you the potentially foot-in-mouth claim that you think your own stuff is good, which is always very risky to say. But I kind of think a recording exists independent of what the composer and performer have going on in their own heads; that's to say that music is only exciting and surprising because you're not exactly sure what you're going to get while you're in the process of making it. So the thrill of hearing how things come together is extremely cool, and the more involved you were in the creative process, the more surprising and exciting it actually is. That being said, we happen to live in a culture that tends to mythologize individual genius, and at the same time we're pretty self-conscious about it, and so the act of listening to your own stuff always seems a kind of indulgence or even masturbation. But the fact of the matter is that no music gets quite a rise out of you like your own.

Fry's Electronics has a novelty/revulsion dynamic like Guitar Center, and is also one of those places that I simultaneously A) hate going to and B) tend to find myself inside, a lot. I guess for the band guys, though, it was the first time they'd seen an electronics store of such scale and affordability. Actually, except for Mark, it was the first time any of them had been stateside, and for Aidan and Dan it was the first time they'd been outside of NZ or Australia. Commerce and consumption seem to be huge part of the way they think about America, and this has come up repeatedly either as the direct subject of conversation, or in passing, through jokes and little observations here and there. For the expatriated NZ musician, the size of US juice containers is gargantuan, the selection of food items at any given supermarket both extremely broad and strange (chocolate-chip pancake-dough corndogs probably make a strong impression on even the most seasoned visitor), and the prices Very Cheap indeed. Exchange rates and purchasing-power parity and the relationship thereof are all things that confuse the shit out of me, but apparently it all amounts to extreme consumer temptation when one is actually confronted with US prices for things such as digital cameras and delay pedals. I have watched Mark and Grayson (respectively) teeter on the brink of big-splash acquisitions on the grounds of They'd Be Paying 20% More If This Were Back Home In New Zealand.

Also prominent on their minds are the weirdness of driving on the wrong side of the car which is also on the wrong side of the road (a fact from which Dan has not yet really recovered; if he sits shotgun he will make some comment about it, and is already declaring his intentions on giving the US driving thing a go himself); the weirdness of mini-malls as the center of city planning and the weirdness of massive suburban sprawl; the weirdness of expressions such as "flip a bitch"; the weirdness of universities being geographically congealed globs of structures as opposed to being buildings distributed across a city. And then, notably, there is also the whole violence/racism/bellicosity thing that comes I think as a result of the global reach of hip-hop and Fox News (and the panoply of associated controversy/paranoia/neuroses), and the fact that the US tends to invade countries for what appears to most thinking observers as plain old profit motive--when the guys want to put on American accents, usually it's in some kind of ebonicized cap-in-yo-ass rant or US football jock-talk. Or they will be reading aloud the marketese written on the side of a box of breakfast granola with a cheesy Midwestern ad-voice. That violence and ignorance (ours, not theirs, I mean) and money predominate their impression of America is kind of abstractly depressing but also not particularly surprising, and maybe it's even a little deserved.

I took the band with me to UCLA, where I had an appointment to meet with some students in the anthropology department. Parking on campus is a somewhat Kafkan affair: I drove up to two separate lots that could not be entered without special tickets that according to the sorta recondite signs above the entry gates could be acquired from the "nearest information booth or parking office". Which advice I found to be helpful in such a remarkably unhelpful way. Fortunately I had a map of the campus on hand, and so we made our way to the nearest point on the map that had a gigantic lowercase "i", and this turned out to be the manned nerve center of all campus parking facilities. There were these girls in a claustrophobic glass hut that would jog out to entering cars and ask them where they were trying to park, and then they'd scurry back to a computer or an intercom and figure out the nearest available parking lot, and then again jog out to the cars and assign them to lots.

I forget what we were talking about exactly--we were joking about something or other--when I rolled the car into a Volvo parked next to the spot I was trying to pull into. Moments earlier I'd decided that I ought to try and park away from other cars and I guess I turned my head for a split second. I left a quick note under the wipers and had Grayson take this commemorative photo:

I spent the rest of the day expecting an annoyed phone call but ended up receiving no such thing. Perhaps it's too early to say, but my current theory is that the pictured damage might not actually have been a result of my spectacular maneuvers, but rather of some past mishap which by rather odd circumstance occurred at the same general angle as my own, and so it only looked like I did any visible damage. What inspires that idea is partly that I never got called (although maybe this remains to be seen), and partly due to the shattered rear brake light, which I am sort of convinced could not have been the result of my hitting the car, since first of all it was a fender-to-fender hit, and secondly there are no smoking-gun chunks of tail-light plastic on the floor. This of course hinges on the assumption that the damage to the Volvo's fender was inflicted at the same time that the tail-light was broken, which I will say looks at least a little possible.

What's maybe not a joking matter is that my vehicular incidents tend involve parking somehow. Granted, the sample size isn't all that large--I hit a moving car once in the parking lot of Ralph's, and I've gotten two parking tickets and once have had my car towed (albeit those in the draconian traffic purgatories of San Francisco, Silverlake, and Hollywood respectively) as a result of not really paying enough attention when I'm parking a car. It's a little too obvious and unspecific simply to insist that I be more careful in these situations, so what might be more useful would be to really try to enjoy the act of navigating a parking lot, to treat it like a highly entertaining exercise of avoiding slow-moving and stationary objects, like you know a videogame or something. I seriously think that might help.

All in all, it's been a hard time letting go of certain fantasies I've carried around of becoming a rock musician. Pop stardom might be similar or exactly the same as winning the lottery, not just because of the improbability and the excess, but also because there's the seductive element of It Could Happen To You built into the way we talk and conceive of both of those things, improbable and excessive as they may be. Every guy who's picked up a guitar and enjoyed it even just a little has probably entertained the thought that he could, that's to say it'd be physically possible, that he could A) make lots of money and B) convince attractive females to have sex with him by way of C) doing something as dumb as playing a guitar (and you can imagine the sort of guy to whom this train of logic would particularly appeal--my take is that rock music is full of withdrawn, self-inhibited nerds). The thing that really makes it work is kind of this apparition of evidence that seems to hover around rock mythology, e.g., musicians you'd rank as second-rate hacks making it big overnight, the local coffee shop act is plucked up by corporate A&R at random, small-town choir boy wins American Idol etc. etc. I'm not a dumb guy, but some part of my decision-making ability is informed by shit like this. I'd even say I enjoy it. But I had a friend of mine relate it to me like this: take any of your favorite musicians, think about what life must be like for them, and ask yourself if you'd want to be them. When it comes down to it, would you actually want to be one of those guys? Somehow this idea was profound to me, or it just arrived at a time when it was easier for me to accept the limits of my talents, and when I was finding that what I wanted out of the world was ultimately more abstract and vague than getting to play guitar for a living.

The rock star fantasy's nonetheless not ever going to die completely. For example, I just quit my job for a month so that I can roadie for my friend Mark's band. That decision was more or less unambiguous for me; I find that the element of simultaneous eating and having-of my life's cake is extremely prominent here. You don't often get the chance to take a step out of your life and sample, even if only for a little while, the stuff of pursuits that you're either too wise or too discouraged to embrace.

As some sort of moral exercise/concession, I'm trying to turn the tour into this Life Challenge whereby I'll take lots of photos and meet people and wax philosophical about and write what I observe, live a bit more dangerously than I'm used to, just really suck it all in, but really now: deep down this is about vicarious rock stardom. Let's be clear about how cool I think this is: The band's name is So So Modern. They are from Wellington, New Zealand, and they play a kind of post-punk-informed synth-pop or maybe electroclash if that means anything to you, and it is high-energy and frenetic and uses lots of disco beats and stop-starts and I won't try to describe the music any further because the risk of embarrassing music-related prose (cf. "dancing about architecture" and your average review at Pitchfork) is unbelievably high. The fellows' names are, in alphabetical order: Aidan, Dan, Grayson, and Mark (with whom I shared a roughly 7' by 20' by 10' concrete prism at UC Berkeley's International House during the 2003 fall term). I do think they're a good band and that their new record is also very good, and I think I am not simply Just Saying That. They arrived in the US this morning and I picked them up from a bus station in Van Nuys, and it took us two trips to move the four of them and their gear to my house. We'll be in Los Angeles for about a week, and then in Austin for South-by-Southwest for all four days, and then in the East Coast for the rest of the month. After that, I go back to California, and the band heads to Europe. My responsibilities will be to drive cars, carry cases and amps, potentially set up and fix guitars (a job for which I am staggeringly unqualified), take phone calls for them on my cell, and troubleshoot any issues relating to American culture and bureaucracy that might arise. Really I think I'll be kind of like an intern. Anyway, I'll let you know how it goes.

This morning I got into the car and it wouldn't shift out of park after the engine had been started, which meant that my tail lights weren't working again. The way you get around this is to shut the car off, turn the ignition key about a third of the way forward, shift to neutral, start the car, and then proceed down the road very carefully, since the car behind you can't tell that you're braking. I left the car at the local shop and had them take me home.

One of the most profoundly weird and yet mundane things you can do is to ride shotgun on a route you drive on daily. You will not believe how much you have missed. We have a tree on a hillside next to our driveway that is wonderfully in bloom. I honestly have no idea how long it's been like this, since the first time I noticed it was this morning, when I was getting dropped off from the auto shop.

Every time I see my Dad he'll want to drive around the San Gabriel Valley and eat Cantonese food and watch a movie and have tea. And we will also never miss stopping by the Hsi Lai Temple in Hacienda Heights, where we burn incense for my deceased grandparents. Every time we go, we'll head out to this little domed building in the back of the lot where my dad will point out the names of his mother and father carved out on a minuscule plaque that's glued to ceiling. He does this every time, even though the plaque never moves. I think it's a ritual that more or less compensates for the fact that my grandparents' actual graves are on the side of a mountain north of Taipei and are basically inaccessible.

The Hsi Lai Temple is advertised as the largest of its kind in the Western Hemisphere (apparently not at all true) and functions as kind of a Chinese-speaking expat's spiritual outlet and New Agey Disneyland smashed together in garish style. The construction is incredibly representative of San Gabriel Valley architectural sensibility--sort of stylish and bright and yet somehow cheap-feeling, a result of a generation of nouveau-riches Chinese immigrants who want frills but don't quite know how to spend their money. This results in a kind of iridescent laquerish feel; you can tell everything's made of plastic and concrete that's been painted to look like wood or stone.

Anyway, it's always been a strange place to me. There's an incredibly vast amount of literature available within the walls of the temple (posters and brochures and easels and books and photo galleries and wall-mounted adverts) that's not really about Buddhism per se but rather the history of the temple and the organization that supports it. The last time we visited we walked through a large gallery of photos of the founder of the temple, who can be seen in a variety of divinely heroic postures, generally in front of a large crowd of smiling people. I can never quite fight off the idea that the true subject of the temple isn't the spirit but rather the temple itself.

On the north end of the parking lot are installed about a dozen cartoon monk sculptures that appear to be made of some kind of stone foam. The monks are each executing a different kind of traditional body-and-mind loosening exercise and they've got huge heads that might be creepy and grotesque and just plain absurd if they didn't fit into the overall picture so well. In the end I think it reflects the character of the temple's constituency: most people who visit the temple arrive in like an SUV or a minivan, probably coming off of a dim sum brunch in the suburbs, and probably on their way to a movie and tea afterwards.

There's a cruel but not altogether unsubstantiated tidbit of popular wisdom stating that people who drive pickup trucks are assholes. I am sorry to admit that the general state of affairs on the I-5 doesn't really help the pickup driver's case much. On the way up to San Francisco I had the pleasure of tailing a silver-colored Toyota pickup driven by a guy who adamantly and really quite assholishly refused to yield the fast lane. I deny him the ignorance/obliviousness defense, because he was clearly unafraid of driving less than 10 feet behind the rear fender of the car in front of him (I mean so he could turn on his high beams and intimidate the person into letting him pass) and so the concept of cars-passing-other-cars must have occupied a critical part of his attention. A classic vehicular sonofabitch, all take and no give.

The driver of the truck pictured above is a totally different guy and was actually courteous and well-behaved, but then he has some hellaciously absurd decal work on his rear cab window, and the fact is that either he or his car is nicknamed "The Coma", and he's enthusiastic enough about such a fact that he paid a fee to advertise it on the back of his car. I guess this was actually way more funny when I was driving at 90 miles per hour while trying to operate a digital camera at the same time.

Anyway, according to the DMV website, this kind of thing costs much less than I thought (like $41 I think), and I can't really tell you just how tempted I am to send out for my THIKCOK or HUGEWPN vanity plate. It also occurs to me that there's probably a finite and perhaps even comprehensible dollar amount that you could pay to get FUCKYOU on your license plate, i.e., even if there's rules against it, you could donate a large sum to certain state legislators' campaign funds and like bribe the right people in the bureaucracy, and literally make it legal. I am willing to bet up to fifty cents that the number's less than, say, five million dollars. IMO worth it.

This is the Mexican grocery at Grand Central Market on Broadway in downtown LA. Said market's got to be one of the best things in all of Los Angeles, and it wouldn't be a bad tradition to have lunch there at least a couple times a month. Go do yourself a favor and get a falafel sandwich and french fries at the shawarma counter. Half the fun is watching the food cook--there are chickens sweating juice off of rotating spits and not one but two deep-fryers in full view. After you're done eating, you can walk two blocks north-west to the central branch of the LAPL, which is one of the coolest and most comfortable libraries I've ever been in.

At risk of violating my NDA, here's a picture of the workspace where I spend most of my waking life. From left to right (and top to bottom when there are multiple items at the same longitude) you can see:

• The corner of my work neighbor's wall calendar, which displays a new and uniquely trite landscape each month along with a psalm written in italics for dramatic effect. On the same wall slightly to the right I used to have taped up an 8.5 by 11 that said "JEFF LEE IS GAY", but they made me take it down one day when representatives from the publishers came to the office for a meeting.


• In the lower left is my trusty off-white Samsonite laptop backpack, which I have owned since 2002 and have been meaning to replace since maybe 2003 but I feel kind of resigned to it for the remainder of my existence.


• Left-center-fore is a cheap leather executive chair that is without exception the belle of the office's furniture. When the senior programmer who'd previously sat in the chair moved to Utah, I was swift in laying claim over it even though I had hardly any justification whatsoever. I have an even better cheap leather executive chair at my desk at home, so as you might imagine I have very few complaints about the chairs in my life.


• On the desk to the left is a blue plastic cup from which I sip filtered tap water. Any development house worth its salt has a mini-fridge filled with Mountain Dew, Diet Coke, and Bud Lite, but for reasons primarily related to guilt and your run-of-the-mill consumer hypochondria I have gotten into the habit of drinking nothing but good ol' H2O.


• The weird blue box is an IS-Nitro Debugger and Nintendo DS hardware emulator toolkit, and is the only real physical "tool" I ever need to do my job. I like having it around because it is made of industrial sheet metal and has no-nonsense red LEDs and in general is really ugly and makes what I do seem slightly hardcore. The DS toolkit comes attached with an actual DS handheld and hooks into my computer via USB, which USB connection is the most reliable damn thing I have ever used in Windows, and vastly unlike the extreme pain in the ass that is hooking a hard drive or IPod or camera or scanner or miscellaneous music gear to a PC. Well played, Nintendo.


• To the right are my now-dilapidated Koss headphones, advertised on the package as having "EXTREME Bass!" and I submit they weren't kidding at all with that. Extremely weird-looking and fragile and mildly uncomfortable, these headphones have nevertheless been good enough to warrant my special-ordering a new set of foam ear pads for them. Generally speaking I have a hard time concentrating on anything work-related while listening to music, so I don't use the headphones all that much. Nonetheless I'll sometimes realize I've been wearing them for like half a day without any sound coming through them except for maybe the first five minutes when I was trying to listen to one song or watch a YouTube video, after which point I'd sort of forgetten that I had them on in the first place. And those things really hurt after a while, I shit you not.


• The star of the show is my trusty Fujitsu laptop that is not quite as trusty as the original Fujitsu laptop that I had to replace almost exactly one year (!!!) ago. I spend probably 10 hours a day looking at this screen, either at work or at home, so it is safe to say it is the single most important object in my life. This strikes me as weird to think about.


• Next to this is a standard Logitech USB optical wheel mouse that's probably the best mouse I've ever used, and a Dell mouse pad whose origins seem kind of shady and illicit, but it's mine now anyways.


• Out back is a tiny ceramic drawer labeled Treasure each moment... along the top edge. I received this at the company's holiday gift exchange and it was generally regarded as the strangest item in the pile. Inside the drawer I have placed a green Gundam miniature (I think it's one of the bad guys' robots, but I'm not sure) that I also received as an office holiday gift.


• The pile of Crap at the right of the desk consists of a pad of college-ruled paper (still useful in our age of Internet dating and cars that talk), a well-worn wool skull cap, and a well-worn scratchy flannel. The latter two items indeed are, in the manner of my Chucks and certain sweaters I own, key components of the iconic Jeff Lee Wardrobe. The fact that an iconic Jeff Lee Wardrobe exists at all is testament to my stunted and underdeveloped sartorial instincts and might be viably employed as part of any theory that attempts to explain why I'm still single.


• I picked up the CURB YOUR DOG sign off a sidewalk lawn on the walk back to the office from a nearby Wendy's. It's reasonable to assume that the sign had been staked into the ground at one point and intended to be left undisturbed, but when I got to it it'd been exhumed and was nothing close to upright, and I interpreted this to mean that it was fair game to do whatever I wanted with the sign, and so then I took it and staked it into the drawer flaps of my cheap mahogany-laminate executive desk. This is a pretty nice arrangement, because the sign is easy to remove from view at a moment's notice, and easy to restore to view once said notice has passed.

I suspect that certain visual artifacts in this image are as a result of shit on my camera lens--would you say that is correct? How do you fix that without scratching the lens glass?

Let's say, despite everything, 2006 was kind of a rough year. Let's say in spirit only--on the standard of certain creature comforts I had it pretty good, and the responsible thing to do would be to try to cherish that, but I'll admit I've been taking it a bit for granted. I spent a lot of time thinking about limits, and also feeling like I'd stopped moving forward, as a creative person or a thinking person or even just a productive person. It felt like the people who were my friends were far away. None of this was ever acutely painful or particularly exciting, although I get worried sometimes that I've become discouraged.

Recently I've been waking up every day a little after dawn and lying in bed until my alarm clock goes off. I must lie there for a couple hours each morning unable to fall back asleep. I'm never feeling especially anxious or uneasy about any one thing, but I'm choosing to interpret this as being the result of several things coming to a head at once. My general complaint doesn't seem very justified, but it's there: my life's pretty easy, but I'm feeling kind of directionless and bored and isolated. As of the winter there's also been a bit of girl trouble mixed in there as well, but it's probably better not to explore that too far because it's really not all that important--suffice it to say it might be as lame as it always is, only this time I'm totally aware that's it's lame, and this is kind of a confusing mental state to have achieved.

I guess it's a little arbitrary, but I have always liked the idea of using the calendar for beginnings and ends--the distance between Sunday and Saturday always seems much greater than the distance between Monday and Tuesday, and sometimes it seems like there is a whole year between December 31 and January 1. December's much more than just last month--it's last year. Because of this, New Year's resolutions actually become a fun game to play--the screwy time-perception is just significant enough that you can try to pin something emotional to it. I know it's illogical, but here in the first weeks of the new year, the potential for change and transition seems much greater.

Of course, this tends to make for a lot of cheap talk. I make basically the same New Year's resolutions every year and my general impression is that I fail with quiet and sorta pathetic whimpers in my attempts to fulfill them. My resolutions usually boil down one of two things, which are A) to quit wasting time and B) to improve my relationships with other people. And I realize that these map more or less directly to my basic life goals, which I have since only very recently understood to be the following:

• Be responsible for something beautiful.
• Be less lonely.

So I get partial consolation for not living up to my resolutions, if only because they represent in essence the fundamental challenges of my life.

I'm going to take a semantic cop-out on the resolution business this year. It'd been suggested to me that one reason I might not be fulfilling my vows is that they were too vague or ambitious, and from a certain point a view it might be a little silly to try to use New Year's as a way to re-state my core life goals (of course, from another point a view, that is exactly the point, but I say fuck it for now). This year it's going to be concrete and modest. Here we go:

1. I'm declaring my re-retirement from fantasy basketball, effective immediately. It's boring, I know it's boring, and yet it's still around in my life, like a sore. Time to suck it up and let it go.
2. I going to visit MySpace at most once a day. The fact of the matter is that my repeated daily visits to MySpace (and these without actually doing much of anything at all) are indicative of serious boredom and dare I say downright alienation from my fellow man, i.e., I am using social networking as a proxy for real human interaction. Okay, so this is treating the symptom and not the cause here, but it's a start.
3. Ditto for blogs, and for news websites.
4. I'm adding horse stance back into my morning workouts. Truth be told I have been sorta hiding from it.
5. As soon as I find a decent one, I'm going to start wearing a wristwatch again.
6. I'm going to find a new beanie that looks cool and performs the function of keeping my fro down. The one I've got is good, but I need a backup and/or successor.
7. I'm going to talk to at least one friend once a week over the phone. Does that sound insane or what? How is it even possible that this isn't already happening? But if I stop and think about it, I think this is actually going to be a big change.
8. I'm going to read these books that I have always been meaning to read or finish: Infinite Jest. Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Dance Dance Dance. Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory: An Introduction. I guess that's about it.
9. Uh here's one lofty and ambitious and vague one: I am going to stop biting my nails. Yeah, I say this every year, but that doesn't mean it's not happening this year. I've got a feeling.
10. I'm going to take at least one picture a week with my camera. In fact, why don't I just go ahead and say that I'll post a picture a week on my blog.
11. I'm going to go see both the doctor and the dentist.
12. I'm going to hang up posters in my room.
13. I'm going to go abroad again before school starts.
14. And another lofty and ambitious one: I'm going to use less profanity. I'm not against vulgarity but I use it as a verbal crutch when I can't think of something else to say, and that's stupid. I will start by refraining from it in the presence of my elders and girls I'm trying to impress, because except in rare circumstances it's actually not all that impressive.

I guess I'll start like that. Wish me luck.

I've been called out by name on my cousin's blog to list 10個怎麼會, which sort of translates to "10 Whys" or "10 How Comes". From what I can tell from her blog, this is more "How come XYZ?" in the exasperated, existential sense rather than the genuinely inquiring sense. But whatever. Here goes:

1. How come my left wrist just won't get better after I fell on it playing basketball like three months ago?
2. How come video games don't interest me anymore? That's all Jim and Jason have been doing this holiday and I've been bored to tears.
3. Why is it that all the "new" music I discover always tends to be 20-30 years old? What's next? At what point do I become a full-time classical/jazz douchebag?
4. How come there are exactly zero compellingly original Chinese-language pop musicians, and yet there are a bunch from Japan and maybe even a couple from Korea?
5. Why are we seeing a revival in 80s trends and fashion? (I have maybe three potentially complementary theories on this: 1) dark times (e.g., corporate malfeasance, high levels of national security paranoia), 2) the statute of limitation on thinking the 80s were cheesy and lame (you know who you are) took effect at the turn of the century, and 3) people who grew up in the 80s just got old enough to start feeling genuine nostalgia for their lost youth, and also just got old enough to produce and consume at a very high level those things that appeal to such nostalgia.)
6. How are petroleum companies able to pass costs to consumers in such a way that A) prices are higher than ever, and B) profits are higher than ever? Why is so much of this attributed to faraway politics and other abstruse supply/demand arguments, and why isn't there a more open conversation about how oil production is basically a cartel and thus structured for exactly these kinds of situations in the first place?
7. How come people are so afraid of each other? Do you realize how far away you feel to me?
8. Sorta a corollary: why is it somehow acceptable that the only contact I have with certain people that I care a whole lot about is trading comments with them on MySpace?
9. Despite maybe half a decade of living in three different countries and meeting like hundreds of people and emotionally mellowing out and growing up a lot and forcing myself to get out of my shell and do things I would never have done before like sing karaoke, play sports, go clubbing, start bands, engage in smalltalk, and join book clubs, why does it still seem just as impossibly difficult to meet a single girl whom I am excited to see, and who is just as excited to see me? Truth be told I am starting to take it a little personally.
10. How come there isn't more negative press on the Allen Iverson trade? I can't think of a more anticlimactic resolution to that whole thing, and there are just so many terrible subtexts to this, e.g., AI in powder blue, Melo and AI as one of the most unexciting superstar combos I can think of, Denver not really being a better team for the trade and thus the fact that the trade will have no significant impact on the NBA whatsoever, and last but not least who the hell cares about the Nuggets?

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.

I'm proposing some updates to your lexicon. As always, use liberally.

The Or Something Like That

Definition: Attempting to compensate for blatant showing-off with a lame and self-effacing conclusion.

Etymology: Upon finding himself in a social situation involving the presence of females, any guitar-playing douche (the implication here not being that there are some guitar players that happen to be douches, but rather that all guitar players are, at some level, douches) worth his salt will invariably seek out the nearest instrument and, through significant theatrical effort, contrive an impromptu performance (this predicating on the widespread fallacy that girls are actually impressed by that kind of thing, the fallaciousness of which I have scientifically confirmed in repeated trials). Classic entries include reluctantly agreeing to play upon being asked, or announcing the recent learning of a "new song" that had in fact been rehearsed beforehand for weeks in preparation for just such an opportunity. The resulting performance is almost always highly self-conscious and half-assed, and as it dawns on the guitar-playing douche that he's actually not such hot shit after all, he will terminate the song midway and announce, "Or something like that..." and then withdraw abashedly into quiet strumming and solopsistic, dissonant noodling.

The Farebrother

Definition: Making painfully magnanimous gestures towards a victorious romantic rival in an attempt to salvage some sense of moral consolation from what is otherwise an unmitigated chumping. Examples: Duckie in Pretty in Pink, George Harrison post-"Layla"

Etymology: Probably the only unambiguously likable character in George Eliot's Middlemarch is Reverend Farebrother, who despite being witty, forgiving, and generally really cool to everyone is still a lonely, 40-something bachelor at the end of the story, by which point lesser, richer men have married all of the eligible women in town. Farebrother is in love with Mary Garth, who ends up marrying a reformed wastrel named Fred Vincy, himself not such a bad guy, but one that needs a stern lecture from Farebrother before he can pull himself together and shape up so Mary will marry him. NB: The Farebrother's by no means a good thing; in fact, on the scale of activities in which you'd like to participate, it probably ranks only a little higher than saying that you're glad you're still friends with the person who's just rejected your advances, or making the observation that one's best is good enough after a major let-down (cf. loser talk). The complication is that there's a big self-serving aspect to Farebrother's activity here. Wanting to be a martyr is one of several vanities enjoyed by a personality accustomed to losing, and there's no particular advantage to going through life believing that there's nobility in failure.

The Vulture Play

Definition: Insinuating oneself deep into the social milieu of one's object of affection in an ostensibly platonic and innocent fashion, with the ultimate goal of occupying a tactically-desirable position when said object breaks up with his or her SO. Most applicable to long-distance relationships and other arrangements that are more or less silly and doomed to failure. Vultures are weird-looking, but they aren't stupid.

Etymology: Here I find it most appropriate to quote Wikipedia:

Vulture seldom attack a healthy living animal, but may kill the wounded or sick. Vast numbers have been seen upon battlefields. They gorge themselves when prey is abundant, till their crop forms a projection, and sit, sleepy or half torpid, to digest their food. [sic]

(Worth mentioning: the reference to battlefields is pretty non sequitor here, but it brings to mind one of my favorite slang terms that I've learned in the past couple of years. In military parlance, Jody or Jodie is the catch-all name for a person running the vulture play on the SO of someone's who's been shipped into service; apparently "I just found out Jody fucked my girlfriend back home" is a complaint heard frequently in US military bases all over the world.)

The Mario Lemieux

Definition: A sudden forward wag of the shoulders and head intended to cause whomever you're facing to flinch or step backwards. Practitioners: Ash in Army of Darkness, or any high-school jock near you

Etymology: Certain claims have been made that Super Mario liked to employ this maneuver as a means of goading opponents into committing roughing penalties. Le Magnifique was hardly the first guy to do this, but it's time we give this thing a name.

I'm taking candidate names for the following:

• Dating A when the person you're really attracted to is A's friend B.
• The classic practical joke in which the target is subjected to the Mario Lemieux while a second tormentor is positioned strategically in an all-fours crouch behind the target's legs. And in case you're wondering: no, it doesn't get any better than this one.

Maybe it's because my current job's in the industry, but it feels like there's never been more hype over video games than now, with all the brouhaha that's being kicked up over the next generation of consoles--I say next but by Sunday it'll officially be current instead. When I was at E3 in the spring, I found myself so completely saturated with neon and gunshots that it was hard to take any of it quite seriously, but half a year later there's a sense that something deeper is brewing, something more significant than the usual incremental step in technical glitziness.

What's gotten everyone by the balls at the minute is the Wii, Nintendo's incredibly-hyped gyroscope-enabled console that comes out this Sunday. While there's been relatively little coverage of the Wii in mainstream media--certainly I've seen many more XBox commercials on TV than anything to do with the Wii--most of the special-interest press seems convinced that the Wii is going to steal a large chunk of the market from Sony, whose own 3rd-gen PlayStation console was released in limited numbers today. I've been told by some that the lack of Wii advertising is in reality some kind of deliberate negative publicity on the part of Nintendo, who, so the theory goes, is afraid that anticipation for the Wii is too hot for what the production lines can actually support this winter. That's a wacky explanation to me, but accurate or not, it sort of represents how far gone expectations for this thing have become. The way Nintendo's managed to capture the hip consumer's imagination and adulation through style points and out-of-the-boxness is very much Apple-like, and you even begin to suspect this was entirely on purpose when you look at the smoothed-over minimalist aesthetics of both the Wii's print/web marketing and the actual console itself.

And yet it took me about 120 seconds of watching Gears of War played through the office's XBox 360 and high-definition TV to convince me that what we're really going to see is the Wii getting thoroughly trashed by its more muscular competitors. I'll give Nintendo about 6-12 months of heady excitement followed by a sharp decline, which in the video game industry means it'll be essentially dead on arrival. The Wii's hardware is at least three or four years behind the curve, and I've heard reliable reports from actual developers that the wireless remotes that have been so important to the hype are in fact disappointingly limited and weird-feeling (and let's not forget that it's inherently copyable and improvable tech, whereas a deficiency in processing power is, in the world of consoles, incurable). My own theory about the lack of Wii television adverts is that the marketers have found it really difficult to show off the remote control system (to wit, having actors waggle a plastic baton around in mid-air as if they're swinging a sword/shooting a gun/punching the air) in a way that doesn't look silly and unremittingly gay--and gay's absolutely the right word there, in its hip, co-opted 21st century sense, the one that evokes a knowing, ironic, and fundamentally insincere nostalgia for tight pants and flamboyantly effeminate men who dance with loose-limbed abandon, which itself evokes certain uncomfortable and yet deeply-held notions of childishness, mental deficiency, and straight-out insanity.

Then there's the fact that Nintendo's whole strategy with the Wii is ultimately retrograde, a kind of Good Ol' Times penny-arcade cartoon artifice dressed up with a rhetoric of simplistic, "innovative" fun. Actually I think there might be something substantial there, something purer and more artistic than the reality-simulation that most of modern gaming is headed towards, but from an economic standpoint there's no way it's going to comprise a dominant portion of the market. When it's done right (which is incredibly rare and hard to do), you get something like Tetris or Zelda, which in no way pretend to be real but are more like supercharged board games or coffee-table puzzles, i.e., the sort of activities that engage your primate delight in geometric niceness or attaching causes to effects.

But what's really going to sell is plain old escapism. Watching Gears of War, a game that I think is on a completely new plateau, was a minor revelation for me. The game had none of the polygonal feel that's typical of even the most recent 3D games--it was more like watching a fully-rendered CG movie, only the game images were fully interactive and drawn in real-time. There was absolutely zero difference between the aesthetics of gameplay and those of the cutscenes--this partly because the former is suffused with scripted events and voice-overs and basically really well-directed, but I have to think the real key is in the seamlessness of the graphics. What we're dealing with here is the fact that video games are starting to cross this theoretical threshold past which so little is left to the imagination (and disbelief is suspended via aesthetics to such a degree) that we've reached a new kind of entertainment that's complexly but identifiably distinct from its historical forebears.

Lest I start to sound a little too much like a game industry shill, I'll have to bring up the fact that all this tends to offend a certain prurience I've developed regarding the effects and psychic value of video games. What all the threshold-crossing and immersiveness of next-gen gaming implies to me is that we're also heading towards new, yet-unseen levels of stultifying, soul-denying, and downright unhealthy entertainment. I don't mean to be too dismissive of the low-culture here, but think about the kind of role something like TV plays in your life: sure, it's fun and you're informed by it, but you also pay for it with your physical inactivity and time wasted and with all of the ads consumed in the process. What we're looking at with the new consoles is a style of gaming that's able to match, for the first time, the levels of hypnotic escapism that you could only achieve previously through blockbuster movies, and available via online ordering and distribution without your needing to get up from the sofa. These are purely technical achievements but their effect is hardly a technicality. I sort of think we are on the verge of something new.

On the other hand, maybe it might not mean so much at all. At the office we've got an entertainment center stocked out with pretty much every electronic diversion you can think of, old-school and new, and yet most of it goes unattended, which is legitimately shocking and seeming entirely out of character for a building-ful of nerds. Generally if there's anyone on it, it's a few people from the creative staff who are not so much playing the games as studying them with neutrally-engaged, work-like expressions on their faces. The things that actually get the most of the attention at work are the foosball table and ping pong table and indoor basketball hoop.

This is what happened: my friend Lynne and I went to get some dinner in Thai Town, and after this we walked back to my car or rather where my car was supposed to be and discovered that it was gone. Which was moderately surprising and perhaps slightly distressing. At the end of the parking spot there was a beat-up posterboard sign taped to a plastic cone, which I didn't notice when exiting the car. The sign said that anyone who parked in the spot but failed to patronize the donut shop immediately adjacent would see their conveyance towed at their expense, a fact that was corroborated by the extremely non-chalant and jaded-seeming proprietress of the donut shop. When I inquired 5 minutes later, said proprietress refused to let me pee in her bathroom, so at the suggestion of a broom-wielding (don't ask) vagrant standing outside, I peed behind a dumpster across the parking lot. Then I gave the guy a dollar. After this I went back to the donut shop and talked to Lynne about optimism and jobs and the LAPD's Torrance beat, all this while my mom drove from Granada Hills into Hollywood to pick us up.

FYI, there is nothing like having your car towed and then getting picked up by your mom in the family car to advertise your maturity, competence, self-sufficiency, and general shit-togetherness. My general thesis for today, if wasn't blindingly obvious already, is that I am awesome.

They'd taken the Altima to an impound yard in Santa Monica that was fenced in and inaccessible save through a buzz-in security door, the access to which was granted by pressing a button on the wall and waiting maybe 30 seconds for a voice through the intercom, much as if you were C-3P0 attempting to gain entrance to Jabba's palace in an elaborate ruse intended to precipitate the rescue of high-ranking members of the Rebel army. (I find the parallels here emerge on so many levels that it kills me not to explore them fully, but let's move on.) After that was a very narrow open-roof hallway, or maybe it was just the space between a building and a very high fence. At the end of this hallway was an extremely out-of-place Coke machine, as if what someone who mis-parked their car really needed at that moment was a Coke. Inside the building itself there were assorted hostile-toned posters such as one reminding the reader that the impound yard was in fact "not Burger King", and that you would not get things "your way", rather that things would be done "our way", or "you would get nothing at all." My estimate is that people show up to these places with some combination of self-flagellating palm-to-forehead sheepishness, anxiety re: their vehicle, and probably also unmitigated fuck-you rage. However the woman at the counter was extremely cool and nice and expressed no detectible condescension or sarcasm (esp. of the "Oh hey, did you lose your car somewhere?" sort, which would have been tongue-bitingly shitty). We talked about the weather, and she let me pay the extortion-scale towing/storage fees with a credit card even though the fellow over the phone had expressly said cash/ATM only. Then I drove straight to work.

The Wired article I mentioned here is now posted online for your reading pleasure.

About a year ago I made several vows, which went something like this:

• No more coding jobs.
• No moving back home for longer than a few months.
• No more fantasy basketball.

And so this now represents a pretty damning case against my personal integrity, or at least my ability to avoid talking grandiose shit when I ought to be more humble. Anyway I joined a fantasy basketball league again today.

It doesn't officially begin until October 22, when the draft occurs, but I already know how things are going to unfold: three or four days before the draft I'll start spending at least an hour a day shuffling through NBA player statistics on online databases. I'll have the constant itch, the slightly distracted and stultified and annoyed look in my eye when you're trying to tell me something really important. I'll manage to slip some basketball-related comment into every conversation I have. When the season actually starts it'll be through-going statistical monomania, and for all intents and purposes the end of any constructive activity whatsoever. There will be this perverse drooling over box scores updated every 30 seconds for games I will never see, all in anticipation of 2nd-string shooting guards getting one more rebound.

It's bar-none the worst conceivable way to enjoy the game. The irrelevance of it might be something like watching The Godfather for the quality of the child-acting, or reading Shakespeare for the fine nutty odor of the binding. At best I'll come up with some sort of bent rubric for what it is I want out of the game, e.g., my home team ought to win, but my guy on the visitor's squad should at least score 20 points, and only then will it have been a successful and satisfying sporting experience. At worst I won't even care about who wins or who loses a game, so long as Paul Pierce can drop 22/8/4. All the drama and the physical beauty and the brutality and the humor will be completely lost on me. To a guy with his mind on his fantasy team, highlight-reel dunks mean nothing more than two sure-fire points. The pull-up jumper from 4 feet behind the line to tie it at the buzzer is just another trey in the bucket, and the slight, indignant regret over the fact that your guy would even chance such a risky maneuver and threaten his overall shot percentage. There's just no sympathy for a guy that goes down with an ankle injury, only the immediate cold-hearted strategizing of how to replace his production with a cheaply-acquired substitute.

Even if you think that's okay, there's still the out-and-out covetousness that gets stirred up. I mean this kind of Gollumnescent fetishism in which you spend thirty seconds staring at the same box score line and maybe clicking on the numbers and highlighting them and unclicking them and then highlighting them again. The surrender of your emotions to what's basically a lottery in a gymnasium is pretty much complete. When Marcus Camby turns in 8 blocks in a single game your shitty day becomes the highlight of the month.

Let's not even get started on what a collossal time-waster all this happens to incidentally be. Suffice it to say that I have less than a month remaining of what passes for my social life, and then after that I will school the whole lot of you chumps, suckas, and fools in Yahoo Fantasy Basketball. You stand no chance.

There's an article in the hot-off-the-presses October Wired (which will hopefully make it to the general public some time in the near future via their website) on metabolic syndrome, a term that's been drawn up as a catch-all reference to such disorders as obesity, diabetes, hypertension, hyperglycemia, etc., things that are essentially the result of being very fat. The associated statistics are impressive and terrifying; estimates for the number of Americans suffering from metabolic syndrome go as high as seventy-five million, or roughly a quarter of the population, and it's a well-known pop factoid that two out of three adults in the US are either obese or on their way there. We are, apparently, looking at the most serious public health issue for the next century.

One thing that's both neat and disturbing here is the recent attempt to shift the way the public thinks about overweightness and its consequences, from the idea that they're a product of lifestyle choices to their construction as a disease with a unifying label such as "metabolic syndrome." The Wired article, which is actually very very good, is more concerned with the terminology than the actual disease; that is, why is it useful to refer to things that were once conceived of as being separate as a single unit, and what is the effect of conceiving a particular set of afflictions and symptoms as a disease. This is a matter of genuine debate within the medical community--the disease-ness of metabolic syndrome is endorsed by entities as prominent as the American Heart Association, while plenty of big-shot experts think it is intellectual horseshit.

This is partly an issue of semantics, but rhetoric turns out to matter a whole lot, especially when you are dealing with the way people see themselves (and the way they change their behavior as a result) on the one hand, and a huge market for new pharmaceuticals on the other. In this day and age, the immediate effect of employing the language of disease is--I'm speaking really generally here--to disassociate agency and personal responsibility from bad health--being "infected" or "afflicted" is a passive activity, something that happens to you, as opposed to anything you might have done on purpose. There is a large measure of line-drawing in here that may be well-informed but is nevertheless tenuous and not quite objective. You can probably see the arbitrariness of this phenomenon a little more clearly in the realm of psychology, where things such as ADHD and addiction and even nerdliness (of late being re-cast as low-level autism) are conceived of and treated as diseases (instead of as products of conscious choices or socially-outlying behavior), but there are philosophically and consequentially analogous cases, such as metabolic syndrome, in physical medicine as well.

The effect of this, in turn, is to modify the way we respond to ill health--if you're unfit, you go jogging and leave the bacon out, but if you're sick, you'll go looking to buy a pill. So it's not particularly surprising that drug companies are feeling pretty enthused about the patholigizing of "metabolic syndrome" and the riches to be mined from a paradigm shift in the way we think about being fat.

Before I go too far with that, it is appropriate to ask how things matter in the end. An interesting tidbit highlighted in the article is that there's not too much clinical proof that lifestyle changes really help people lose weight--it's more an idea we have taken for granted. For issues of public health you can probably argue that the ends justify the means (within reason here--I'm not talking about depopulating the world of monkeys or throwing prisoners of war into Manchurian ice chambers), and that if a culture oriented towards medication really improves our health, then there's nothing to despair over.

The catch is that drugs, especially drugs marketed to treat metabolic syndrome, or obesity/diabetes/hypertension/overeating/whatever if you prefer, don't have anything remotely near a good record of improving public health at large. The recent history of American dietary medicine has had a pretty sordid run of wonder drugs, from amphetamines (aka speed) to phen-fen to whatever it is they advertise today that suppresses food cravings or inhibits the absorption of fat, drugs that don't seem to work without fucking you up in some way, by damaging your liver or heart valves or even your sanity. If miracle diets have been mostly unsuccessful, then it's reasonably safe to say that miracle drugs have been mostly unsuccessful and potentially homicidal.

Another problem is the manner in which society arrives at some sort of equilibrium concept on what's a disease and what isn't. The dialogue doesn't proceed without the interference of more than its fair share of lobbyists and shills and spokespersons who have a huge stake in re-branding physical conditions as things that we want to attack with pills. I say this at risk of sounding like a tree-hugging hipster, but it's naive to think that what's in the interests of profit run exactly parallel to what's in the long-term interest of public health. There's little short-term incentive for the patience required to determine the latter--it's simply much, much easier to figure out what could sell and then run with it. The result of this isn't so innocent, either: for as dumb and easily-ignored marketing efforts seem to be, they are hugely influential to the way we look at ourselves and categorize the events of our lives, and consequently affect our ideas about what's good for us.

Pp. 39 to 65 in the ubiquitous silver paperback version of The Elements of Style, aka "Strunk & White" to anyone who gives a damn, compose a list of three- or four-score commonly misused words and expressions that seems at first nitpicky and then sort of discomforting, because unless you are an incredible nerd or have already read the list then you will probably be a habitual violator of a fair share of S&W's proscriptions. Maybe you break out the occasional "I could care less" when you really mean "I couldn't care less", and you will mix "further" and "farther" when you are not really paying close attention. These things are entirely forgiveable unless you are at all self-conscious about how you come off in your writing, and at that point you're on this incredibly slippery slope upon which you are constantly in danger of mangling some usage convention or grammar rule that looks really bad to at least one person or another. Even if this matters to you a whole lot, there's probably no way you can have your all of the bases covered--the thing is, Chapter IV in S&W looks anal-retentive but only scratches the surface of the vast body of solecism and sordid malapropism that goes on in writing, yours and mine, on a consistent basis.

There's quite a good article by David Foster Wallace called "Authority and American Usage", on the politics of usage and if/why anyone should even bother (as it turns out a bonafide subject of scholarly debate). I'll spare you the gory details, since I estimate that four out of the five people reading this (I said the five, and that is probably optimistic. Have you even gotten this far, or do I consistently bore the crap out of you after my first paragraphs?) most likely don't care. The one aspect of the article I wanted to point out was the massive list of misused phrases that are printed in 4-point font at the front of the article and arranged in pseudo-designy fashion around the title. I sort of consider myself post-S&W in that I'm mostly aware of its usage rules and feel like I've got a fair case regarding the rules I choose to break, but DFW's big list (apparently compiled from a mere week's worth of very casual notetaking) gave me this creeping sense of dread that I was really making an ass out myself everytime I sat down at the keyboard. Here's a partial recap:

On accident

I say this all the time. But repeat it over and over again--it starts to get weird.

Somewhat of a

Ditto. "Somewhat" is really an adverb, but the Free Dictionary lists it as a pronoun, probably due specifically to the popularity of this apparently incorrect phrase. I suspect people say this when they really mean "Something of a".

quote for quotation

This doesn't bother me when I see it, but I wonder if it bothers other people when I write it.

nauseous for nauseated

Shit. I just had no idea. nauseous is the quality of something that makes you nauseated. Actually this is canonical S&W. Shit.

To mentor, to parent, to partner, to critique, to reference, to process

All nouns that would not also be verbs if it weren't for several decades of marketese and academic BS language.

in so far as

I think (as in I'm not sure) that the objection here is that it really ought to be "insofar".

bald-faced

Really ought to be "bare-faced".

begs the question

Really ought to be "raises the question". "begs the question" is a self-enclosed predicate and shouldn't be followed by a modifying phrase starting with "that..."--it refers to a logical fallacy in which a statement supports itself by assuming its conclusion, something along the lines of someone proving the existence of God using statements from the Bible. That is begging the question. Period.

sum total, complete dearth

Checked out from the deparment of redundancy department. I'm pretty sure I've let these fly before.

At this point in time

Could just be "At this time", right? Or just "At this point"?

Boy, does it go on. Anyway, there's the very real issue of who-gives-a-fuck, but you do draw your lines about this kind of thing at some point. My guess is that most people put just enough scrutiny into usage so that they won't come off sounding stupid. But then there's the issue of what "stupid" means, and in what context your writing is being consumed, etc. Where people really get into trouble is trying to sound smart, something which I'm totally guilty of and can only partially rationalize as wanting to do something creative and interesting with the language--there is definitely part of me that is informed by the thoroughly academic instinct to intimidate and impress you with my words.

I once read that making grammar and usage errors is a kind of verbal tone-deafness, very similar to playing music out of key or rhythm. I find this analogy pretty distasteful, since it is snobby, and more than a little uncomfortable, since I also agree with it on a certain level, and this makes me a snob. While I was reading DFW's article I kept trying to find ways of justifying the usage errors he'd point out, mostly in a sort of everyone-makes-that-mistake-so-it's-no-longer-wrong appeal to custom, but in the end this just shows how preoccupied I am about being "correct" in the first place. Luckily this all has more to do with the fear of embarrasment than my judgment of others; I've yet to cross the line into being one of those jackasses who is always correcting the way you talk. Uh, right?

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]

A few things:

A. I checked out Middlemarch by George Eliot about two months ago. As of today I have read to page 366, this out of a total of 799 pages. In both its size and writing style, it comes at me as some kind of fruitful and ultimately rewarding obligation, constructive rather than escapist, towards which I harbor this sort of mild loathing that degenerates rapidly into procrastination. In the process of trying to get through it I've read The Sun Also Rises, Moneyball, Craig Thompson's Blankets and Carnet de Voyage, Ghost World, half a dozen short stories, one chapter of Infinite Jest, and about half of Everything Is Illuminated. When I finally finish Middlemarch (at a date to be measured in certain units of time well-suited for the study of geology and astronomy) I think I had better take myself out for an ice cream or something.

B. Birthday well-wishing is now an eerily timely affair thanks to social networking websites requiring the entry of your DOB upon registration.

C. I don't know very much about tennis, but I think it has to be a weird thing for anyone to watch guys like Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal play a match. At 24, Federer has a lot of people resigned to the fact that he's more or less the greatest male player ever and has been predictably kicking the shit out of everyone. He's 55-4 for the ATP season. Those four losses all went to Nadal, who has a pretty firm lock on the great majority of whatever dregs Federer has allowed to slip by him. Nobody else comes close--it's like dropping Tito Ortiz and Zangief into a high school wrestling league and then holding a draw with no warmups. Seeing them in the Wimbeldon final on Sunday was equal parts sublime and brutal. There were no grind-out effort points or long rallies--either one guy made an error, or there was a completely devastating and impossible winner reminiscent of video-game tennis when you've been cheating, as in acute-angled groundstrokes hit into the service area from behind the baseline, and assassinating 103-mph returns of serve. In a way it was sort of gross. You could just barely hear John McEnroe in the background muttering to himself "Oh, God," in between his play-by-play comments.

D. My sister sent me a Jung typology test the other day, which is the more academic and decidedly less cute antecedent of the myriad websites that give you a short quiz and and then determine which superhero or Beatle or baked good or Seinfeld character you most resemble. I sort of see why people like these things, but then they make me uneasy in a couple of ways. First off I can't really believe people do this just for fun, or at least that the fun to be had is purely silly and inconsequential. It's a legitimately non-silly and exciting notion that there could be an algorithm that can tell you more about yourself than you already know. This much I understand, but exactly why that's the case isn't very clear to me. I have to think that part of it comes down to self-affirmation or rather self-flattery or maybe vanity even. From these kinds of tests, I have been compared to the Incredible Hulk, Martina Navratilova, Dan Akroyd, and no less than six American presidents. The language is at worst teasing--you'll be called "introverted" and not "shy", or "strong-willed" and not "a total asshole". You see a lot of the same kind of thing in horoscopes, which of course are more obsviously lame and are way more insidious in terms of consequences, but IMO are bullshitty in essentially the same way as a personality quiz. Both seem to rely much more on what people want to believe about themselves rather than any kind of objective reality, and while it's true that there's even some merit to that, I'd say it isn't that much.

The really funny thing to me are the questions themselves. For over half of the Jung test I had a hard time answering the questions with a "yes" or "no", either because they were fundamentally abusrd and impossible to answer ("Do you value justice over mercy?") or just very much context-dependent and fraught ("Do you feel better the more people you speak to?"). They're also blatantly leading questions, i.e., they'd be better off telling me the definitions of "introverted", "intuitive", "judging", and "thinking", and then asking me directly, "Are you introverted, intuitive, judging, and/or thinking?" And past all that, those generalizations are all so empty of any real meaning that the answers to the specific questions are far and away more important than whatever they may boil down to as a group.

E. I kind of want to list off some let-downs and frustrations that have nothing to do with money or girls (both about which I should be worrying a whole hell of a lot more, given my official and much-acknowledged (assist, MySpace.com) inauguration into the remote outskirts of the Late Twenties), but they are long-standing and get sort of personal. Relax, it's not about you, not specifically. Though it is not entirely about me either.

F. About once every other day there's a piece of mail addressed to me or The Parents Of me about how I'm going to enjoy my life as an undergraduate of UT-Austin, but I'd enjoy it better if I Had A Convenient Wells Fargo Student Bank Account or I Used A Free (Ad-Supported) Student Social Networking Website or My Parents Visted Me In Austin At The Hyatt Now With Exciting Low Rates or I Was Subscribed To One Of These Great Monthly Periodicals. I have no formal relationship with the University of Texas. I did pay them to read my application to their economics department, though, and they sent me a very gracious offer that I turned down since I'm not going to grad school anyway. And anyway: while it is not even inconveniencing enough to me to even consider it a nuisance--I guess it is kind of funny actually--a part of me is disappointed at how cynical and tacky and mercenary it was for them to throw my name into the junk mail rolls. It was a shitty thing to do.

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?

It took almost zero convincing on the part of my friend John to get me to put down for a plane ticket to Japan; he'd emailed me about low-price airfare from United and immediately I replied with a categorical refusal, claiming financial distress and potential loss of face at the office; after this I fantasized two hours about the party I'd be missing and then sent another message to John telling him I'd think about it. Of course I'd already made my mind. There was no way I was going to let him and Carl go to Japan without me. I brought the trip up at work sounding far too guilty about it--oh, the project's gonna go beta, I don't want to set the team behind--but the fact was we were content with being permanently behind schedule, and I was a contractor anyway, so with a little advance warning I'd have the privelege of taking time off when I needed it. There was the little hitch of the Alaskan cruise with the family a week after I'd be coming back from Japan, but really I was more worried about that than anyone else, and so I sank $650 into roundtrip airfare, LA to Nagoya and back. The rest of it went down something like this:

LAX

LAX might be the worst airport I've been in. It is the new dentist, the next champion of unpleasant necessity. A few years back they'd installed light-emitting glass columns along the driveways outside in an attempt to bring the place, at least the facade of the place, into the 21st century, but it's been a poor ruse. Inside it's the same gunky, slouching cavern it's been for about as long as I can remember. I guess I don't really know any better than to complain; I've never actually been formally screwed by the place but it never fails to deliver the impression that somewhere nearby there's something going wrong. Does everything really have to take that long? Can these people really be having a bad day all at the same time? Did they really have to run the security line through the windy parking-lot walkway? Can United Airlines, Terminal 7, LAX administration at large, the TSA, and fully one-half of the international-bound LA passenger population all be passing the buck, missing the point, flying by the seat of their pants? It is full-blown unbelievable, every time. It never fails.

Waiting in line at the airport has a lot in common with waiting in line at the bank, or the post office, or the loan processing center, or the registrar, or any such sufficiently understaffed, overworked bureaucracy with a public counter. Specifically I'm referring to the fact that the people in front of you invariably have business that takes much longer to handle than it should. If you need to post a small package, then the guy in front of you will be buying eighty-three separately-priced money orders. If you are waiting to deposit a check, then the woman currently at the counter has to cash her monthly savings bonds dating back to 1975. Or more commonly: the guy in front has something that ought to be perfectly cut-and-dry but there is some inexplicable beef or confusion with the person behind the counter that precludes any chance of a sensible solution, and the only cure is more beef and confusion.

International check-in had an inncuous-seeming line of less than a dozen individuals that revealed its true nature as a death march as soon as I got too close. There was a group of three or four travelers at the counter in that tell-tale elbow-on-counter, chin-on-palm posture, which is always a dead give-away that their situation is flat-out intractable. On at least two separate occasions their check-in agent retreated back through the security door into the rear offices to discuss matters with hidden authorities. These passengers were at the counter before I got in line, and were still there when I left, which was a hell of a long time. Then there was this couple en route to Addis Ababa carrying in the six or seven suitcases between them what appeared to be a minority portion of the treasures of the Spanish New World. The check-in agent nailed them for having more pieces of luggage than they were alotted, and for loading each piece past the the maximum weight limit. She nailed them again for the transfer through Washington D.C. After all was said and done they slid over a credit card that was charged for around a thousand dollars in extra fees. This proceeded over a flurry of complaints and disbelieving grunts, which I think I resented more than all the time wasted prior to that. Seriously, did they really think they were going to sneak by with a half-ton of designer jeans and sweaters without getting nailed? I thought it impossible that they weren't aware of the rules. They couldn't have been so clueless. Could they?

Of course I wasn't completely innocent of causing delays myself. As recently as three years ago the TSA began to monitor a certain Jeffrey Lee due to the suspicion that he may commit crimes during a plane flight. His name is my name too. For this reason, I'm almost never allowed to use the express check-in kiosks, and instead constantly find myself in line with the Confused, Overpacked, and Unprepared and getting weird, paranoid looks from the check-in agents. I sort of suspect that the automated screening mechanism merely compares first names to first names and last names to last names when attempting to ferret out potential terrorists, since I supply no additional information up at the counter than what's readily available on my itinerary in the computer.

Nonetheless, it couldn't have taken more than five minutes to process my check-in, with most of that time spent by the agent trying to get a dial tone on not one but two separate phones behind the counter. After that I waited in a pat-down line for the length of one and a half Nirvana albums. Then I flew to Japan.

SFO-Nagoya

I had set for myself a vague deadline of early June to decide whether to go to graduate school or not. I'd already told Columbia I was going to go, but it technically wasn't a done deal until me and my personal belongings were physically re-located to Morningside Heights. Nevertheless it was too long and too stressful to wait until the last minute, so I scheduled the decision just after I'd returned from Alaska. I thought the trips would give me some perspective and time to think.

The flight over was not so much a plane ride as a time machine: everything in Japan was exactly as I'd remembered it. Ten months away could be a short time or a long time; for me it was like I'd hardly been gone. I'm pretty sure my Japanese skills have suffered a serious decline in the time since I've been away, but the survival-level vocabulary I used to use for day-to-day affairs came out of storage still seeming fresh. Even less expected and in some ways more disturbing was the lack of hey-I-remember-that-from-the-good-ol'-days nostalgia along the lines of what I'd felt when I went back to Taiwan last year after a couple years away. In its place was the sensation that I was merely picking back up from the moment I flew back from Osaka last August, as if I were headed straight back to teach school after a spell in the States. I think the experience of living in Japan had been so much more remarkable, on some deep psychological level, than what had happened in the intervening ten months since I'd left, and so it felt very literally as if I'd never left.

Matsusaka

Doug, famous among other things for his vehement, thou-doth-protest-too-much defensive harangues in response to accusations that he'd slept with a particular member of the previous year's JET community (who herself had been regarded by some as a somewhat unsavory personality; this became such a terrific inside joke that even I was in it after a point, and I think Doug has yet to live it down), had volunteered up his apartment in Matsusaka to the three of us coming back to Japan. I met him at the ferry terminal in Tsu and at first he didn't recognize me with my long hair. After a short catching-up, we immediately began to commiserate about our mundane romantic frustrations, and what an overall cockblock the JET situation seemed. This is somewhat ironic, since for most foreign men a visit to Japan is a moment of high sexual confidence, maybe even for yellows such as Doug and myself. But we'd both been of the attitude that we just couldn't date girls we couldn't speak to, and that to learn the native language from your girlfriend was ass-backwards and insincere. We'd always thought if anything were to happen for us it'd be with someone in our situation, such as a Western girl stuck in Japan, and this for all intents and purposes meant one of the JET girls of Mie-ken. Despite frequent protests to the contrary, this did in fact leave us with a number of appealing candidates, but it was nonetheless a pretty extreme limitation and made for rough going if you had the bar set high. We'd both been looking for something steady and meaningful, and I suspect we were also way too scared of the sleazy one-offs that tended to occur between JETs.

Anyway, excepting some relatively innocent drunken mishaps for which we nonetheless would have poured forth relentlessly teasing and emasculating opprobrium had we been there first-hand to witness them, Doug's second year had gone by much the same as his first. He was single as always. He told me he was eagerly awaiting the incoming class of new JET blood arriving mid-summer. This of course was an entirely familiar game to me, since all throughout college I would play it at the start of every semester. Counting summer school, the years in Asia, and the extra semesters at Cal, I've managed to observe a pretty broad sample, and the results are grim: waiting for the perfect mate to emerge from the rollsheet of a class you're taking is some kind of lottery, maybe with better odds and an arguably better payoff, but still the expected returns are pretty close to completely depressing.

We got into town mid-evening and met up with a group of mostly familiar faces at Matsusaka's new Spicy King, a second branch of a curry house I'd always sworn I'd go to the year before but never did. Past the initial greetings, the conversation at Spicy King felt shockingly routine. My memory of these people was picture-perfect. It was like any other night in Japan. I sort of wonder what it was like for the others to see me again; usually you'd expect everything to be have much more emotional significance for the guy who'd been gone for a long time than for the community he's re-visiting. I'd missed the faces and the entire landscape for nearly an entire year, whereas they'd just lost one face among their ranks as life otherwise went on as usual.

For Doug it was probably a little different. He'd had the red carpet prepped for us, since his mainstay of friends during the first year had largely evacuated along with me, and I suspect that what came in their place were more successors than replacements, at least from a social standpoint. When I was still teaching, Doug and I hung around mostly the same crowd of people, and so Doug's social situation was probably a fair estimate of how things would have gone for me had I stayed. Imagining how a second year of JET would've gone was always a pretty interesting counterfactual fantasy for me, especially during the times I was depressed and nostalgic for Japan over the past year. There was only once or twice that I'd felt actual regret for leaving, but I was always curious about what was going on with my friends and my band. For as isolated as I'd felt living on the other side of the tracks in a sleepy commuter suburb in a foreign country, I really felt more alone coming back to America without something structured like JET to provide a social filter. Berkeley was vast and I had nothing to do with the thousands of faces I'd pass every day, even though I spoke their language. And in LA it's been easy to stay at home where my family is, since outside it is an ocean of strangers who are all at least a thirty-minute drive away. Coming back to Japan and feeling so comfortable among familiar faces, I wondered a bit whether I'd made the right decision in turning down the second-year contract.

That night, after getting back to Doug's and hooking up to his internet connection, I received a terrifying missive from the Columbia housing office. They'd assigned me a room in one of the university apartments and wanted a $1600 deposit within seven days. This spoiled my little scheme of waiting till after I got back from Alaska to decide; in fact, this didn't even leave me enough time to decide after I got back from Japan. It meant I'd be spending my vacation in Japan thinking about what was probably the only real decision I've ever had to make. I could only take it as bad news, since I had no idea what to do.

Nabari

Of course I still tried to worm my way out of it: the next morning I arose early and wrote to the housing office a letter about how I was excited to receive a housing placement, but that it came at an unexpected and rather inconvenient time, as I was "backpacking through Japan on a pilgrimage of sorts" and that I was spread very thin on cash, and that I'd recently lent a fair deal of money to a person for a good cause (this was actually true) and that I was returning in several weeks (here I entered a date that corresponded to the time the Alaska trip would conclude) and that I had a paycheck at the office waiting for me when I got back, so could I please, please get reprieve from sending the deposit until then? It was a well-crafted story, entirely-believable, and less than 60% bullshit. If they bought it, I could carry on with my original plans. If not I was moderately screwed.

After sending off the email, I left Doug's for the train station. I'd front-loaded my schedule with the vaguely unpleasant task of returning to Nabari to visit one of my old schools. While I was still teaching in Japan I'd spent more than an appropriate amount of energy (the appropriate amount probably being zero) concerned about whether I was doing my job properly, and what the people at school thought about me. So I didn't exactly feel like I was just one of the guys in the office. Since I was shy and didn't really speak Japanese, and most everyone else was shy and didn't really speak English, my office relationships were nothing but polite for a whole year, which is quite a ways from amiable or friendly or even just sociable. I fully anticipated that going back would result in a polite welcoming followed by polite and shallow keeping-up, and if things developed past that there could be nothing but incredibly awkward pretenses. I had no particular goal in mind; there was no news to report to nobody in particular, and I felt I'd had my closure with everyone at school by the time my job ended.

Compelling me to go was not any genuine curiosity of how things were going back at school, since I was pretty damn sure that things were exactly the same barring desk rearrangements and the occasional retirement or two. Rather I felt this teacherly obligation to show my face to my co-workers and particularly to the students. It was this unspoken, metaphysical thing which is a lot or maybe exactly like guilt. The idea of me going back to Mie-ken for a whole week and not showing my face at school even once struck me as sort of disrespectful, despite that I knew it'd be put-on and awkward. If, say, I were to run into an old student of mine ten years in the future and related to her that I'd gone back to Nabari but didn't go to school I would have felt bad about it--it was exactly this sort of hypothetical situation I was trying to preclude, even though it was fundamentally absurd and there was no chance whatsoever of that ever occurring in reality.

The JET who succeeded me, a girl from Colorado called Ashley, had graciously offered to accomodate my visit, and even had my old bike ready for me to ride to school. This had been made possible since the kooky Board of Education had decided to equip the new JETs with two bicycles apiece, like so many redundant instruments on airplanes, lest there be teacher absences on account of mechanical mishap.

At school all the greetings and catch-up conversations were cheerfully uncomfortable, much as I'd predicted. The one guy who seemed legitimately glad that I was back was Mr. Takagi, an art teacher who I'd met in bizarre fashion when I'd just moved into town. (I was walking down the street, and this guy saw me from his car and recognized me from the papers as the city's new JET, and he stopped his car in the middle of the street and came flying out to meet me; my Japanese was as good as his English and we had a very animated, extremely incoherent conversation in which I repeatedly thought, "Who the hell is this guy?" I sort of regret not getting to know him better over the course of that year.) This time around he told me he wanted to chat with me during his free period, but I was leaving before that and had to decline, for which I felt quite bad.

As for the kids: most of the 3rd-year students in the hallways did a double-take when I walked by, and then responded with one or both of two distinct types of behavior, in any order:

• Gesticulating and commentary about the unusual length of my hair, which I'd stopped cutting entirely over half a year after the last time they'd seen me. Apparently, while I was still living in town, I'd been known as the monk with the Western girlfriend (this apparently was Chelsea, whose own students knew me as Chelsea's monk boyfriend)--the "monk" business evidently due to my shaven head, and the "girlfriend" business because junior high school students are confused about the opposite sex and judge the events of the world accordingly. Anyway, I looked like a different person coming back this time.
• Shouting, in chorus, "Jeff! CHIKIN!"--this due to the fact that they were just out of elementary school when I was their teacher, and I'd resorted to cheap pedgogical gimmicks such as the introduction of a gag rubber chicken, specially ordered from America, into my lessons. This I would produce at the beginnings of classes with the following announcement: "THIS. Is a CHICKEN!"

Truth be told I was a bit worried about how the students would receive me, since I'd regarded myself more as a (vaguely lame) clown rather than an educator per se. I felt what I'd given them were occasional distractions from regular English class drudgery, but probably nothing particularly memorable or significant. For what it's worth I think this last visit went much as my job had been in the past: the students were excited to see me, but my presence wasn't much more of a blip on the radar for them. As I sat in on a couple of Ashley's classes, it dawned on me how different things were on the other side of the lectern. For me, classtime was where all of my attention was invested, but for the students it was just another hour in a long week of school. I listened to Ashley call out instructions to her games, enunciating and exaggerating and repeating herself over and over, sounding like a matronly robot, and then I watched the students look around the classroom, down at their desks, playing with their things. I couldn't say how many were truly engaged. I thought that by and large it must have been the same way for me, give or take a few gags.

After Ashley's classes finished we headed back to the office and Mr. Kanda, the school principal, stopped over and asked me what I was doing in Japan. In his own way he'd tried to be my buddy, always attempting to make smalltalk and occasionally inviting to a kyokushin karate class he taught across town. I never did take him up on that, mostly due to the band, although I was slightly suspicious that he wanted to kick my ass in a friendly but very real way, since his invitations had Chinese-kung-fu-meets-Japanese-karate-in-pyrotechnic-showdown written all over it (and he totally would have rocked me, as I have never been much more than an agile wimp as a fighter). He was feeling particularly colloquial that day and spoke in rapid slang. I had no idea what he was saying, and so he observed that my Japanese had gotten pretty sucky. I don't think that's especially the case; rather I think what was going on was that I'd always been able to put up this farce of knowing more Japanese than I actually did by spicing my responses with non-verbal cues, a vast arsenal of nnnn's and ahhh's and soooo's and ehhh's and nods and tics, which implied that I was somehow an engaged and active participant in the dialogue when I was, in fact, very near clueless. But the last exchange between us was straight-up interview and I had nowhere to hide. He'd found me out.

Ashley had to leave school early to visit the Board of Education that day, and I said I'd go with her. The timing worked out well, since I'd fairly well run out of thing to do and say after a couple hours at the school. We met up with my former supervisor Nakamori-sensei, who was the same dervish as before, as tightly-wound and effusive as I'd remembered her, never too focused on the task at hand to avoid making a comment about her rapidly-advancing age or her fraught relationship with her husband, these the sort of tip-of-the-iceberg conversation-stoppers to which you can offer neither endorsement nor disagreement comfortably, and so you can only chuckle a little pointless laugh and adjust yourself in your seat. I was very glad to see her again--I think she really liked it when Chelsea and I were her JETs--but I couldn't quite relax until I reminded myself that I no longer worked for her, an idea that I found powerfully relieving. She made sure to parade me in front of her superiors at the Board of Education, individuals who'd been in essence irrelevant to me but would pop up now and again for decorum's sake. Much fuss was made when I revealed to them that I was to study in the fall at Columbia, although I elected not to mention that I was still very much on the fence about it--it was close to exactly the wrong crowd with which to start a heartfelt existential discussion. So instead I just nodded a lot and gave them a thumbs-up when they asked me to bring my PhD in economics back to Japan one day and build some kind of factory.

Up Up Down Down

After that the formal matters were done. Ashley and I went our separate ways, and I headed downtown to spend the afternoon with Ewan, UUDD's drummer, who'd taken up a post at a Nabari high school after I left. We sat down for some instant ramen and talked about cellular automata, self-help literature, the band, and the general state of affairs around Mie-ken. Of the latter he made mention of one particularly remarkable evening, one that was referred to as "The Incident" by other witnesses/participants who would later relate to me more or less exactly the same events. So far as I understand, "The Incident" began as your typical JET all-you-can-drink/karaoke bacchanal, but leapt to new heights of misdeed thanks to at least three distinct situations, each of which would have made the night historically noteworthy on its own. First was the destruction of karaoke booth paraphernalia, including glass tables and monitors, by a JET on the warpath; what's more is that he'd apparently preceeded his tantrum by chasing every last person out of the room with his nude impression of a helicopter. The second involved Ewan himself: he'd invited Ben Wright, another one of our buddies, into an entirely friendly "slapping match"--he acknowledged right away to me that it was fully preposterous, along the lines of the Penis Game, only with slapping your friends harder and harder in the face instead of shouting the word "penis"--and then made the unilateral decision to escalate affairs by flooring Ben with a surprise closed fist five or six rounds into it. I think it ended right then and there. Third was Ben Ehlers's (the other Ben, who'd become UUDD's sole guitar player upon my departure) stunning acrobatic catastrophe, which was the least blatantly criminal act of the three major fiascos but nevertheless seemed to have won the Unprecedentedly Ludicrous Award for the evening by vote of gossip. After successfully landing two improbable handrail-assisted flips from a second floor balcony down to ground level, Ben E. proceeded to attempt an incredible third descent, which he botched terribly, losing grip of the handrail mid-flip and landing chest-first on the staircase below. Ben lay motionless on the ground for several tense seconds, and then sprang to his feet and ran up the staircase as if nothing had happened. Inebriation had rendered him invincible. That Ben had survived this mishap was a fact that beggared belief for everyone who'd saw it happen. Ewan summed it up with this analysis: "Really I think he should have been dead."

Doug had been in the midst of all of this (in fact he'd been ascending the staircase in question just as Ben executed his ill-fated maneuver) and told me he thought they'd all be banned forever from the karaoke place. It'd been flat-out sordid. Given that the entire band was around to see it happen (indeed half the band's members were part of the happening), it's certain that were I still around, I would have been there for the whole trainwreck, and these situations are only funny up to a certain point for non-drinkers such as myself. I took it to mean that things had changed for the Mie-ken JET community since the time I left, indeed maybe a little for the worse, that the piss-ups had gotten surlier and the antics a little less forgiveable. All this I found quite funny and yet more than a little disturbing, and in some small way it made me glad that I hadn't been there to witness it and nights like it go down in flames.

Late in the day Ewan and I went off for UUDD's weekly meeting. The process of getting to the rehearsal studio had been fixed into a precise ritual a long time ago: taking the 60-minute train ride into Ise, cramming bodies and gear into the band van, everyone immediately in a good mood, stopping off at a supermarket for cheap eats (very frequently consisting of an wobbly, shrinkwrapped, uncut 8" fried chicken sushi roll affectionately known as "the schlong", plus a PET bottle of barley tea for 92 yen, a fantastic deal wherever you are in Japan), giggling about the wares on display at the 100-yen shelves (e.g., socks stitched with pixelated creature designs and nonsensically meaningful labels such as "EROTIC MUSEUM"), talking shit about the draconian studio staff, putting on a good face upon arrival, taking 30 minutes out of 3-hour practice session to eat our contraband dinner under the frown of the "NO FOOD OR DRINK" placard fixed to the wall. Minus the presence of Chelsea and plus an extra layer of clutter at the floor of the band van, all this was exactly the same as it had been a year prior.

For a good part of the practice I sat in the middle of the room and listened to the band play. I was intensely curious about how the repertoire and the working dynamic had changed. I have to admit this was primarily for egotistical reasons. I wanted to see if things were different now that Chelsea and I weren't in the band. I had this complicated feeling, something like wanting to perceive the band-with-us as a separate entity from the band-without-us. I sort of suspect Chelsea had similar thoughts. The others had always had our blessing to run with the music as far as it would take them, but the fact remained that the band and most of the songs had started off with Chelsea and me and my guitar, and we couldn't help but feel jealous at the idea that they continued to be put on display without us, that with our departure we'd become quite irrelevant to the spectacle of it all. After we'd left, UUDD had gone on to do magazine photo shoots and play in bigger venues and flirted with performing at the Fuji Rock festival. These things were all mostly a function of being a more consolidated and established unit in their second year, and these were all things that I sorta felt like I'd missed out on. We'd helped drag the sled up the hill but we fell off halfway on the way down.

Nonetheless it made me so happy that they'd carried on with the band. These were my good friends and it was an extremely fortunate thing to hear them play together again. And of course things had changed. Their sound was harder, edgier, more rock, and less pop. They'd re-worked the old tunes, deprecated some, and written new ones. They humored me for a little while and let me play along with some old and new songs, although I couldn't keep up with their version of "Space Race" and I forgot some of the changes. I felt a little self-conscious when I started to direct a jam on a new riff they were working on; that had been my de facto responsibility before, but after the fact I decided it was in bad taste to have lorded about the proceedings of their art. You tend to revert into habits around familiar faces and places.

Afternoons

Throughout the week I kept trying to get Doug to skip work. He was on test duty every day, which meant they needed him only five minutes out of the morning for dictations, and the head English teacher had given Doug a blank check to stay home on account of his steadily worsening cold. Ever the sportsman, Doug insisted that he perpetuate "the streak", his apparently unvarnished record of not ditching his salaried work to goof around. I gave him shit for it but it was probably for the better; the JET routine in Mie-ken was remarkably unproductive during daylight hours anyways. Doug got back to Matsusaka from school around lunchtime, and we'd spend the rest of the afternoon waiting for evening to come. We'd drive around, go to the mail, sip coffee, and play air hockey. During these times I regaled Doug with numerous prolonged, self-pitying exegeses regarding my graduate school dilemma, to which he, ever the sportsman, graciously feigned interest and sympathy.

John arrived a few days after me and gamely took to destroying us at the air hockey table. This was one game I'd always felt I had a fighting chance with, but John never conceded a single match to either Doug or to me and would routinely end rounds with several times the number of goals as his opponent--it was similar to the time I challenged John to Connect-4, a game for which I'd been essentially unbeatable up to that point (give or take the odd mercy loss), and gotten my ass intensely kicked.

Somehow amidst the carnage Doug had cracked the screen of his cellphone, and after a short-lived bout with consumer guilt he took us on a tour of Matsusaka's Vodafone outlets in search of a replacement. At the store where Doug finally found his new phone, I mentioned to John that I thought the girl prominently featured in the poster advertisements mounted all over the walls, was, after some consideration, the hottest poster girl I'd ever seen in Japan. This might not have been objectively true, but it is one of those observations that is impossible to substantiate (much as the hamburger you're currently eating seems the best meal you've ever had) and is in no way meant to be provocative, but I made my opinion known with a tone of authority. John thought I had to be kidding. So I went over to Doug and said roughly the same thing. Doug's eyes went over to the poster and back to me at least twice. He thought I had to be kidding. John came over to tell us how much he'd appreciated how my attempt to gain Doug's support had backfired. Then the two of them spent a good deal of time making crude references to my manhood and my taste in women. They may or may not have called me gay. After this we went to Matsusaka station to pick up Carl, and only five minutes after his arrival they told him in detail about my embarrassing admission at the Vodafone store that I had a terrible eye for girls.

I've since done a little research and discovered that the girl in question is none other than Ito Misaki, star of many recent smash-hit films such as Ju On and something like Japan's Jennifer Aniston, only much, much fucking hotter. Jesus Christ. You guys have got to be kidding me.

Evenings

Doug had arranged a reunion party for when John, Carl, and I had all gotten back into town, and after making repeated attempts to avoid doing so, grudgingly settled upon an all-you-can-drink session at Tontonbyoshi followed by a karaoke stint at Paradise, which was exactly the same configuration of venues as "The Incident" mentioned previously. At Tonton, we crammed over two dozen JETs and assorted Japanese acquaintances into a side room fit for about fifteen people; the situation in the karaoke booth was about the same. I spent the rest of the evening attempting to reacquaint myself with my JET friends through hand gestures and screaming, and after turns at the mic for "Debaser" and "Believe" (the Cher classic) I'd pretty well blown out my voice.

Doug had been back to Paradise with small parties a couple of times since "The Incident", but the place probably hadn't seen foreigners come out in real force again until that very night. With no other karaoke houses as cheap or respectable or roomy, the Matsusaka JETs could ill afford another night such as "The Incident", and we'd felt slightly tense about it. The reaction of the staff was hospitably unreadable, but John took it upon himself to kiss major ass anyway. Since he owned a car, had passable Japanese, and was by nature restless and immune to embarrassment, John had been the JET-king of Matsusaka during his day. He knew all the good places to eat and drink and sing, and they all knew him. Despite that he'd probably never go back to Matsusaka after this trip, he still had the instinct to answer for the lot of us to the Japanese locals and set relations right.

The next day the four of us busied ourselves in preparation for the Century Club, a 3-year-old local JET tradition in which the participants consume one 30 milliliter shot of beer per minute for 100 consecutive minutes. For the second year in a row I was the official timekeeper and unofficial janitor. Tensions ran high throughout the day. Doug had reached Shot #87 the previous year, which was by most measures admirable and even a little insane, but since he'd been pegged early on as the guy to hurl first, he took the failure pretty hard. This year, with his cold worsening by the hour, the possibility of a triumphant redemption the second time around grew increasingly grim. John had spent the year away from Japan a virtual teetotaler and had himself caught Doug's cold, and he professed to be nowhere near in game shape. For my part I was vaguely dreading time spent among a horde of drunken assholes, and specifically concerned about leaving the Matsusaka Castle grounds saturated with spilt beer and trash, as we would have done a year before were it not for the hasty intervention of the sober minority. Only Carl, who in any circumstance refused to take himself so seriously, seemed unaffected.

We kicked it off under the last bits of sunlight. The timing gig was a sadist's dream and actually a lot of fun, since everyone around absolutely hated me after Shot #30 or so. The crowd had taken to shouting "For fuck's sake, Jeff!" in unison with a put-on Scottish accent, in reference to Carl's incessant and very much earnest plaint made at the announcement of nearly every shot during last year's Century Club. Upon Shot #50 there was a huge cheer for making it halfway; at Shot #69 we all sneered "Siiixteee Niiiiiine!" at high volume for probably ten or fifteen seconds.

John was in a bad way by Shot #20. He looked redder than I'd ever seen him and had the posture of an abused baboon; after a point, pouring beer from bottle to shot glass seemed to pain him. Some time between Shot #50 and Shot #70 he'd quit entirely and was forced to endure the boorishly unsympathetic jeers of his already-drunk compatriots. Shortly thereafter he hauled his carcass down the hill back towards Doug's place. He would later describe to us how he staggered down the fanciest street in Matsusaka, evacuated his gullet into the pavement, and scared off numerous passers-by and at least one face-hiding cab driver before scoring a taxi ride home. Carl made it to Shot #87 (matching Doug's record from the previous year; Doug theorized that it was 13 shots from the goal and thus an inauspicious moment for the weak-livered) and unceremoniously spewed into a nearby bush, prompting loud cheers from the crowd.

As it turns out Carl was the only serious participant who didn't clear Shot #100; Doug had indeed gone the distance this time and by Shot #90 had become something of a gloating Viking warlord. At this point things turned sour for me. Of course it was folly for me to try to get everyone to be tidy as they proceeded through the Century, but I insisted on being offended by what a mess the aftermath was. Attempts at cleanup were half-assed and often just resulted in more mess. I pleaded for everyone to settle down. Someone started shooting off fireworks. I uttered numerous profane oaths and threats.

Mike (UUDD's bass player), giddy but mostly coherent, stuck around after everyone else had scampered off to help me clean up the last of the trash. We made it down the hill just in time to catch Doug puking into what appeared to be a newspaper rack. Mike saw that I'd taken up the role of the disgruntled garbage martyr and told me that I didn't have to take responsibility for everyone, a suggestion that at the time made me feel indignant, and I just walked away without responding. It's been a tendency of mine to covet the sensation that I've been maligned, and telling me to chill out is always bad news even when it's obviously the sensible thing to do.

Everyone had scurried away for a second night of karaoke, so me, Mike, and a few other stragglers climbed into Doug's car and headed off for Paradise. I double-parked the car and let everyone out, and then, in a huff, decided to straighten out the car. Mike told me that he wouldn't worry about, but I ignored him. He said it again, at which point I told him rather impolitely to stop condescending to me. This I regretted almost immediately, since Mike had only ever been very nice to me and didn't deserve it, but I turned away and re-parked the car anyway.

In his own way Doug saved me from a guilty and awkward evening. As I stepped out of the car I was immediately distracted by the sight of Doug across the parking lot, hanging halfway out of the backseat window of another car. Vomit streamed from his mouth onto the ground below. I looked over at Ben Wright, who'd come with me in Doug's car, and we decided right away that we needed to get Doug home. His eyes were barely open and he couldn't stand on his own power. We chucked Doug length-wise into the back seat and drove back to his apartment. It took about five minutes to drag Doug to his doorway, and then he collapsed all over the floor as soon as he got inside. Ben and I couldn't help but laugh. We picked Doug up together and dumped him into the shower fearing that Doug would make a mess of his bed, and then we headed back to Paradise.

Karaoke is fundamentally stupid entertainment and relies heavily on irony for thrills, and so it is fun for exactly one night and god-awful if repeated within a period of two or three months. I'd really looked forward to Japanese karaoke before the trip, but the idea of a second consecutive night, at the same joint even, seemed powerfully lame to me. Twenty minutes into it, Carl and I looked at each other and decided to take off right then and there. Outside of Doug's place we found Mike reclining in his car; he was disgusted all the same at the prospect of another night of "99 Luftballons" and "Enter Sandman". I gave Mike a pat on the shoulder and apologized for my hissy-fit. Then the three of us headed to Sukiya, "the thinking man's Yoshinoya", where Mike ordered and promptly scarfed the wretched Curry Hamburger Cheese bowl.

Upon returning to Doug's we decided that we'd straightaway get to teabagging John, who was lying in an unconcious heap on the living room floor. This plan met with more or less total failure, since we could not keep from giggling, and furthermore we could not keep our giggles quiet. As soon as Mike got himself in position over John it'd became totally unbearable, and John woke up to the three of us cackling like hyenas. Later, after we'd shut the lights off and settled down, Mike and I began to whisper harshly in Carl's direction. "CARL. I THINK YOU SHOULD TEABAG DOUG." "CARL. I WANT TO SEE YOUR GENTLEMEN ON JOHN'S FOREHEAD." It went on like this for fully ten minutes.

Matsusaka-Nagoya-SFO-LAX

The day before my flight home I took one final outing to Ise Sanjou, a hiking spot sold to us as "relaxing" but instead turned out to be a grueling boulder crawl replete with long stairs, slippery inclines, and chain-assisted ascents and descents--in other words, it was impossible for us not to enjoy it. We tripped back into Matsusaka and ate kimchi and grilled beef for dinner. It was more or less a perfect close to my trip.

After the meal it was just the four of us again, Carl, John, Doug, and myself, and we walked around Matsusaka in our t-shirts under the summer night sky, through the city streets and up alleyways next to the rice paddies to the sound of frogs and cicadas. John and I got into a conversation about how it was good just to walk around Japan again. It was one of the special things about being back, maybe even the best thing. Matsusaka was nothing special, a small prefecture's excuse for an urban center, but that evening it was an extraordinary constellation of little things, the lights and sounds and the smell of the air, and the cosmic guarantee that everything was going to be alright for us. It felt safe to walk around, not like all the places we'd been to in America, but this had nothing specifically to do with what we knew about crime in Japan. It was more the quality of the darkness, how it was soothing rather than suffocating, and the way the buildings sat next to each other, comfortable in their own lots, and low so you could see the one down the way, and the one after that. It was more the feeling that we were far away from what was mundane or troubling in our lives. When abroad, you put a lot of yourself on the line, but the risks are all novel and full of color, and that is called adventure. It's a feeling so far removed from the grey droning of the everyday threats to your peace of mind when you're back home, settled among your routines. It's the excitement of being the stranger. Along the way are the kinds of friendships and insights you never knew of before. That is the capital joy of living abroad: you feel removed from yourself and your life, and you have as concrete a chance for escaping where you belong as you could ever have. It is not retreating so much as it is searching. Of course, that is also the great flaw of living abroad: you can't exist for too long uninvested in your surroundings and the society that sustains you. At a certain point you will need to be in a place where you speak the language, a place where you are concerned with the local politics, a place that is familiar rather than mysterious, a place where you are not an outsider. You can't be gone forever.

It dawned on me over dinner that I hadn't heard back at all from the Columbia housing office, which meant that there was still a good chance that they wouldn't extend the deadline for my deposit. Because of that contingency, I realized I'd have to be prepared to make a decision on whether or not to pay--i.e., whether or not to go to school--by the time the plane touched down in Los Angeles. The trouble was that I was nowhere nearer to a decision than I was so long ago. Even when I was thinking about applying, I didn't feel sure about it, but I applied anyway and pushed the choice into the future. When the offers came in, I still wasn't sure about it, so I accepted one and pushed it out further. Now that there was a hefty financial aspect forcing the issue, I felt pretty certain I couldn't delay any longer.

The major concerns, the pros, the cons, I'd pretty much hashed out for myself months ago. But I'd spent so much energy trying to elicit a solution through logic and at the end there was nothing. So on the plane ride back I tried to put all the contextual issues aside (including the appeal of being back in an academic community, of being out of the suburbs, and my concern for what to do with myself if I didn't go to graduate school this year) and focus on the only real question, which was whether I wanted to study economics or not. It'd always been incredibly difficult to get out of my head the issue of alternatives. I felt I was curious and capable and really belonged in a situation where I could learn more, but what would I focus on, if not economics? For a long while I felt like I'd lost interest in everything, that I didn't have enough passion for any particular thing to pursue it deeply. Perhaps the one and only insight I was able to reach on the plane was that I was actually interested in a lot of different things. This was significant in that it meant that if I didn't go to graduate school this time around, I wasn't lost nor had I wasted anything. I still had a million different paths to follow.

With that in mind it was easier to see the ways in which I'd been trying to convince myself that economics was a good option for me. I was always trying to work in relevant angles. The logical angle: I'm good at math + I'm interested in society = Why not study economics? The East Asian angle: I'm interested in China and Japan, why not study the economics of China and Japan? The writing angle: I want to write, why not become an economics professor and at that point you can write whatever you want? The uncertainty-about-academia-angle: I'm suspicious of academia, so why not get a degree that makes it easy to get work, just in case? These all make sense on a certain level, but they have the ring of weak-willed advice. They are rationalizations that neatly circumvent more direct questions, like "Are you interested in economics itself?" or perhaps "Are you excited and enthusiastic about the idea of studying economics for the next five years?" And in those cases, I now believe that any expression of doubt or indifference is much closer to no than it is to yes.

You see where this leading: After a year of struggling to get them, I've just turned down two fully-funded offers from top-8 economics graduate programs, with no concrete backup plan, and holy fuck! But I feel great.

One of the benefits of working on video games designed for six-year-old girls is that I get automatic entry into the medium-exclusive, medium-cheeseball nerd spectacle that is the Electronic Entertainment Expo, now ongoing at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Prior to attending I had the following expectations:

1. I would see more nerds than I have ever seen in my entire life.
2. The male-female ratio would exceed 5.
3. I would not be impressed by anything I saw there.

I was +1 upon arrival. Even before as we parked the car, we beheld flocks of industry insiders trudging from the parking lot to the convention center, and it was an impressive parade of mohawks, pasty-white skin, camos pants, couch potato obesity, Asian girlfriends, and seriously excessive gadget fetishism along the lines of filming the concrete facade of the convention center with an expensive digital camcorder while waiting for the crossing light to change. There was a guy we ran into who made a thirty-second, straight-faced pronouncement about some free Nintendo t-shirt and the elaborate means he would employ to acquire one. There was another guy who was playing his PSP while waiting in line to play another game, wrapped up like a hungry child with a Twinkie, all the while oblivious to the fact that he was in the way of a whole crowd of people trying to get by.

When we showed up we patrolled around the Sony floor for a little while and elected to get in line for a peek at the Nintendo Wii; the Wii is officially knocking the publicity shit out of the PS3 and Xbox and we only decided to hop into the ridiculously long queue after we met another guy from the company who'd give us cuts. It took us about 90 minutes to get to the primary Wii exhibit. This stretch of time we filled with many very, very bad puns on the word "Wii"; these puns felt old and unfunny and lame from the moment we heard the announcement of the name "Wii" but have nonetheless been the subject of countless penis jokes at the office for a solid two weeks running, and with absolutely no sign of abating whatsoever. While waiting in line, one guy gave an attractive passerby some directions and then turned to us, pointing suggestively at his groin: "In fact, she can play the Wii right now if she wants." "I've actually been playing with the Wii for years now," announced another guy.

Pleasantly, I was mostly wrong about the woman thing. I assumed there would be the painfully awkward situation in which the female population would be composed exactly of dog-faced, bespectacled industry skags on one end, and struggling actresses oozing out of the booths with leather bustiers and plastic broadswords on the other. Instead there were numerous respectably-presented girls with whom I'd be delighted to flirt save for the crushingly total inappropriatness of the entire situation. To take nothing away from the women of the gaming industry at large, what I really wasn't expecting was the number of camera-weilding nymphs with media badges--that girls who do photography or play music have automatic appeal makes not very much sense but is anyways a pretty basic fact of life. Also surprising was how well-informed, confident, and generally competent some of the booth babes were when they were working the E3 crowds. This actually gets me every time I go to an expo, which probably says something about how readily I jump to the conclusion that hot chicks are dumb. (For example, when we walked by the press table for the gaming mag Tips & Tricks, manned exclusively by booth babes, I just had to mention that they ought to call that magazine Ho's and Tricks instead. There was no way I was going to miss making that joke. Zero chance. I was laughing out loud even before I started to say anything. Anyway, I don't think the guys I was with got it.)

There is this weird split in the way game industry does its marketing at E3--the same institution that loads the floor with C-rate models also has some pretty weird attempts at subtlety and sophistication in their advertising campaigns. Sony's mantra was "Play beyond" or something, and there were abstruse and fairly silly commercials playing on video feeds all over their exhibit. One featured a girl swinging monkey-bar style from hanging ring to ring with a vaguely orgasmic smirk; after the girl navigates a few rings, the camera pans back and it's revealed that she's swinging over a river of lava. Another commercial had two counterposed fists playing paper-rock-scissors, the twist being that the fists would transform grotesquely into computer-modeled paper sheets, rocks, and scissors. I think they are trying to communicate the innocence and pure funness of their games, while beating their chests about their technological ability to put that funness in interesting contexts. They do a terrible job of getting this across. Even aside from the fact that the commercials are terribly constructed from a craft standpoint, the entire idea is just whacky and forced to begin with--it's easy to imagine behind these videos the exaggerated posturing of twentysomething English majors desperate to convince themselves that marketing can be more than what it actually is.

Even worse might be "Wii" itself--even the ongoing and constantly crude panning of this name doesn't do justice to how catostrophically dumb it is. More specifically, it isn't the badness of a particular idea but rather the lengths to which a bad idea is taken that really does the damage. The first prominently featured link on the Official Wii home page is labled "Philosophy", and leads to this absolute stunner:

Wii will break down that wall that separates video game players from everybody else.

Wii will put people more in touch with their games ? and each other. But you?re probably asking: What does the name mean?

Wii sounds like ?we,? which emphasizes this console is for everyone.
Wii can easily be remembered by people around the world, no matter what language they speak. No confusion. No need to abbreviate. Just Wii.

Just asinine. It is a punch to the gut, obviously something dreamed up by a group of people mutually reinforcing their self-delusion for months on end. I can sort of guess how this happened: one or two really idealistic marketing guys get laughed out of a meeting room but manage to impress one of the partners, and so then other people are willing to give the idea the benefit of doubt, and then there are mock-ups made, everyone is working hard to make it work and the snowball starts to pick up speed and mass, and then people have put in way too much effort to even consider looking behind, to even allow the holy-shit-just-what-are-we-doing-and-what-have-gotten-ourselves-into feeling to sink in for longer than a second--the thought is just way, way too terrifying--and what dissenters are left have nothing to do but accept the fact that the only option is to slam the gas to the floor, get the thing red-lining, and hope they can smash through the enormous brick wall that has been erected in front of them. "Wii" doesn't detract from the technology itself, and people who are excited about the games will obviously buy it no matter what, but let's not fuck around here: it is as close to an objectively stupid name as I've heard, and I would probably make unfavorable judgments about your value system and personality if you announced that you thought it was a good idea.

I didn't get to play any of the new marquee games for the Wii, but I did get a chance to noodle around with its much-touted and argued-over gyroscopic controller. I give it a qualified thumbs-up. I heard murmurs from all over the floor about how surprised people were about how responsive the controller it was, but it also seemed to me that people were having quite a hard time getting the thing to do what they wanted it to do; it's either a learning curve thing, or a bust waiting to happen. I don't have the imagination to get too excited about this thing, as I think it adds very little to a game hit tennis balls with a swing instead of pressing the B button, or to shoot things by pointing at the screen as opposed to aiming with a mouse. The new Zelda game looked very much in this mold, with superficial replacements of certain button presses with aerial gestures (e.g. drawing-a-bow motion for shooting arrows, overhand swings for chucking boomerangs) put over an otherwise familiar-looking game. The new Mario game, on the other hand, looked thoroughly fresh and badass, but since I didn't get to play I am not certain it uses the controller well either.

The best part of the day was when I stopped at a booth for the PC real-time strategy game Company of Heroes. A guy standing at the exhibit offered to demo the game for me and it occurred to me that he was probably a developer or producer or otherwise intimately related to the making of the game. He gave me a rundown of the game's key features in a mostly non-sales fashion and talked at length on the goals the development team had--they wanted to make the terrain destructible and modifiable by the player, and they wanted to emphasize the value of taking and holding territory. I didn't ask for such a thorough explanation, but I thought it was neat to hear about the creative decisions, which, I suppose, is much more interesting to me than the actual gameplay and graphics. It was also nice to have a real conversation, as opposed to the "Hey check out this astonishing blippity doodad thing here" which I got a lot, e.g. when I asked the guy at the Nintendo exhibit if the Wii did hardware or software emulation to provide backwards compatibility for N64 games, he told me to talk to public relations.

Maybe the truly strange thing of the day was how fundamentally unexcited I was to attend what was essentially a massive, cutting-edge arcade with free replays. I remember as a kid being excited to go to a laundromat convention with my friend's family because there'd be one or two arcade machine vendors there; I remember reading issues of Nintento Power over and over and fantasizing about each and every game; I remember just dying to get a SNES console; I remember spending hours fiddling with autoexec.bat and config.sys so I could play the crappiest games imaginable. There is this mix of ADD and boredom and self-consciousness that I get when playing most games nowadays, like I have played the exact same game before with a slightly different cosmetic presentation, like I already know what's coming, like I feel like I've basically figured out what a game is about thirty seconds into it, like I'm sure that playing any further would be an unrewarding waste of time. There is this weird feeling that I am just watching an algorithm run itself.

Barring the occasional Knights of the Old Republic or Virtua Tennis (which in essence are either 10-hour movies or social grease for friendly shit-talking amongst friends), this is what happens to me now every time I sit down to play a game. This may be something I have truly and unequivocally grown out of, as opposed to many other things--procrastination, fear of rejection, not thinking before speaking--that I haven't. That's a tough way of putting it, since it's not really that I think games are kids' stuff. Undeniably, I do feel guilty playing games, since I always feel there's something more constructive I could be doing, but the boredom is real. Part of the blame has to go to the games themselves, since they emphasize prettiness and gadgety novelty (this during a time when I have been continuously less and less impressed with what computers can do the more I learn about them, which is not a whole lot but still a bit), and are on average incredibly repetitive and unoriginal. It is a little bit how I feel about jazz music. But Zelda and Mario are the Coltrane and Miles of gaming for me, so I might have to give the Wii a chance when it gets released.

warped.nu is officially on the map of the Internet! We got our first semi-significant comment spam attack around 2:00AM last night, and to celebrate I'll be reading up on CAPTCHA at work instead of any and every article regarding the Lakers' playoff collapse (which I saw coming the entire time, I assure). Since installing some semblance of security into the web apps of this site has been on the list for quite some time, I guess this is a good thing. Anybody want to help? Most CAPTCHA implementations in PHP are fugly, but it's unlikely I'll be able to get anything quite so nifty as Yahoo!'s or eBay's, given that I am a little behind in the market capitalization department.

Anyhow, som brief specifics: I deleted about 350 spam comments of only three distinct types (i.e. I could delete them with three DELETE queries, using wildcards on the body text) throughout the site, less than 40 of which were directed towards my blog. Since there are only four other hosted blogs on this site, the rest of the blogs, on average, got it worse than me. Although my blog is probably the largest, it is the least well-organized, and I suspect Johann's blog is the most popular. I sort of think the latter issue would be less significant in how much a particular person's blog got spammed, but I'm not really sure.

Here are two movies I have watched, or rather re-watched, very recently:

ワンダールフライフ After Life

To me, After Life is a sci-fi film without spaceships; it does the whole "what if?" thing and answers with old office buildings and VHS tapes. The idea is that after you die, you are re-materialized as a regular human and sent to a rusty dormitory, where a group of counselors interview you and attempt to glean which of your memories is the most important one. After that, they make a short film out of it, and as you watch it you disappear into nothingness, and all you have to take with you is the memory recorded on film. If you can't decide, which technically you are not allowed to do, then you get a desk job as a counselor interviewing other dead people about their memories.

The plot mostly about a counsellor named Mochizuki, who is physically 22 years old but has been dead for fifty years, and his rather abrupt encounter with an old fuddy-duddy who, as it turns out, ended up marrying Mochizuki's fiancee after M got killed in World War II. That is plenty interesting and leads to a really beautiful resolution, but the real core of the movie are the unrelated stories of all the people that arrive after they've died. There are these great side-stories of people who have a hard time dealing with the idea of choosing an important moment in their lives: one guy hates his life so much that he chooses darkness as his favorite memory; another guy can't think of anything notable in his life; yet another guy refuses to choose a memory because he doesn't think it makes any sense. But most of the characters have a really simple story to tell with no special significance. One woman remembers eating rice balls in a bamboo forest when she was a kid; another guy remembers flying a Cessna through the clouds.

The whole movie is filled with basically mundane situations, of people telling the counselors about rice balls and Disneyland, of the film crew deciding how to build a Cessna when all they've got is a Piper, of the office directory and the security guard playing chess. But every moment is so refined and human. One of my very favorite scenes is of the staff rehearsing some marching band music for a final ceremony. There is nothing going on, just a music teacher directing a bunch of amateurs. It's not especially humorous or exciting--in fact I'm not even sure it serves a particular storytelling purpose in the first place--but it really carries through the movie's lack of sophistication and basic humanity. This is a better idea of the afterlife that I've ever heard: no angels, no fire, no moral judgement, only the basic acknowledgement that you lived. It's both funny and really important that the young and the old, the lucky and the misfortunate, the good and the bad alike, all end up at the exact same bureaucratic processing center, and that their memories are re-created by a terribly-underfunded film crew, financially incapable of pretense, who make clouds out of strands of cotton and shoot with a decades-old camera.

Other things about this movie: I love how banal and undramatic the movie is despite all its nifty concepts. It's exactly as if you got up from the morgue table and took a ride across town to a county office building. You're given the impression that there is life going on outside of the office--there's shots of city life that can't possibly be filled with wandering dead people--but the movie simply can't be bothered to explain any of that. It works perfectly.

Also, I when I first saw this movie, I had a mad crush on Shiori, the office intern. She is not particularly pretty, but from certain angles, she looks like an amalgam of several girls that I used to have a thing for, which creeps me out, and from certain other angles she looks like a twentysomething version of my old boss when I used to work in Japan, which really creeps me out. Those are mostly unrelated, I assure.

Anyway, I sort of think that to reduce your existence down to a single moment is an interesting thing, but at the same time a little scary, and maybe even perverse. Whenever I reflect on my life I've this tendency to rank and categorize moments, and I'll often talk about "the best year of my life" or "the best thing I've done". There's the problem of those statements being self-fulfilling and thus coloring your ability to enjoy the present and be optimistic about the future, and there's also the problem of perceiving things in terms of simple preference, without acknowledgement of quality or texture. But if we categorize things a bit more fuzzily, then surely those preferences exist. If not a single best moment, can there be a ten-best list? A 100-best? I guess when I really think about it, I'd probably need a hundred or a thousand; I'm spoilt for choice. That's pretty cool.

Bloodsport

I caught this on SpikeTV the other night and it is very much a SpikeTV film, but even before the advent of such things as entire channels dedicated specifically to dudes, Bloodsport had been making the off-peak rounds in local network programming for over a decade. So long as I was physically in America, there probably hasn't been a week that's gone by that I'd have been unable to catch it on TV. One the one hand, this kind of implies that the movie is firmly welded into the realm of the low-brow. It's dished out primarily for bored people needing something to watch on a Sunday night before heading off to school or work. But after seeing it again, I'm pretty confident in saying that it's no mere filler. In fact I'll take it a few steps further and claim that Jean-Claude Van Damme had made a bonafide artistic statement in Bloodsport. That movie is a genuine moment for my generation. It's easy to treat Van Damme with this sniveling so-bad-it's-good ironic disregard, but I'll watch one of his films in its entirety probably once every six months and I continuously find something legitimately redeeming about the guy and his work. I don't really know how many other actors and filmmakers I can say that for, but the number is probably not that high. And Bloodsport is no Hard Target or Double Team. That's right: put it up there with the cream of the Hong Kong stuff. It's one of the greatest martial arts movies ever made.

First let's get the irony part out of the way: there was way more unintentional humor in the Steve Westly-for-governor ads during the Bloodsport commercial breaks (in which the narrator with the deep sinister baritone that crackles during long vowels announces that Steve Westly "cracked down on tax cheats" while a shot is played of Steve Westly pointing at a blue PowerPoint-esque poster reading "CRACKING DOWN ON TAX CHEATS", god what comedy) than there is in the movie itself. You forget about the bad acting almost immediately and the one-liners are just not trying hard enough to be cringe-worthy. Here's the special part though: the intentionally funny parts don't suck. They're actually funny. It's funny when Van Damme runs away from the army guys. It's funny when Van Damme threatens to punch a guy he's already knocked down and the guy pretends to pass out. It's funny when Jackson makes fun of Frank Dux's dim mak by breakin a brick over his head, and that scene is made even better by the fact that the buddy relationship between the two is well-developed enough that you the viewer sort of feel like you're in on the joke along with the characters themselves. Also, the directing is really uneven, but for every terrible scene there's at least one other legitimately cool one to balance it out. For example, maybe the worst scene in the whole movie is when they break out an absolutely terrible child version of Van Damme who is trying to steal Tanaka's katana sword; when Tanaka is heard in the background the Van Damme kid just stands there awkwardly and proceeds to pick up the sword. None of it makes any sense whatsoever. But minutes later you are treated to an awesome, awesome sequence where Tanaka is training the (thankfully) adult Frank Dux how to fight, and there's no actual contact--the camera is just rushed towards Tanaka's face by a guy literally running with the camera, and then a shot of Van Damme eating the mat is edited in immediately afterwards. It goes on like this for four or five repetitions. Great scene. And the love interest--usually the prime insult-to-injury aspect of bad action films--is mercifully likeable in this movie, and the script doesn't abuse her or use her as a device to manipulate the plot. She is leaps and bounds more tolerable than, say, Katie Holmes's character in Batman Begins or 90% of all Bond girls. She even gets to participate in my favorite non-action scene of the movie, in which she's trying to convince Frank Dux not to fight anymore, and he replies that he's just trying to do his best at what he does. It actually comes off as pretty meaningful to me--Van Damme pulls off that scene with this odd earnestness that I think is a key part of his overall charisma as an action hero (for a film that relies purely on this aspect of Van Damme and none of his physicality, check out the surprisingly good Legionnaire).

Then there are the all-out badass action elements that make the film great. There are so many terrific, distinctive fighters showcased in the fight scenes, and they come off as well-conceived through their movements and facial expressions, despite that most have close to zero spoken lines. Inasmuch as kung fu films attempt to reflect real-world fighting (which is not so much really), the Bloodsport choregraphers and directors really did their homework and managed to include a lot of different styles from around the world. Bolo Yeung as Chong Li is an unbelievably good villain (although totally not believable as a Korean character--there isn't a more Cantonese-looking face on the planet than Bolo's). He's huge and scary as hell and when he's working the Kumite fans after he wins his bouts he looks absolutely psychotic. Can you believe Bolo was almost or exactly 50 years old when he shot that film? As for Van Damme himself, he's totally rad (by the way, anybody who tells you Van Damme's martial arts suck basically has no idea what they're talking about; arguments typically involve claiming either that he can't really fight, which is patently untrue and totally irrelevant to movie fantasy regardless, or that he sucks compared to the Hong Kong action stars, which is totally ridiculous and something I can't help but feel is rooted in a) an Orientalist, romanticized notion that yellow guys are better at ancient yellow sports, and b) that Van Damme is Belgian and thus, for all intents and purposes, French). I'll forgive his silly Tai-chi panther-hands-while-doing-the-splits nonsense because the rest of his fighting is just top notch. Forget that they use the slo-mo cam a lot: Van Damme is the real deal. His athleticism is incredible and he manages to use it so cleverly in each of his fight scenes.

On this note there is something that hit me like a spin-kick to the nose while watching this movie for the latest time: Bloodsport might be the finest and truest homage to Bruce Lee that we will ever see. Seriously, stop and think about it for a moment. The overwhelming majority of quality martial arts films you see (Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, Gorden Liu, Jet Li, and most recently Tony Jaa) are descended from the old Shaw Bros. wuxia mold: lots of acrobatics, intense speed, a barrage of techniques, tons of blocking and riposting and jumping. Bruce Lee is a hero to everyone involved in making that sort of film but none of those people have ever come close to producing something that feels like a Bruce Lee movie.

And then there's Bloodsport. There are the obvious but superficial shout-outs, like when Frank Dux reminds Tanaka that he trained Dux to learn many styles (a fundemental Bruce Lee tenet). But it's the fight scenes that strike true gold. Unlike modern-era Hong Kong work, the fighting in both Bruce Lee's work and in Bloodsport is slow and jagged. They concentrate less on grace and technique and more on brutality and emotion. The fighting stances are clenched and stiff and twitching. The expressions on the hero's face are as important and as practiced as his attacks. There is this intensity to every motion that I think is lacking in most other martial arts movies, if only because in those films the punches and kicks come a little too cheaply. Each of one of Bruce Lee's moves was a methodical, emphatic statement--THIS IS A PUNCH. THIS IS A KICK.--and it's the same with Van Damme in this movie. And while many may imitate Bruce Lee's monkey growl, Van Damme actually knows how to use it. There's a scene where Chong Li pulls out some sneaky ninja powder and blinds Frank Dux, and Dux just sits there for a while moaning like a starving animal, and it is exactly the right mix of disturbing and silly and savage. The overall effect of all of this is a much more emotionally-charged and expressive fight scene; in fact I believe the reason why most martial arts movies avoid this style is not entirely because it's a bit uglier and less kinetic--it's also because there are very few people who can pull it off succesfully.

I suspect I'm preaching to the choir on this one. I don't need to convince anyone to enjoy Bloodsport. It floats slightly under the radar but everybody reconizes its details, probably on a plane of retro cultural awareness alongside the likes of Luigi, the flux capacitor, and Castle Greyskull. What we do need to do is to celebrate this film, to dig it out of the dregs and to recognize how few movies of its kind come close to succeeding on as many fronts as it does.

And we should chew on something else: I sort of now think that Bloodsport is the spiritual antecedent and inspiration for Street Fighter II, which is my unequivocal choice as the best video game ever made. It has this international menagerie of freaks employing bizarre fightings styles, including the pro wrestler, the monkey-like fighter, and the sumo wrestler. The similarities are overwhelming. And on the note of games, since publishers are fond of churning out macho-nostalgia fare like The Warriors, I think that it's time for somebody to make a full-out video game version of Bloodsport. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, you marketing types. It would play precisely the right strings for that all important 21- to 35-year-old market, and it would be absolutely badass. To have it done and done right could not but make the world better. Doing it right would be the hard part, though; given all the legal issues in putting together a licensed title like that, and given the general bullshit of doing quality creative work of any kind for the mass market, a Bloodsport game would almost certainly suck. To do it correctly would involve interesting characters and a fighting engine of the caliber of the best fighting games (anything less would make it feel cheap), and a detailed and legitimately-fun-to-play story mode that follows the movie plot as closely as possible (and by that I mean having a full-fledged, playable Karate Champ port in the virtual lobby of Jackson and Frank Dux's Hong Kong hotel).

I am not joking about any of this.

I was going to write this really long thing about Bloodsport and why it is good, because I wanted to procrastinate from working on some songs and/or this story I'm trying to write, but then in procrastinating about that I wrote an RSS feed for all the blogs on this server instead. Now you can avoid hammering each of our respective blogs every day looking for new content when you can check our spankin' new subscription service. Point your aggregator yon:

http://www.warped.nu/rss/

NewsGator is a mostly non-annoying RSS site that I have been trying to use.

Bonzi Wells looks like Kif from Futurama:

While not as good a comparison as in the much-publicized Sheldon William/Chewbacca meme, the resemblance is definitely there and deserves more attention. Next time you go to a Kings game, bring a poster with "KIF MVP #42!!!" on it. We need to get something started.

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.

Around this time a year ago Chelsea and I were in Taiwan in my old room thinking about playing an open mic at a music cafe I used to play at. We'd just finished our band's first EP and were feeling very proud of ourselves and made certain oaths to write a song on the spot and go out and perform it in front of native strangers the next night. We quit the plan about twenty minutes into it, deeming it highly ridiculous and scary. Out of that venture came a couple of scraps, one disposable verse in the pop style about how dirty Taipei is, and another about Laika the space dog, with whom Chelsea and her boyfriend Ben were obsessed at the time. She hummed out some lines that Ben had come up with on the fly a week or so before:

Leave it to the USSR to take it way too far
Those commies have done it again, they've gone and killed man's best friend
Laika, I woulda loved ya
Laika, been thinkin' of ya

To this I laid out some pretty stupid chords with a pretty stupid strum on one of my cousin Simon's three rather-filthy classical guitars that were stored in his room under huge piles of assorted high-school fanboy paraphernelia. Back in Japan, we brought the words and the chords into practice somewhat bashfully and apologetically and told everyone we should make it sound like Joy Division, and that I wanted a drum beat like "kick-kick-snare, kick-kick-snare", maybe some cymbals on the two and the four. Then we took it to our lead singer Jen's place and plugged our guitars into her TV and her computer speakers and added all of one more chord, which we decided should be repeated precisely five times, I think because we thought five was much more arbitrary than four or six. Then we argued over the bridge for another couple of weeks, Chelsea added a second verse, and we were done. This was our bonafide audience-pleasing rocker, demanded-for with threats of walkouts by at least one fan, which for us was pretty good. We put all the parts to tape over the summer and then I left Japan. By the time I was back in the US I'd sort of disowned the task of mixing the thing, because I was afraid it would have been extremely tedious and frustrating, even as I was making all kinds of noncommittal and flaky promises to "have a look at it when I had the time". This being regarded (rightfully IMO) as a shitty situation, the band put out their own mix about half a year later. Nonetheless I was still hanging onto the idea of having a crack at the mix, but for lack of motivation and the occasionally flirting with depression I procrastinated up until about a month ago when Chelsea and Ben drove down from Folsom to visit me in LA, at which point I got inspired again to get to work. In disturbingly predictable fashion I did nothing with this inspiration for another two weeks, at which point I finally sat down with the recordings.

Anyway, I was right. The mixing was indeed extremely tedious and frustrating, probably even more so than I expected. Like all things that take more than a couple of hours (e.g. term papers, apartment cleaning, strategy games), I came to a point where I stopped caring whether the thing was any good, and this was also exactly the same time when I decided I was done with it.

That is a very long story for a very short song. Enjoy.

I gotta say I was feeling pretty apprehensive about the whole moving back to LA thing, of course before it happened, a bit while it was happening, and even some after it happened. For a while I hadn't been able to get myself excited about new things--moving back to LA meant leaving my friends up in Berkeley, staying at home in the suburbs meant missing out on city life, working at my friend's company meant cubicle tedium for low pay. Don't even get me started on the medium-term grad school thing. Well, I will probably get started on that tack in a bit. But anyway: something weird has been happening to me, weird but slow and gradual so it's seemed more natural than weird, weird in that A) I seem to have lost a lot of the optimism I'd had before about the future (this generally being associated with youth, hence the slight irony of the following) and B) I've reverted back to some old fearful tendencies such as the inability to let things go. This resulted in my watching Star Trek for three or four hours a day and slowly going broke and generally accepting of the fact that life was sort of unsustainable and crappy in a really generic and undramatic way, all the while dreading the idea of any kind of change, out the fear of future responsibilities and the general loss of freedom. That is unemployment.

Dan was out of town for most of my last week in Berkeley but he came back in time for a nice send-off that resulted in the karate picture of last post, and vaugely, further pangs of guilt or regret at leaving town. I packed up my stuff in about two hours tops--that is how long it takes to get my material life together--and loaded it all into a rented minivan. While that was happening I was accused by my eccentric, superficially-friendly-yet-seething-with-power-related-issues-lawyer/fascist liberal neighbor lady of attempting to prevent her from parking in her space, as I'd temporarily--temporarily, I assure--left the van in the driveway to load up my things. I had half a mind to attack her, first verbally and then with blows, very confident that, in my resentment of her technically accurate but substantively bad-faith complaints, I'd have no qualms over hitting late middle-aged women, and that I'd most likely win should she decide to defend herself. Then I drove down Interstate 5, which used to be long and boring, but due to spring rains and cool weather I saw orchards in bloom and green hills the whole way down, so it was beautiful in addition to being long and boring.

I feel as if I caught my mom and my sister and my brother-in-law slightly off guard with my arrival even though it'd been anticipated by all parties for at least four weeks. The timing was bad maybe: my mom was working on her grant, which, like anything promising large quantities of money, sucks ass, and Justine and Jason are naturally industrious and busy people. I felt the need to apologize frequently and they insisted that my re-introduction into the household was very welcome, but I still felt as an intruder. The other three would often tell me that they would get my room cleaned out and that they'd have to re-organize a bit but they thought the four of us would all be able to squeeze in, which unintentional as it was made me feel like I'd cannon-balled into their jacuzzi and spilled too much water out.

If I'd spent any more time at home watching Star Trek I think this would have bothered more and more, but I kept myself busy visiting certain old acquaintances the first weekend back and did not really settle in for at least another week. I went to the Buddhist temple in Hacienda Heights with my old man and then met up with my childhood friend Mark and a coterie of his friends and their friends and their friends as well and all of us ate at a fun but mediocre all-you-can-eat Brazillian barbeque and then smoked hookahs and went to a really terrible bar in Burbank.

I was at work the next day. One of the previous evening's dinner acquaintances was a guy named James who had during the month of February lobbied hard for my return to LA and subsequent integration into his programming team. I had intense reservations about this position because I really did not want to be working full-time and, I'm ashamed to say, I thought the pay scale was beneath me.

The company is in my slightly lame and generic hometown's slightly lame and generic mall/frufru commercial center now apparently controlled by the Westfield Group. The office is being leased from Morgan Stanley, who is next door, and the environmentally indifferent staff of programmers and artists have elected to stick with the interior decoration appropriate to investment banking or related subsidiary financial services. This consists of faux mahagony desks and forest-green argyle-ish carpeting, the very soft ruggish kind that you could possibly use as green for a putting tournament between deals. The illusion breaks when you pass the honor bar (Snickers, Big Grab bagged chips (which are not actually so big), &c., with a drop slot for quarters but no cashier or security implementation save your conscience) and when you catch a glimpse of the way-too-young and way-too-laid back owner dude who has Chucks and blue hair.

Let's clear the downsides out right away: James, great guy that he is, is producing the project and is so easy going about everything that I'm sure shit will hit the fan more than once when the executive producers (i.e. the outside representatives of companies that fund our projects) breath down his neck regarding a milestone due the next day and we have been surfing the web and playing nerf war the whole week. Also, I occasionally (and this does not refer to my immediate teammates) feel like I am working with a group of versions of my 17-year-old former self, who for reference was really a pretty nice guy but not exactly the most scintillating conversation partner, who thought he was funnier than he actually was, who had lots of interesting ideas but little perspective, and was really too preoccupied by material things such as TV shows and role-playing games. I am not actually holding myself above them as the over-educated well-traveled NorCal convert, but the fact of the matter is that I do have a distinctly different background than any of these guys and so we don't exactly relate all of the time, and this in turn results in a lot of thought-to-be-zingers and truly ripping punchlines laughed at only half-heartedly and only half-understood by our respective opposite parties.

Anyway I've yet to log my 80th hour on the job, so this is going to be set up as one of those classic blunderous-in-retrospect premature oaths: I really dig this gig. They have me doing grunt programming work on a game which is called "Barbie and the 12 Princesses", to be released on GameBoy Advance and is the sequel to two other games that are pretty much exactly the same thing. There is this conventional wisdom in geekdom that playing games is a completely different matter to making them, and this usually kills the enthusiasm for your average bright-eyed game-loving CS major fresh from graduation, but totally saves my ass in this situation. I like figuring out how to make Barbie pick up books and cast magic, and I feel no shame whatsoever about the actual subject matter of the game because at this point, I simply do not give a shit. There's a dude who sits next to me on a project that is way more sophisticated and cooler than mine but he always qualifies any description of his work with a brief tirade on how much he hates the cartoon that it is based on (this, by the way, being a prime example of how I sort of don't relate to all these programmer kids around me. When was the last time I couldn't offer some kind of anecdote about a cartoon? This was my domain!). I don't sympathize with this fellow at all. Getting stuff working, doing stuff that is both technical and creative and craftsmanlike, has rewards in the act and not the result, and that's been an incredibly rare thing in my life. I get home from work thinking about the stuff I was working on during the day, and I drive to work looking forward to sitting down with the code. I don't dread it one bit.

In this brief honeymoon phase I've thought to myself that if I was being paid thricely and given something more glamorous to work on--okay I admit it would bother me if I was doing Barbie games for a decade straight--that I'd be happy to settle in with the game industry for as long as it would have me. This is a disturbing thought to me for a few reasons. First off, I've been in serious denial of my coding jones for a while. Despite my pretensions of being a writer or a musician, I find those kinds of purely creative activity to be just ridiculously hard and so I resort to gimmicks and self-criticism to motivate me to action. Give me a programming task, on the other hand, and I'll be pretty much absorbed in getting it done, and I'd never doubt myself at the beginning that I could solve the problem the way I doubt myself every time I sit down to write a song. But you know I've been holding myself with a liberal arts slash socially relevant slash internationally aware posture for so long now. This has given me some unequivocally terrific experiences but is in pretty stark defiance of certain aspects of my basic character, which I think for a long time was basically that of a Lego-building, game-playing nerd. Granted, I've been writing code all the while and it's never inspired very much joy in me, but the low-difficulty, medium-interesting sort of stuff that's put in front of me right now makes me feel really good about the work I do. Jumping back into this stuff after years of overt and self-conscious refusal to see myself as my old pre-college self is strange and sort of feels like retreat, or embarrassing confusion at the very least.

Secondly, for me to acknowledge that something makes me happy or satisfied has been, as of recent, insanely complex and fraught and requires a pretty obsessive-compulsive chain of qualifications and caveats. For example, was it studying Chinese I enjoyed so much in the past, or was it that it was the first time I had that kind of unfettered freedom to explore, or was it that I could do all that in the company of really close friends, or was it that I felt really good about being abroad and being the cool foreigner? Sure, you could say it was all of those things, but then that makes any future decision so difficult. Who's to say flying back to Taipei would make me happy, when so many other aspects of the situation would be completely different. It seems a total oversimpification to say, "Taiwan made me happy, I should go there now and I'll be happy." It's pretty tempting but equal parts fallacious to credit a particular location as the reason for your happiness, and I am equally suspicious of doing the same for your subject of study, or the specific content of your job. Maybe, I have thought, what I really enjoy about my current position is the laid-back atmosphere, the sensation that I have exactly the right tools to do my work (as opposed to frequently feeling like I am doing things I am not prepared for, or that I'm biting off more than I can chew), the fact that I am given a precise attainable goal (as opposed to the vagueness and airiness of all of my previous jobs and experience as a student), and the fact that I am being paid to do pretty easy and neat stuff (as opposed to spending six to eight months applying the greater portion of my laughably meager savings to take classes that caused me a great deal of discomfort).

(This ambiguity of what it is about what you are doing that makes you feel good or bad is something I have been stuck on for a while. This is because I am getting ready to start a PhD program in economics at a time when I am not feeling very interested in economics. In choosing between the programs that have accepted me, I'm worried not about the quality of the scholastics but the weather of the host city, and whether or not the professors/students are dicks. That concerns me greatly. On the one hand it seems a bit silly, like I am compensating somehow, but my attitude about this has become overwhelmingly post-modern: context is terribly important to me. If I didn't play in a band in Japan and was surrounded by a bunch of gaijin sex predators I would've marked JET down as a blown year; likewise if I were studying Chinese in Taipei and they graded me and my classmates were a bunch of competitive private school shitheads I would probably think that Taiwan sucked ass right now. And just the same, if I walk into a grad program where people are congratulating me interminably and at high volume on my cleverness and the girls are all beautiful and funny and the guys all love Nintendo and have interesting stuff to say but are just slightly dumber than me to make me feel very special--well, I'd probably believe I was born to study economics. Believe it or not, this sort of makes me feel better about the whole thing, because it allows for a good time despite my current funk of academic pessimism. I am not at all prepared to jump back into school without the promise of interesting people and fun places and semi-tolerable weather and a good music scene. Anyways, here's the real situation at hand: I suspect it will come down to three schools, which are Berkeley, Columbia, and Austin. UCSD took me but didn't offer money, MIT emailed me a Dear John, and UCLA emailed me a link which took me to a website that, following a sequence of password-entry pages, displayed a Dear John (which sucks because I was secretly hoping to get fabulous cash offers from them so I could stay in LA and my situation right now wouldn't seem so temporary). And then I haven't heard from UW, which was a backup to begin with, nor from Harvard, which was an incredible longshot to begin with. Thus: sad as I was to leave Berkeley, I am not inclined to return because it is such a known quantity for me--I think I am unable to experience the university or the city beyond the encrusted habits and attitudes that have accumulated over the years of leaving and going back. Austin is cool, but quite far from water and arguably less prestigious, and thus would have to present Vast Sums Of Money to tip the scales in its favor. This leaves Columbia, which is probably the most exciting context-wise, despite my past fears of New York as a place way, way too cool for me, and my general distrust of private schools and glamorous public academics the likes of which fill the economics department there probably to a greater degree than Berkeley, which was already pretty bad. Nobel Prizes are sorta bad news to me. The real kicker will be to see how comfortable the department at Columbia feels. I won't accept a competitive atmosphere--I've had enough of curved grading scales, and the best classes I ever had were those in which I didn't feel like I was being judged and my classmates all genuinely liked and supported each other. I'm flying to New York in a couple weeks to check it out.)

My dear, dear friends Chelsea (UUDD #1) and Ben/Winnipeg (UUDD #7) came down last weekend to stay at our house for a few days and this did wonders to make me more comfortable in LA, which of course is weird in that their stay was so fleeting. I came back to save money and be with my family, to free myself of as many outside pressures as possible and to be in a community again, but for a while I wasn't convinced it was going to be more than a mild, lukewarm spell in a decompression tank. I guess I just needed to be reminded that I could have adventures in this town, which Chelsea and Ben supplied in year-in-Japan-magnitude quantity and quality. The point of my bringing them up is that we tried and tried but made very little headway into giving me an musician's nome de guitar for the solo album I have been writing and will being to record shortly god willing. The best name we came up with was "Here Come The Trucks", which was a rehash from one of C and B's old conversations and was anyways claimed and patented and jealously guarded by Ben himself. I then decided that the band name for my solo project must be of the "The [plural predicate]" cut, and so past a constant stream of total stinkers offered by Chelsea, we came up with these:

• The Slants, a name I 95% adore and do not at all reject because of the knowing and cloyingly hip co-opting of a racial slur, but reject because it comes built-in with racial connotations positive or negative but nevertheless distracting.
• The Pants, which is cool but loses fire for me by the day.
• The Hillarys or The Hillaries, which has emerged as the long-shot winner of the batch despite its slight but undeniable similarity to "The Donnas", who mostly suck. Obviously most people would see some sort of political in-joke going on there, and while I don't deny that the name would not work quite so well without the association to certain major politicians, this particular aspect of the name has absolutely no emotional weight with me whatsoever. I don't care one way or the other. The real disadvantage of "The Hillaries/Hillarys" is that both spellings look really incorrect to me, on account of that goddamned "y".

How about some more ideas?

So long for now, Berkeley. Your rent is exorbitant, your sidewalks are filthy, and your streets are poorly-lit, but you've sustained me for so long. May your karate-men stay healthy and insane forever.

Anyway, here goes nothing.

I decided that today would be my last day of work until I came back to Los Angeles. In the mean time it is my goal to eat well and be among my friends. And also, I will try to read and read and read, and finish writing that album for the FAWM challenge. I thought maybe I ought to go out and visit people and places I'd always meant to see as part of a ritual nod to my on-again, off-again home for the last seven and a half years, but I am not quite so cheesy, nor quite so mobile. Things may work out like this anyway. There are some irregular acquaintances that I'll get to meet up with in the next few days, old teachers and friends I should have seen more of, and it looks like I will get the chance to explore some neat places, like the Winchester Mystery House and the horse-racing track in El Cerrito.

Thursday is the day I will head back.

It's two months after New Year's, but here are my resolutions:

• Record and relase my solo album.
• Write and print a zine.
• Focus on the small and immediate things that make life good.

That is it. Nothing big-picture, abstract, or career-related. No lofty ambitions. Just stuff that is specific and in front of my eyes, that is doing not talking. These things are completely within my control and will be realized. But I had better get cracking, since I have spent 1/6th of my time trying to decide what to do with the remaining 5/6th of it. Actually I really don't have any of it figured it out, so I need to start small.

These are my friends:

Last Saturday we got together for the annual SF Treasure Hunt, which was four or five hours of walking around Chinatown and North Beach and solving little word games and trivia riddles.

The way it works: you're given a map, an index of street names, and a list of eighteen clues and questions. Each clue contains a puzzle which, when solved, takes you to a particular location on the map, at which point you are to search around for a particular word or number, usually something written on a street sign or engraved on a statue.

They scheduled the hunt late in the afternoon so that we'd be walking around during the evening's Chinese New Year parade, which was a nice touch, but made for slow going when we had to cross the path of the parade. We were about two-thirds the way through when the hunt officially ended, but we walked around for about another hour before turning it in and meeting up with Jim for milk tea.

That's Dan.

That's me, enjoying what I enjoy.

Chelsea introduced us to "Shaky Face" photography when we were somewhere near Telegraph Hill. The photographer gives a three-count before taking the shot, and on two the subject starts shaking his or her face from side to side as fast as they can. The results are appropriately entertaining.

The Shaky Face makes Emil look like he's gotten a solid right to the jaw.

Awesome.

Dan's Shaky Face is particularly atrocious.

Nights like those make it impossible to feel good about leaving Berkeley and my friends. I decided to move back to LA a while ago, when it was safe to decide things like that without worrying about what regrets might come of them. Now it's two weeks before I go, and I'm already missing what could have been, in this special place and among these people who mean so much to me. As with a lot of decisions I am facing now, I am starting to wonder if going home is the right thing to do.

When I got back from Japan I told myself I wasn't going back to LA, that I was going to figure out some terrific arrangement where I'd be just getting by, scraping out an economically workable existence, with enough time to be able to meet people, to do volunteer work, to work on my creative projects. I suppose it was a miscalculation to expect the work situation to fall into place so easily, and to think I could just conjure a social community for myself without the institutional trappings of work or school or JET or whatever. I think, though, things really began to unravel as I started to have doubts about my long-term plans. With that kind of uncertainty I feel like there's no ground underneath my feet, like I have nothing upon which I can base my smaller decisions. I thought maybe I'd feel better when classes ended in December and I had some perspective, but I have not been able to shake certain feelings of loneliness and confusion. All the while I've been getting poorer, but not wiser. It makes sense on some level to go home to be with my family; it will shake things up a little and it will simplify things for me, financially at least, but it's also a tactical retreat: the idea of it is sort of disappointing to me for a few different reasons, and the move won't help me solve any of the fundamental issues directly. I think I will feel less under the gun at home, I guess.

(Let me take this aside for a minute and acknowledge exactly how aware I am that I may not deserve or have not met the sufficient conditions to feel as dissatisfied and put off as I claim to be. I am specifically concerned with whether or not I've earned the right to be unhappy. Here is an immensely privileged, highly educated, well-fed young fellow, living in the best place on the planet, and yet he still somehow manages to trip over his own ego and wallow nose-bloodied in privations over a vague sense of not having his shit together. Are my expectations just too far divorced from reality? Am I just totally ridiculous? Of course it bothers me that the answer to those questions is probably yes, but it bothers me even more to think that my friends and family would think so too. The idea that everyone is just humoring me when I list my complaints and they nod--that idea just kills. It's fucking dynamite. I imagine everyone thinking to themselves, So what's Jeff's deal, anyway? or Jeff just needs to get over himself!, and holy shit! I guess I mention this because I am being slightly snarky. I am proposing to fill the space that follows with some detailed account of the sort of things that have been getting me down, way down, in chronic fashion over the past six months, and at the same time I am trying to compensate for the negative and personally-damaging response that it will probably evoke by pre-empting reader criticism with a scathing but mostly accurate-to-real-emotion self-criticism of my own. I am trying to have it both ways at once. I want the satisfaction of saying what is on my mind without the consequences that saying so might entail. It's your stock-standard manipulative rhetoric, your little finessed white lies. I mention that, in turn, because I suppose (or rather I hope) it's possible to do a little better than that. It is probably pointless to worry about justification when the problem exists regardless. You don't convince someone to cheer up by saying it's somehow wrong or logically inconsistent to be gloomy, by making it a moral imperative. I think one has to reach that conclusion from another angle, on one's own. Anyways.)

Here is my problem:

• I do not know what to do with myself.
• I feel the need to decide what to do with myself.

These are the characteristics of my situation:

• I have a bachelor's degree in history, a subject that I find interesting but unspecifically so.
• My most marketable skill (although it is losing earning power year by year) is that I know how to use, fix, and program computers. I like it okay, but it bothers me on a pretty deep level that I might spend most of the rest of my future days doing those things.
• My other most marketable thing (really this should be Number One, maybe) is that I did good in college and on particular standardized tests and it is generally expected in a non-spiteful and totally well-meaning way (sometimes even by me, or just parts of me) that I become a professor or some equivalently prestigious and well-compensated know-it-all.
• So, I applied to Prestigious Graduate Programs in a subject (economics) sort of foreign to me, one that I had a vague but good-intentioned desire to study but has not, upon closer inspection, inspired much in me. Barring any harm done by a particular professor who submitted his recommendation letters probably past the last minute (or potentially not at all, in the worst-case scenario that he is even more disorganized, forgetful, indifferent, and prevaricating as I have feared up until now) (oh and also any harm done by the lack of recommendational enthusiasm that such delays imply), I will be given offers to attend two or three of the Prestigious Graduate Programs.

I have thought about doing these things, seriously even, but they defy common sense and are, at best, extremely difficult to do, requiring much paying of dues and tolerating of poverty; and, at worst, quixotic, opiating fantasies of the most pathetic sort, maybe even worse than a midlife crisis pleasure binge:

• Writing. As a -er, I'd do observational nonficton, novels, long essays, and screenplays. I am energized and inspired when I read something which I regard as pure shit, and am close to completely discouraged when I read anything that I believe is worth a damn. Really, though, I haven't got the imagination or empathy for human characteristics that'd be necessary for fiction, nor the assertiveness and flexibility to be a journalist, nor the patience generally required for any of this bullshit in the first place. I am nearly allergic to poetry, and with this I feel as if I have mortally failed some prerequisite already.
• Rock and roll. I have issues being regarded as a "musician," as it would imply that I'd be just as happy writing jingles for radio commercials or being in a Beatles cover band that plays weddings. As if. I want to be a fucking rock star, but my voice is weak, my songwriting doomed to be amateur and uninspiring, and worse, I refuse to pander to the egos of my audience, which is exactly what weak-singing, uninsipring "artist"-type rock stars do, and they probably don't even realize it. Seriously though, I enjoy doing this kind of thing, making stuff up, playing it back, jumping around, twiddling knobs, but the idea of me doing it is so patently absurd and so against the grain of my ostensible talents that it grates the mind, body, and soul. Also, at the age of 25, what's my lease on this particular lifestyle? 15 years at best, after which point I would wish I'd become a college professor or computer programmer or something.
• (Additionally: I'm writing my first album anyway in participation with FAWM, yet another one of my arbitrary tricks to get me to work on shit instead of just talking about it all the time. See more on this come April, when it is hopefully recorded and mixed.)

Conflicts and urges, purely abstract and therefore of no particular value to decision-making and so exist to just make me feel shitty about myself:

• Overwhelming desire to take the beaten path, to long-term stability and prestige. Really overwhelming, but not enough to erase the doubts, and for this fact I should be thankful actually, or else I'd be a total asshole, and the academy is just bored to tears with those.
• Disturbing, constant, haunting sense of dissatisfaction, throughout college and professional career, that Things Will Be Better When I'm Finally Grown Up (though exact opposite feels many times more likely as I approach Grown Up).
• Related: the feeling that maybe, just maybe, I could end up doing something creative and cool, you know, and maybe it'd be okay, but you never know unless you try, you know?
• Wanting very badly to push forward, integerate, follow-up, and make good on what I perceive to be prior "investments" in life, as if this life were an accumulating pile of achievement and skill. These include speaking Chinese, analyzing and criticizing arguments, programming computers, doing math, writing in an engaging and competent voice, playing the guitar, the occasional leadership role in things I have cared to be associated with, experience with living abroad, a healthy imagination, and a slowly dying sense of humor. Maybe I mean quickly dying.
• Money. (But in the financial security, take-your-kids-to-school-no-day-care, mom-and-dad-will-be-happy sense. I don't give a shit about the rest. Except for maybe travel, and 20-hour work weeks.)
• Irritating but consistent lack of initiative when it comes to things that matter such as money and job-finding, in spite of showy demonstrations of elbow grease regarding things that sort of don't matter or are just taken that way, like recording 4-song EPs, and making attractive flyers, and doing web sites.
• More vaugely, but there: irrational but undeniable fear that in my capacity as [choose: business manager/advisor to the World Bank/influential think-tank and/or university researcher] I will end up saying something with no more surety than the flip of a coin, but due to my stature this will be acted upon, and bad things will result of this.

Immediately though, here's the deal:

• Suppose Harvard calls me next month, despite my late recommendation letters and despite my lack of economics background and despite my sorta shitty essay, and offers me like twenty-five grand plus expenses to study with them. Jesus fucking christ. I've been the groomed student all my life, and that would basically the glowing door in the sky. Get in your time machine and ask me five years ago, and I'd say I'd be a goddamn raving lunatic to say no.
• I would not mind so much doing economics, but then I would not mind so much being a high school teacher, or a banker, or a doctor. I guess I could do any of those and I guess I'd do a pretty good job at it if I pulled up my sleeves and got to it. Doing any of those things I listed would seem totally arbitrary to me right now, except that I've spent the last six or so months and a bunch of money and effort getting ready to the first thing and not the others. Here's what has happened though: I don't really remember my original motivation for doing this, or rather that what I thought before was incoherent and airy and quite removed from what I know now. I sometimes worry that I've never had a conversation over the topic of economics that has really absorbed me, that reading summaries of the nation's economic status excites me like reading the N section of the white pages, that I kind of don't like the idea of turning every social analysis into a formula like X (probability for event X' to happen) = A^2 (probability of factor A' which contributes to X') + log B (ditto) + C (a constant C, which is calculated as an unexplained residual that makes the theory appear less bullshitty than it will be revealed to be in 5-10 years' time). The excesses of literary theory and philosophy in the more texty social sciences turn me off intensely, but the monomanaical mathness of economics greets me like a jab to the solarplexus. Also, I like stuff like learning languages and talking about the influence of art and wondering how ideologies affect institutions and vice-versa, and the meaty, angular world of economics, broad as it is, has little room for that sort of fairy treehugger crap.
• Now forget the prestige aspect and focus on something more meaningful, like what would make me happy. The big problem with saying "no" is it just begs another question, which is why not just go and do what you want instead. I have proposed to myself that I just pass up Harvard, get a full-time job to pay off the loans, save up a little, buy a car, enjoy LA, maybe record some music and do some writing, apply for a Master's in East Asian Studies. Painted this way, it seems a pleasing alternative, and tempting. BUT:
  • Just as I expected to have some kind of life direction after three post-baccalaureate years messing about and was subsequently dismantled by the realities of my utter cluelesness, it is completely possible that spending two years doing a general East Asian studies thing will give me no surer direction, and I'll be back to exactly this spot right here right now, only with debt from the MA program, and I'd be about 30.
  • My mom and a very nice professor of mine hate the idea, for differing reasons, and all of which I have considered myself before anyways. According to them, it would be costly and purely exploratory, of no professional value, and essentially redundant and inferior to a PhD. I don't know if I entirely agree, but I don't directly disagree. I like the idea because I can keep doing languages and I can get some general exposure without committing to a particular discipline, but they are older and their opinions carry a lot of weight with me. It is scarier to move on in their disapproval.
  • Plus, the non-committal aspect of this is pretty prominent. I keep telling myself this is not a good reason, since A) Why am I in a rush?, and B) Why commit when I'm not sure?, but then again C) it may be a way to avoid thinking about commitment altogether.

This is all nowhere near as tangled and complex and tautological as it all exists in my head, and so you might imagine it makes me miserable every now and then. Alongside is this occasional desperate feeling of not wanting to make any choice at all, and it may be the worst feeling I have ever had, like I don't particularly care to see this life played out. Like there isn't any point.

These last few weeks in Berkeley I was supposed to enjoy wholeheartedly, but even as I went to visit Chelsea at her place in Folsom I couldn't really shake these feelings. I really let her have it. Yesterday night we went to a club in downtown Sacramento and danced really hard to rock music and then we went to Lyons at midnight and I ate some eggs and told her how I was feeling. I told her as much as I've told anyone. In the end, she just told me to eat up. I wasn't expecting her to say anything about it, but it was good to voice all my grief, imperfectly and inarticulately as it was. Actually, putting it into type helps too--it is totally inaccurate and the relief is temporary I think, but it sort of abstracts and organizes and virtualizes the issues in a way that makes them manageable and rational, and therefore trivial. When all you have is quiet and time, then they become real monsters in your head. Maybe, then, the short-term goal is to ignore the long-term, to keep busy and distracted, as a moving target, so that there is no way the shit can settle down and collect and fester. LA will be good for that.

Dan and I made tacos.

I think maybe it all started when I got a little glass teapot from my mom for Christmas. She gave me lots of other stuff too: a comic book by Chris Ware, a biography of Muhammad Ali that is one of my favorite all-time reads, and a multi-slot picture frame with some pictures of me in different stages of my life. You will see how these are all important things. I shit you not.

Two weeks in LA were the best winter break I had (I'll use the term loosely since I failed to resume anything resembling practical drudgery after such a "break" was over). Eat, sleep, drink, the company of friends. No funny business, just sedate and warm and free-feeling. Felt like home. Encountered semi-distant semi-lost high school acquaintances. Guitar. Nostalgia, but the good kind. Started on the long road of getting to know my dad better. Acquired new appreciation of family in general. Importantly, I didn't spend too much time in the company of intense thoughts regarding my past or my future, which is sort of a rare thing for me recently.

Back in Berkeley the first night I pulled out my new teapot and made some green tea. Then I set down in front of the computer to surf the web, like some thousand past instances of the same exact thing. Only this time around I knocked my cup of hot tea over onto my keyboard while I reached over to turn the volume up on my speakers. There was no immediate effect such as visible arcs of electricity or exploding monitors or grinding alarms. Windows kept chugging along. I went into crisis mode, shut the thing down, ripped the battery out, wiped it off. Then I set it on a towel to dry overnight.

The next morning my computer was the guy in the movies who is just barely hanging on, clutching a bellyful of shrapnel, when the hero arrives on time to receive a stern warning or inspirational speech from his moribund gasping buddy. After a couple of weird boots and freezes (which always imply much much worse than BSOD or segfaults or mandatory safemode or whatever) I decided that a general backup was in order. My email made it safely onto my backup drive, but halfway through copying over my personal data partition, there was a little pop (the CPU core popping off the base from the heat, due to fan failure maybe, which would explain the freezing) and I couldn't turn my computer on at all after that.

I'll put that computer ahead of my guitars, my old stereo, every book, and every pair of Chucks I've worn as the most useful thing I have ever owned. It was a trusty sonofabitch. I can't even begin to imagine how much time I spent at that same keyboard. I carried it with me up and down California, across America, over the Pacific six times. It'd recorded every meaningful word and scrap of music that I've ever come up with. The last three years were the very best and most fruitful of my life and I'd had that computer along for the ride, to write it all down, record it, and to distract the hell out of me with NBA statistics and video games. By the end it was jerry-rigged aberration along the lines of the Millenium Falcon, guts on the outside, hanging on by a thread, with a broken audio jack (replaced by an ugly-but-useful extruding cardbus substitute), a mass of black duct tape covering up the hole where the broken DVD drive had been, a 12- or 13-month old Windows install (absolutely, unforgiveably decrepit, thanks to said breaking of said DVD drive), and a golden sticker with my Chinese name on it. It said "Jeff was here" more than anything I've ever owned.

I wasn't so sentimental about it that I would refrain from taking it apart immediately, though. Twenty minutes after I'd declared it dead it was lying in several pieces on my bedroom floor, guts on the outside, and chunks of the frame chipped off from when I was feeling more forceful than patient. The hard drive and memory were intact, which meant there was a pretty clear path set out ahead for me to get back to the spot I'd been immediately before I knocked my cup of tea over and destroyed my computer:

• Step 1: Buy a new computer.
• Step 2: Get data off of old laptop hard drive.

Step 1, like most things in life, is generally pretty exciting except when you absolutely must do it and it becomes a restraint on your time and money. And thus your freedom, which was supposedly my general (and not very well thought-out) theme of my return to Berkeley. The plan had been to work as little as necessary, scrape together enough to get a beater of a car. I was tired of life-by-train-station and the lack of mobility, and I suppose part of me thought I'd be carrying a trunkful of guitars and amps to practice with a band I'd yet to start. Now, I had to sit on a new computer's worth of credit card debt and stare, mumbling and nail-chewing, at the inexorable erosion of my savings. Scratch the car, I thought.

That day I went to campus to shop around on the internet, and later on that night I invited myself over to my brother's place in SF. I guess I was kind of feeling lonely and displaced. I'd come back to Berkeley feeling good about the idea of progress, and I wanted to punch out a resume and a portfolio, write some stories and essays, make myself some recordings. Now that my computer was dead I couldn't do any of that--I couldn't even surf the web or listen to music--and I needed to go some place that wasn't so quiet as my apartment. As it turns out I saw Jim for about 20 minutes altogether in the couple of nights I was there, because he had to work late, but it was an improvement that I could just use his internet connection. You could say I was addicted to email and the web, and I would agree without irony, but that is still not quite right; what's better is to say that the internet is really part of my socialization, that it's become an institution of my life as much or more than TV is for most people. Not that I want to sound enthusiastic about that--in fact the idea of it still strikes me as somehow lame. But it is what it is.

At Jim's, with nobody around but his laptop, I felt a bit more secure. I was a little less alone. When I was in junior high, school got out forty-five minutes earlier than did high school, where my sister was, and elementary school, where my brother was. Every day I'd get home and I'd be alone, so I'd turn on the TV, not just for Duck Tales, but to hear voices. To feel connected to the world, or to have signs of life other than my own. The internet is like that for me. To have friends active on my buddy list approximates, to mediocre but more or less satisfying degree, half a dozen live bodies in the next room over. It's an ambient thing, more about the sense that you are in the presence of others than it is about any actual interaction.

I stayed in San Francisco for as long as it took to receive email confirmation that my new computer was on its way. It took me two days to clear up some confusion over the fact that my shipping address wasn't listed with my credit card provider (apparently for things as expensive as computers, online retailers like to validate shipping addresses so they don't send stuff to identity thieves) and it all felt way more complicated than it needed to be. Between the phone calls to my credit card company and the retailer and all the waiting for confirmation emails and such, I accomplished amazingly little. Jim had all his guitars laid out for me, but I wasn't feeling it and watched a bunch of his Firefly DVDs instead. I ate the snacks in his pantry and went through the last three or four Tazo tea bags he had on his counter. I've been mooching off of Jim fairly consistently since I came back from Japan. He'd take the check for sit-down meals and I'd lose the will to fight his generosity. I suppose I have been feeling poor and generally low on the pride since returning to California, and Jim knows I've been depressed and he's been very good about helping me out when he can. I think the shit needs to end, though. I don't want to be the elbow-patched unshaven mendicant uncle. After all, my kids are supposed to kick the crap out of Jim's kids; we already have a regime of brutal competition planned out for when they arrive and have finished their training.

On to Step 2. I got through the rest of the week taking full advantage of the generosity of other people. Back in Berkeley I got a hold of my pal Emil, who is a legitimately good friend of mine, but whom I called specifically because he had a car that could get me from BART to Emeryville, and also because he knew a lot about computers. I had him take me to CompUSA to get some parts we'd need to retrieve data from my laptop hard drive. The service there was a colossal disaster. We stood around for 20 minutes waiting for somebody to help us before we hijacked a display computer, looked up the part we needed on the corporate website, and found it ourselves.

Emil told me to call him whenever I wanted to go to his place to grab the data off the drive. I'd ordered the new computer with next-day shipping and I called my sister three or four times over the course of the first day to check the tracking number online for me, but the package didn't appear. It eventually came late in the afternoon a day later. The forty-eight hours or so that I spent confined to the apartment waiting for the UPS guy were bleak and hazy. In that time I don't think I saw another human face. The apartment was generally cold, and the food I made and ate generally bland. I passed the time in the company of books and movies that were depressing at best and horrifying at worst. I read Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, which is basically about the denial stage of grief and how complicated and painful it is. Also, The ACME Novelty Library by Chris Ware (given to me by mom), which was more genius stream-of-conciousness stuff along the lines of Jimmy Corrigan, only he actually managed to make it even more depressing. There was a strip about how a poor little kid promises to make a million dollars and take care of his mom, and then the kid grows up three panels later into an old man who is just happy he has thermal mittens. Then there was Hotel Rwanda, which is about how easy it is for a group of people to kill another group of people based on arbitrary distinctions, and how absurdly fragile society is in general.

My computer arrived just as Don Cheadle and his prodigal employee drove their van over an enormous pile of bodies. I have to say it was the least excited I'd ever been about getting a new computer, or any shiny and expensive new toy. I was feeling pretty displaced, and my first priority was to set things up to exactly as they'd been before. I'd ordered a faster, slightly more modern version of my old computer, and virtually nothing would be different except that I'd be down a couple thousand bucks and a week's worth of time.

It took me twenty minutes to execute yet another regrettable technical debacle. You may or may not be aware of how much a given computer's set-up is more "home" to its owner than the way he dresses or arranges his bedroom. For me this is borderline obsessive-compulsive. The desktop is arranged just so, with the music app icons in the upper left-hand corner, the key internet utilities near the middle, the quick-launch icons in a precise order. The hard drive must be partioned into three chunks, the first containing only applications, the second with music and other collectible media, the third slightly smaller with all of my personal data. The folder structure is the product of a ten-year-long evolutionary process. There is a logic and and a history behind every last little thing. The particular weird mix of obvious and non-obvious programs I use, their minute options, the view settings, the way the menus look, whether I like my tabs displayed as three or four spaces in the text editor. This is my ecology.

This is what I did: while reinstalling the operating system (ridiculous for most new-computer purchasers, but necessary to me for preceeding reasons) I had my backup drive hooked up to the computer, and in my haste I deleted its partition data while choosing where to put all the Windows files for setup. This is a process that I'd gone over a hundred times before without permanent incident, but six days after raining tea death over my old computer, I managed to blitz one-hundred gigabytes of music, photos, essays, emails, software, comics, and movies that I'd accumulated, through pains and tribulation and fastidious pruning, over the last two years. I found this extremely dissatisfying and unsettling. What followed were some hilarious technical gymnastics by Emil (5th-year computer science grad student) and me (former engineering student and psychological cyborg since 10th grade) to retrieve the data from the backup drive. Let me summarize briefly. "Deleting the partition" of a hard drive does not mean that you destroy the data, no more than tearing the binding off a book destroys the story it contains. But what is in theory an easy issue to rectify was actually a Colossal Time-Consuming Pain In The Ass. And we basically failed in our general goal, which was to rescue the partition in its entirety. After four tedious days I was able to get the really critical things--my older photos from Taiwan that never made it to CD--and nothing else, through means that seemed and still seem silly and less effective than they should be.

There was a point where I was ready to give everything up entirely. I was going to just re-partition and re-format the goddamn thing. I was never going to read those comics or watch those movies again. Half the music I didn't listen to anyway and the rest I could get again. What really hurt was the idea of losing the photos. Very seldom have I had the chance to savor the sentimental value of physical or semi-physical things. Were you to smash my guitars or burn my clothes or, god forbid, toss my laptop into bathwater, I'd be materially poorer but emotionally unsinged. But the idea of losing those photos was pretty powerful. It was a good shot to the gut. That sensation of loss is almost uniquely rare for me. I recall only one other time I'd felt that way, when I was at a week-long Boy Scout trip, my first time away from home for so long, and I'd misplaced or badly soiled an old t-shirt of mine and was just absolutely mortified to leave so obvious a sign of my safe and cozy life behind in an unfamiliar and faraway place.

This of course is an irrational feeling. That's to say that in my despair, I don't think I really knew what I could have lost had things been completely beyond retrieval. I was able to recover the photos but not the file structure or organization, and this forced me to go through the images one by one and arrange them again. That may have been a very good thing. By this time Dan had already come back, so it was a good opportunity to reminisce with him on past, and, I'm unafraid to say, better days. Lots of first-times, bizarre circumstances, forgotten people. How much younger I looked. The very specific palette of the moments I captured, determined by that particular camera and the particular places I'd been. It occurs to me that over time, what I'll remember from Taiwan and Berkeley and Japan and China will depend increasingly on the digital records I kept of them, and this in turn seems to me so arbitrary and unfair that I'm tempted to write down everything that I remember to keep the undocumented memories alive.

I was supposed to get cracking on my work portfolio and my zine and my solo album from the moment I stepped back into town, but it took me still another week to set my new computer straight and reconstruct my music collection. When I was done I archived my photos and other data onto DVD three times over, which means it will now take brute violence on top of plain stupidity to rid me of my sentimental scraps and knicknacks. I hope that will be enough for now. I eye with deep suspicion any vessel of water in close proximity to my computer. Any time I move one file from one place to another I worry that something might go wrong, that the copied file will come out corrupted and I won't have another backup. I am paranoid as hell right now. I'm really terrified of leaving things behind.

Well, I was wrong about what I said at the beginning. I believe "it" actually had started sometime in 2005 and has only incidental relation to Christmas gifts and computers breaking. I can pick a few of moments that stand out in my head as a crossroads of sorts to my existence. (Now I am aware of utterly ridiculous and put-on that kind of summarization sounds, especially with so little time after the fact, but it strikes me as significant at this stage, so at least it's useful for me right here right now.)

Number one was me in Japan, standing on a raised stage singing "Hey now, hey now, don't dream it's over..." (now seeming to me heavily ironic) to a crowd of a hundred people in marker-signed white t-shirts, some of them friends, some of them I barely recognized, all of them my community. This was the pinnacle of my musical career and easily makes the grade as one of the best things I've done, maybe not for its quality or impact on the outside world, but for the heavy and true-seeming sense that it was exactly what I wanted to be doing and where I wanted to be for that instant in time--not at all a common thing. Afterwards I put on my own white t-shirt, and got it signed by exactly two people. One was my good friend John, who wrote "The Economist" in reference to the magazine I sometimes carried around with me in my backpack, and also to the career I was set to take on. This I explained to the next signer, an acquaintance named Meghan. She frowned a little and marked down a counter to John on my t-shirt, which read "The writer and guitarist" (now seeming to me a heavily significant and perspicacious distinction, such as the dichotomy of my analytical and creative sides, or perhaps the conundrum of identity that I insist on cultivating and feel pressing, ever-more intense, on my sense of self-worth).

(While this is probably just incidental and irrelevant, M made my list when I was gossiping with another JET friend named Sonia and she asked me to name five JETs I'd consider dating. I didn't get to know M very well and she was older than me by a little and I felt like she was sort of at a different stage in life and in mindset than I was {and in retrospect I still think she was}, but I dug her quite a lot in the platonic fashion.)

Number two was turning 25. While the celebration of this had its specific circumstances that deserve acknowledgement on their own merits, they don't really play too much a factor in my immediate dilemma. The important thing here is the relative roundness of the number, and its implication to me about how far gone I am from college (a general symbol of purposeful screwing-around and hilarious, meaningless fuckups done in an atmosphere of freedom) and about where I should be headed (a slippery concept even to me, but more on that later). It also may just be, by coincidence, the age at which I became self-conscious, and I mean really self-conscious, about what the hell I was doing. As in, "What the hell am I doing?!"

Number three: Some time ago, maybe it was three or four months ago, when I was wrestling with my extension classes and they were winning, I became fixated with the idea that the best days of my life had past. That, if not on a physiological level, then I'd at least psychologically ceased to be young. That I would no longer be free to leave the country for a year just to see what it was like, no longer be free to waste time thinking about the myriad chimerical projects (The Band, The Novel, The Awesome Website, The Terrific Career etc.), no longer be free to change my mind, no longer be free in general.

Now I'll look back on some of my photos from the past three years of my life and wonder with morbid curiosity if I'll ever have it as good again. If by "good" I mean "low-responsibility funded vacationing", then the logical answer must be no. I am struck aghast that some events which I remember very clearly are now a year past. I struggle to answer some disturbing questions: how did things go by so quickly? What is it that I've done since reaching the crossroads, since turning 25, since coming home, that has been meaningful in any sense, be it financial or intellectual or social? I look back and the nostalgia is not warm but painful and escapist. I dig up old comic books I wrote in the 4th grade (ahem) and wonder when I ceased enjoying stories so much. I wonder where my optimism has gone. I wonder what it is I can believe in now that I've lost so much faith in what I'd once idealized and wanted to do.

Maybe it was Monday, after a couple weeks of accomplishing nothing at all and feeling lonely and not even really fooling around properly, I was staring at the frame full of photos of Young Jeff that my mom had given me. It has these images:

• Me, asleep in an really uncomfortable position, in one of those baby-seat-slash-food-tray things that kids in commercials cover in a mess of carrots and peas.
• Me, with a newborn gremlinish Jim, who looks just awesome.
• Me, red dinosaur shirt, smiling. I think it was my 4th birthday.
• Me, grimacing and of indeterminate mood, in our old backyard at the house on Frisca Drive.
• Me, karate pose, holding Quaker Oats chocolate chip granola bar, wearing what surely must be a t-shirt given to me by my grandmother in Taiwan.
• Me in Florida with yellow-framed plastic shades, drinking from a Sprite can half the size of my head.
• Me, now wearing glasses, with one Ernie Terrian, a stuffed bear/badger thing who was my best friend until, god I don't know, junior high, and may be the single best idea I ever had. He was my tiger in the Calvin & Hobbes sense and in the Life of Pi sense.
• Me, many years later, sometime before I left for Japan, with Jim and Mom at Skates, smiling maniacally. It is the best picture of "modern" Jeff that I've ever seen, and I never saw it until I got this picture set a month ago.

On that day, maybe it was Monday, I was sitting on my bed, holding this picture frame, crying pretty steadily. That was a complex feeling. Partly it was due to things completely unrelated to the picture. Partly it was because the pictures were so beautiful to me. I mean that in a completely non-superficial and non-egotistical way and I hope you get what I mean, because they are truly wonderful and amazing things that maybe only I can see. Partly, I think, I was mourning my past.

This is all depressing and moderately pathetic but also regret-free. In one sense I wish I were still in Japan, playing guitar and making funny faces at little kids, but then I recognize very clearly that that wouldn't change a single thing. I see this all as necessary; that despite the bullshit and the emotional toll, I need a philosophical and spiritual brick wall to smash into head-first at medium gallop. It's been a long time coming, maybe 25 years or so.

Wouldn't it be nice if that was all I had to say about myself and my private confusions? But it ain't so. I think next time I will tell you all about the future, where I am headed for the long term, and why I'm going to move back to LA at the end of Februrary.

You can get my 24-hour story, "Becoming the Teapot," in PDF format. It is a story about kung-fu and a kid named Joey James.

It took me about 21 hours to write the thing. I started at eight in the morning and turned in about five in the morning the next day. I probably could have stayed up for the entire twenty-four for editing but at the time it felt like I woulda been doing CPR on a corpse. I had the energy but not the will for it. I stayed within the rules mostly, except for the one where I couldn't touch it after the 24 hours were up. But I was reading over the story last night and I couldn't resist fixing some things up. If it's any consolation for the purists, it didn't go past fixing typos and cleaning up sentences for clarity and flow. Actually I thought about not putting the story up at all, because the idea was just to write for writing's sake, and also because I was afraid it wasn't any good. But I'm way too curious about what other people think about the stuff I do to keep it to myself. I once read this interview with Neal Stephenson in which he said he would still write books even if he were trapped on a desert island. Lots of successful writers love to talk like that but it is probably a lot of bullshit; writing is communication as much as it is creation, and the positive/negative/unexpected way people respond to your work is a big part of the motivation and what makes it interesting.

Well anyway, I hope you dig it. After having some time away from it and getting the chance to re-read it, I think it is both better and worse than I initially thought, for a final self-rating of eh. And there you have it.

Jim and me were cleaning out the garage at my mom's house when we stumbled upon a couple of ancient file boxes containing a bunch of school stuff from when we were small. I found copies of the junior high school news rag I used to write for. I found old preschool photos of me and a report I did on the state of Washington. I found a limerick I made in the 6th grade and a plaster impression of my 5-year-old hand.

The best thing that came out of that box was a 22-page comic book I made in the 4th grade called "Green Dragon vs. Mr. Radioactive". It's a gory ninja fantasy replete with spin-kicks, kidnapping, explosions, shootings, decapitations, and deaths-by-boomerang. The plot follows the adventures of the Green Dragon as he attempts to rescue his "scout team" from the clutches of Mr. Radioactive. Most of the action involves our hero assaulting robot-infested bases designed in the style of Bowser, King of the Koopas. These scenes appear to be lifted wholesale from so many classic 8-bit video game storylines, in which the protagonist is forced to complete many meaningless, tedious objectives (generally involving pits of lava and falling chandaliers made of spikes) before confronting the villain.

The quality of the art is pretty inconsistent. At nine years old, you can do legs, animals, and weapons, but not hands, machines, or poses. I can tell I was pretty concerned about continuity errors at the time--the scenes where the Green Dragon drops his scabbard or when his arm suddenly heals were obviously added after I finished the comic and realized that I forgot to draw in scabbards and arm blood after the first few panels in which they appear. It also kind of looks like I didn't understand that I could write the dialogue first and the bubbles later, because there is a lot of text that drifts over the lines.

When I showed it to Justine and Jason they gathered everyone around and Justine made Jason read it out loud. "Do the voices, too!" she demanded. So Jason did the Green Dragon (pinched skinny anime protagonist voice), Mr. Radioactive (confident muhaha baritone), the newscasters (sorta the same as the Green Dragon, only more constipated), and the bear (bear-voice). Justine kept pointing out little features of the comic that she thought was neat. She liked how I colored only a few things in the entire comic, like the Green Dragon, and fire, and blood. She also liked how I kept the Green Dragon out of frame, ninja-like for some of the panels. Of course for both of these cases I did them because I was lazy. The "selective use of color" was due to an unwillingness to color anything else, and if the Green Dragon didn't appear in a particular panel, it was because I didn't want to draw the poor bastard another time. So if I did something neat, I did it without being conscious of it, either by instinct or by accident. That's one really cool thing about being a kid. If the inspiration strikes you the right way, you can sit down for hours on end and churn out a couple dozen pages of comics without worrying about how clever you are, or if what you end up creating is any good at all. You're not worried about technique or craft or how people will react to you when you're done.

Well, anyway, I'm sure you want to read it. Knock yourselves out.

I'm finally going to do a 24-hour story tomorrow. The idea, inspired by 24 Hour Comics, is to write a complete short story, start to finish, in a contiguous 24-hour block of time. What really makes this kind of thing fun is if there are multiple people participating separately at the same time, but I picked the date a little too late to let anyone else know, and I think most people I know would deem it too crazy and time-consuming anyway.

Here are the rules I will set for myself:

• The story must have a coherent introduction, development, and conclusion, i.e. no significant hanging plot threads at the end.
• The story must be at least 5000 words in length.
• The story should be free of obvious grammatical mistakes and other mechanical errors.
• Every creative act--plotting, outlining, writing, editing, proofreading--must be included in the 24 hours. That means I cannot continue an old story, or write on plot seeds that have been going through my head over the last week.
• The 24 hours begin the moment I start thinking about the plot or setting or characters.
• I cannot fix a word after the 24 hours are up.

These rules are specific, arbitrary, and somewhat absurd. They have nothing (or at most very little) to do with the subject matter and the quality of the story-telling. They are designed to focus on the exercise of writing, in spite of perfectionism, exhaustion, sloth, excuses-making, and such bugbears that otherwise get in the way of doing something creative. These rules force me to come up with and develop a completely new idea--it can be derivative in aesthetic or theme, but not something I've thought a lot about before. They also completely preclude the chance of procrastination and require that I follow through to the end. I threw the word-count rule in there so that I don't work for only six hours and then call it quits to hit golf balls at the driving range. I think 5000 words is a little ambitious, but it's a target to work towards.

I sort of anticipate fumbling around with three or four ideas for a few hours, picking up steam around midday, and then getting completely miserable after the 12-hour mark. I will probably sprint through the last few passages, finish the job half-ass, and fall asleep six hours short of the mark. But it doesn't matter if the the thing is shit. The important part is that I actually do it. With any luck, it won't be completely embarrassing and you'll get to read it. If this works out really well, I might do the 24-hour song recording (or EP) in the future as well.

On the way to the department office to drop off some papers, I got stopped by a representative of Save The Children right in front of Act 1&2 Theater on Center Street. He stepped directly in front of me and offered up his hand. I missed his name, something Eastern European. He was tall and smelled like cigarette smoke, and he was wearing a dingy fabric headpiece which I think was supposed to be a pair of reindeer antlers. He opened up his binder of laminated info sheets, showed me a map of the world, pointed out all the different places where children were suffering. I listened patiently, and when he got to the page where I fill out my credit card number, I told him that I was very sorry that I couldn't help but I was a student and didn't have very much money. He said that he made eight dollars an hour and showed me that his shoes were broken, but at least he had a job and a pair of shoes on his feet, and that the people I would be helping wouldn't have shoes, or running water, or power. He said that we were all very comfortable in America, and that giving up my lattes and Jamba Juices once a week would make a huge difference for a whole community.

By this time I'd already made up my mind not to give him any money. It wasn't by any particular fault of his. I just sincerely felt that I didn't have much money and couldn't spare anything at the moment. So I told him I understood and offered to go to their website and get more information and learn more about their organization. He asked me what information I needed and suggested that I knew the problems were out there, and that I probably learned about them in school. I told him again I understood and that I was sorry. Inside I was sorry, but I was also feeling uncomfortable and wanted to leave. He started to talk again, and I told him another time that I understood and that I was sorry. As I started to walk away, he said I obviously didn't understand or else I'd help him out, which kind of annoyed me. I told him that I didn't think that was the right attitude for him to have and walked away.

That all left me feeling pretty confused. He'd gotten me to feel a little passive-aggressive, and on an issue in which I was playing devil's advocate to the moral high-ground. I resented his oversimplification of my comfort versus the world's plight. I resented how he didn't leave me any options for declining politely, that I was ignorant because I didn't make a donation. But then I realized the guy had been standing on a rainy sidewalk all morning asking the dregs of the student population to help out a little and getting polite, disingenuous rejections from everyone. To him it was hypocritical to make any claim of sympathy without any real action, because the tragedies were just too monumental. To him the world was falling apart all around this happy bubble and it was all too easy for us to help. I suppose it all seemed very ridiculous to him.

And I suppose, from a certain point of view, he was right. I've been thinking about buying a car and maybe a new computer and have been saving money for these things. I have been thinking about repaying the money I owe, and about feeling more secure about making the rent. There are certain things I could do to allow for the sponsorship of an impoverished child. The money is there. But the issue was just way too abstract to me to be willing to hand over money.

I have a lot of respect for my poor wet donation-seeking curmudgeon, but I wonder how much he can expect from others. I wonder if there is a way to avoid guilt on this issue. I think maybe not, because I think giving is based on sense of guilt for our fortune in the midst of others' misfortunes. To a logical extreme, though, it doesn't end until we have total equity. But we all draw our lines at one point or another. There is a dollar amount at which we say alright, that's good, I've done my part. We have to have those lines, or else much about the way we live would be unjustified. And I'm not defending the existence of those lines, or saying that the way we live is justified. Just that we happen to need those lines.

I think this is a piece of true religion in the modern day. We've (mostly) discarded with the idea of god-made man or the heavens circling the earth, but we require other semi-conscious limits to anchor us and give us a sense of security. There are many things that we prefer not to consider, perhaps because they are ugly or perhaps because what they imply contradicts and undermines what makes us happy. I somehow think life would be way too terrifying to face if we chose to consider all of those things in their full and unsavory reality, if we got rid of our psychic barriers altogether. But it also scares me a little how arbitrarily we are able to set those barriers.

And, look where I'm at now: The disapproving frown of Save The Children hasn't gotten me thinking about the poor per se--they've merely gotten me thinking about some vague metaphysical question about how our lifestyles are intertwined with our worldview. I guess I still don't really care that there is tremendous atrocity occurring all around. If there was a switch in front of me that would end all that, sure, I would pull it. If I were a billionaire, I'd write a few large checks and wash my hands of the matter. But in any case it would be giving in a disposable, throw-away, one-off sense. It wouldn't be sacrifice in any meaningful sense of the word.

That also makes me think how I wrote on all those graduate school applications how I wanted to study development economics (note this is not specifically related to the career anxities I've been having lately). On paper it is a nice thing to do, since you would be helping out the abjectly poor and the downright ill-fortuned people of the world. But do I really give a shit? Do I really, really give a shit? I actually don't want to know, because I'm afraid the answer might be "no." It's kind of part of the career-choice process these days to consider the moral ramifications of your prospective job; certainly I have this distaste for naked profit-seeking in a 2-piece navy blue suit, and I somehow think there would be more spiritual "value" if I were an artist or a teacher than, say, a computer programmer. But then, for the most part, none of those things I belittle are unnecessary by default. In fact they are important. So it seems what I'm after is moral cachet of sorts--I wish to be seen by others doing something that is altruistic in principle. But if that's the case, it would only be "moral" by coincidence. It would have nothing to do with my true instincts.

Or so I'm afraid.

I want to cease thinking about the long-term until I get back to Berkeley after the new year. The next two weeks will be pure Jeff Lee-style hedonism, which is pretty boring by most people's standards. These are my goals:

• Find excellent Christmas gifts for my family (tomorrow).
• Spend quality time with said family.
• Read as many books as possible, and watch as many movies as possible.
• Decline to blow Dad off yet another year, and actually join him in Vegas.
• Cordon off 24 consecutive hours to organize, write, and proofread a complete short story.
• Play basketball.
• Play tons of guitar, holy shit I will.
• Organize and execute a barbeque with Jim.
• Visit my friends and tell them how much I appreciate them.

Right now, as I write this, I am feeling strangely, uncommonly good about the prospect of all of this. I feel fantastic. Has it occurred to you how many times, after today, you will get to fly home and see everyone, to come home to Mom's cooking, to go to Vegas with Dad? Count them, or make an estimate. Put down a precise figure and see how that makes you feel. If you did it three times a year for thirty-three years, that would be one hundred times. We should be so lucky. We really should. And lemme tell you what: even a thousand times seems too few to me. A thousand sounds ridiculously low. Just absurd. We have so little time left.

I once knew this guy named Mark who was studying Chinese at the same school as me when we were in Taiwan. He was a bit older than me, married with a newborn kid, and ran a company based in Hong Kong that outsourced programming work to India. I was pretty suspicious of business-types, but he was perpetually relaxed and seemed at home in his own skin, and I didn't feel like he was a tool, so I liked to talk to him. He'd gone to Cal as well and he told me stories about his college days, like when he took elementary Chinese with his future wife, who was pretty much fluent in Chinese and just taking the class for the easy A. "She was a total sand-bagger," he said.

One day Mark took me aside and told me that one day I would have to go down University Avenue and go to The Cheesesteak Shop for a sandwich. He said they were the best thing ever. IB's Hoagies on Durant didn't even compare, he claimed. "The key," he said, "is the bread. They get it delivered there everyday straight from Philly." I promised him I'd stop by if I had the chance.

A little while later I was back in Berkeley to finish my degree and Mark's advice had pretty much faded away into a dark corner of my memory. My brother Jim and me took Japanese together (predictably we got no work done in that class, we were so busy screwing around), which finished right at lunch time every day. Probably once a week we'd head towards Durant and get IB's cheesesteaks and pearl milk teas--in retrospect an unfathomably wretched, gut-busting combo that by any sane estimate has shortened my life by at least five or six years.

I didn't get around to The Cheesesteak Shop for at least another two months after graduating. We were showing my friend Dan around town when we rolled by and I suggested that we give it a shot. Mark, at any rate, was right: they did serve the superior cheesesteak product, a savory, chewy, spicy, cheese-imbued bullet of meat, shot straight to your arterial lining. I tend to think the bread-delivery-from-Philadelphia part was bullshit, some storytelling embellishment device to give it more purist cred, but the place definitely reflects a certain old-school, tradition-bound aesthetic. The shop has the right kind of local dinginess, with wall-mounted napkin dispensers and the pages of the Oakland Tribune's sports pages placed at eye-level in front of the counter seats. When your order is done, which always takes longer than you'd expect, the cook, who is usually this woman with an ambiguously Caribbean accent, shouts out your name, and you hop up like an anxious child getting his turn on Christmas Day.

(In general, through her accent and the whine of the grill vaccuums, she is near impossible to understand. This, combined with the fact that the counter is surrounded by hungry, impatient assholes, makes for excellent times. Tonight when I was there she called for "Eddie!", and one guy got up and asked, "Did you call for Andy?" "Eddie!" she repeated, but it might as well have been "Andy". Later on, she called out, "Gabe!", and then I got up and asked, "Did you just say 'Jeff'?" She said "Gabe!" again, which caused some other guy to stroll up to the counter and say, "Did you call for Tim?")

The cheesesteaks themselves are basic by design, made with only five ingredients: steak, cheese, grilled onions, sweet peppers, and an "Amaroso's roll" (which is, admittedly, really good sandwich bread). The cook wraps them in foil and paper, and twists the excess lengths of paper tightly at either tip instead of folding it around, making the whole bundle quite a bit longer than the actual sandwich. It reminds me a little of how the foil around stadium hot dogs is pinched and rolled into points at either end. To me this is a big part of the presentation--it's sort of a perfunctory but functional way of packing stuff up, and is enough of a novelty that it may as well make the food taste better.

By contrast, the IB's cheesesteak has an over-complex construction, adorned with such hoagie-style excesses as veggies, mayo, and hot sauce. The flavors fight each other. IB's sandwiches now seem to me lacking in character, with the tartness of the tomato and pickle dominating the cheese, the hot sauce not exactly filling in for the absence of real peppers, and the bread passable but not quite chewy as you'd like. They make for a decent meal, but since visiting The Cheesesteak Shop, IB's just sorta makes me wonder what's the point.

Now that Dan and I live on 9th and University, two short blocks away from The Cheesesteak Shop, you'd think we'd be raiding the place nightly for dinner. But by my count I've only been there three or four times all year. We have terrible dietary habits, but a cheesesteak sided with seasoned curlies might just be on the wrong side of the guilt line for me. It is way too obviously a form of poison to be eaten with any regularity. This works out well anyway, such that the mystique of the object is preserved by the infrequency of its consumption, similar to how having In N' Out Burger as far as Pinole makes it a cause for celebration every time we get to have it.

There are a similar items of junk food myth that have lingered about in neglect, completely untested, even longer than did the Cheesesteak Shop cheeseteak: the deep-fried Snickers bar, the pastrami from The Hat in Alhambra, the taco from Del Taco #1, the kimchi burger at McDonald's in Taiwan. The list is probably longer, too, so I'm thinking I really need to get my act together. This is serious business and life is short.

My sister was telling us a story like this: It was holiday season when we were very young and she and my brother Jim were playing around by the Christmas tree. Back when we actually bothered to put up a tree in the living room, we liked to hang little shrink-wrapped candy canes on the branches. Jim was probably three or four years old and was already a huge fan of sugar, and so he'd enlisted my sister, five years older and much taller, to harvest candy canes from the tree for his immediate consumption. She kept feeding and feeding the little guy until he spontaneously vomited. Then our nanny, who we called Chen Po-Po, arrived on our scene and Jim started to cry. Chen Po-Po got angry and scolded my sister. I imagine small-time mayhem: plastic wrappers on the floor, Jim standing with his face smeared with red food coloring and saliva, bawling in a puddle of kiddie-puke, and Justine standing there with the "What, me?" expression in her eyes.

Almost as surely as fact, I know there must have been a thousand other equally funny and wretched scenarios that I have witnessed or been responsible for, but I'm at a loss every time I try to recall them. There are childhood stories that other people have that are detailed, lengthy, coherent, and funny. Some people can produce these kind of stories in bulk. When I relate this to my own inability to recollect much of anything at all, I think that these other people must be embellishing old small-talk yarns, or maybe just manufacturing them on the spot. There's simply no way you can have kept all that in your active memory unless you had a notebook conveniently on hand for all of those silly or important moments.

But I guess I am less skeptical than I am jealous. There is nothing about those kinds of stories that isn't excellent. They are great for parties. They make girls laugh. They are embarrassing and endearing. They remind you that you were once a tiny human and that once you ran funny with no particular destination but straight ahead. They are evidence of how far you've come and they preserve what you might otherwise have lost. For all of these reasons I wish I had more to share, but sitting here tonight, thinking about it really hard and wanting it bad, I come up with so little.

The following is the best that I could do.

One: drinking gasoline

At our old house on Frisca Drive we had a fireplace we never used. It had a mantle made of brick, upon which I nearly cracked my head open about a million times when sprinting past. Above that there was a big mirror.

One day my parents were cleaning stains from this mirror with a bit of gasoline, which they put in a short juice glass on the mantle. When you are small any translucent ruddy brownish liquid might as well be apple juice, so when I walked by I helped myself to a sip. I kept the gasoline in my mouth for a little while and made a little closed-lip squeal towards the kitchen where my mom was. Then I swallowed. Thus ensued a scene. My parents rushed me to the hospital, where I sat in a dark room for a while and was eventually pronounced healthy. For whatever reason my memory of this incident ends with me eating fried rice out of a soup bowl later on that night.

Two questions come to mind whenever I think of this one. First is why I didn't spit out the gasoline instead of hesitating and then swallowing. I don't remember the exact flavor of refined petroleum but I am pretty close to certain that it is nasty. Perhaps I didn't recognize that it was something such as gasoline, and thought that if it was in a juice glass, then surely it would be okay to drink. The explanation I like a little better is that I didn't want to make a mess of the floor, so I just took it down (however, this means that I did not consider either a) depositing the gas in my mouth back into the cup, or b) running to the sink/toilet/garden and spitting it out there). Secondly, I wonder why I thought any random glass of liquid was mine to drink. I think I was past the age of doing things like that (eg eating random particles from the floor etc.), and also past the age by which most people have figured out that if you want a glass of juice, you can just go to the fridge and get your own.

A third question just came to mind: why did we have a mirror above the mantle? In retrospect, it is a pretty weird place to put a mirror.

Two: sport

The first after-school sports team I joined was a t-ball team called the Angels. During one of the first practices, we'd been arranged into a line, standing shoulder-to-shoulder, and facing a similarly-composed line of gloved tykes. The idea was to throw a ball to the guy standing exactly opposite to you, and to catch the ball when that guy throws it back. For the latter my tactic was to hold my glove out and present an easy target for the thrower. At one point my throwing-partner sent a real winner directly at my head. This so violated my expectations (I was anticipating a throw towards my outstretched glove) that not only did I not adjust the position of my glove, but I did not move my head out of the way either. I took it in the face like any little boy at that age would, which is to say exactly like a girl.

(Note that I learned no meaningful lessons from this particular incident. After at least two other t-ball teams, and also team basketball and AYSO soccer, and the elementary school playground, and PE class in junior high and high school, I still did not really know how to catch a baseball. I'd matured to the point that I would respond to a hit or throw by vaguely extrapolating the probable desination of the ball and putting my glove somewhere in that vicinity. But that's not how you catch a ball. You catch it not by thinking about it, but by just catching the goddamn thing.)

Sometime later I was at a practice for my first soccer team and something similar happened to me. I don't recall the specifics, like whether it was an inbound pass or a kick, but I managed to take one to the face again. Generally I like to extend this story by saying that it happened again when I joined a basketball team, but I don't really have any such recollection. It's highly likely, but it would still be a complete guess to say so. Either way I have been afraid of airborne balls, flung, hit, or kicked, for as long as I can remember.

One awesome thing about that soccer team was that we were called "The Koala Kickers". I think most of my teammates at the time would've preferred some other stand-by youth soccer moniker, like "The Black N Blue Wrecking Crew" or "The Silver Bullets" (I think I played on a Silver Bullets team at one point), but I propose that those are tired, overdone, and, frankly, really gay. The Koala Kickers, on the other hand: they will knock you to pieces. They will make you a chump.

Three: tires and fear

One of the first friends I can remember making is a guy named Michael Cleary. This was either the first or second grade. I walked up to him one day and said I didn't have any friends, and he offered to be my friend. It was that easy. After that I hung around Mike all the time.

One day he introduced me to another kid that lived near him called Matt Bradley. Matt and I would become pretty close friends later on in elementary school, but at first I felt pretty neutral about him. I had my one friend and that was enough. At recess one day, the three of us were messing around on this bizarre circle of tires on the school playground. This was one of those classic pre-litigation sandbox disasters-in-waiting, composed of a pile of discarded radials attached at forty-five degrees to a large, suspended chain loop. We picked out a tire and put Matt, the biggest out of the three of us, on one side. Me and Mike got on the other side. We'd sit down and Matt would sort of drop himself down on the other side, causing the tire to see-saw and lift us up. Then we'd jump and lift Matt up in return.

What followed was actually Mike's idea, but that doesn't absolve me of much. The next time Matt would plop down on the tire, we'd pre-emptively hop off the tire so there'd be no counter-weight, so Matt would eat dirt. I guess it didn't occur to us that this was not really all that funny--we were playing with expectations but not much else. When we actually executed our little plan, Matt hit his chin or his cheek and came up crying and bleeding a little. The only thing I could think of was that I was fucked, and so I ran to the other end of the playground. I thought Mike was fucked too, but that wasn't his immediate concern. He stayed behind to help out his buddy.

I've always felt this: I sort of want that one back. If I could do it all over again, this would be on my checklist for things that ought to be fixed.

Four: ice cream, the whimsies of fate, and pride

When I was in kindergarten you could buy ice cream sandwiches for ten or twenty cents from a truck that stopped by the school every so often. These were the circular type of ice cream sandwich, with the hard cookies that didn't quite break when you bit into them. What happens when you clamp down on them with your five-year-old chompers is that the top cookie just detaches from the ice cream, and flips up into your nose, with the near edge of the stiff, intransigent filling acting as a fulcrum. As a dessert they are merely inferior, a travesty. But as an objective to be sought after and won, they were the Holy Grail. I think the first acquisitive sensation I can consciously recollect was the desire to buy and consume one of those motherfuckers.

There was one day I'd finally asked for money and brought it along to school. However much it was--a dime or two--was an incredibly staggering fortune, and I kept it in a plastic sandwich bag stashed away in my personal cubby. I was out on the playground when the ice cream truck showed up. I get the impression I was expecting it to show up much later, maybe at the end of school. I was completely out of sorts. I ran to the fence by the sandbox and told my sister, who was waiting on the other side, that the goods had arrived prematurely. She said Hurry up! Go get your money! So I ran back into the classroom, collected my loot, and returned outside only to find my opportunity long gone. The truck had driven away. What's more is that every single lucky bastard who'd been outside had somehow gotten a sandwich! The irony here is just terrific, but not perfect. I am troubled by certain plot holes, not least of which are the fact that it couldn't have taken me that long to get ahold of my money, and that nobody else had to run back inside to get their money. I suspect that on that particular day, the ice cream man had been giving out free ice cream, and that this may even have been a pre-arranged event, which provides useful explanation for why I'd chosen that day to bring my money--I knew the ice cream man would definitely be there, but I didn't understand the concept of "free".

In any case, irony. The shitty dimes in my shitty plastic bag must have felt like a ton of coal in my hand. But here's the really extraodinary part of the story for me. One of my classmates noticed that I hadn't gotten any ice cream, and in an astonishing, precocious display of empathy and generosity, asked me if I wanted some of his. I tell you that kid grew up to be a priest or a volunteer doctor or a human-rights lawyer or something.

Then, my own precocious display: I refused the ice cream. I'm sure I wanted it, but I think I actually wanted to savor the wound to my pride even more. I wanted to wallow in its bitter flavor. Fuck you God, you sadistic purse snatcher. Fuck you. Let the world acknowledge its sins against me and weep in remorse.

Anyway, my preference nowadays is for the rectangle-style ice cream sandwich, with the melty, sponge-like cookie. This has pretty much nothing to do with the story. I think this is objectively the better snack, for its texture and ease of eating.

I guess it varies a lot, but for these last few months, I have been dedicating the better part of my mental energy to worry, anxious fantasy, moral outrage, self-obsession, and flat-out terror. In the mornings I often wake up twenty minutes before my alarm clock sounds in a state of woozy dread. There is a nervous rumble in my abdomen and I am already processing blurry, cheerless thoughts about school or grades or whatever I'm doing that I don't much want to do. Sometimes the gloominess will clear up as the day goes on, but sometimes it intensifies. I go back and forth between feeling like everything's going to be all right and feeling like everything's going all wrong. In either case there's no end to it. I never seem to reach any satisfying conclusion in either direction and end up on the same cycle when I wake up the next morning ahead of my alarm.

As an exercise, I keep wanting to spell out all the specifics of what's been bothering me, but it is a confused mess, and above all I get self-aware about how perversely lame and tedious and it would be. I self-censor not just because I want to spare you from my petty miseries but because I also think my feelings are sort of illegitimate bullshit, like in the end I don't really have the right to them or I don't deserve them, like I should just shut the fuck up and get over myself. Which is in turn such a frustrating thought that I want to jump around loudly and break some shit.

I'm thinking it is probably time for a break. It is high time to cut the crap.

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.

I go through about 20 or so websites every day, which is a pretty limited selection considering how much time I spend on the internet. I feel like I'm missing out on tons of interesting stuff just because I'm so dug in to my surfing routine. I'm pretty curious what you out there are reading, so if you have just a minute, please post a reply and let me know. Anonymously even, if that's your style. Blogs and work stuff qualifies--what I'm looking for are the sites you read pretty much every day. Here's my list:

1. News sites: Google News, CNN, Slashdot, Yahoo Sports, ESPN, Salon, Angry Asian Man, and sometimes BBC Chinese and NPR if I get around to them.

2. Blogs: Yeah, I pretty much check these everyday, although most don't get updated very often: Don (I think Don wins the update prize among my pals, and that's a good thing), Albert, Johann, Wendy, Jim (the ultimate Chump of updates. I myself come a close second.), Grace, Evelyn, Jen, and Ben, Emil, and Zhaoqin.

3. Yeah, I admit: I spend lots of time on Friendster and MySpace. I wouldn't feel so self-conscious about that if I actually spent more time interacting with my friends, but I just sort of surf around profiles and stalk people from afar.

4. "Work": Lately I am spending too much time reading about macroeconomics and economic history. Yeaargh.

5. Nostalgia: Also, due to No. 4 above I have been having disturbingly intense waves of nostalgia for my easier days in Japan, so recently I have been checking out MieJETs and Up Up Down Down. I catch these tantalizing hints of old times but in the end I'm only reminded of what I'm missing. It is a lot like scratching a mosquito bite.

And there you go. I've got some more questions lined up for you guys, but let's see what you have to say about this first.

I am in the middle of drafting my statement of purpose for graduate school. It is a slow process and I get through maybe less than a paragraph per hour. I'm doing it in a text editor, since I realize from all my blogging and coding that I'm more comfortable staring at monolithic blocks of 10pt Courier New. That, and Microsoft Word reminds me my worst days of paper-writing in college.

Here is what I've got so far. Lemme know what you think.

Dear Harvard,

I hate rich people, intellectuals, and East Coasters. Enclosed are my ten (10) General Mills brand cereal box tops. Please send my free Economics PhD to:

Jeff
2018 9th St. Apt. E
Berkeley, CA 94710

Only 4-6 weeks till you start calling me Dr. Lee, you goddamn plebes! Bow down to your well-educated overlord.

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.

In the movies or in stories, life gets cute: all the big events fall into place just so. Maybe you left something back in the cafe and you head back to retrieve it, and then BAM! you run into your soul-mate, who by an incredible coincidence crosses your path on their way out the door (and happens to look like Jude Law or Kate Hudson). Or maybe you get fired by your intransigent boss, and you're all despondent and not thinking clearly, so you spend your last two weeks of pay on a motorcycle, upon which you are struck by a vehicle driven by your soul-mate who looks like Jude Law or Kate Hudson, and then this person nurses you back to life and falls in love with you, and all this because your boss was an asshole.

I think my life would actually be a lot simpler if it were dictated by such whimsies of irony and fate. I'd have a bigger sense of relief about it all. But instead everything just seems vague or intimidating or something in between. This might be what all the existentialists were talking about: life is tough because you're in charge, and you have to take all the responsibility all by yourself. You're not just free to make your own choices--you're obligated. Do I drive or walk? Do I do my homework now or do it in a week? Do I go for practical, or sporty? Do I choose a life of ease and irrelevance, or one of meaningful hardship? It would be easier if someone just decided for you.

Personally, I find that a lot of these types of decisions, especially the important ones, to be pretty scary. But they don't all have to be. I like to tell people the best kind of decisions are like choosing between chicken or steak. There are pros and there are cons, yes, but in the end you still get a taco. And these are even better when the decision has some significant bearing on your life.

I suppose I bring this all up because this semester is only halfway done and I'm feeling myself start to fray. I feel all kinds of pressure to do well because of how important these classes are to my graduate school applications, and this has soured me not only to the subject of economics, but to the actual prospect of being in school for five or six more years. There have been moments when I feel there's not much more I can take of this. Being in school specifically to get a grade sucks.

So, I'm starting to think I've got an attitude problem. It'd be nice if I just pictured grad school as a chicken-or-steak scenario. If I just relaxed a little, I'd realize that there will always be mid-tier school X's chicken sandwich to Harvard's filet mignon, and it would be just as satisfying and almost as tasty. Even more generally, it'd be nice if I just saw all of life as a chicken-or-steak scenario: grad school or not, there's still plenty of interesting things to see and do out there. But instead I get this gut feeling that it'll be a total trainwreck if I don't get into a top-15 school. That sounds bad, but I think it comes from some other piece of conventional wisdom, something that sounds like "opportunities aren't worth much if you aren't afraid of losing them" or "you have to set a high standard if you want to achieve something significant." I don't think I've been able to reconcile this sort of contradiction. I want to believe that there's nothing worth worrying about so much (outside of the well-being of your friends and family, I guess), but I also suspect that if you don't worry about what you have to do, you won't get it done.

Maybe it would help to keep sight of the big picture. Let me sort of generalize the main conflict in my life as my wanting the freedom (in terms of time and money) to mess around doing interesting things, while at the same time wanting to be self-sufficient and useful to society. So far, I think I have succeeded somewhat in the former respect, but have failed categorically in the latter. You might say that this all means that I just need to shut up and grow up, but it doesn't feel quite so simple. You might be right, though. I haven't really figured it out yet.

Anyway, during my idle moments this semester, I have entertained countless imaginary trajectories delivering me from where I stand now to some depressing or fantastic terminus in the future. Maybe I freak out over my performance this term and totally jump off the whole academia plan. Or maybe I just barely make it out with my sanity intact and then I get into a school I'm happy with and it turns out all of my worries were for nothing. Or maybe it's the same thing, only I end up not getting in anywhere, and I go to China to teach English or something, and then I end up becoming an overnight rock n' roll phenomenon. But this all gets back into wanting life to be a story. I feel this need for irony, some force that derives good from bad, to make any potential failure an ultimately meaningful event. I think this basically means I'm scared. Which is okay, but it's uncomfortable.

Yesterday was the most story-like my life has been in a long, long time. It's nothing that spectacular: I get of lecture in the morning feeling sleepy and I go to take shit in the men's bathroom on the basement floor of Morrison, which has been my favorite place to drop the bomb for like six years running now. When I'm done, I walk outside and notice a line forming outside of Hertz Hall, which is when I remember that it's noon on a Wednesday and that they always have free concerts there on Wednesdays at noon. I think I really want to go, but I decide it's more important to economize on my time and get some work done. So I head over to the library and sit down to get to work, and then I realize I hadn't brought the sheet of problems to work on. So I decide to work on the problems I'd already started on. I sit down and open up my notebook. Then I realize I hadn't even brought a pencil, and you can't do math in ink. Apparently I was meant to listen to the concert. Fate made me do it. The whole time I was watching the recital in Hertz Hall I kept expecting something huge to happen, as if I'd hear some amazing, inspirational musical idea or perhaps make deep and significant eye contact with a clever, charming, and single girl. I was more hoping for the second one, but neither actually happened. I had a good time, though.

At the end summer, right after I returned from Japan, I went to mainland China with my family. It was the first time I had ever been. I only spent two weeks there and stuck closely to the beaten tourist paths, so in a lot of ways it was as conventional a trip as I've ever taken. But China is a weird, confusing place, and two months after the fact I'm not sure what to make of it.

I was excited to go and excited to be there. It's easy to exaggerate the sense of gravity you get when you visit sites of grand culture and grand history--I tend to think people pay into that illusion more than it pays out--but there is a vague something about China that feels very old and huge. Much of its direct historical legacy has been destroyed, but you still get a sense of scale in both time and space. On a less lofty plane, you get a sense of incredibly cheap food and some very nice scenery. As with most other places in Asia, China has a good mix of the cosmopolitan and the downright funky to make everything seem motley and interesting. We left leaving behind a very long list of things that we didn't have time to see, do, or eat.

But often times I thought China was an ugly place. Part of this, I'm sure, is that seeing China through the lens of its tourist industry is a twisted and awkward experience--high on exotic cachet, but full of lamely obvious fakery and genuinely depressing scenarios. The goal of any tourist machine is to make a spectacle of a place and then sell it, and I think China is new to the game and happens to be pretty bad at it. But I sort of suspect it this is indicative of other things going on in Chinese society. We ran into a lot of people who were angry and purposefully unhelpful, or way too eager to take advantage of their fellow man. If China were a person, she would be too busy and too ambitious and too poor to have a sense of humor. We saw fabulous suburban developments built up next to dusty shantytowns. If China were a mythical beast, it would be one that eats pieces of itself and somehow manages to grow larger. I suppose I saw a lot of this coming beforehand, in what I'd read and heard, but as with most things, it is hard to appreciate your expectations until reality sets in. Or, your expectations were off by some degree. I didn't think China would be so harsh and abrasive.

At this point, I suddenly feel the need to go back to writing something redeeming about China, but that isn't actually necessary. There's no such evaluation of a place that sums up the positives and negatives and leaves us with Good or Bad. The best I can say is that China is an interesting and very fucked up country, and I haven't seen nearly enough of it to say any more. I also feel the need to write something about what it meant for me to finally get to China (or if it was supposed to mean anything), but I think I might leave that for some other time. Let's get on with the photos.

The first part of my trip was a group tour through southern China. This took us through Kunming in Yunnan Province, purportedly the city with the nicest weather in all of China. The city sits on the edge of a lake called Dianchi, which is some dozens of kilometers in breadth but averages a depth of only a few meters. According to our tour guide, industrial runoff hasn't destroyed all life in the lake but has instead made the water far too nutrient-rich, which itself is a big ecological problem.

A temple for Guanyin, Goddess of Mercy and/or the Sea, in Kunming. I repeatedly made the claim that after a year in Taiwan and another year in Japan, I had had enough temples for the remainder of my life. But this was actually a very cool temple.

A man-powered truck at the Guanyin Temple.

Still in Kunming, we found a calligraphy exhibit near an old scholar's retreat called Daguan Lou. They had in residence China's first national calligraphy champion after the Cultural Revolution. For a relatively insignificant fee he scrawled out several impromptu poems based on our Chinese names. Here he is composing a good fortune poem for Justine and Jason.

It was funnier at the time.

The Stone Forest is Yunnan's most famous natural attraction and is predictably packed with tourists. Chinese people have markedly different tastes than what you are probably used to: they carve and paint huge words into unique, ancient limestone formations and call it an improvement, whereas you'd call it graffiti. The landscaping around the rock formations is manicured to the level of certain expensive golf courses. This, coupled with the unending throngs of visitors, has the effect of turning the Stone Forest into a mountain-themed Disneyland queue with a two-hour bus ride at the front of the line.

The mountains around Guilin, in Guangxi Province, might be China's most recognizable natural scenery. Most of China's classical landscape paintings were intended to reproduce the sensation of gazing upon these very mountains. We got to see them from a tourist boat floating down the Li River. Upon the sun deck and looking to the right or left, you could see an endless succession of these very weird and peculiar mountains, shrowded in fog. Looking ahead or behind, you could see an endless succession of tourist boats.

Jason sketching the landscape. Pretty much everyone else on the boat was taking pictures. It occurred to me how strange tourist trips like this could be, with everyone spending so much time and energy just taking pictures. It's like you paid a thousand dollars to fly over the Pacific to play with your digital camera and take pictures that are most likely inferior to whatever you could buy in the guest shop. I can accept that you want to record your own memories, but if you spend most of your time staring into a viewfinder or an LCD (which people do), then you really aren't having a memorable experience in the first place.

Mom on the boat. Originally only Jason, Justine, and I would go to China, but the timing worked out so that Jim and my mom and my mom's friend could come along as well. That's a really rare opportunity that will probably come less as time goes on.

Jim kicks your ass.

After a week on a guided group tour, Jason, Justine, and I took off for Beijing, which is a fascinating, frustrating, and really polluted city. We made our way to the Forbidden City only to find much of it under renovation. To me the Forbidden City is the most representative historical tourist attraction in China: massive, crammed wall-to-wall with tourists, suggestive of past wealth and grandeur but mostly empty of any real content and probably built-up and re-finished with the middle-class consumer in mind. While I'm glad I went, I think the best part of that day was just riding bikes around central Beijing.

This really long open-air hall was the most pleasant part of the Forbidden City. Monotone, subdued, and peaceful. It was here that I saw the best Engrish t-shirt ever. It was a portrait of Donald Duck labled "DONALD DUCK: HE IS A WINNER". There are unintentionally profane t-shirts all over Asia that are funnier, but none that I've seen have made more sense yet been more ridiculous.

The Great Wall, on the way from Jinshanling to Simatai. Based on this one experience, it is the only way to see the Wall. After a long bus ride that takes more time than you think it should, you get a 4-hour moderately vigorous hike over a big, crumbling chunk of wall. There are very few tourists and the structures feel un-reconstructed and authentic.

Climbing up and down the Great Wall might have been the best part of our trip. The only disappointing part was the presence of jaded and impoverished merchants positioned strategically along the entire trail. Some of them cozy up to you with chummy conversation at the start of the hike but don't make a pitch for half an hour or more. And the entire time you just know they're going to try to sell you something, and it's on your mind the whole time. While I think those kind of tactics are in bad faith, I have to respect the effort involved. In retrospect I probably should have bought a t-shirt or a can of Coke, because if I can spare a quarter for a dude sitting on his ass on Telegraph, then I can spare a bit more for someone trying to sell me something on the way up a steep old wall.

This photo almost worked, but then when you look closely you realize they aren't even pointing at the same thing.

I am in Berkeley now, but I thought I would take a break from doing generally nothing to share some of my pictures of China with you. Tonight's theme is:

小皇帝, The Little Emperors, or J.W. Lee's Gallery of Spoiled Little Bastards

Take a rapidly developing place like China and then make it so everyone can only have one kid. Give that kid a couple of parents who prefer boys and are finding themselves flush with disposable income for basically the first time in their lives. Throw in KFC, MTV, ADD, and MSG. Out from the furnace emerges China's "little emperor" phenomenon, a widely-recognized demographic trend that you can experience for yourself walking around the vicinity of the Wangfujing Snack Alley in Beijing.

We encountered this despicable creature scurrying about recklessly, crying to his parents/manservants, "Buy me this! Buy me this!" It was at this point that I decided I would make a concerted effort to document such encounters, with the ultimate goal of putting the results on the internet for all to mock. Because if making fun of fat kids isn't classy, then nothing is. And you know I'm all about class.

I caught Fatty McFatt here mid-bite and double-fisting, and you can imagine that I am endlessly proud of the resulting image. Yes, that is his real name.

Sorry about the blur on this one. As I shot this picture I was hurtling towards this kid at a high speed, unable to resist the gravitational pull of his incredible mass.

Quick! Somebody get this kid a first-class ticket on the express train to fat camp!

This kid is so fat that when he sits on a quarter, a booger comes out of George Washington's nose, followed by a pickup truck, the complete works of Shakespeare, a T-rex skeleton, the wreck of the Titanic, and the iceberg that caused the wreck.

When I first saw this kid he was doing the same thing with his mouth while his dad was holding him and it looked like he was trying to eat his dad's head. I got this shot after he actually finished eating his dad.

I saw this kid on a hill at the Summer Palace, so I asked him why he was pouting. He explained to me that he was pouting because he was a chubby little bitch.

Upon a subway platform I happened upon this thundering tyke urinating into a trash can as his mother held him up by his armpits. It was maybe the