Packing for SF and Cecilie has her "dinner party" playlist on the iPod speakers for packing music. Hooverphonic, Lamb, Kruder & Dorfmeister, Dimitri from Paris, the first Wallpaper magazine soundtrack... it dawned on me that every song on that playlist was a track I'd gotten when I lived in San Francisco in the late 90s.
Some kind of funny synchronicity, and I guess the music is putting me in the mood for the city. It's just that there's a hell of a lot about what happened in San Francisco, at the end, that I'd prefer not to remember. I've been too busy to think about it till it came up just now, surfacing through the music.
I hope this is going to work.
Crazy few weeks since Houston - plenty cooking. Houston was exactly as I expected it to be, and I was happy to get outta there & jet up to Chicago. Landed at 1030pm and was in the industrial club with Hannah, Jeannette, Maggie & friends by 1130. We danced our tails off till 4 (All due creds to you, Chicago, and your generous club closing hours), then Hannah & I caught wiener circle (don't ask) for a 4am calorie burst. Thanks again Hannah. It's always awesome, and it's always over too soon.
Back in Seattle and into a few weeks of madhouse workload - there's usually a lull after the July conferences because people are too exhausted to work for a week or two afterwards, but not this time. It's good though - I got what I needed done, and I think I'm in-role long enough now to get the hang of the new job.
Last weekend Deborah drove down from Vancouver with an extra NIN ticket (merci beaucoup Deborah!). Great show - Trent had these semitransparent metal screens with LEDs all over them descend across the stage in front of and behind the band, so the LEDs would create these wild pictures and patterns (some phonecame pictures here). I've never seen stage visuals like that before.
Now Magnus and Kajsa are here from Sweden, and tomorrow morning we're all cramming into my little Honda Civic and barreling down the Pacific Coast to San Francisco. I've never done the drive before and people say it's great. We're going to stay overnight in Eureka and see the Redwoods. Then to SF where all kinds of fun awaits. Can't wait to hook up with the SF crowd again (Marton - it will great to see you before you go back to Hungary!). And fuck knows I've needed a vacation lately.
Love you all, as ever.
Heading off to Houston for a big conference tomorrow, Fox help me. It will be okay - this will be the first of this type of conference I'll be attending in the new role that I started back in February, and I'm going to be doing some interesting work there. Much more relationship-based and less pure message control. I'll miss getting on stage in front of hundreds of people like I used to, but the new job has other compensations that make up for it.
The big conferences are good though because it pulls everyone together from wherever they're based - people you're on email with from Denmark, Germany, UK, Singapore, Quebec, but never get to see outside of Denver, Dallas, Munich, Toronto, or whichever weird city they're sending you this time. And everyone's going through the same disassociated Lost in Translation hotel-life experience, so there's a real feeling of comradeship & solidarity, carried through on that infrastructure of jetlag, chronic fatigue and alcohol. It can be good sometimes, when it works.
I hope it will be good this time.
I just heard that Jesse Helms has died at age 86. Throughout his whole career in the Senate he fought against civil rights, AIDS research, women's rights, foreign aid programs, government support of art and culture, and anything that represented tolerance and equality.
It's a mean-spirited thing for me to do, but I swore fifteen years ago that I would toast that self-righteous jerk the day I learned he passed on to the netherworld. And so this morning I raised a glass of the cheapest whiskey in the cabinet.
I hope that Senator Helms is resting in the peace, grace and equanimity that he worked so hard to deny to others.
It's great news that the Colombian military was able to free those 15 hostages from a FARC hideout in the Amazon. The operation went off without any violence or injuries to either side, which is obviously the best case result anyone could ask for.
But I just heard today that the way the Colombian special forces were able to get the rebels to let them close to the hostages was by posing as aid workers that were supposedly bringing food and medicine.
I think that's a really bad and irresponsible idea, because it now casts suspicion on anyone who from now on will claim to belong to an international NGO, and it directly threatens the lives of aid workers around the world. What rebel group is going risk negotiating with the real aid orgs now?
It used to be a favorite tactic of CIA agents to pose as journalists in the field, until the CIA was forced to stop doing it in the 1970s because they were getting too many real journalists killed. I wish the Colombian military had behaved with the same restraint.
I'm glad the 15 Colombian hostages are free, but I have a bad feeling that this operation is going to end up killing a lot more than 15 people in the long run.
OK, this is cheap and gratuitous but I had to do it...
Bush Tours America To Survey Damage Caused By His Disastrous Presidency
Seven months left and counting...
Dreamt I was walking through a huge library built like a cathedral. Old books and parchments stacked in narrow aisles on all sides. I could hear the voices of some girls speaking softly from somewhere nearby, but I couldn't make out what they were saying.
I wandered through a section of medieval illuminated books filled with religious iconography and bound in stamped leather. Then through a tack and sail-themed section filled with rolled up nautical charts and schematic drawings of sailing ships and old pre-Dreadnought armored cruisers from a hundred twenty years ago.
Then I entered a section of globes and atlases - rolled up parchments bound with ribbon or leather. I chose one dark, heavy parchment and unrolled it, revealing an incomplete, hand-painted map of the world that could have come from Drake's time. Only the western coastlines of North and South America were sketched in, and in the wide blank space of the Pacific, the words "Terra Incognita," and a large coiled sea dragon.
Another table-sized chart with ragged edges showed a number of small circles widely spaced from each other and connected by faint lines, the way Victor airways connect distant VORTAC beacons on an aviation chart. Ringing each circle were a series of dots, each circle with a different number of dots of varying size. Next to some of the circles was a hand-printed word, but the parchment was very old and the words were smudged. I was able to read only two of them - the words Deneb and Centauri.
I woke up to the sound of thunder.