I didn't get to watch as much curling this year as I did during the last Winter Olympics, but I still got to see a fair amount, including the championship games for both the men and women. I used to watch curling on TV when I was growing up in Detroit, because the Canadian TV station across the river in Windsor used to air it often. I think it appealed to my sense of the absurd, with the sweeping in particular looking profoundly silly. But seeing it as an adult, I can definitely see the subtlties that evaded me when I was a kid. And I love a sport where some of the best athletes are in the forties. Kevin Martin, the Canadian men's skip, and Cheryl Bernard, the Canadian women's skip, are both 43; Carolyn Darbyshire of the Canadian team is 46. It's a pity we won't be seeing any more curling here in the U.S. until the next Winter Olympics, because I genuinely enjoy watching it. Then again, maybe we're better off not having it on TV here; NBC's host last night joked that NBC stood for "Nothing But Curling", but it was more like "Nothing But Commercials". It felt like we were only getting to watch half of the spiel.
In honor of the just-completed Olympic curling competition, here's my favorite curling-as-metaphor-for-failing-romance song, Tournament of Hearts by the Weakerthans.
Now listening to: "Tournament of Hearts" from Reunion Tour by The Weakerthans.
I've been going through my photos from my trip to Frankfurt last September and came across this one. I stumbled across an anti-nuclear protest march near the river my first Saturday there.
I was walking along in the opposite direction, looking at the march, amused, when I was approached by two very excited people who accosted me in very fast German. "Ich spreche kein Deutsch", I said with a slightly exaggerated American accent (I can't speak much German, but when I do I have a reasonably good accent, but it's sometimes useful to play up the fact that I really don't speak the language) and smiled. They immediately switched to English.
I had a very nice bag with me (it was a bag I got from my friend Marshall from the 2000 Apple Worldwide Developers' Conference), and my new friends were wondering if maybe I had room in it for some nuclear waste. They didn't have anywhere else to put it, so they were hoping I could help them out. I laughed and suggested that maybe there was a mountain in Nevada where they could store it, as my bag was already pretty heavy with all the cameras I had in it. "I think maybe they don't want to take this waste either." No, I suppose maybe they don't.
Laura and I went into the city yesterday for a day of musical entertainment. Our evening destination was Santos Party House in Chinatown, where the Chinese record label Maybe Mars was putting on a label showcase for three of their bands from Beijing who were on tour in the U.S. The band that I was most interested in seeing was the headliners, Carsick Cars. I don't remember where I first heard about them, but I found a copy of their first album and fell in love with it. About half of it is in English and half in Mandarin, but I've never let not understanding a language deter me from listening to interesting music. Their signature song is 中南海, or Zhong Nan Hai. The first time I heard it, I was gobsmacked; it sounded an awful lot like one of my favorite bands from New Zealand, The Clean, except sung in Chinese. I sent a link to the song to a bunch of friends of mine who were also Clean fans, and they were pretty amazed, too. If I had to list bands that I love that I never expected to see live, Carsick Cars would have been near the top of the list, so it was a real treat to have them come to New York.
Another band that played at last night's show was P.K. 14. I understand they've been around since the late 1990s and hold a position in the Chinese indie rock community of great esteem, roughly akin to, say, Television or Talking Heads in their impact as pioneers. They were fantastic. All of their songs were in Mandarin (I presume; not that I can tell the difference between Mandarin and Cantonese or any other Chinese dialect), but their lead singer was able to speak English. I found a very cool music video for their song Tamen:
The third member of the tour was avant-folk musician Xiao He, who made quite a racket with an acoustic guitar, a black box hanging off of it, and a Macbook Pro that was used to loop and repeat bits of the audio he was creating. This could really qualify as Difficult Listening Hour material, but I enjoyed it anyway.
There was a fourth band playing that night who weren't part of the tour, Antimagic. I thought they were good, but I would have preferred they didn't play. The show had to be over by 10pm because there was a separate show by Basement Jaxx and the doors for that were opening at that hour, and four bands just don't fit easily into 2.5 hours. Carsick Cars were limited to a 30 minute set because of that, and they were the headliners. I would have rather had a 50 or 60 minute set from Carsick Cars and no Antimagic. No reflection on them, I'm sure it wasn't their fault and they were good, but the club sucks for double booking that night.
Maybe Mars has a page on their blog about the tour and the bands, and one nice feature is that they're offering the most recent albums by Xiao He and P.K. 14 as free downloads, as well as both albums by Carsick Cars. I didn't even know they had a second album out. I'm listening to it now, and it sounds pretty damned good. The tour continues along the east coast of the U.S. for a couple more weeks, and there will even be three or four more opportunities to see them in New York City.
I spent two and a half weeks in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, last month for work. I had a really good time there.
I brought five cameras with me; I brought seven home. I shot about 500 photos on my iPhone, mainly to share with Laura so she would know what I was up to. I also shot 24 rolls of film: 6 rolls of 35mm black and white in my Lomo LC-A, Kodak Retina Ia, and a Canonet QL19 that I bought at a flea market there; 2 rolls of 35mm Kodachrome 64 in the Retina Ia; 3 packs of Polaroid 600 adapted with a neutral density filter to work in my SX-70; and 13 rolls of color and black and white 120 film in my Kiev 88CM Hasselbladski, my vintage Diana, and an Agfa Isola I that I bought at the same flea market as the Canonet. I finally developed my last roll of film from the trip last night. I'm still scanning, and I'll probably be posting photos from the trip until Christmas, but you can see the first 42 photos from the trip in a set on Flickr.
I found out some interesting things in this New York Times article about record stores that keep going after they've gone out of business. I worked a couple of blocks from the old location of Midnight Records for a few months. They were gone by the time I was there, sadly. I wish I'd known the store was sort of still being run out of the owner's apartment when I was working there; my checkbook is probably just as happy, however, that I didn't. Good record stores are a dying breed. I was just in Frankfurt, Germany, for almost three weeks for work, and I found a couple of verygood used stores, great for older stuff that I already knew about, like NDW bands and some of the indie bands from the 90s, but nothing that sold new music, particularly the indie rock I was looking for. I managed to pick up some music at the local big box store, but it's not the same; good bands, but all on major labels. I love the buried gems on small independent labels.
I've been having fun with the camera on my iPhone. I don't always have a real camera with me, but I always have my iPhone with me. And actually, I had several real cameras with me when I took these two shots, but the iPhone seemed the most appropriate camera to use.
I just love the abstract quality of these. They're something concrete, something that, if I told you what it was, you would say, "of course!" But I kind of like putting them out here without saying what they're photos of. They could be almost anything. If you look really closely at the second one, you can probably tell. Or maybe I just think so because I know where I took it.
"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull
his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand
this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they
receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."
- Albert Einstein, explaining radio
There used to be a cat
Mischief, 1988 - December 20, 2003
Sylvester (the Dorito Fiend), who died at Thanksgiving, 2000.
![[ photo of Mischief, a black and white cat ]](/images/moosechief.jpeg)
![[ photo of Sylvester, a black and white cat ]](/images/conehead_sm.jpeg)
