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It keeps coming

Woke up this morning not knowing where I was again, I was so far away. LCD Soundsystem on the clock radio when it turned on -

And it keeps coming...
and it keeps coming...
and it keeps coming,
till the day it stops.

Yes, that's exactly how I feel these days. I was dreaming like crazy last night, probably because of the Pynchon book I'm reading. Mason and Dixon at the Cape, examining the flaws in the carapace. Mason and Maskeylyne at Saint Helena. Something that turns out to be weather blotting out the stars, looming in slowly from the Atlantic. And an image of Sevastopol harbor at night, waves crashing against the breakwater and a great black nothing beyond...

Then I remembered, oh wait, that wasn't a book, that was me... that time in Ukraine in 2005, sitting on the breakwater, staring out to the navigation buoys on the Black Sea, past the hundred meter-tall monument to the Russian fleet... The missile cruiser Ukraina resting quietly at anchor across the gap, just over my right shoulder, and a warm southern breeze from Asia Minor blowing through my hair. I'd almost forgotten.

It just keeps coming till the day it stops.

Spring Shows in Seattle

The concert schedule is heating up again and a lot of great stuff is coming through town. For you guys in Seattle and anyone passing through in the next couple months, here's what I've found so far. If you're interested drop me a line so we can hook up at the show!

Dean & Britta
Feb 15 at the Triple Door - mellow, lyric-driven post-rock pop

Tullycraft
Feb 29 at Easy Street Records - The Seattle twee-pop kings. I've seen these cats twice since I landed in September, and I just love 'em!

Crystal Castles
March 6 at Chop Suey - f-ed up atavistic glitchy electro. I saw them open for Metric and they were great.

Magnetic Fields
March 7 at Town Hall - mostly-analog post-rock arthouse music.

Rufus Wainwright
March 13 at Paramount - I'll be out of town for this one but highly recommend that you catch this show - fun vocal-driven arthouse pop music, and Rufus is just awesome.

Hot Chip
April 22 at the Showbox - I don't know them that well, but they just put out a great remix of Ladytron's "Destroy Everything You Touch"

Ani DiFranco
April 23 at the Moore Theater - Good fem-punk folk music.

The Elementary Particles

Am more or less recovered from the Copenhagen trip, but I'm still way behind on sleep. Crazy schedule now - I'm switching jobs in three weeks and need to package up the the projects I'm working on before I can go.

Not much time to write - I've had some good ideas for the book but am just trying to scribble down some notes I can hopefully pick up on later. I need a couple of days off so I can process this, but slim chance of that these days.

I just finished The Elementary Particles. Marcella lent it to me in San Francisco to get my take on Houellebecq's psychology. I don't think a book has left me feeling so uneasy since I tried reading de Sade ten years ago. Marcella couldn't decide if Houellebecq was a mysogynist himself or if he was being knowingly offensive as part of his writing style.

After kicking the story around in my head around for a while, I think the book isn't so much mysogynist as just anti-humanist. He certainly seems to despise men just as much as women if not more so. While de Sade rejected the dogmatic morality of his time and embraced sadism (or "libertinism," as he called it), Houellebecq rejects both morality and hedonism as bankrupt and ultimately futile philosophies.

Even relatively non-offensive New Age philosophy, or the non-dogmatic impulse to be "good," is reviled as pathetic and weak-minded, though the impulse to assign value and find meaning in life is something he picks up on at the end. I won't describe where he goes with that impulse as the book closes because it's just too shocking - I really didn't see it coming, though there were some hints throughout the story. And if you just read it described in a few sentences without reading the first part of the book it would lose all its effect.

Reading this, it sounds like I'm saying that the whole book was a treatise on abstract philosophy, and it's not. It's just a fiction story told in a very peculiar voice. Like de Sade, The Elementary Particles was difficult to read in places, but it was thick with ideas that underlay the images (and these ideas can't be rejected quite as easily as one can reject de Sade). It's been hard to stop thinking about this book.

So I just started Mason & Dixon when I was in Denmark. Pynchon recounts the mostly fictional adventures of the real astronomers Mason & Dixon, taking place in the late 1700s. Like most of Pynchon, you have to read everything twice or three times before you see what he's on about, but there are moments in there as brilliant as staring at the sun.

The Crying of Lot 49 was over too soon (though it was enough to give me weird dreams of the Trystero for weeks!). So it left me still needing my Pynchon fix.

Jet Lag

I was on a phone call with the chief content specialist of a company I've hired to produce materials for one of the projects I'm working on. The woman apologized that she didn't have much content for me to review, as her son had been in an accident a few days before and had suffered a concussion. She'd been distracted since then and hadn't produced much.

I told her not to worry, that we were still far enough away from deadline and could catch up later. Then, wanting to put her at ease, I mentioned that I too had suffered a concussion in a car accident when I was 16. In fact it was serious enough that I'd been put in the hospital for a few weeks afterwards.

The only side effects were that, for the next year or so, I had an insatiable appetite for eating Kentucky Fried Chicken and watching professional wrestling on TV. I supposed that could have resulted from either the hormones of puberty or the head injury I'd received, but I suspected the latter. Fortunately, the symptoms eventually went away.

Well, thinking about that conversation today, now that I'm a bit less jetlagged , I don't think I succeeded in putting her at ease about her son's injury. Instead I probably just increased her apprehension at what kind of screwball she has as a project leader.

Sigh... Jetlag spares no man.

Copenhagen, again

Sitting in the Sea-Tac lounge waiting for a flight to Copenhagen. I'm really not feeling too well (I think I've been holding off a flu for a little while now), so I'm not looking forward to a week of meetings and hotel life.

The good news is that I just got a new job in my company, which will pull me a little further away from the tactical, technological aspects of my job, and will instead be more global and public communications-focused. I think it will be good, and it's the direction I want to take, so fingers crossed.

It probably means fewer trips to Denmark and more time spent in other places, other continents. I start the day after Valentine's day (how romantic). We shall see.

Busy day

On a completely unrelated note, did anyone catch the audio file that the US Navy just released about that encounter between an American task force and some Iranian speedboats in the Hormuz a couple days ago? Very surreal. The poor teenager running the communications systems on the American destroyer is squeaking out stuff like "Unknown small craft, your intentions are unclear, alter your course immediately!"

And then you hear someone on the Iranian side say over the frequency in a deep, overdramatized, Doctor Evil voice, "I am coming to you...!" and then later, "You will explode after a few minutes!!!" Heh, great stuff.

And on an even less related note, I saw a car with a bumper sticker today that read,"My other car is a Pynchon book." Then tonight when I got home my Amazon order for Pynchon's "Mason & Dixon" just came in the mail. I love sychronicity.

Angst

Now I'm really torn. I've had my head around Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee for months now, but the more I see of Obama, the more I think that not only is he more passionate, but I'm starting to believe that he'll be a lot more electable as well.

Watching the Republicans in the brief period between the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries, you could see that they were completely unprepared for the idea of an Obama candidacy. After hearing Obama's speeches (even his concession speech after the New Hampshire primary tonight), I think he could light a fire that would sweep the country in a way that Hillary just couldn't.

I don't know if an Obama candidacy or an Obama presidency would work, but I would like to see us get the chance to try. I haven't felt this inspired since I was just a little sprog and Clinton won in 92. It's a strange feeling.

We shall see. Nevada and South Carolina next.

Obama takes Iowa

Anybody catch the Obama speech after he took the Iowa Democratic Caucus? I think it was one of the most memorable, most important political speeches I've ever heard - and I've been leaning towards Clinton for the last few months just out of a sense of Macchiavellian practicality.

Obama's speech touched on non-partisanism, healthcare, change and a lot of the memes that he's been trading on, but when he said "They said this day would never come," it was Martin Luther King I was really thinking of. For the first time in history a black man won a presidential primary - and a primary in a fairly conservative all-white state. I only wish Dr. King could still be alive to have seen this - I was moved.

I really didn't expect him to win, and I don't know what happens in New Hampshire and the bigger states that come later. But watching Obama, I felt something I really haven't felt for a long time. Something beyond the "kick the bastards in the stones" joy of bare-knuckle politics. It was inspiring, and it did feel like hope.

Slow start

Getting 2008 off to a pleasantly slow start. Spent most of today eating hangover food, listening to news podcasts, reading Michel Houellebecq and watching old original Rod Serling Twilight Zone episodes - good for some fun insight into American societal norms from 1960.

Spent New Years Eve last night downtown with Cec and the expat crowd, watching 2008 come in with fireworks off the Space Needle. I can still hardly believe sometimes that I'm living in the US again.

Here are some pics from Christmas at the Twin Peaks lodge.

Hope everyone had a great weekend and that this is the beginning of another epic year.