our friends Debbie and Daphne from Avenue D were invited to perform at july 4th festival in, of all places, Charlotte, North Carolina. Debbie, a couple Charlotte locals that they knew who live in nyc now and a couple other new yorkers got in a van earlier last week for a little trip to the south. daphne and lani had to work till wednesday so Daphne and i took a bus down to DC wednesday night where we met up with lani and daphne’s friend Marin and drove down to Charlotte from there in a borrowed Pulsar.
<p>i think that driving many hours across several states just to see Avenue D play makes us all officially groupies now.</p>
<p>since we left DC at about 11 pm after all working all day, we knew it was going to be a long night. at about 5am, somewhere south of Chapel Hill, and still a few hours from Charlotte, we gave in and got a motel room for a couple hours of sleep. when we got up we continued on and met up with everyone who’d come down earlier. </p>
<p>the whole trip was kind of a redneck safari. the group consisted of: debbie and daphne (from miami but living in nyc), marin (from miami but going to school in austin and living in DC for the summer), me (from maine but living in nyc), lani (from washington state but living in DC), rick and grant (both living in nyc and i’m not sure where they’re from), lauren (from georgia but living in nyc), travis, derek, and autumn (charlotte locals who all live in nyc now). travis and derek basically acted as our tourguides, showing us around the city and introducing us to the cool people they knew there.</p>
<p>on the fourth, the <a href="http://www.fatcitydeli.com/">Fat City Deli</a> had their “family fun picnic” which was a combination music festival (with two stages) and 9 hour long party with food and booze. it’s a pretty cool place; lots of nice graffiti and alternative subculture type people hanging around. you get the feeling that it’s one of the places in charlotte where the few cool people in the city hang out on a regular basis. Avenue D performed at about 6pm on the outside stage. the fact that it was called the “<em>family</em> fun picnic” amused me to no end. Avenue D is <em>not</em> what comes to mind when i think of “family” entertainment. they make 2 live crew sound like someone you’d see at disneyworld. nevertheless, they played, they kicked ass, they shocked and impressed the locals, and, miraculously, the didn’t get arrested for being the most obscene act that the bible belt’s seen in quite a while.</p>
<p>there were more local bands throughout the night. most of them were fairly mediocre punk and garage rock types. a couple really stood out though. Snagglepus sounds kind of like a cross between the B-52s, the Cramps, and Babes in Toyland; fun and loud with some horns and sax. the last band of the night was Babyshaker. everyone was pretty tired by then but they still rocked. they’re pretty straightforward heavy garage rock. sort of reminded me of Kyuss or Queens of the Stone Age. nothing fancy, just solid rythms, loud guitars and catchy melodies.</p>
<p>between the bands, the cool people, and the cheap beer (<span class="caps">PBR</span> for $1.50), it was one of the better parties i’ve been to in a while.</p>
<p>on friday, those of us where were capable of waking up at noon did so and went to the Original House of Pancakes for breakfast. then we did a bit of shopping and drove out to Automn’s parents’ house which is about an hour outside the city and (most importantly) situated on a lake. i didn’t have a bathing suit with me (actually i don’t even own a single pair of shorts) so i sat in the shade and read for a few hours while everyone else went swimming.</p>
<p>when it started getting dark, we headed back to charlotte and went out to see a sketch comedy troupe which derek and travis were performing with. in new york, travis frequently does a drag queen act as “Pearl”, a janis joplin impersonater. we saw him perform it once in new york at one of Avenue D’s early shows. he really is amazing. he’s got the voice and the personality down pat. the comedy show featured Pearl, a talking baby, the song “fuck the goat” and a bunch of other sketches.</p>
<p>after the comedy show we went to a diner called Athens that was about the only thing open by then. <voice type=“comic book guy”>sketchiest. diner. ever.</voice>. seriously, the place was scary. lani and i shared a seafood platter that i’d rather not discuss in too much depth. let’s just say that it included a whole deep-fried horseshoe crab.</p>
<p>then, because all the bars were closed by that point, we went to a house party. the house was owned by a bunch of musicians (including some of the members of snagglepus and babyshaker i think), some of whom have a hip-hop side project called “the McClintock G’s”. they were excited about Avenue D being in town and wanted to get them to do some cameos on a few tracks for them. luckily they had a whole studio set up in one of the rooms of the house. for hours everyone just hung out in the studio drinking. they set down some beats and just set it to record everything. different people would go up to the mic every few minutes and freestyle until they got tired and someone else would take over. some of the funniest stuff i’ve ever heard. </p>
<p>on saturday lani, marin, and i got in the car and started driving north to DC. everyone else was going to take the van back up to nyc later that day. we managed to stop off in Chapel Hill for a break and had dinner with anthony (and said hi to the llama). </p>
<p>on sunday lani and i walked around her neighborhood and meridian park for a bit before she dropped me off at the bus station. greyhound that day was seriously a clusterfuck. everyone and their brother was traveling that day. to make matters worse, apparently there had been a bomb threat earlier that day and all service had been halted for a few hours. the station was full of people who had been trapped there for hours, all semblance of lines and order had vanished, staff were running around trying to get things organized, everyone was pissed off and tired, and they didn’t have enough buses or drivers to take care of the load. it took me about 2 hours just to get on a bus only to discover that they didn’t have a driver for that bus so we sat in the parking lot for another hour before they moved us to a different bus and we finally left. even the drive up to new york was slow. lots of holiday traffic and accidents. at least i was in no real hurry and i had my diskman and some books to keep me occupied.</p>
i frequently suffer from insomnia. this usually involves me lying in bed for hours staring at the ceiling waiting to fall asleep while my mind jumps from subject to subject. a game i like to play sometimes when i’m lying there is to try to backtrack along my stream of consciousness. i try to remember what the last topic i was thinking about was, then i try to think what i was thinking before that lead me to that, then what i was thinking before that lead me to that point. on and on until i can’t remember how i got started on a certain subject. it’s hard at first but if you do it on a regular basis i’ve found that you can usually improve how far back you can remember.
<p>if you do it regularly, i can pretty much guarantee that you’ll gain new insights into how your mind and, in particular, your subconscious works. my theory is that doing this kind of exercise on a regular basis will even change how your mind functions, possibly giving you more control over how you focus and giving you more of an ability to think creatively.</p>
<p>this can also be fun in a group setting. if you’re sitting around with a few friends having a drink and conversation and the conversation hits a lull, pick out the last topic you were discussing and try to work back from there to figure out how you got onto that topic. you’ll probably get much farther than with the solo exercise. also figure out who it was in the group who initiated each topic change. try drawing a diagram of the conversation. maybe you’ll notice interesting things about the group dynamic and individual personalities; eg, perhaps a certain member of the group has a tendency to change the topic much more often than other people.</p>
<p>well, that’s the kind of thing that i think about when i can’t sleep…</p>
everytime lani comes up to visit, she leaves behind a couple of the complimentary magazines from the Delta Shuttle. usually, the tech magazines are bland Wired wannabes with fluff stories about upcoming technologies and rising dotcoms.
<p>after lani leaves, they tend to last until my next cleaning pass over the apartment when, if they’re lucky, they get a quick once-over just to make sure there isn’t actually anything of interest to me before heading into the garbage.</p>
<p>tonight i’m cleaning a little and decide to flip through the copy of <a href="http://www.technologyreview.com/">Technology Review</a>. there’s an <a href="http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/tr100_0602.asp">article</a> on the top 100 young innovators (this article was, of course, depressing lani because it made her realize that at 22 years old she hadn’t yet won a nobel prize ;)</p>
<p>amongst the likes of Shawn Fanning (napster) and John Carmack (doom, quake, etc) i was quite pleasantly surprised to see <a href="http://goatee.net/">Joe Reagle</a>. Joe is a friend of <a href="http://www.miromi.org/">mimi</a>’s and goatee.net is on my regular reading list. seeing a (somewhat) familiar face in a magazine when you aren’t expecting it is kind of weird. i knew that he does all kinds of cool stuff but i never realized he was a celebrity.</p>
<p>so congratulations, Joe!</p>
after drinking a lot this weekend and generally staying out late a few times too many last week, i decided i should re-hydrate myself and flush out some toxins. so over the course of the day, i drank a few gallons of water.
<p>felt good but i was pretty much running to the toilet every half hour all day. it’s hard to get programming stuff done when you can’t really concentrate on something for more than about 20 minutes before your bladder distracts you.</p>
last night, lani and i got in a van with Daphne, Blair, and Angela (Angela is doing production work on a movie and was given a van for the duration of the filming so she can pick up the crew and equipment). we drove around manhattan for a while listening to nirvana and screaming obscenities at the crazy taxi drivers. then we went out to williamsburg looking for dinner. we’d planned to go to the brooklyn brewery’s restaurant/taproom but they were closed by the time we got there. so instead we went to some other ale house nearby where i had a Weihenstephaner hefe-weisse and a grilled portobello sandwich.
<p>then we wandered down to Daphne and Blair’s to watch Iron Chef while we digested our food.</p>
<p>around 2am, we headed off to Luxx again. some of Daphne’s friends who have a hip-hop duo called Moreplay were performing. stylistically they were pretty similar to Avenue D: electro beats and sexually oriented rhymes. Daphne joined them for one of their songs. pretty good show.</p>
jP eventually did ride the wet pink pony. lani has photographic evidence.
<p>lani’s in town for the coming week, staying with me while she attends a biophysics lecture at princeton.</p>
<p>jP came down for the weekend to visit me, lani, daphne, blair, keith, and a few other bates types. on friday night we all went to see yet another Avenue D show out in williamsburg. they just keep getting better. even had a hardcore song this time.</p>
<p>the rest of the weekend we spent drinking, eating (<em>lots</em>), and hanging out.</p>
dhs.org appears to be having some trouble. they’re a free service that provides simple domain name functionality. for the last couple years, i’ve been using them to point thraxil.dhs.org at this site. my main rationale for using dhs.org instead of going the ‘proper’ route and registering thraxil.(com|net|org) has been simplicity. i’ve never really bought into the whole mindset that you need a good domain to be cool. the system is a beaurocratic nightmare with the main players abusing their customers every chance they get. stories about squatters selling domains for millions of dollars just made me laugh. i’ve never had any great desire to subject myself to that kind of abuse.
<p>dhs.org seems to be having problems lately though. you may have noticed that this site was inaccessible for the last couple days. it should be fixed now and thraxil.dhs.org should exist for at least the near future. however, the future is not looking so good for dhs.org. at the very least, it’s unstable enough to have me worried.</p>
<p>so i bit the bullet and registered thraxil.com, thraxil.net, and thraxil.org. i grabbed all three because i couldn’t make up my mind at it was pretty cheap. it could take a day or two for <span class="caps">DNS</span> to propagate fully and for any/all of them to work.</p>
<p>once they stabilize, you’ll want to change your bookmarks and links to point to one of the new domains (for the time being, all of them will point to the same place. in the future, i might decide to different things with different ones though).</p>
<p>in other words, in the next couple days, thraxil.dhs.org will be deprecated.</p>
a coworker of mine drove up to maine last weekend. as a favor, he brought me back a case and a half of shipyard export ale, which pretty much can’t be found outside new england but is one of my favorite beers in the world.