One of my myriad responsibilities is to serve as black market music supplier for a friend of mine who shares my taste in music but who doesn’t fileshare or anything, being a little net-phobic. I recently began compiling a new playlist for him when I realized that everything I’ve added is stuff that was popular at the goth and industrial clubs here at least a couple years ago. Chris and I just don’t go out much anymore, and while I’m dimly aware that music continues to arrive and disappear despite our absence, I actually have no idea what I’ve missed since, say, 2001. So, if I haven’t yet driven off all the club kids who used to read this site: what are the singles currently being overplayed by Ian Fford and his brethren? What should I be buying and downloading? What’s the late 2003 equivalent of that Beborn Beton song which must not be named? Do people still listen to Covenant?
You know the sort of thing I mean if you’re a current Batcave regular (or former Bank regular). There’s the stuff that’s been around for twenty years and isn’t going anywhere, and the stuff that nobody really likes, but every year there are also a few new classics that everyone loves and then says they’ll never dance to again because oh my god that song is so overplayed, but they end up dancing anyway if it’s 4am and they’re tipsy. That’s what I’m looking for: the stuff that would make me roll my eyes if I had been going to the cave every weekend for the past two years.
It’s depressing to be out of touch with this sort of thing at a tender 22 years of age, and I suppose it could be remedied if I actually made an effort to go out once in a while. And I do mean to, but every weekend that rolls around seems to be a bad weekend to go out. When I went clubhopping with Al around Halloween, we heard lots of things that we liked, but we were only able to peg a couple of artists by the vocals. Maybe over winter break I’ll see if I can’t catch up - I suppose I ought to invest in some new fishnets.
Visiting my parents’ house always makes me miss having a dog. Even though I’m generally way more about the cats than anything else, the current parental pup is this big friendly border collie who’s awfully good at making me wonder if I’d ever be willing to scoop poop in the city. (I wouldn’t.) Even if the poop issue weren’t an issue, though, I don’t think NYC is really a good place for dogs - those tiny depressing dog runs in the various parks are more like little doggy prisons than anything else, and aparments aren’t much better.
If I ever move somewhere where I could have outdoor pets, though, I’d definitely get another dog. The parents’ dog is this huge adorable black furball named Ruby, and she has taken to following me around the house whenever I’m there for a couple of days. She’ll climb up next to me if I sit on the couch, or on top of me if I sit in a chair - and she’s really not anywhere near small enough to be a lap dog. Despite her habit of running through the pond and salt marsh a couple of times every morning and then coming back inside and climbing up on my bed (while I’m still asleep in it), she’s generally just the sweetest thing you can imagine. Here’s a shot of her from last Thanksgiving:
And yes, this is the same dog that used to hop up on the roof of my car every time I got inside. That was back when she was a puppy (that car is long since gone), when another of her habits was to herd people she didn’t know because she thought they might be sheep. She no longer nips heels or jumps on cars, but her basic personality remains the same. It’s just that now she’s learned to sit down and cock her ears ever so adorably when she wants whatever you’re eating, and then climb into your lap to get it.
Rather than hop a train back to the city today, my brother and I caught a ride with our mom, who had to drive to North Carolina this weekend anyway. Although the truck might have been just a wee bit small for three people, we happily ate leftover turkey sandwiches and zoomed through Connecticut in about the same time that it would have taken on the train (and for a couple hundred dollars less). Mmm, leftovers.
It’s appropriate (in a sappy, Hallmark kind of way) that the day we filthy Americans are supposed to give thanks happens this year to also be the birthday of one of the people I’m most thankful for. The indefatigable Chris is another year older today, and he doesn’t even mind it when I end a sentence in a preposition.
I’ve spent the morning working on another philosophy paper in the endless succession of philosophy papers to which it seems my life has, for the time being, been reduced. I suppose it’s a good thing that I like philosophy, but it’s also becoming more and more apparent that it’s probably an equally good thing that I’ll be getting a bit of a break from it in about six months. This afternoon I’ll be eating turkey and pumpkin pie with the family, and then tomorrow morning my brother and I are back to New York.
A couple of people asked if I planned to go to the Macy’s parade today, or if I had been in the past: the truth is that while it’s been about five years since I moved to NYC, I have yet to spend a single Thanksgiving in the city. Even when I inevitably do, however, it’s unlikely that I’ll go to the parade. I’ve spent lots of New Year’s Eves here, and not a single one in Times Square. There’s something about standing around outside in cold weather with lots and lots of people in order to look at something that doesn’t really appeal to me unless it’s exactly the right kind of thing. Like Godzilla - I’d probably wait around outside to look at Godzilla.
I know I say this every semester, but this year the end of the term really is running me ragged. It may be that I’m taking eighteen credits, but I don’t remember another year in which I’ve had six papers due in the last three weeks of classes - that’s without even taking into account final exams. I’m at least two weeks behind on the reading for two of my five classes, and I’ve stopped even pretending to have time to write a paper more than one weekend before its due date. Every November (and April) is stressful like this to a certain degree, but this is truly horrifying. It’s a little reminiscient of my senior year in high school, too. Back then the other seniors were taking four study halls and three electives (or whatever) while the handful of hopeless nerds (which included myself) actually signed up for an additional class a full hour before the regular school day started. That year I had nine classes each semester, and had to be at school in time for a 6:30am class. Of course, all those AP credits meant that I entered NYU as something like a Sophomore Lite, but I have the same sort of frantic, wide-eyed feeling this year that I did then. I’ve got my regular course load of three upper-level philosophy courses and one computer science, plus the senior honors seminar in philosophy, plus that Logic class I’m TAing for. I’m once again firmly addicted to caffeine, after finally weaning myself from my high school habit only two years ago.
On the other hand, in (approximately) three weeks’ time I’ll be fourteen credits shy of a bachelor’s, if nothing breaks or unties. That hasn’t stopped me from registering for another eighteen credits of classes, of course.
One more paper done, two and a half to go. I’ve spent every spare minute for the past week or so reading paper after paper in preparation for writing my senior thesis. I’ve settled on a topic that I’m actually very interested in, but there’s a tremendous amount of literature to get on top of - a lot of it is recently published as well, which is both good and bad. I really dislike it when Thanksgiving falls so close to the end of the semester - this is the worst possible time for me to be going to Massachusetts (which I will this week), but there’s not much to be done about it. I’ll probably end up bringing along an extra sack-o-philosophy for the train. Who knows, maybe I’ll even get some paper revision done.
Today I graded thirty-one Logic midterms, wrote the second-to-last program for my current CS class, produced half of one of two philosophy papers I need to do before Thanksgiving, worked on one of my freelance projects, and watched Pokémon, but it still feels like I didn’t accomplish all that much - I suppose it’s that other paper hanging over my head. I’ll let you know how that turns out, but in the meantime I’m off to bed. Content yourself with A Practical Guide To Seppuku - especially if you have papers of your own to write this weekend.
Last night I went with Al and his friend Mark to the NYU Colloquium in Law, Philosophy, and Political Theory, where Lawrence Lessig, Thomas Nagel, and Ronald Dworkin talked about some issues raised in Lessig’s upcoming book, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. That’s a lot of capitalization, but the seminar itself was great fun. I took some notes, but there’s much more thorough coverage of the conversation here. Afterwards, of course, I joined Al and Mark in getting moderately sloshed before heading home to grade Logic midterms. As it turns out, though, drinking and deriving don’t mix - so I’m doing my grading today instead.
I’m no longer tired and my feet feel fine, so here’s some more on the Stripes show: It’s been a while since I’ve been to anything like a large concert (not that Roseland can really be called a large concert venue), and I’d forgotten what it’s like to mingle with Serious Fans. Because Roseland is entirely general admission, I figured I would try to show up early enough to get more or less to the front - I’m just under 5′6″, so if I get stuck in the middle of the floor there’s no way I’m seeing more than the backs of other people’s heads. However, having taken the time printed on the tickets for the actual show time (which it was not) rather than the door time (which it was), I turned out to be dramatically early, early enough that I was perhaps only ten people back from the front of the line outside Roseland, and smack in the middle of some very serious fans indeed. One pair, a mother and daughter, had come from California to NYC for the week because there were three Stripes shows here on consecutive nights - they bought tickets for all three on eBay and made a vacation of it. The mother was very Jack-focused, and gave me (whether I wanted it or not) an update on the past six months of his love life and haircut. The daughter, a sophomore in high school, was more of a Meg fan, but still had several anecdotes that involved waiting around outside venues until one in the morning and getting to actually touch one or both of them.
As this was only my second show, the first one being that free performance they did in Union Square last October, I was distinctly in the front-of-the-line minority, but everyone else assured me that I was still nonetheless a Serious Fan for having shown up four hours early, and allowed me to share umbrella space when it started to rain about forty five minutes before door. (I didn’t tell them that I’d only meant to show up an hour and a half early.) Once actually inside, of course, we had two opening bands to sit through. I don’t even know who the first was, but after them we had Whirlwind Heat. I’m not a fan, exactly, but they were certainly entertaining, and better than I expected.
The White Stripes show itself was fantastic, although the atmosphere was distinctly different from that of the outdoor show last year - there was less between-song conversation, for one thing, and I think the crowd’s energy was beginning to wane by the time they went on - but they’re still better live than (almost) any other band I’ve seen in recent history. I haven’t been able to dig up a complete set list yet, but they did most of Elephant and a healthy portion of the earlier stuff - Death Letter was great, of course, and Hello Operator might be the best song in the world. I ended up being able to see perfectly, being front and center behind nobody except a girl who couldn’t have been more than four and a half feet tall. And at least this time I didn’t get a horrible sunburn.
Because it’s late and I’m so tired that somehow even my feet are actually sleepy, I’m not going to tell you very much about the White Stripes show at Roseland tonight. One of the highlights, however, included Jack pausing not once but twice in the middle of Boll Weevil to tell off some dumbass crowdsurfers up front, directly behind me. (Keep in mind that crowd surfing at a White Stripes show is comparable to moshing at, say, an Indigo Girls show.) The first time he just stopped playing until the offender had been thrown out, but when two more people tried to follow suit, he marched to the front of the stage and told them to get the fuck out. “I’m sick of you fratboy motherfuckers showing up and squishing heads in the front. Now, are we going to have a good time or are we going to have a fucking good time?” The fratboy motherfuckers were ejected by security, and the rest of us affirmed that we were indeed there to have a fucking good time.
