Too Early to Think About SXSW?

Paul Lamere from Sun Labs constructed this great mashup for SXSW. He took the list of artists that have been announced and created a pages with their bios, youtube videos, flickr photos and links to last.fm. I need to figure out a way to carve a block of time out to digest it all.

Marriage

I talked to the founder of Youth Launch last night and he shared with me the secret to a successful marriage.

A couple years into his marriage, things were not going well. He and his wife were fighting all the time and he didn't see how it would last another year.

They lived across the street from the couple who created the Curious George books. The husband did the art and the wife did the writing. The husband was a quiet easy going guy, while the wife could be very strong willed and difficult.

One day he mentioned that he and his wife were having a difficult time and asked the husband how he and his wife had been able to be happy for so long given his wife's strong personality.

To which the husband said, "I make the important decisions, and I let her make the rest...and over the last 40 years there haven't been any important decisions."

Wilderness - (k)no(w)here

The Wilderness are one of my favorite bands from one of my favorite labels Jagjaguwar. It's impossible for me to be objective about Wilderness because I think they speak to me and only me. No one else can understand them like I do. To listen to them and appreciate them is to feel this way.

Objectively, their sound is reminiscent of PIL Second Edition. It can be discordant, challenging and emotive. Yet their sound to me is emotive and powerful, fresh and provocative. It requires repeated listening to the entirety. Though it's broken up into 8 songs, it's one piece. The crinkly crisp guitar, plodding bass and drum, emotive vocals build until the 6th and 7th tracks where the ugly and beauty become transcendent.

The Helio Sequence - Keep Your Eyes Ahead

Talking to Ben tonight he suggested I start blogging about the CDs I'm listening to. I'm amazed at how much great music has been put out this year. In years past, I've put out end of year best of lists without much detail about why a particular CD is on the list. The lists were self indulgent memory queues for me to reminisce about what I was listening to at a given time without any context for anyone else. Here's an attempt to put some context around the music I find special.

The Helio Sequence has been one such band for me since I first saw them open for Ugly Casanova at the Parrish. Benjamin played drums like an octopus with a flailing tongue and Brandon played wonderfully fuzzy guitar and screamed lyrics all the while their electronic loops filled in the spaces between their notes.

Their first three CD's followed a similar formula which I thoroughly enjoyed. Keep Your Eyes Ahead is a departure from their previous work. I read that Brandon had some issues with losing his voice and even having to relearn how to sing prior to Keep Your Eyes Ahead. The result is a more mature if mellower sound.

The first song Lately is the most beautiful post break up song I've heard. Most of the songs deal with the theme of solitary happiness. There is a richness to the songs now which grows from their maturity as musicians and song writers.

Trip to Ft. Lauderdale

Day 1

• Early morning flight. Needed to be up at 5:30 to catch 6:50 flight. Glad I didn’t decide to stay up through to flight time. The two hours of sleep made me almost functional.
• Enjoyed listening to the guy with the aisle seat say, “Please not here, please not here…” under his breath every time a new person walked on the plane. It worked! The seat between us was empty for the AUS to DFW leg of the trip.
• Slept the whole way from AUS to DFW and from DFW to FTL. I could’ve snored and farted the whole way, I have no idea.
• Lady next to me when I sat down for the DFW to FTL leg had her barding passes and passport in some pocket thing around her neck, which reminded me of being in elementary school and having notes pinned to my jacked by my teacher to bring home.
• First stop in Ft. Lauderdale is Kelly’s Landing for lobster rolls. Kelly’s gets all their lobster flown in from Maine and the lobster rolls are delicious. But Tim and I let the car salesman next to us talk us into the hot lobster roll. It was good but now I’m going to need to come back and make sure that the cold version isn’t better.
• Watched 2nd half of UT vs OK game at Tim’s house. Big win for UT, it would launch them to a #1 ranking and I’d get to hear how overrated the Big 12 is all week. They’re just hurting because of the depths Miami has fallen.
• After UT game, we go to a bar Tim’s friend Timmy Hagen works at. This place is full of old school drinkers. It’s around 3:30 a couple of the regulars are already hammered. Timmy Hagen is having trouble watching USC, his favorite team, because people keep asking him to put the Miami game on all the TV’s around the bar so that they can see it without having to readjust their seats. He’s actually kinda pissed about it.
• Checked out the Ft. Lauderdale downtown area. A couple bars have live music. One plays covers the other original work. The Whore House reminds me of Room 710 but with less metal.
  

Day 2

• Miami Dolphins play early game and Dallas play late afternoon game. Going to be on couch all day. This is cool with me, still catching up from fri/sat.
• Tim lives in a predominantly gay part of town. Great for property values. Every time we drive around the neighborhood and there are two guys walking together, he points out this fact.
• We go to pick up a couple things at the grocery store. Tim says something like, “See what I mean?” and granted there did appear to be a lot of male couples shopping. When I said, “They probably think we’re gay.” He tells me to “go stand over there.”
• Watched a couple movies Foot Fist Way and Leatherheads. I would recommend not seeing either one. Yup one big couch day.
  

Day 3

• Listening to a lot smooth jazz this week. This is what Tim listens too. Bands like Steeley Dan and Boz Scaggs. Trying hard to let it all sink in, figure out the rhythms of this town. Every time I come to Florida whether I’m with Tim or not this is what’s playing. I suspect that the record distribution companies haven’t been down this way since 1984.
• Took a long walk on the beach. These would end up being my favorite times on the trip. There are tons of empty condos along the shore, some of them halted in the middle of construction. The economic downturn hit here about two years ago. It’s odd when I was down 3 or 4 years ago, the place was booming out of control, looking back it’s reminiscent of the tech stocks in the late 90s.
• Lots of jelly fish on the beach. They look like inflated ziplock bags. Glad no one got stung so I’d have to pee on them, not into that kinda stuff.
• Stopped at The Parrot after walking on the beach. When Tim first moved to Ft. Lauderdale in the 70s this is where he made his living, albeit not a great one, by playing darts for money. He mentions that collecting became much easier once he started partnering with this big guy known to have a temper.
• Monday is league bowling night. Pretty interesting crowd. Tim will blame me for ruining his perfect game (he started with 6 strikes) because I was talking to Deidra on the phone outside the bowling alley. He was worried because I hadn’t returned with his beer.
• After bowling, back to Tim’s house for Monday night football and baseball playoff game. There would be a lot of sports watching this trip. I think I may have had my fill of sports for a while.
  

Day 4

• After Tim’s daily ritual of oatmeal, coffee and reading the newspaper front to back (this took up most of Sunday), we head out to the beach again. Winds are really strong out of the northeast which is creating big waves and there are lots of surfers out.
• We stop in at a place called Sly Foxes, which strangely enough is an Irish pub. End up bumping in to JR and this other friend JR who’ve know Tim for almost 30+ years.
• Getting back to the house after eating out, there is a blue crab running around his parking lot. Tim laughs at me chasing it around sideways trying to get a picture.
  

Day 5

• Late start, stop by a bar called The Dive. Ivan is working, JR shows up. I think they’re following us J. Lady at bar is there celebrating her wedding anniversary alone. Tells us that she’s having an affair with some guy who claims to have been Mike Schmidts backup in the 80s. I can’t find anything about the back up using the kindle’s internet capabilities.
• Went out to the pier, I looked in a couple shops for something to bring back for Deidra, but it’s all crap.
• Stop in to see Timmy Hagen who is working at a different bar tonight. Meet a Scotsman who likes to play golf (go figure).
  

Day 6

• Highlight is that stone crabs are back in season. They can only be harvested from Oct 15th through March 15th, so the one we eat at Old Florida are as fresh as can be. Delicious!

Day 7

• Wishing the lady next to me on the flight from FTL to DFW will stop putting perfume on every 30 minutes. I showered that day, so I don’t think it was me…hmm…I did have oysters and red beans and rice for lunch before the flight. Maybe that was why.

Have You Ever Been Pulled Over For A Speeding Ticket?

Unfortunately in my teens and twenties I got pulled over several times for speeding. Hopefully, you don't know the routine as well as I do. Cruising along. Listening to music. Talking to a friend. And then flashing lights behind you. The scramble to figure out where the cop came from and why he's behind you. Maybe you're in the fast lane and you pull over hoping that he's trying to get around you. But no, he follows you into the other lane. You become hyper alert, try to recreate the last 10 minutes. "Was I speeding?", "Was I riding that guy to closely?", "Is my signal working?", "Are my tags expired?", "Does god hate me?".

The first time it happens, you slam on the brakes and skid onto the shoulder, or stop in the middle of the street. After a being pulled over a couple times, you're calmer about it, find an offramp, a parking lot, any place without cars whizzing by a couple feet from your door. Ideally, you find some place where you aren't exposed to the embarrassment of having every car drive by and look at you. Where the riders are conjuring up all the horrible things you could've possibly done to merit being pulled over by the police. "Was he running from the law?", "Did the cop have his hand on his gun?", "I bet he's a wanted felon.", "He's a criminal if I've ever seen one!" or even "Sweet! I'm so glad that isn't me."

The cop always walks up and asks, "license and registration" and then "Do you know how fast you were going?" At this point, all you want to do is get out of whatever the cop is accusing you of doing. You think that if you admit to being a couple miles over the speed limit that the cop will recognize your honesty and let you go, so you say, "68" when the speed limit is 65, regardless of if you were going 85. At that point you've admitted to breaking the law. The cop has everything he needs even without the radar gun to give you a ticket

Kevin sent me this link, where a Virginia law school professor makes a compelling argument giving 8 reasons why you should NEVER TELL THE POLICE ANYTHING. It doesn't matter if you are completely innocent, under no circumstances should you say anything to the police without an attorney present.

http://www.tuccille.com/blog/2008/07/eight-reasons-even-innocent-shouldnt.html

There's a stigma against pleading the fifth. It's assumed that the person pleading it has something to hide. The second clip in the link above is of an officer of 20 years describing the tactics used to get confessions. I was extremely surprised to discover what could be determined to be incriminating.

Memory, Learning, Sleep, Repeat

Do you ever think about all those college class you took, made good grades on the tests, and now can barely remember what the class was about? Today I came across a fascinating article on memory retention in Wired. A lot of psychological studies show that repetitions over variable intervals are required for retention. Which falls under the maxim "use it or lose it". According to the article the key is to trigger the memory recall at the point just before the memory is forgotten.

The article is about Piotr Wozniak who's worked for decades on an application called SuperMemo which attempts to remind you of these nuggets of information at that point right before it's been forgotten.

The SuperMemo site has a ton of information on factors that affect learning, including one of the most in depth articles on how sleep affects learning I've read.

One poignant quote from the article, "By graphing the acquisition of knowledge in SuperMemo, [Wozniak] has realized that in a single lifetime one can acquire only a few million new items. This is the absolute limit on intellectual achievement defined by death."