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Josh’s Wedding, Baba’s Room

What a weekend. Insane amount of work getting Amy’s darkroom and office torn down, finding places for everything. Great cleansing experience letting go of material stuff to make room for us to share an office space. Then up till midnight Friday scrubbing walls and spackling.

Up at 6:30 the next morning spackling again in my underwear (mmm, that doesn’t sound quite right ;), then off to Josh and Minette’s for early morning wedding in a Redwood Groove in the Berkeley Hills, near the botanical gardens. About 100 people, most of them buddhists. Josh is my oldest friend – since junior high – and lives right next door. Celestial light streaming through the redwoods, much chanting and music. Lovely ceremony, then up to the park for reception – hours in the sun seeing old friends, including the old Milky Way crew – feasting, dancing. Yassir and Fuson played live Moroccan Gnawa music, amazing. Other friends of Josh’s put together a more-or-less impromptu dirty blues band – gritty Son House / Leadbelly stuff.

Napped for a couple of hours, then got out the paint and rollers and got the wall coat done in the baby’s room – entire ceiling and walls, minus trim – cranking the Pretenders, righteous work music. Finished painting at midnight, totally exhausted. Tonight after work and after swimming and after dinner will do all the trim and baseboards.

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Twig and Berries

What happens when you shop at the hippy grocery store? Amy just returned with a box of cereal which posts as a bragging right in a big purple splash panel on the front, “Flakes, Twigs, and Granola!” That’s right folks, you read correctly. This cereal has twigs in it. And that’s supposed to be a good thing. OK, let’s see how these twigs taste… hey, not bad! I take it all back. Those hippies sure know how to live.

I’ve been going back and forth for a year on whether to keep up my Wired magazine collection. I have 90 issues, going back to issue 2.08, August ’94. I think if the mag was still good, I’d keep on collecting without hesitation, but it’s gone all Fetish, no Revolution. Funny, because they finally emerged from that 18-month stretch where there was nothing but CEOs on the cover, and I really thought it was going to make a turn for the better, but no. So I just put the whole thing on craigslist. I have no idea what something like this is worth.
Wish boing boing was still in print.

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I Pity Inanimate Objects

Clearing out the office closet so Amy can share it with me so we can make her office into the baby’s room. On a cleaning binge, throwing out tons of old software boxes. Just found:

– Adobe Photoshop 2.5.1
– ColdFusion Application Server 3.1
– Kai’s Power Tools 3
– No less than five separate Win95 installers, some of them legal

and so on and so on…

Another tough one : revisiting the floppy disk boxes : around 300 floppies – BeOS R3 boot disks, antique Linux and FreeBSD boot disks, WinCIM and CompuServe and Prodigy and ZD Interchange installers, DirectoryFreedom (my old favorite DOS directory navigator), XyWrite installer (my favorite DOS text editor), tons of games, Photoshop on floppy, zillions of drivers for sound, video, and network cards I no longer have, setup disks for long-defunct ISPs, all those new hard drive setup disks you never use, ancient terminal communication apps, paint and morph programs sent to me at Ziff, which no one ever heard of and never got off the ground, games like Heretic and Descent, BIOS updaters, old embarassing writings, about 14 MS Intellipoint driver disks (none ever installed, as far as I can remember), CD-ROM ATAPI drivers, SCSI scanner drivers, and on down the road. I kept about 20 — the rest, into the crapper. Too much trouble to get rid of them. I haven’t touched a floppy in a couple of years now, except to booting or rescue drivers on the odd x86 box. But I’ve eliminated almost all the x86 from my life, and convinced everyone I support (family members, landord, and now the law firm) to go Mac. This stuff is groovy history, but it’s gathering dust. Sentimentality and attachments bog me down. Things that once seemed important no longer do.

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Bum Fights

Just got a spam formatted exactly like a porn spam, which led to a site formatted exactly like a porn site, except it’s not about porn, it’s about watching homeless people beat each other up — ebumfights.com. “It’s a train wreck you can’t turn away from!” “Angry and drunk? Wanna fight?”

I swear we’re headed for cultural implosion.

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Macromedia Seminars

Attended Macromedia seminars in SF today. Kind of large – like 700 people in a room, not hands-on like I had hoped. Sort of a feature by feature intro to all the goodies in the MX suite. I am constantly tempted to do more work in Dreamweaver. And every time I try, I find myself running back to the comfort of BBEdit. To watch the pros, you’d think you could do everything in Dreamweaver. But every time I sit down to work, I find that there’s still no replacement for a really powerful text editor (please, no comments about Dreamweaver’s code mode). Of course Macromedia claims that 80% of professional web developers use Dreamweaver. I believe that 80% may have it installed. But how many actually use it as their primary development tool? Would be curious to hear feedback from other web devs out there on this topic.

In the city, encountered this fellow on Market St., who seems to have excellent sign-making skills!

fornicator

Lots of excellent cult movies wallpaper.

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Liberace Stalker

So last night there’s a message on the machine from a woman who is “very concerned” about some “untruths” on Birdhouse related to Liberace. I assume the call is from someone at the Liberace Foundation contesting my claim that the photos I have posted there are used with permission (they are).

Called her back today and it turned out to be the wife of a one-time Liberace impersonator who has been stalked by a rabid Liberace fan ever since doing a rousing impersonation in Nevada once. I have a page : The Best of Birdhouse Mail, on which I had posted an email from someone claiming to have witnessed the living reincarnation of Liberace. Turns out the email was from this stalker dude, and the wife just wants to do all she can to protect her husband from the stalker, including not giving him air time. Of course, the email has been up there for five years, so it’s kind of late, but I thought she made a good case. Not a big deal, I took it down.

Perhaps I need a raccoon penis bone amulet to protect me from the kooks. Or a conference bike I can use to better understand them. Perhaps I shall meet them at the most beautiful motel in America.

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The Long Now

Perhaps old news to some, but I just came across the thelongnow site.

It has been nearly 10,000 years since the end of the last ice age and the beginnings of civilization. Progress lately is often measured on a “faster/cheaper” scale. The Long Now Foundation seeks to promote “slower/better” thinking and to foster creativity in the framework of the next 10,000 years.

They are considering designs for a clock to last 10,000 years, as well as a library. Brian Eno is heavily involved with this project and has created some of his generated musics to accompany. According to my friend Mal, the organization is a sort of think tank and Eno sits on the board, “along with Stewart Brand, Esther Dyson and others.”

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Fried Huge Caterpillars

Plowing through my spam trap and thought I saw a subject line “Fried Huge Caterpillars.” Had to stop and read that one. Turned out to be “Friend, Huge Pillar Candles,” which is almost but not quite as surreal, inverted by my partially dyslexic brain. I swear, sometimes my appreciation for the absurd and my mild dyslexia are a match made in heaven… what Dali called “the paranoicritical method” – rather than correcting the frequent small perceptual mistakes we all make, Dali cultivated this technique of allowing the brain to run with these sorts of errors for pure entertainment or surrealist value. I seem to do this quite naturally. Amy is sometimes unsure whether I actually didn’t perceive something correctly or whether I brushed against a misperception and unconsciously encouraged it to flourish just to flustrate conversation, or for a laugh. The funny thing is, when she calls me on it, I’m not sure either.

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Daniel Popsicle

Spent most of the weekend looking for a dresser for the baba’s room in SF’s Mission district. About half a dozen vintage and antique stores. Neither of us have bought new furniture before – both of us have come this far on sidewalk trash, improvisations. Amy made the comment that this is a fork in the road – where we decide either to trade in the mismatched dishes for a matched set from Crate and Barrel or continue on the path of funk for the rest of our lives.

Today we found a perfect 1930s deco dresser for cheap, and bought it. A bit worse for wear, not fancy, but bearing the character of its previous owners. We are both gratified to have stayed on the path of funk. For now.

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On Valencia St., saw a baby in a stroller coming at us *very* quickly. Soon realized that its father, who was pushing the stroller, was riding a skateboard. Father and child on wheels, on an SF sidewalk at 15mph. As they passed, I realized the father was wearing a skirt. I love the 21st century.

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Last night off to see Daniel Popsicle perform at New Langton Arts – sort of a Braxton set for kids, or a Willem Breuker Kollektief with fewer dodecahedrons. Enjoyable, but wished it would have featured more banjo-bass duets, or trombone solos, or something. Very orchestral in other words – all 13 of them playing together at once, never any featured instrumentalists. Sort of orchestral modern jazz with a child’s melodic mindset. Very odd, very fun.

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Mission of Burma

Went with Roger last night to see Mission of Burma, who haven’t toured together since the Reagan years. Amazing to walk into the Fillmore Auditorium – as I said to Roger, those walls have witnessed more great music in the past 40 years than just about any building on earth. It’s a great vibe. The walls are plastered on every floor with photos and posters – name just about any great post-50s musical act and they’ve probably played the Fillmore at some point.

Mike Watt was opening, along with Silkworm. We were half there to see Watt, and crushed that we missed him – they must have started the show on time, which threw us. Crap. Another time. For the record, Silkworm was boring.

Burma, on the other hand, ruled. Forced to break up just as they were peaking 20 years ago, due to Roger Miller’s creeping tinnitus -today he wears big bulky noise-reducing headphones to block out the sound. Birdsongs of the Mesozoic was formed out of Burma to create chamber rock, and Miller switched to piano – all an attempt to protect his ears. But now he just goes with the blocking phones and plays what he’s always wanted to play.

Anyway. It was like all of that antique art-punk was bottled up in them, perfectly preserved, and came rushing out, unravaged by time. Totally inspired and brilliant, just dada enough, rhythmically and melodically intense. Kind of the Magritte of punk. Or should that be the King Crimson of punk? Just totally righteous.