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Jet Fuel

Through a lucky confluence, it looked like I was going to get a window between a business trip in Seattle in mid-April and a vacation in New York, so I could pretty easily spend a week in San Francisco with my old friends. They changed the date of the conference, of course, and blew my plans, but I'm trying to salvage something from the wreckage. I have to extend my New York trip to make the new conference date in early may, and there's just the chance that I can pull off extending a few days longer so I can still catch San Francisco... How am I going to do this?

Two good shows

Argh. Just checked Stereolab's site and saw they're playing in San Francisco tonight, where I am quite decidedly not right now. Yeah well, I can't complain too much. Last week Cec and I caught Einstürzende Neubauten and Chicks on Speed on two consecutive days. Both shows were great in different ways.

Einstürzende Neubauten's show was strange and inspirational, the way they are. The stage looked like the set of a 1980s post-apocalyptic movie, and the band created an sometimes grinding, sometimes hopelessly beautiful soundscape from the wreckage, while Blixa took the center and held the crowd in thrall with his stage presence, like something out of a 1920's Berlin cabaret.

Chicks on Speed was all energy, the three of them doing that great talking-over-each-other thing against the filter of feedback from their machines. It was so much fun. Two songs in they created some on-stage art punk agitprop, unrolling a two-meter square photo of Anders Fogh Rasmussen (Prime Minister of Denmark), and explaining that the night of the show was the one year anniversary of Denmark's committing troops to the American invasion of Iraq. Then all three of them started screaming "Liar!!! Liar!!! Liar!!!" as one of their comrades wrote in glowing pink paint across the smiling face of the Prime Minister the word LIAR.

Sigh... It's been a long time since I've seen PoMo agitprop done live. Great show. I just loved all the feedback

The happy surprise of the evening was Chicks on Speed's opening act, a girl called Sophie Rimheden, (from Göteborg, apparently) who created some artistic feedback of her own, tearing apart old 80s classics, and putting them back together over a looping haze of electronic glitch pop, as she sang vocals over the top with a high, clear voice. I bought her CD after the show. It's really beautiful stuff.

Tabula Rasa

Getting ready for the Einstürzende Neubauten show tonight. I am flying! It's been so long since I've seen a good show. E-N was the last concert I saw before I left San Francisco, too. Kinda funny since I've just now gotten the chance to visit there again, but more on that later...

Notes from the past in Dublin

I was looking on my Palm for a Drunken Prawns recipe I thought I'd saved there, and while paging through the memos I found some notes I forgot I'd taken last year during a biz trip to Dublin. I don't even remember what I was talking about, but it sounds kinda funny...

Ice on the wings. No food.

Walking through Dublin pissed, with hail cominq down.

Then I found an even more cryptic note a couple of minutes later... I don't know if this was the zygote of a book idea, or a dream I had...

The swimming pool was so long it ended in Lithuania.

Calling everyone "Baby." Raining.

Inflated Head

Man, I just had the weirdest day. I was having another insomnia attack last night, and made the mistake of trying to knock myself out with booze. Ooh, it was really bad. Giving me single malt when I'm like that is like casting pearls before swine. It's a waste of decent whisky. So I went to work today with a crippling hangover, and stopped in to the company acupuncturist to see if he could do something to help.

Usually when I get acupuncture it's pretty subtle and almost pleasant, but this time it hurt like hell (he was jabbing me in different places than usual). When it was finished, my hangover was pretty well cured, or at least I had so many endorphins flowing through my system that I didn't notice it any more. But he must have poked something important, because my head inflated to like four times its normal size. I was in a whole other world of weirdness for the next couple of hours, sorta dazed, but at the same time my central nervous system was cranked up to wartime emergency levels. I was jumping at little sounds and sweating, etc.

So just before lunch I was walking away from the printer room back towards my office, and a bunch of techies were milling around the open space on my floor (they were taking a class in the meeting room and were having a smoke break). One of them, a very petite Asian woman, was facing one of the bookcases with her back to me, and she was manipulating something with a shaking motion, producing a kind of clicking, popping, crackling sound. I was transfixed, it was like the sound was jamming my nervous system, but I couldn't see what it was she had or figure out what she was doing to it, or, you know, why. Suddenly I realized that half the crowd of techies was staring at me, because I guess I had a strange expression on my face as I was standing there staring at the Asian girl... and she just kept... clicking the thing... whatever it was that she was manipulating. I had to get out of there!

Then as I scuttled away I saw my colleague Jacob standing in his doorway watching this scene and covering his eyes with his hand, almost crying with silent laughter. I asked him, when my head got back to normal a couple of hours later, what the hell that was all about, like what was his point of view and what, specifically, about the scene was funny enough to laugh at. I wanted to figure out what happened. It was all so bizarre... All he would tell me was "That was very funny, Peter." Which I guess was better than what I got from my co-workers all day (which was the now-traditional "Hey man, you really don't look too good.")

I'm just glad today is over.

Election in Russia

Kinda funny, they held the Russian presidential election on my birthday. Exit polls are showing Putin with a 69-percent landslide. No surprises there. At this point, Putin has consolidated so much power that the inter-party politics are almost a sideshow. The politics to watch are the internal struggles within the aptly-named All-Russia party. The problem is that those battles are all happening behind closed doors. To figure out what's happening, you have to look at changes in policy, and then try to extrapolate which faction has just won an internal battle.

For example, when Khodorkovsky was arrested, most people took it to mean that the hardline ex-KGB faction had gained the upper hand. But it's all so murky that it's almost impossible to figure out what's really going on unless you have the ability to do some deep research. Most of the analyses on Russian politics have been pretty poor lately, even coming from heavy-caliber sources like the BBC. Not that I can do much better from Copenhagen...

Ugh. Well, anything to avoid thinking about my birthday. Sorry I've been a bad correspondent to everyone lately. I've been swamped with work and just... tired. My friend Natasha says she feels like going to the North Pole. That sounds like a pretty good idea to me.

Down

Looks like Elena from Kiev's site is down, maybe overloaded from the number of hits.

It's the end of an exhausting week. Must sleep now.

The End of the World, take 2

I just followed this link off Die Puny Humans... It's a photo blog of Elena from Kiev's motorcycle travels through the Exclusion Zone around Chernobyl. Amazing pictures and an amazing story. I'm thinking of taking a couple of weeks off in the fall and chilling out in Crimea to get some movement in this book I'm trying to write. Chernobyl's pretty far to the north, but it's doable if I plan right. I want to see this... what the planet is going to look like after we humans go away.

Also check out my friends Katrine and Bram's story- for our final project in J-school I went to Estonia. They went to Chernobyl.

Loathing

Ugh, I just heard on BBC that Bush the Lesser is using the World Trade Center attack as one of the symbols in his first round of election ads. That just leaves me speechless with loathing.

Most New Yorkers can't stand Bush, and for him to use our suffering as a tool to keep him in office- where he will continue to enact policy that most New Yorkers find despicable, is just sleazy and vulgar, and it makes me want to be sick.

It does show that Bush knows the attack is his biggest asset and was probably the best thing that could have happened for him politically. The attack and the wars that he started afterwards conveniently took the headline away from the Enron and other scandals, which probably would have got that talking monkey thrown out of office two years ago.

This is going to be a dirty campaign. I just hope we win.