A Live One

The weather is finally getting nice...well...nice-er...and because this past Saturday was truly lovely (San Francisco weather!) Michael and I decided to play "tourists at home" and walk down through The City, along the river, and end up at the Tower of London.

It's a neat walk from our place down through The City to the river. We decided to walk right past the Swiss Re building (known as "the Gherkin," but which I can't help but call "the Pickle"). It's debatably ugly - in shape at least - but has some seriously redeeming geometric qualities:

It's also right across the street from the Lloyd's of London building which is also a feat of modern architecture, though of a strikingly different sort:.

Frankly, I hate it, but it does make for some cool pictures.

One of the things I love about living somewhere that's been around for longer than a few hundred years is the juxtaposition of old and new. I took a conference call the other day in the square next to St. Paul's Cathedral and tried to remind myself that the beauty of my surroundings should trump the idiocy on the phone. Somehow, it's easier to appreciate that kind of beauty on the weekends:

We eventually made it down to the Tower and found that it wasn't horribly crowded. (Crowded is - of course - relative in London. And I did overhear a southern drawl expressing surprise that the ice cream vendor didn't take American money. Sigh.) When I took the picture below, we were planning on walking across the bridge after we finished at the Tower. We decided to leave that for another day, but it's still a cool view:

Yes, this dude is actually guarding the Crown Jewels. He marches, too.

The jewels were sparkly and all that, but frankly a bit disappointing. I'd rather see Diana's dresses (heh). Besides, I was much happier to be outside. Indeed, I have photographic proof that Spring is FINALLY here. Thank God.

(Note: The picture above is also supposed to be where the ravens usually live, however they've been kept indoors since February as a preventative measure against bird flu (them getting, not giving...).)

I walked home from work tonight, too...it's finally light late enough that I can make the hour's walk and get home before it's dark. It's not the prettiest walk ever (High Holborn to Newgate to Bank to Bishopsgate...) but with Phish's NYE 1993 on my iPod and just a little bit of blue sky it was almost perfect.

Posted by jmakunas at 09:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Malta. Why Malta?

We wanted to go somewhere for the long Easter weekend that met a few simple criteria:

1. Warmer than London
2. No longer than 3 hours on a plane
3. Warmer than London
4. No obligation to do anything "touristy" or see any sites
5. Warmer than London
6. Someplace we wouldn't normally go, or wouldn't go someday from the States
7. Warmer than London

Research on Expedia presented us with a few options...we ruled out Turkey and Morocco (violated Rule #4) and Dubai (Rule #2) and ultimately ruled out the Canary Islands just because I couldn't bring myself to go back to Tenerife. So we settled on Malta, found that a new Starwood hotel had just been opened in one of the little bays near the main city, and booked our holiday.

A quick synopsis (illustrated):

Thursday:

Go to the airport ridiculously early so I can do one last conference call in the relative "quiet" of Heathrow Terminal 4 the day before a four-day weekend.

Buy "Julie and Julia" in the bookshop on the way to our gate and proceed to devour it uninterrupted from the time we sit down to wait for the flight until we arrive in our hotel room in Malta, where I finish the last 10 pages before we go to bed at about 3am (late plane, hour time difference). (Yeah, it was a decent enough read; it inspired me to make Julia's Potage Parmentier (potato and leek soup) for dinner tonight.)

Friday:

Drag ourselves out of bed at 11 and head out to explore. Walk approximately 10 minutes, find a restaurant overlooking St. Julien's bay, park ourselves and have lunch in the sun.

Walk back to the hotel. Nap.

Wake up to go into Valetta to see the Good Friday processions. Ride one of the really cool busses (picture later).

Take a lot of cool pictures, but can't seem to quite figure out the "action" setting on the camera so many of them are blurry.

Watch a veritable parade of scenes from the death of Christ, and people dressed as Christ, his disciples, various soldiers, Pontius Pilate, a random Pharaoh, characters from the Old Testament, a few marching bands, lots of cute kids in costumes, hooded penitents, priests, nuns, various devout churchgoers, and about 100 men dressed in black suits at various intervals who had to be the Maltese Mafia. Listened to the story of the resurrection in Malti.

Take the bus back to the hotel, eat dinner, sit in the bar until after midnight drinking Brandy Alexanders and Frenet Branca.

Saturday:

Wake up at about 11 again. Walk along the coastline into Silema.

Try (and fail) to find lunch in Silema. Take a pretty picture of Valetta across the bay.

Ride one of the cool busses back to the hotel.

Eat lunch. Nap. Go for a shockingly good dinner at a restaurant called "The Kitchen" that I had spotted out the window of the bus earlier. Return to bar, drink Brandy Alexanders and Frenet Branca until past midnight again.

Sunday:

Wake up at 10 (shock!). Stay in bed until 11 reading and drinking crappy instant coffee. Go for massages in the fancy new spa. Have lunch in the bar, drink fruity drinks, finally make our way outside for a walk at about 3:30. Walk along the coast the other way to the Paceville area. Look at boats. Find a cannon.

Have a drink. Walk back. Nap. Go to dinner. Go back to bar.

Go to bed and get all of 3 hours sleep. Thanks, Expedia, for making the cheapest flight out of Malta on Monday the earliest as well. Get back to London. Unpack. Nap.

Sadly, no Brandy Alexanders.

Cheers!

Posted by jmakunas at 10:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This morning, we were here.

It was lovely. More later.

Posted by jmakunas at 10:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What am I listening to these days?

Shockingly, it's the same three albums over and over and over:

My Morning Jacket: "Z"

JQ's been trying to convince me for months that this is one of the best albums of the past year and you know what? He's right. It's Air + Radiohead + Uncle Tupelo + The White Stripes without being derivative or identical to any one of them. I've said a million times that it's hard to write a good pop song...these guys are writing scary good pop songs with a lot more to them than you'll hear on your first listen. Maybe that's why I've listened to this album at least twice a day for the past two weeks.

Listen to "Knot Comes Loose" and then go buy the album.

Aimee Mann: "The Forgotten Arm"

As far as I'm concerned, there's nothing bad to say about Aimee Man. Ever. This album is more mature, more cohesive, and more achingly beautiful that anything she's done before. And it's pretty and witty and tough and tender and everything that she does better than almost anyone else out there. Bachelor No.2 will always be the soundtrack to which I fell in love with San Francisco. There's a good chance this album will be the same for London...I may not fall in love with the city in the same way, but I'll always associate "Little Bombs" with the winter flowers outside St. Paul's.

Listen to "Video" and then go buy the album.

The Arcade Fire: "Funeral"

I'm not one to buy into the New! Indie! Hype! that's dished at every young/angry/punky/pretty band out there. But I admittedly bought this album because people I respected (and Trey) were saying that the Arcade Fire was the brightest thing out there. The fact that this is still on repeat probably bears out that hyperbole. It's one of those brilliant end-to-end albums that manages to be simultaneously gorgeous and gritty and really, really interesting. I do wonder what they're going to do next and which of their many obvious influences are going to win out...here's hoping they continue their unique trajectory.

Listen to "Rebellion (Lies)" and then go buy the album.

Posted by jmakunas at 10:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Interesting occurrence at our house two nights ago:

M and I were both dead asleep at midnight when we heard (and felt) a major crash and heard glass shattering. We though it was the garbage truck (they come late at night on Thursdays and make a lot of noise), but then about 30 seconds later we heard it again and felt the building shaking.

M jumped out of bed to look out the window and then turned around and yelled "Someone is BREAKING INTO OUR BUILDING! DON'T MOVE!" and sprinted for the front door. (Of course, I think that means that we have people charging up the stairs, but he just wanted to make sure we were locked and bolted. Which we were). There's no way I was just going to sit in bed and let this happen, so I dashed after Michael and called the emergency services number (which serves police, fire, ambulance, and coast guard, apparently. Just in case Curtain Road ever floods). While I was trying to get through to the police Mike went back to the window to see a few guys (2? 3? 4?) run out of the office that's on the ground floor of our building and take off on mopeds with a bunch of laptops.

(Note: While it was super-trippy and somewhat cool to hear a clipped voice answer the phone with "Hello, New Scotland Yard," I was wholly unimpressed with my ability to get through to the police. What about "I live at [building number, street name, post code] and someone is breaking into our building right now!" is so hard to understand?!?" I finally gave the phone to Michael, and he couldn't get them to recognize our address, either. Not comforting.)

Anyway, while we were on the phone, a police car comes flying down our street (the people in the building across the street called immediately, as they saw the whole thing too). We hang up with Scotland Yard (who still haven't found our address yet) and M and I and our downstairs neighbors Ollie and Lorna all hang out the windows screaming down at the cops about what we saw. We had all been asleep and all had seen (and heard) different things, but the stories all matched.

Ollie and Lorna are lovely – we don't know them that well at all, but they're our age, creative types, and do a lot of what we do (cook at home, play funk music, have friends over). Ollie's always struck me as kind of a tough bloke himself, and my favorite quote of the night came from him, leaning halfway out their living room window, shirtless, bed-headed, still with the phone because he was calling 999 too, yelling in his thick accent "OY! Then the fat one grabbed a laptop and took off on the moped!" (See...there was humour!)

The next morning as I was leaving for work the people who own the office that was robbed were outside and I got to talk to them. Apparently the robbers seriously warped the security gate somehow - maybe with a crowbar, but maybe by ramming a car into it (which is called a "ramraid," I guess, and somewhat common in Britain) or hooking it to a car's bumper and pulling - and then smashed the shit out of the security glass behind it. They made off with 2 G5 desktops and 3 laptops (they must have taken the computers the first time and the laptops on the mopeds). Very fucking scary.

What we can't parse out is whether the robbers were super duper stupid or really smart. Our street is well lit, well trafficked, and has a ton of security cameras. It gets constant foot traffic at all times (more humour: drunk pub/club-hoppers wandering down the street gawking at the cop cars and crime scene unit and four barely-clothed people hanging out the windows shouting) The office was right under the street lamp and they made a massive amount of noise. However, they must have had a plan, since you can't just throw a G5 on a moped and no one wandered by when they were carrying out the job, so they had to have been working with someone else or had lookouts or something. Yuck. M thinks maybe it was a gang initiation or something where brazen violence was encouraged. The thought of someone casing our apartment makes me ill, so I'm choosing to think it really was random. We haven't heard anything about the case, but we'll find out what's happening eventually.

I guess that living in the city is...well...living in the city.

Posted by jmakunas at 03:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Uno mas, por favor

How long do we have to wait before we can go back to Amsterdam without looking weird? More than two weeks? Dammit.

In other news, they announced the High Sierra Late Night schedule today.

Once again, we'll probably be seeing something each of the four nights, despite SWEARING we wouldn't go all-out late night again this year. We'll probably discuss our potential late night plans (will we pay to see Umphrey's? Can I hold out all the way until Bisco? MMJ or GAT? or ALO? Geez!) at least once a week until we leave in June. The countdown has officially begun.

Frankly, I'm just thrilled that Tea Leaf Green's headlining a Saturday night late night show in a bigger venue this year and that they're not up against anyone I remotely care about. I don't even see caring THAT much about all four mainstage closers unless they add a Claypool or a Galactic (or maybe a Yonder, but I've got to be in the mood for that...) so maybe I'll get some sleep from 9 to midnight or so to rev up. That's a nice nap (and it's nice and cool then, too).

This has been quite a bright spot in a big bad week, indeed.

As the kids say....

Posted by jmakunas at 09:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Hello little fella. You've changed my life.

For my 30th birthday this past January, M gave me one of the best (and coolest) presents I've ever received: that nifty little device you see above called Squeezebox.

Basically, this shiny little thing connects to our computer over our wireless network and allows us to access and play ALL the music on our hard drives (all 100 gigs of it...no...I am not kidding...) regardless of file type, location, etc. through our stereo.

I cannot overstate how amazing this is. 100 gigs is a LOT of music, yo, and it's very hard to manage it all. It takes time to burn, label, and archive all the live stuff we have onto CDs (we're both really anal about how this is done, as I'm sure you can imagine, so we're really slow at doing it...I have hundreds of CDs that I haven't labeled yet and there's just so much music we haven't even attempted to burn). There are shows that I've wanted to listen to for years that I can't because they're not on a CD or in MP3 format for my (also overflowing) iPod. Now we can (and do!) listen to whatever the heck we want. And since I've already ripped a lot of our CDs onto the computer for my iPod, it's totally cut back on the time we have to spend searching through the massive binders of CDs we brought with us. (Yes, we brought ALL our CDs with us...they took me 4 days to pack. I kid you not.)

It also plays podcasts and internet radio, which has been super-cool (I highly recommend the awesome mix of funk, rap, and old-school hip hop on WeFunk radio from Montreal) and we've actually mixed up our standard Sunday morning newspaper music (the Dead) to include some great stuff from nugs.net.

So today I was working from home and we turned the Squeezebox on "random" to see what it would spit out. First song...Stevie Wonder...ass-shakingly fantastic. And then, out of 100 gigs of music, the next song the thing picks is...more Stevie. Heh. It got a lot more random (and fun) from there on out though. I especially liked the old school/new school Space > Triple Wide and the 36 minute LMLYP from Ween, which pretty much encapsulates everything I love about that band in one dirty, dirty song.

Ultimately, the Random feature made for a pretty cool setlist. (And it was MUCH better than the shitty dance music that's been blasting through Marketing in the office these days.)

...read on to see what we listened to today...

Stevie Wonder: Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I'm Yours from Signed, Sealed And Delivered
Stevie Wonder: Living For The City from Innervisions
Grateful Dead: Dark Star from Winterland Arena 2-24-74
Phish: Llama from Drum Logos, Fukuoaka Japan 6-14-00
Stereolab: Three-Dee Melodie from Mars Audiac Quartet
Les Claypool: Highball with the Devil from Tipitina's 5-4-04
Phish: The Lizards from Deer Creek 8-13-96
moe.: Spine Of A Dog from L
Phish: Down With Disease from Worcester 11-28-98
Phish: Birds Of A Feather from Portland 7-15-98
moe.: Sweet Emotion from Stubbs 11-10-00
Jurassic 5: Break from Power In Numbers
Phil and Friends with Trey and Page: Alabama Getaway from The Warfield, 4-15-99
Grateful Dead: Loser from Cornell 5-8-77
The Slip: Soft Machine from Main Hall, Montreal, QC 3-2-06
Project Logic featuring DJ Logic: Ron's House from Great American Music Hall 11-09-00
Tea Leaf Green: Harvest Time from Moe's Alley 12-15-05
Grateful Dead: Space from Oakland Coliseum 12-28-88
Umphrey's McGee: The Triple Wide from Murat Egyptian Room 2-26-05
Ween: LMLYP from Live At Stubb's
Grateful Dead: Here Comes Sunshine from Boston Music Hall 11-30-73
The Jayhawks: A Break In The Clouds from Smile
Phish: Foam from The Keswick 11-25-92
Brain Damaged Eggmen: I Am the Walrus from Jam Cruise 2006
Widespread Panic: Rock from Backyard, Bee Cave, TX 7-20-02
Tea Leaf Green: Planet Of Green Love from Moe's Alley 12-15-05
Galactic: Tippi Toes from Jam Cruise 2005
Rufus Wainwright: 11:11 from Want One
Tea Leaf Green: Panspermic De-evolution from Cafe-Club Fais Do-Do 10-21-05
Talking Heads: What A Day That Was from Stop Making Sense
Grateful Dead: Let it Grow from Winterland Arena 2-24-74
Phish: My Old Home Place from Deer Creek 7-21-03
Medeski, Martin, and Wood: Sasa from End Of The World Party (Just In Case)
Funkadelic: Let's Make It Last from Cosmic Slop
Beck: Tropicalia from Mutations
Trey and friends: Speech from the 2002 Jammys

...and then I had to jump on a call. Which was fitting, as the last words from Trey's speech are "Stop. This. Shit. and give us back our Phish!" Indeed.

Posted by jmakunas at 07:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

You may love or hate Jim Pollock, but I've decorated my living room around him.

Michael found a horrible version of the 20th Anniversary montage that was shown at setbreak at Phish's 20th anniversary show (natch) on You Tube today. It's like one of those bad bootlegs from China: someone with a shaky handheld videophone trying to tape what was shown on a larger screen (and it comes with all the ambient noise, bad color, and poor zoom skills that you'd expect from shit like this). I can't in good conscience re-post it.

Of course I loved every minute of it.

It's fantastically indulgent. Made by Cactus, it's the ultimate insider's guide to Phish, and if you don't already know and love the band, this certainly isn't going to change your mind. But for those of us who did, it's really, truly lovely. I often feel that despite all the amazing things that I've done and experienced since the boys broke up almost 2 years ago my life hasn't been quite the same. Watching the video of their high (and low) lights since 1983, I know it hasn't.

URGH.

Anyway.

In the spirit of celebrating what I loved about Phish, here's a song that inspired one of my favorite moments ever at a Phish show. Alpine Valley, 2004, standing in the line for the womens' bathroom after a ripping set, the two girls ahead of me were engaged in an animated discussion about that night's show that proved for once and for all that Phish girl phans are as hardcore as anyone else. "Funky fuckin' Bitch, man!" the girl ahead of me said, "Funky fucking Bitch!"

"I know!" her friend responded. "I haven't seen that in 89 shows!"

Funky (fucking) Bitch, indeed. Enjoy.

Posted by jmakunas at 10:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Not. Amused.

Sigh. Since I sent out a mass email designed, in part, to drive traffic to this blog I had hoped to have more interesting content here than a meme. Alas, some of the entries that I'm working on aren't fully developed enough to post, and some others are actually kind of a secret, so meme it is. Check back tomorrow (or read the archives!). This one courtesy of Rappy.

1) Who is the last person you high-fived?
That's discouraged in Britain. Too American. As is whooping, yee-hawing, and yodeling.

2) If you were drafted into a war, would you survive.
I'd probably either be a cook or a computer dork, so probably.

3) Do you sleep with the TV on?
I can, but we don't have one in the bedroom, so no.

4) Have you ever drunk milk straight out of the carton?
Eew, no. Have you ever seen milk crust?

5) Have you ever won a spelling bee
Nope.

6) Have you ever been stung by a bee?
Yep, once on the bottom of my foot when I was little (which I remember, 'cause it hurt a LOT) and once on my finger in the lunchroom at New Trier.

7) How fast can you type?
Fast. 70wpm or so.

8) Are you afraid of the dark?
Sometimes. Sure. Who's not?

9) Eye color:
Grey...ish.

...more...

10) Have you ever made out at a drive-in?
Those still exist?

11) When was the last time you chose a bath over a shower?
Last week, maybe? I love baths.

12) Do you knock on wood?
No, in the UK you "touch wood"

13) Do you floss daily?
At least 4 times a week.

15) Can you hula hoop?
Do I look like I like String Cheese?

16) Are you good at keeping secrets?
Sure. Telling them to M doesn't count.

17) What do you want for Christmas?
My two front teeth. Sorry. Um...Phish back together before New Years. Please.

18) Do you know the Muffin Man?
He lives on Drury Lane. That's where the Cohn twins used to live, too.

19) Do you talk in your sleep?
Apparently so. The other night I asked Michael to give me the blanket with the robots on it.

20) Who wrote the book of love?
Tom Marshall.

21) Have you ever flown a kite?
Yes. Poorly.

22) Do you wish on your fallen lashes?
Yes. I also do padiddle and I kiss the clock when all the numbers are the same. I'm a bit OCD like that.

23) Do you consider yourself successful?
I am not answering this. Really, now.

24) How many people are on your contact list of your cell?
40? I don't count.

25) Have you ever asked for a pony?
Hate. Horses. Ponies too. I had a pair of pony skin boots once.

26) Plans for tomorrow?
Work, sadly. Stupid meetings.

27) Can you juggle?
See above re: hula hoop.

28) Missing someone now?
Who am I NOT missing? I'm still ridiculously homesick.

29) When was the last time you told someone "I love you"?
Less than an hour ago.

30) And truly meant it?
Ibid.

31) How often do you drink?
Daily. No, seriously. We just did a vodka taste test...and it's Monday night.

32) How are you feeling today?
Eh. I have a headache and work's a pain in the ass.

33) What do you say too much?
My new favorite expression: "For fuck's sake!" That, or "Dude." "For fuck's sake, dude" works too.

34) Have you ever been suspended or expelled from school?
I am the ultimate girly swot. (So no.)

35) What are you looking forward to?
Friday. Malta. Budapest. David Gilmour. High Sierra. High Sierra. High Sierra.

36) Have you ever crawled through a window?
I have no clue. Probably.

37) Have you ever eaten dog food?
Eew. Probably as bad as milk crust.

38) Can you handle the truth?
I can't handle either Tom Cruise or Jack Nicholson these days. So no on this as well.

39) Do you like green eggs and ham?
No. Didn't The Daily Show just do something on Green Ham and Eggs the other day?

40) Any cool scars?
Nope. I used to have a scar from where Cory Russ dug her fingernails into me in third grade, but that's gone now.

Posted by jmakunas at 09:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We didn't think that upgrading Moveable Type would be easy, but we certainly didn't think it would be such a pain in the ass either. (Eh, I was due for a facelift anyway.)

It's certainly not perfect yet, (yes, I know about the ? marks...I'm fixing it!) but the comments are open...finally. You'll have to register first, please, but don't let that put you off...I'd love to hear what you have to say. (It's to prevent me from getting hundreds of spam comments a day. No, really, hundreds.)

You can also add my feed to your My Yahoo! page by clicking the link on the bottom right. (My Yahoo! is fun...and the stock needs all the help it can get.)

Enjoy!

Posted by jmakunas at 11:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yeah, the title is obvious. I couldn't resist.

It's no secret that I have a penchant for crap TV. I do try to limit the number of crap TV shows that I watch (or I'd be glued to my TV all week or my TiVo all weekend), but I've long argued that reading Phillip Roth and watching, say, Alias don't have to be mutually exclusive. High culture, low culture, pop culture...whatever. It's all good.

M and I have been fans of American Idol since it started. Originally, we watched it because, well, how could you not? It was culturally ubiquitous, the first season of auditions were fresh and hysterical, the judges were an unknown quantity, and the whole show was just bizarrely brilliant (in the way that many UK to US television exports are - see "Dancing with the Stars."). The next few seasons lost some of their sheen, and though we both liked Bo Bice (sort of) we didn't watch too much of last year.

This year, though, AI is one of the few US shows that we watched at home that we get in the UK, and it's the only show to be somewhat in sync with American broadcasts. It's shown in the US on Tuesdays and Wednesdays; we get it on Friday -- blissfully cut down to eliminate all the voting numbers and mindless patter after the songs -- and the results show is shown immediately afterwards. And, more importantly, it seems that the quality of the contestants has dramatically risen this year as well. There are still a few stinkers (Ace, Bucky, Kellie), but for the most part we're actually enjoying listening to these folks sing instead of just snarking on them for a few hours each week.

So let's talk about the weirdly polarizing (and just plain weird) Taylor Hicks. From what I can tell people either love or hate him: Television without Pity has decided that he's all an act, and is mercilessly cruel in their reacaps, but according to Andy Gadiel he's getting searches on JamBase (!!) and I've read a surprising number of genuine props on Phantasy Tour.

Frankly, I adore him. I don't even consider him in our discussions of the show -- as far as I'm concerned he's on a completely different plane. He has a voice that I actually want to listen to and even though he's utterly spastic when he performs, I find him completely mesmerizing. Every time he sings I turn to M and say something along the lines of "That boy's got the music in him;" I really do believe that he's one of those people who is truly passionate about actual music and could probably care less about the television or the stylist or the theme of the week (unless it's Bob Seeger week...heh) and just gets up there and sings in the same way he would if he were in a bar in Alabama or on Jamcruise. (He was on JAMCRUISE. Come ON.) And he had the balls to do "Not Fade Away" last week, and I guarantee he knows the Dead covered that song and probably has a favorite version. In fact, this may be the first time on American Idol that a contestant actually knows who the Dead ARE.

I sincerely hope he loses. Or at least doesn't end up under contract to Simon Fuller or someone who will try to market him and prevent him from playing with Robert Randolph or James Brown. And while I won't go as far as to buy a Soul Patrol shirt, I wouldn't kick him off a stage at High Sierra.

In other news, Kat McPhee needs to find her inner Joss Stone, and Paula needs to cut down on the Botox. Stat.

Posted by jmakunas at 09:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)