Yes, I'm still alive! I made it back this evening from my weekend in NoCal with no scratches and precious few bumps and bruises!
The trip served as a short vacation from work, but my main purpose was to sell music at the Sebastopol Celtic Fest in, naturally, Sebastopol, CA.
Mason flew up to meet me at about the same time I arrived in town Thursday evening. He and Chris (my best friend in the whole wide world besides Mason) got to meet and get to know each other, and Mason also got to meet Rose, Seth and all of Chris's other housemates. Rose, especially, is worth getting to know. Much wine was drunk, and Chris and Mason discovered they both have equal facility for giving me shit; getting the two of them together is positively dangerous, since they feed off each other and egg each other on. It's kinda funny!
Friday Mason and I played tourist, plunking down dollars for matryoshka dolls at the Russian store on Pier 39, taking pictures of the sea lions, hunting for antiques on Sacramento St., etc., etc. For Friday's dinner, Mason, Chris and I ate with my friend Alex at an intriguing Japanese place in Oakland. While we were sitting there, I reflected on how lucky I was to have the people I have around me. It did me good seeing Alex again, although he dashed off not long after our return from dinner. But he made a great impression on Mason and Chris, so maybe he'll be persuaded to do it again sometime.
Come the weekend, Chris and I jetted up north to Sonoma County for the festival. I felt tremendously fortunate to be visited by Todd and Chris and some other new people who seemed nice enough but didn't really talk much. I dearly wanted to hang out with them all for the time they were at the festival, since I hadn't seen them in about a year, but the booth was amazingly busy for the entire weekend (thanks also, partially, to Chris, who indeed kindly patronized my wee business!), so I had to content myself with a couple of brief meetings, hugs, etc. I didn't even get a chance to take advantage of Todd's offer to spell me for a while. There were others, too, I'd hoped to see sometime on my trip, but time and circumstance didn't allow. Perhaps next time!)
I went into the weekend worried about competition from other vendors and came away having my most successful year yet (we've been vending at the Sebastopol Celtic Fest since its start eight years ago), so even from a money standpoint the trip was a success.
Fast forward through another long day of driving and I'm home, unpacked, desperately tired and grateful for the escape from work, the chance to work at something I love and my many friends who kindly altered their orbits to intercept mine for at least a short time. It won't take us so long to come back next time. I promise!
Monday, September 30, 2002
Saturday, September 21, 2002
Finally my favorite band of all time comes back with some more material. Naturally, it's all old material, since they've been broken up for, oh, 12 years or so now. But they've given me a 3-CD collection that satisfies my hunger for interesting new Spandau discoveries, slakes my thirst for nostalgia and proves that they really did have a place in the legacy of the '80s.
The collection is broken up into different sections. The first disc contains the most unusual stuff -- demos, a couple of live tracks, some of the overlooked album tracks, etc. The second disc is a 10-track live disc from mid-1983, the height of their popularity. Somewhere I've got the video of this concert and I remember hooking my dad's stereo VCR up to the tape deck and recording it straight to cassette tape. The tape is lost now, but no matter; I've got it all on CD now. The third disc is all remixes, including what in my opinion is one of the greatest '80s dance tracks ever recorded and one of few 12" mixes that I feel totally outshines the original, the obscure track "Glow," and the archetypal '80s club remix, "Communication."
And now a few words about the band themselves. I got into them long ago, but long after they were past their peak. I latched onto them at first because of the mega-hit "True," which was just about ominpresent on the adult-contemporary stations I was exposed to in the mid- to late-'80s. But it was the stark, daring post-punk electronicized dance music of their early career that most grabbed me.
Looking at it now, I can intellectualize it as the escapist glamorizing of working-class Londoners who needed something with a good beat that was easy to dance to and an image that exotically evoked the lavishness of past eras without slavishly imitating. Too, they reveled in the homoeroticism inherent in wanting to be, sound and look glamorous. The aesthetic was evidenced by the cover of Journeys to Glory, which featured a Greek-looking statue of a male nude in relief and in the video for "Paint Me Down," which featured the band in loin cloths and smeared with paint (really quite tame, to look back on it, but banned from the BBC for its shameless depiction of male flesh, some time before Duran Duran could claim BBC-banning honors for "The Chauffeur."
But at the time the music simply grabbed me by the gut and wouldn't let go. And their look changed seemingly from month to month, a fast-forward fashion culture that was completely alien and fascinating to me.
The band released the first 12" dance remix (for their first single, "To Cut a Long Story Short) outside the reggae and funk worlds and the rest of the world followed suit. They set the trend for filming their videos in wild, adventurous and exotic locations that Duran Duran later became known for. Duran Duran's manager, early on, asked Spandau's to let his band open for Spandau at a club in London. He refused and to this day regrets it, wishing as he does that he had a poster that proclaimed in large letters "Spandau Ballet" and in smaller letters "special guests Duran Duran." Duran Duran became the best-known exponents of the New Romantic movement (though they, like everyone else, abandoned it around 1982 or early 1983), but they were neither the first nor the best.
Spandau Ballet's members weren't the most talented musicians (though Tony Hadley has the coolest voice imaginable and Gary Kemp's unusual guitar rhythms, chord voicings, but they captured the spirit of a specific time and place (Britain, end of the '70s, start of the '80s) better, perhaps than any other band save Visage. They followed the musical zeitgeist of pop in the '80s till it totally abandoned punk and moved more in the direction of Sade, Simply Red and Roxy Music. The result, of course, was the album True and the title track (which appears here, newly remixed, with the original intro restored in place of the syncopated guitar stabs of the chorus that replaced it and helped make the song a hit).
I didn't realize how much I missed these guys. Every word of every song, every hit of every drum, every sax solo, every wash of reverb is etched permanently in my brain, as I discovered when I had to forcibly stop myself from humming instrumental bits and singing all the words at the top of my lungs (including the hyper-edited 'ccccccccc - communic -communic - communication, woo-oo-hoo-oo-hoo-oo-hoo) even when working on other stuff and no longer consciously paying attention.
Three discs. 39 tracks. Thousands of good memories. 12 pounds 69p from amazon.co.uk. A bargain.
The collection is broken up into different sections. The first disc contains the most unusual stuff -- demos, a couple of live tracks, some of the overlooked album tracks, etc. The second disc is a 10-track live disc from mid-1983, the height of their popularity. Somewhere I've got the video of this concert and I remember hooking my dad's stereo VCR up to the tape deck and recording it straight to cassette tape. The tape is lost now, but no matter; I've got it all on CD now. The third disc is all remixes, including what in my opinion is one of the greatest '80s dance tracks ever recorded and one of few 12" mixes that I feel totally outshines the original, the obscure track "Glow," and the archetypal '80s club remix, "Communication."
And now a few words about the band themselves. I got into them long ago, but long after they were past their peak. I latched onto them at first because of the mega-hit "True," which was just about ominpresent on the adult-contemporary stations I was exposed to in the mid- to late-'80s. But it was the stark, daring post-punk electronicized dance music of their early career that most grabbed me.
Looking at it now, I can intellectualize it as the escapist glamorizing of working-class Londoners who needed something with a good beat that was easy to dance to and an image that exotically evoked the lavishness of past eras without slavishly imitating. Too, they reveled in the homoeroticism inherent in wanting to be, sound and look glamorous. The aesthetic was evidenced by the cover of Journeys to Glory, which featured a Greek-looking statue of a male nude in relief and in the video for "Paint Me Down," which featured the band in loin cloths and smeared with paint (really quite tame, to look back on it, but banned from the BBC for its shameless depiction of male flesh, some time before Duran Duran could claim BBC-banning honors for "The Chauffeur."
But at the time the music simply grabbed me by the gut and wouldn't let go. And their look changed seemingly from month to month, a fast-forward fashion culture that was completely alien and fascinating to me.
The band released the first 12" dance remix (for their first single, "To Cut a Long Story Short) outside the reggae and funk worlds and the rest of the world followed suit. They set the trend for filming their videos in wild, adventurous and exotic locations that Duran Duran later became known for. Duran Duran's manager, early on, asked Spandau's to let his band open for Spandau at a club in London. He refused and to this day regrets it, wishing as he does that he had a poster that proclaimed in large letters "Spandau Ballet" and in smaller letters "special guests Duran Duran." Duran Duran became the best-known exponents of the New Romantic movement (though they, like everyone else, abandoned it around 1982 or early 1983), but they were neither the first nor the best.
Spandau Ballet's members weren't the most talented musicians (though Tony Hadley has the coolest voice imaginable and Gary Kemp's unusual guitar rhythms, chord voicings, but they captured the spirit of a specific time and place (Britain, end of the '70s, start of the '80s) better, perhaps than any other band save Visage. They followed the musical zeitgeist of pop in the '80s till it totally abandoned punk and moved more in the direction of Sade, Simply Red and Roxy Music. The result, of course, was the album True and the title track (which appears here, newly remixed, with the original intro restored in place of the syncopated guitar stabs of the chorus that replaced it and helped make the song a hit).
I didn't realize how much I missed these guys. Every word of every song, every hit of every drum, every sax solo, every wash of reverb is etched permanently in my brain, as I discovered when I had to forcibly stop myself from humming instrumental bits and singing all the words at the top of my lungs (including the hyper-edited 'ccccccccc - communic -communic - communication, woo-oo-hoo-oo-hoo-oo-hoo) even when working on other stuff and no longer consciously paying attention.
Three discs. 39 tracks. Thousands of good memories. 12 pounds 69p from amazon.co.uk. A bargain.
I experienced a long, stressful, difficult low-self-esteem week at work today. Principally, this was occasioned by the even more unusually high number of nurse's visits we've had to do relative to the number of working nurses than in other recent weeks.
But generally, this was the week when everything went wrong. It got to the point by Thursday when everytime I heard 'Chris?' from the next room over (from my supervisor), I cringed, knowing it would be something else I forgot to get done, forgot not to get done, did wrong, etc. I'll say, too, that my supervisor's extra-stressed-out-ness contributed to my own. Several times, in sheer frustration I just completely shut down for about five minutes.
In the end, I finally got done this evening. An hour or two of over time is nice on occasion, but doing it every day gets truly old. I definitely hit mini-burnout before I finally left at 7:40 this evening. With a weekend to recharge and many patients going off service next week, one hopes things will return to normal.
At any rate, I hope I get to recharge this weekend. Between car repairs, ordering, stocking, pricing, etc., the inventory for the festival next weekend, picking up the dry cleaning, paying the electric bill, cleaning the house, helping my mom with her computer, helping Mason's mom's friend with her computer, updating the business Web site, sending out the business e-mail update, reading my online homework, doing school research at the library, doing dishes, emptying more boxes in the office, contacting friends in the Bay Area and making arrangements to meet and/or stay, processing and mailing orders, depositing money in the bank, grocery shopping, etc., I doubt I'll much time for leisurely recliining. But if I do, I know what I'll be listening to ... (entry on that to follow)!
But generally, this was the week when everything went wrong. It got to the point by Thursday when everytime I heard 'Chris?' from the next room over (from my supervisor), I cringed, knowing it would be something else I forgot to get done, forgot not to get done, did wrong, etc. I'll say, too, that my supervisor's extra-stressed-out-ness contributed to my own. Several times, in sheer frustration I just completely shut down for about five minutes.
In the end, I finally got done this evening. An hour or two of over time is nice on occasion, but doing it every day gets truly old. I definitely hit mini-burnout before I finally left at 7:40 this evening. With a weekend to recharge and many patients going off service next week, one hopes things will return to normal.
At any rate, I hope I get to recharge this weekend. Between car repairs, ordering, stocking, pricing, etc., the inventory for the festival next weekend, picking up the dry cleaning, paying the electric bill, cleaning the house, helping my mom with her computer, helping Mason's mom's friend with her computer, updating the business Web site, sending out the business e-mail update, reading my online homework, doing school research at the library, doing dishes, emptying more boxes in the office, contacting friends in the Bay Area and making arrangements to meet and/or stay, processing and mailing orders, depositing money in the bank, grocery shopping, etc., I doubt I'll much time for leisurely recliining. But if I do, I know what I'll be listening to ... (entry on that to follow)!
Monday, September 16, 2002
So I have this modest proposal with regards to the whole US/UN/Iraq thing.
Truly there are a great many UN resolutions that Iraq has ignored, violated, etc., and they (for the sake of argument here, anyway) should be brought to task.
But really I don't think this country can take the moral high ground in this respect until it moves to comply with the many and myriad UN resolutions to which it has said, "We're the most powerful country on earth. Who's gonna make us?"
Don't think the US has ever ignored or violated UN resolutions? Do some research.
I think it's a fair trade.
Truly there are a great many UN resolutions that Iraq has ignored, violated, etc., and they (for the sake of argument here, anyway) should be brought to task.
But really I don't think this country can take the moral high ground in this respect until it moves to comply with the many and myriad UN resolutions to which it has said, "We're the most powerful country on earth. Who's gonna make us?"
Don't think the US has ever ignored or violated UN resolutions? Do some research.
I think it's a fair trade.
It's been a quiet evening here in Phoenix, my home town. Driving out toward a (relatively) nearby outlet mall, gazing on the hills and valleys north of town once you get past the sprawl, I turned to Mason and said, "Just remember, none of that's really there. Arizona's all flatness and wasteland." Recent rainy spells have left the desert ablaze with color. We then started talking about all the places we love (both of us grew up here, so we admittedly have our biases) ... Jerome, Prescott, St. Johns, the Verde Valley, Flagstaff. Then there's the Grand Canyon (nothing special, just a big hole in the ground) and Kartchner Caverns (again, nothing special, just a different kind of hole in the ground). He has a greater appreciation for beauty than almost anyone I've ever known. It was a pretty cool moment.
So anyway we spent lots of money yesterday, since I'd received my G.I. Bill check for school, which was sufficient to put some towards my saving plan for paying for school and still left us money for various useful household items, to wit: A router/switch so that I didn't have to keep using his computer to access the Internet through our new DSL line (hallelujah for that, incidentally); some music; a new CD burner (48x! Just think, a full CD in 2 minutes, give or take!); and the mother of all purchases, dearly-bought gift for my psuedo-housewife, a Kitchenaid. Now, permit me to be excited by domesticity for the moment, but this thing is truly wonderous to behold. To call this thing a mixer is to insult its robustness, or to elevate the common handheld mixer to godhood. 300 watts, untold horsepower, this thing could probably tow a car if it were harnessed properly. With the attachment thingie on the front of it, it'll do just about everything this side of cook for you. It's pretty cool. It's also very red.
Right, so that was yesterday. Today was occupied by homework, business chores, watching Rat Race (which would've been OK if not for the all-too-evident focus-grouping that went into the filmmakers' decisions as to what was funny and for the frequent flagrant violations of the laws of physics, probability and causality), more homework, and soon bed.
Boy ain't home; he's working, and is presently asleep somewhere in Minneapolis. I feel a little lonely. But all in all, it's an OK end to a decent weekend. All too soon I head back into the fray that is my job, the daily struggle to fit too few nurses with too many patients and keep all of both groups happy.
Can't wait for the weekend after next, when I trek to NoCal for the annual Sebastopol Celtic Festival! I have open time at this point for Thursday night and Friday during the day for my friends, and I intend to make use of it. I may've mentioned before that I'm planning on Friday tea with the #gaysfca group, so consider yerselves warned! And be excellent to each other!
(And a side note to Joseph: Thanks at least for saying you don't think I'm a bad person. Really. It's comforting to know we're making progress! ;^) )
So anyway we spent lots of money yesterday, since I'd received my G.I. Bill check for school, which was sufficient to put some towards my saving plan for paying for school and still left us money for various useful household items, to wit: A router/switch so that I didn't have to keep using his computer to access the Internet through our new DSL line (hallelujah for that, incidentally); some music; a new CD burner (48x! Just think, a full CD in 2 minutes, give or take!); and the mother of all purchases, dearly-bought gift for my psuedo-housewife, a Kitchenaid. Now, permit me to be excited by domesticity for the moment, but this thing is truly wonderous to behold. To call this thing a mixer is to insult its robustness, or to elevate the common handheld mixer to godhood. 300 watts, untold horsepower, this thing could probably tow a car if it were harnessed properly. With the attachment thingie on the front of it, it'll do just about everything this side of cook for you. It's pretty cool. It's also very red.
Right, so that was yesterday. Today was occupied by homework, business chores, watching Rat Race (which would've been OK if not for the all-too-evident focus-grouping that went into the filmmakers' decisions as to what was funny and for the frequent flagrant violations of the laws of physics, probability and causality), more homework, and soon bed.
Boy ain't home; he's working, and is presently asleep somewhere in Minneapolis. I feel a little lonely. But all in all, it's an OK end to a decent weekend. All too soon I head back into the fray that is my job, the daily struggle to fit too few nurses with too many patients and keep all of both groups happy.
Can't wait for the weekend after next, when I trek to NoCal for the annual Sebastopol Celtic Festival! I have open time at this point for Thursday night and Friday during the day for my friends, and I intend to make use of it. I may've mentioned before that I'm planning on Friday tea with the #gaysfca group, so consider yerselves warned! And be excellent to each other!
(And a side note to Joseph: Thanks at least for saying you don't think I'm a bad person. Really. It's comforting to know we're making progress! ;^) )
Wednesday, September 04, 2002
So it's time once again for my big gay trip to the Bay Area for the Sebastopol Celtic Festival. Plans are afoot -- I'll be there from the evening of Sept. 26 till I hop in my car at dawn on Sept. 30, although the festival will take up most of the 28th & 29th. So finally I can give my friend Chris the Ashley MacIsaac CD I gave him last year and inadvertently packed away in my stuff! If all goes well, too, my honey muffin will join me for at least part of the weekend.
At work, I got my lateral promotion, so I'm a full-time staffing coordinator with benefits and everything. It's about time! Yay me.
School goes well.
The house is finally almost completely cleaned, truly a first for me in many, many years. Monty loves his new home, but mostly he loves the fact that he gets walked three times a day.
Songs are being written, but nothing is being heard about the band. I'm still waiting till they decide what instruments they want before even worrying about having the chance to audition for them. Clearly, they're not exactly organized yet.
Qwest is really pissing us off. We wait a month for the hardware, only to be told they only signed us up for MSN dialup service (why we'd go through Qwest to order MSN dialup service is beyond me). Then they told us to use MSN dialup and upgrade our account. Um, no. So now we wait for the hardware, wait for them to activate our line Sept. 10. Wait, wait, wait. I'm getting bloody sick of waiting. And their tech support people are true mouth breathers.
*yawn* Be good. More soon.
At work, I got my lateral promotion, so I'm a full-time staffing coordinator with benefits and everything. It's about time! Yay me.
School goes well.
The house is finally almost completely cleaned, truly a first for me in many, many years. Monty loves his new home, but mostly he loves the fact that he gets walked three times a day.
Songs are being written, but nothing is being heard about the band. I'm still waiting till they decide what instruments they want before even worrying about having the chance to audition for them. Clearly, they're not exactly organized yet.
Qwest is really pissing us off. We wait a month for the hardware, only to be told they only signed us up for MSN dialup service (why we'd go through Qwest to order MSN dialup service is beyond me). Then they told us to use MSN dialup and upgrade our account. Um, no. So now we wait for the hardware, wait for them to activate our line Sept. 10. Wait, wait, wait. I'm getting bloody sick of waiting. And their tech support people are true mouth breathers.
*yawn* Be good. More soon.
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