It's not me, it's you.

L's getting married. In August.

The show was phenomenal.

Phenomenal.

The album looks fantastic, and a lot of people who are often hard to please have been offering us a fair amount of praise on a job well done. I know it's been a while, but we've all been breathing about a week-long sigh of relief. Maxwell's Demon, B-Sides and Rarities is a reality.

The release show at the National Underground was sweaty, packed and noisy, with everyone primed to go by our phenomenal friends in the band Pieces (who consistently amaze me).

Check out these vids from our awesome party (drink a beer as you watch, you'll feel like you were there):


Confidence Man into Life During Wartime. Dont miss the great band banter at 3:10


An excerpt from On the Run. Look at that crazy devil on lead guitar!


Love is a Destroyer

and the big finale by popular demand,

Four Square


If you think that rocked, come out and see us at Piano's on July 5th.

The Radiated Library

Jaylinked me to this utterly fascinating piece in the Times.

Much to my dismay I cannot find any of Otlet's works for sale in English, and can barely find them for sale (or for free, for that matter) in any other language. Interwebs? Help me out here.

Michael Buckland's Otlet Site

An interesting bibliography

Doesn't break any Dad rules

Spent Fathers' Day upstate with my folks and my grandfather, playing boccie and pinochle, cursing, and generally having a fantastic time.

While in town at a farmers market with my mother, she made a suggestion that I liked--namely that when the lease in Brooklyn runs out in a year, I spend the summer upstate. It would cost almost nothing, and would be remarkably relaxing, to get a job waiting tables in Cooperstown and spend the remainder of my time reading and writing hundreds of miles away from any big city. I just may do that.

Anyway, my father performed an emblematic act of dad-hood when, as I was getting ready to leave for the city, he looked at the bent and dented hood of my Volvo and decided to pull it back into shape using, almost exclusively, his bare hands. That's the spirit of fathers' day, right there.

---

Took the bike upstate with me, where the terrain is absolutely brutal and challenges the gearing on the little Raleigh. I rolled into the first downhill I found at about 20mph. I went into an aggressive tuck, and was very quickly catapulted to 41mph. My highest gear, about 105 gear inches, was completely useless, and all I could do was tuck and coast. I kept a pace of about 25mph on the flat roads, ducked around the neighboring village and came back up the hill from the another angle. The uphill was just as relentless, with my smallest gear (65ish gear inches) quickly becoming equally useless torture. I made it though, and that ridiculously painful loop should serve nicely as my benchmark course for a while. I hate to say it, but I'm beginning to understand why modern bikes have 7000 gears.

Question to be asked: Do you love ideas--passionately, with your life? Does this thought keep you from sleeping? Do you feel that you are risking your life on it? How many philosophers would retreat!
. . .
Sade: "People decry the passions without thinking that it is their flame that lights the flame of philosophy."

-two excerpts from the notebooks of Albert Camus

Then I must be greater than Daedalus: for whereas he only made his own inventions to move, I move those of other people as well. And the beauty of it is, that I would rather not. For I would give the wisdom of Daedalus, and the wealth of Tantalus, to be able to detain them and keep them fixed.

-Socrates, on argumentation, in Plato's Euthyphro

More album work.
Yesterday, our best friend Damien's father, a professional photographer of note, had a wonderful photoshoot with us, trucking around Bushwick and "East Williamsburg" shooting frame after frame, shouting interesting encouragements (Damien makes so much more sense now) and buying us beer. It was a wonderful experience, and great to see a man I already respect in his element.

This album work is becoming interesting, though, and not in the way I mean when I'm talking about, say, guitar amplifiers or bike wheels. There was a time, not so long ago, when this album was my final tie to the city. I was madly in love, and it was clear though not always spoken that, when the album was done and we had played it out a little, I had a pressing obligation southward. As we rapidly approach the end of the project, I find myself feeling a whole strange bunch of emotions at once, not the least of which are recapitulations of the abandonment I'm now aware of again. And I don't trust my long term plans anymore; and it's rubbing off on my relationship with Kay when I have more than every reason to trust her blindly; and I'm not sure what to do next (with my life); and I'm getting really, really tired of L's enduring legacy being one of distrust and uncertainty.

How do you afford your Rock and Roll Lifestyle

It is HOT in Brooklyn today. Manhattan's not great either. It almost makes the fact that our hot water is inexplicably inoperable a non-issue. It's probably time to bite the bullet and try to afford a small air conditioner. It's a sticky New York summer, punctuated by the rattle of decades-old fans, adorned with every imaginable smell. I'm used to spending at least a month of the summer in a more southern direction where, even if it's hotter, its so much less dense. This will be my first all-New-York summer in some years. I was dripping sweat during breakfast. And it's only June. Oy vey.

It's been busy times in the music business over here. Maxwell's Demon's first full length LP, B-Sides and Rarities, came back from the mastering engineer on Friday. It was a pretty great scene, me, Jay and mattio jumping on our bicycles and riding out to Greenpoint where we met face to face for the first time with our mad scientist of a mastering engineer. He characterized our recordings / mix as "needing a lot of work", but recognized that that's sort of "what [we] were going for". We get that a lot. (function of recording in the 3'x3' of Hangover Studios)
Anyway, the master sounds pretty phenomenal. He primarily masters for vinyl, and, accordingly, much of the digital harshness of our pro-tools recording has been magically washed away. The instruments blend in a warm way, all audible without competing for attention. That night we had a show at Goodbye Blue Monday in Bushwick, and just killed.

This album is becoming a busy proposition. Tuesday we're gathering to have photos taken for our press-kit, and kibitzing about album art. (Tangentially, did you know that firefox v2.0 spell checks Yiddish? Neither did I until right now!) And now that we're approaching the completion of this year-long project, we're all getting the itch to start writing again. One of mattio's newest songs, "Love Song for Liam" has become a favorite at live shows, and there's this wave of momentum building to start jamming and writing again, all of us working on brand new songs out of the sound we forged over the past twelve months of recording and gigging. It's very exciting.

Kay left for Berlin yesterday, leaving me a care package of increasingly hilarious envelopes to open each day (she just finished the Raw Shark Texts). She also charged me with updating my resume while she's away so that we can embark on JobHunt 2k8 together when she returns. Along those lines, I started talking with my uncle and old employer last night, about the possibility of returning to a freelance position in Lower Manhattan. We'll see if i can juggle both jobs for a little while, but it'll be really nice to start reporting again.

A Morning Person

When the day's been good by 9am, you really can't complain. Woke up this morning at 6:30 (thats 0630 for those of you in the military) ate a little bit of food, then suited up and clipped into the bike for a brief ride with mattio. After my old friend dragged me around a couple of laps worth of prospect park, I broke off and rode back home, showered, had some coffee, selected a book off the book shelf and got on the train. On said train, I began reading said book, Resistance, Rebellion and Death, a collection of speeches and essays by my favorite thinker, Albert Camus. Now, after a while, reading said book on said train, an older gentleman who had sat down next to me a few stops earlier, reading the NY times, leaned over and said, "Excuse me, may I ask what you're reading?" and so began a conversation, about Paris, where he had lived in the 80's and which I had never seen, about the post-war European intellectuals, how important they are to our current situation today, and how they've fallen out of favor with the current intellectual climate. He told me about a community theater he's been volunteering at in midtown and a book he's been working on; I told him about my desire to start writing for a living again. We exchanged e-mail addresses, I got off one stop past my stop, and thought, this has been a good day, and it was 9am.

Out of gas

New York by bicycle is unlike any New York I've ever seen. If you haven't done it yet, you just have to take my word for it. On short spurts, you're going about as fast as a car or a non-rush-hour subway, but you're out in the wide-open. If there's a radio on somewhere, if some cat's practicing trombone in a fifth floor walk-up, or whatever, you hear it. If a bakery is just opening, or if someone's car has just overheated, you smell it. And the sense of geography,of how all these disjointed pieces of city make a whole unity. It's pretty fantastic.

Went out to the Kissena velodrome at the ass-end of Queens after work yesterday to see mattio race. (As an aside, I want to bring back the -drome ending and start calling EWR the Newark Aerodrome.) Kissena was a goddamn trek, even with the assistence of the 7 train (I cheated and took the train on the way out). But I brought the Raleigh with me, and in between races, when they called a weather delay on the track, mattio had me fly his wing around the big banked, swoopy turns. The R caught 25mph with extremely little effort, and I quickly came to realize what phenomenal speeds a good rider could get a tight little track bike to on a good velodrome. And mattio did well, getting three second place finishes, looking strong and confident on his new Felt track bike. It was a fun time, and after a few post-race runs around the track on the Raleigh i was feeling dumb enough to feel up to the ride home.

At this point it had begun to rain, but it was a warm night so I hitched myself to the wheel of one of the racers who was riding back to Bushwick. On the long ride that followed, we kept a casual pace and made good conversation, getting lost here and there (it is Queens after all). At about the Brooklyn line, however, I realized that my throat was closing up from thirst. I'd ridden out without any food, water or cash. By the time my companion pulled off in Bushwick, i'd completely bonked, my body running on zero fuel. By the time I was ten blocks from home, I was barely able to hold the handlebars steady. Even today my legs feel like jelly.

It's making me question plans that I had with my good buddy A to try to ride up to the alma mater on a long weekend.
If I'm going to keep this up over the summer, I'm going to need some place to stash a water bottle on my ancient racing bike.

The Greatest Generation

Woke up this morning to the following e-mail from my father:

c-
Please forward this to all of your like-minded and like-spirited friends, if you wish. Thanks to all of you for being an integral part of making obama's nomination and likely his election happen. We, at your age, had all of the passion but not the power to make this kind of change. it's long overdue that this kind of opportunity for can occur. tonight alone is monumental, but there's more to do. we're happy to be part of it.....again....
-d

From his generation (my father was growing up in the sixties) to mine. It's truly nothing short of astounding to see a country unified in something they believe in, not just against. And to see the population actively supporting a man who is brilliant and nuanced? Why thats just too much for my hardened little heart to bear. This morning I actually feel pretty OK about being an American.

I'd also like to point y'all towards this:

Michelle Obama tells it like it is

and then suggest my dream ticket, Obama Obama '08. Say it out loud, it sounds even better.

Things that I have crashed:

+ car
+ snowmobile
+ three bikes (one twice)
+ kayak
+ sled
+ checking account
+ another car

Liability

A few nights ago, we were entertaining casual company, trading stories and drinking things. And when I got to a story about driving a snowmobile 65mph across a frozen lake I said something in Kay's direction akin to "You probably wouldn't like this, but..."

Much to her credit, she later took me aside and gave me crap about my aside. Lots of "Look" and "I'm not that kind of girlfriend", lots of "I'm never going to tell you what to do."
She was right of course, to be miffed that I just assumed her role as such, and I appreciated what she said greatly.

But I appreciated last night even more greatly.

Out on a ride around the borough (which would culminate in a wonderful roof party in Williamsburg), I was riding on my bicycle somewhat... stupidly. I was riding faster than I was paying attention, and I found myself faced with a car. So, like any fast-acting limbic system, I jammed on the brakes. On my new, more powerful brakes.
The front wheel locked up, and the whole bike kept rolling around it. that is to say, as I quickly dimished my speed from 20mph to zero, the rear of the bike bucked up and over the front, and I, still clipped into the pedals, went with it. I hit the ground, somehow, still half clipped into the now-inverted bike, and over the next few nanoseconds unclipped and summersaulted forward, ending up in a somewhat lounging position on the blacktop, the bike aside me. Testament to the borough, the car peaced out. I took a breath, stood up, brushed myself off, noting the one gash on my elbow, picked my bike off the deck, clipped in, rode off, both myself and the bike in far better condition than we'd any right to be.

So anyway, I get back home later that night and relate this to Kay. She has that look that appears on one's face when they eat horseraddish or their own previously-spoken words. Thinks for a second, and then very diplomatically just goes, "so, how many more things are you going to crash?"

Also this:

muh. Terrible few days of a fever that morphed into a throat infection that morphed into a cold. But three house-bound days with a healthy dose Battlestar Galactica and Daily Show reruns seem to have been quite the cure. Still frustratingly unable to hop on the bike, but what are you going to do?

Anyway, living in Bedford-Stuyvesant for the past month has been an adventure. In the world of New York real estate, where trendy white neighborhoods expand their boundaries, quite literally, as real estate agents start establishing "East Williamsburg" and push Clinton Hill across Classon Avenue, I've become very cognizant of the fact that, after my stop, there are usually no white people left on the train. In the very way I live, I'm living on an edge of sorts: I only go east of Bedford Avenue when biking to Bushwick.

I've been exploring my own neighborhood, the little corner of Bed-Stuy that's become home, and I like it a lot. Tons of families out every day, a School and a Library right across the street, I've a downstairs neighbor who's director of a marching band and whose two-year old son is learning the drums (with a full kit(!)).

And the apartment itself is coming together pretty wonderfully. Elias and I have two big common rooms, one of which has a couch and a big computer/movie setup and a drafting table, the other of which is turning into a study. We just finished painting it today... it's where a newfound 1940's era radio console sits, as well as my desk and as many bookshelves as we can find. Between the painting and the writing desk I built last week, its all very reminiscent of a long conversation Kay and I had while we were both sick and house-bound... when you build the things you use with your own hands, you feel so much more on top of your life and in control of situations. And as I look around my newly painted study with my newfound health, I'd say that's a pretty accurate description.