Monday, August 05, 2002

Just got back from checking out an apartment...1000 dollars, in downtown Lowell. Top floor of a renovated mill. HUGE place - 750 or so square feet. Really big windows, AC/Heat/Hot Water included, with a swimming pool, a health club, etc... onsite. It's perfectly located in between the river and the (admittedly small) nice part of Lowell. I need to make a decision in the next couple days...$1000 is not a small amount of money. And I'll need to buy a couch and chair, maybe a table...then again, I'll have to do that no matter where I go... One of the biggest advantages to this? .3 miles from an Indian restaurant. WOO!

5:14:24 PM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

Damn - I'm trying to figure out how to mess around with the templates and get something different/interesting going on, and I'm just failing miserably. Does anyone know if there are any decent examples of templates for Radio anywhere?
3:13:43 PM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

Saturday night, I saw David Bowie. And my life is a lot better now. I discovered David Bowie late. It wasn't until I was a freshman at college, with a summer's worth of paychecks burning a hole in my bank account and a whole lot of CDs staring at me from the racks at the college bookstore, that I first really listened to Bowie. I'd heard bits and pieces - I watched the videos from Outside, since I was in a Nine Inch Nails phase around that time, but never any of the really great stuff. Then I bought Ziggy Stardust... (actually, that was a really good run to the record store - Ziggy, Pulp's Different Class, and the Stone Roses' self-titled album...) Ziggy kicked me in the face. I had no idea what to expect, and even if I had, I'd've been shocked. Where the hell does music like that come from, anyway? It wasn't like the Beatles, it wasn't like the Stones, it wasn't like the Who...I'd heard nothing else from the early '70s, really. This didn't make ANY sense. But it rocked. I'll admit that at first I played Suffragette City over and over again - it rocked a bit harder than the rest of the album, and at the time I still had the teenage punkishness. But as I listened to the whole album a few times, I had to put the whole thing on repeat. I literally didn't leave my room for 5 hours once, just sat there replaying the album and trying to make sense of it. Five Years is without question my favorite song on the album. The tune isn't all that much...a bit catchy, and with some nice build, but what carries the song is Bowie's lyrics. At age 18, the idea of breaking down the fourth wall was foreign to me, but here was David Bowie saying: I think I saw you in an ice-cream parlour, drinking milk shakes cold and long Smiling and waving and looking so fine, don't think you knew you were in this song I didn't know what to make of that, so I had to listen more and figure out what the rest of the lyrics meant...not that I've gotten that for sure yet. To me, Five Years is about going insane, about losing your self...becoming Ziggy Stardust. Five Years, along with Rock 'n Roll Suicide, describe the dark beginning and end of a rock star. Well, to me. I'm sure it can mean forty thousand other things. It's David Bowie - he's malleable. I've gradually bought more Bowie since then. His whole Berlin period (not just his albums, Low, Lodger, and Heroes, but Iggy Pop and Lou Reed's stuff from that period as well) is amazing, and utterly different than the Ziggy/Aladdin Sane/Diamond Dogs music. Sure, he did mainly shit during the '80s, and his '90s stuff was not particularly impressive, but his new album is excellent...and he did Ziggy Stardust. I'll always love that album more than I can put into words. I don't think it's the best album ever - that's reserved for the Stones' Exile on Main Street, with Abbey Road not far behind. It's not even my favorite album - Exile, Abbey Road, Primal Scream's Screamadelica, and U2's Achtung Baby share that honor. No, it's something deeper, more visceral. Part of me really, really wants to be as confident, strong, and ballsy as Bowie, especially during that period...going to an Elvis show at MSG, sitting in the front row in full Ziggy regalia...I want that courage, that performer's sense. I don't have it...I get nervous when you ask me to speak publicly, though I'll babble privately for hours. I'm terrified of my appearance - no matter what I do, I think I look like crap. I tried drag once at Drag Ball at Oberlin...didn't work, really. I don't want to be Ziggy Stardust, but he represents something I wish I could want to be, if that makes any sense. I babble - moving on. So I saw Bowie on Saturday. It was the Area2 festival, with Ash, Blue Man Group, (an absent) Busta Rhymes, Bowie, and Moby. My roommate and I didn't even bother showing up until partway through BMG - it was hot, and I only had any real interest in seeing Busta and Bowie. Busta was stuck in New York, so we waited an extra 45 minutes...and then got an extra 15 minutes of Bowie. He played a decent number of songs off the new album, three songs from the '80s, a couple songs off Low, some more obscure stuff (e.g. a GREAT Life on Mars?)...and then he hits the encore. I'm trying to remember exactly what the first two songs were - I don't think I can. One was off Heathen, I think...and the other was...I dunno. The third and final song of the encore wiped my brain clean for a while. He hadn't played any Ziggy all night - I didn't expect to hear Five Years or Rock 'n Roll Suicide, but Ziggy Stardust, Suffragette City, Starman...not that I was disappointed, mind you. I still got to see an hour and a half of Bowie. He had said there was time for three songs when he came out for the encore...before the third song started, he said something along the lines of 'This last song is the first song I ever played in Boston...' I knew it was Ziggy. (he first came to the States on the Ziggy tour, and opened damn near every show on the tour with Ziggy Stardust) And I was in heaven for five minutes or so...I was at the back of the lawn, as far away as I could be while still technically in the crowd. And I was in heaven. THAT is why I love music.

1:47:15 PM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

So a co-worker of mine just read Martin Amis' new book and is now convinced that Stalin was worse than Hitler. Why is it that someone saying this to me sends me into a fit of rage? It feels so offensive to me...It's really hard for me to think that Stalin sat in his office and deliberately thought to himself, 'hmm...I think I'll starve a couple million people this year.' His policies killed millions upon millions, no question, but unlike Hitler, his goal wasn't to kill them. If they died, that was an unfortunate cost to pay for the future, blah, blah. Evil, certainly. And the purges were monstrous, symptomatic of a severe paranoid. But Hitler built DEATH CAMPS. Yeah. He deliberately slaughtered 12 million people. It was planned out. It wasn't an ACCIDENT. It was frickin' EFFECIENT. Comparing body counts doesn't work here - for one thing, Mao would then trump both Stalin AND Hitler. I'm not apologizing for Stalin, but am I missing something here? Is there something really obvious to some people that I just can't see? How for fuck's sake can Stalin's starving of Russia be worse than Hitler's genocidal massacre of 12 million people, PLUS instigating a war in which something like 25 million more people died? I don't know - it just gets me so angry that anyone could believe that, especially anyone who seems intelligent. Plus, most of the people who chirp that kind of line tend to brush aside the Holocaust, or deny it completely. It feels like a right-wing, anti-Semitic propaganda piece. My co-worker said to me 'I don't see how it being deliberate makes it any worse.' Go see the Holocaust Museum, you ignorant fuck, and then tell me how Stalin was so much worse than Hitler...

9:55:33 AM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

US plan to attack al-Qaeda 'ignored' [BBC World] ha! The Bush Junta just can't catch a break, can they? 'No, just because Condi Rice got briefed on the plan in January 2001 doesn't mean that we knew about it - no, check that it - doesn't mean that we wanted to do it - oh, forget it. I give it.' I'd make some snide comment about how they were never really elected, but hey, is that even necessary any more?

7:21:14 AM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

Clear-Cutting the Radio Forest. Clear Channel Communications is changing the face of radio broadcasting, buying stations left and right, firing local DJs and replacing original programming with bland, formatted material. Nowhere is that more apparent than in San Diego. First of a three-part report by Randy Dotinga. [Wired News] It isn't just Clear Channel stations that suck hard now, to my dismay. There used to be an amazing little independent station in Boston: WFNX, owned by the Boston Phoenix, Boston's equivalent to the Village Voice. They had a low-powered transmitter in Lynn that you could barely get a signal from maybe...35 miles away? I could get a decent signal in exactly one place in my room, and on one of the three possible routes I could drive to school. But it was GOOD. Real good. The music was awesome...nearly everything they'd play would be either something new that had yet to become a big hit, or something from the '80s that sounded just as good in the mid '90s. I remember hearing a great live version of Modern English's 'I'll Melt With You' followed by the Butthole Surfers, and then Social Distortion. They did a top 500 alternative songs countdown every year, and it took until '97 or '98 for 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' to dethrone the Smiths' 'How Soon Is Now' at #1. Julie Kramer, who's still far and away the best DJ in Boston now, did (and still does) 'Leftover Lunch' every weekday, without commercials, a long block of songs from the '80s that no corporate-controlled playlist would ever include. The DJs knew when to shut up. It was great. While I was off at school, the Powers That Be that run 'FNX started to expand. They bought up frequencies in Providence, Manchester, and Portland, and jacked up the power on the main signal as well. They also decided that the 'college rock with commercials' category wasn't profitable enough, and went after the big rock station in Boston, WBCN. That is, they started playing lots and lots of bad metal. And guess what? As of last I heard, they hadn't gotten much more profitable. Their DJs are generic (excepting the still fabulous Julie Kramer), and the playlist is just as bad. The station is still indepedentedly owned and operated, but it's just as bad as if they were part of the Clear Channel Octopus. Luckily, a small station out of Haverhill in the northern suburbs, WXRV, has risen up with a really great music library and quality playlist. It's not as rock-oriented as I'd like, but it still has a unique sound, and they still play good music I haven't heard before.

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