Bleeding Fiction

A few years ago, when I was working at InterSlice, I took a flight from Moscow to some smaller city in Russia. I've forgotten the name of the city, but I remember the crowded flight and the tiny plane and the strange thing that happened when we landed. Everyone cheered. The flight didn't last more than two hours, with smooth skies all the way and a textbook landing, but everyone cheered as enthusiastically as if the pilot had brought us down with only one engine left on the plane, and that one on fire.

I had a similar experience today, while taking the midterm for my Program Evaluation class. This thing was hefty; twelve to fourteen pages long, all of it writing. Not a single multiple choice or fill in the blank question to be found. Our professor expected it to take us about two and a half hours and we groaned at the weight. But for all of that, the test was actually pretty easy. Compare and contrast terms, a fair bit of analysis; simple stuff, provided you knew the material.

About an hour into the test, one girl got up. She put on her jacket, slung her bag over her shoulder and turned her test in. Everyone in class, every student in my class, dropped their pens and applauded. There were a few woots. One guy, very distinctly, said "you punched that test in the face!"

There are times and places where you don't expect to hear cheering, but it sneaks in anyway. Little moments, slices in time, when routine flights make heroes of pilots and let mere mortal students slip the surly bonds of earth and punch the face of a test.

I haven't mentioned Bishop Allen around here in over a year, and even that was only to comment that they have a song on the Saved soundtrack. I haven't talked about their music since May of 2004. Which is odd, because they're one of my favorite bands.

The problem is that they only have one album. They'd been working on their second, Clementines, for over a year, but started shopping around for a label. For a while, the rumor was that they'd signed with Polyvinyl, which is cool as that's the label for both Rainer Maria and Mates of State, both acts that I love. Only apparently the Polyvinyl deal fell through and fans of Bishop Allen were bereft of new tunes from them on CD.

But today I saw something really strange at the Bishop Allen website. The band's decided to do something... well, a little nuts. They're releasing a new four song EP every month of 2006, for $5 each, building up to the anticipated release of Clementines next year, which won't contain any songs from the EPs. Four songs a month, for twelve months, plus a ten to twelve track album after that. So about 60 new songs over the course of the next year. That's just crazy.

Crazy awesome.

1. The 32 teams seeded in 4 Pots, A through D, divided into 8 Groups, A through H compete in best-of-three competition from June 9th through June 23rd to make it to the Round of 16. This includes Group E, the Group of Death, which counts Italy, Ghana, the US and the Czech Republic amongst its members.

2. The Round of 16 begins on June 24th and runs through June 27th, and everything is single elimination from there on out.

3. The Quarterfinals are held on June 30th and July 1st.

4. The semi-finals will be on July 4th and 5th.

5. The final match, to determine the 2006 FIFA World Cup Champion, will be held on July 9th.

6. Right now, my money's on Brazil.

7. Superbowl? No. No. I said "football," not "wuss-ass American rugby knock-off." Helmets. Shoulder-pads. Feh.

Something that seems true but had never explicitly occurred to me before:

"Satisfying is counter to the mission of advertising. Satisfied people don't need to buy stuff."

Recorded here because this blog has long since become my memory.

"Every Chinese New Year Bruce Lee fights Chuck Norris for good luck."

Have I ever mentioned that I really, really love Overheard in New York?

From a long essay on the history of Wonder Girl at The Wonder Woman Blog:

"Stan Lee didn't get the nickname 'The Man' for nothing. He got it for killing Bucky."

Because she loves me, Erin McKeown released a six song EP today. It's a short introduction, an interview and tracks that she performed live on Morning Becomes Eclectic on KCRW. The EP's a download only, from any of the usual places that you'd download music. If you've got a real audio player, you can check out the whole 36 minute long set for free right over here. (Not sure how long that'll last, though.)

Now, you should know that it's not new stuff. The six songs (Aspera, Beautiful (I Guess), We Are More, White City, Float and Life On the Moon) are all off of Erin's most recent album. But I think Erin's live performance energy, and a bit of the improvisation/re-orchestration she brings to a gig, comes across pretty well. Interview's snazzy, too. "Smokey-voiced." Damn. A little more of an accent than I've heard from Erin in the past, which is interesting.

Live On KCRW, available now. Because Erin McKeown loves me, dammit.

I'm listening to Ani DiFranco's Double CD Reveling/Reckoning right now. It's tearful, broken-voiced, staccato slow-jazz. Neither my usual fare nor Ani's, but I dig it out now and again, feeling vaguely guilty, I suppose, that I don't listen to it often enough. But sometimes music's a sort of trap - I wear myself into a comfortable groove with a new band or a new sound, and soon two months have gone by with only the same 10 CDs revolving through my stereo. Everything else is just air, or dead plastic.

As it turns out, though, this album fits my frame of mind about perfectly. I'm feeling a little bit regretful today and annoyed at the demands on my time; I want there to be either more of them or fewer. The ones I have right now are small enough for me to push off until later but large enough to take some time to tackle. It makes me feel guilty about doing other productive things. So I end up becomming both reclusive and lazy. More lazy than usual. Example: I've been resisting going to sleep at night because it seems like too much effort compared to lounging around doing nothing. In fact, I'm doing it right now.

It's starting to get to me. I can't think this way. I need a change. I need to reduce clutter, both in my head and my living space. I'm in the market for the following:

1. A filing cabinet

2. A vacuum cleaner

3. New bookshelves

4. New, colorful art for my walls

5. A plan for how to rearrange the furniture in my apartment

6. Help in doing the rearranging

7. A new design for my blog

8. Something new and different in my everyday life

So. Who wants to help?

I just watched the final episode of Justice League Unlimited. Thing's only been broadcast in the UK so far, I believe, so I had to grab it off of a BitTorrent site. It should hit the States in a month or so; Canada probably a week or so before then.

It's a decent episode, but not great. It features Darkseid. And cameos by... well... pretty much everyone. No Titans, of course, and I didn't spot the Huntress or Captain Marvel anywhere, but other than that every member of the Justice League or Society shows up for at least a second. Zatanna's few moments, though unvoiced, are brilliant. Flash has a typical fun moment, too. And Superman... damn, but if Superman doesn't get to cut loose for a moment there. You know that when Superman finally starts talking like a badass, there's a titanic struggle on the way.

Unfortunately it only lasts for a minute before the writers remember that the series bible calls for the total wussification of Superman and the blue boy gets dropped again pretty quickly.

Darkseid's defeat (if you can call it that) comes in an unlikely way and the ramifications are... interesting: Luthor hands Darkseid the Anti-Life Equation. You know, the thing that Darkseid wants to get so that he can have absolute dominion over all life in the universe. Sure, when Darkseid gets it he teleports out and stops trying to open up firepits in the earth and kill off all of humanity right then and there, but isn't that only delaying what you've just made inevitable? It's sort of like... I dunno, summoning Great Chthulhu in the hopes that he just wants to play a hand of bridge. Seems to me that you put yourself in a pretty bad position that way. I figure you're better off just having Superman pound the crap out of him. Erm... Darkseid, that is, not Cthulhu.

Finally, my one continuing complaint about JLU still stands: not enough Stargirl. It's hard for me not to like Courtney. She's got a cute, athletic costume, a youthful attitude, a neat set of powers and she's a legacy hero to boot. Jack Knight's legacy hero. And they even make sure to give her the right, art deco-style cosmic rod in her appearances. I can't blame the show, of course; I couldn't expect them to give Stargirl a lot of play at the expense of the more well-known characters. But it'd be cool if she had more than just the one episode to feature in. Ah, well; I guess I need to start collecting the Justice Society trades.

Anyway, I'll look forward to picking up this season of JLU on DVD, but unlike Teen Titans, which I thought had a really solid extra season, I think this show sneaked by with mostly the visual references to Super Friends to keep it neat. It was nice to see for the nostalgia, but the show's real end was last season.

The Aenied is basically Virgil writing Homer fan fiction.

Weird.

Last month, Mates of State played at Schine. Some folks will already know this as the student center at Syracuse University; everyone else has just been informed. The incomparable Erin McKeown is playing at Schine at the end of March.

The doomshield mocks me.

On the up side, Mates of State hit Seattle on April 20th. Whee!

Judging by the amount of cyrillic seen in the pictures on this collection of images, I'd guess that Russia has discovered livejournal.

I wonder if they can do something better with it than we have.