t. rex, scruffy the cat, lloyd cole, and the perils of aging

sometimes you get little reminders that your brain ain’t what it used to be.

kirk and i had a fantastically fun time last night at joe’s pub in the park. joe is joseph papp, the guy who started doing the shakespeare in central park thing, and his public theater has an adjacent performance space for bands and cabaret and performance artists called joe’s pub, but it’s downtown, and sometimes they produce joe’s-pub-style shows in central park at the delacorte, which is where shakespeare in the park is, and last night was one of those nights.

whew.

that bit of explanation aside, we originally went to last night’s show because justin bond was covering the carpenters’ “close to you” album in concert. you know, kiki and herb justin bond. the combination of justin and karen carpenter being, of course, too irresistible to resist. and he did not disappoint. their registers and resonance sound remarkably similar, and he engagingly covered all those bacharach tunes. also did “superstar” as a bonus, and told a chillingly effective story about being a kid and being forced to play softball. it went badly, and he took solace in listening to the “close to you” album with a young relative, and feeling loved and accepted regardless of his inability to hit a softball. it was a favorite childhood memory, and that relative was in the audience, so it was full circle for justin. a lovely moment.

justin was done, but he was just the opening act. two more sets: a guy doing covers of some guy’s music that i’d never heard of, and a t. rex tribute on the occasion of marc bolan’s sixtieth birthday, which was also the thirtieth anniversary of his death. i never knew that marc bolan died on his thirtieth birthday. wow.

i had no interest in the penultimate set, but i’m a bit of a t. rex fan, and kirk was into it, so we decided to stick around. so glad we did.

the second set turned out to be songs by scott walker. i’d never heard of him, but i’m now a huge fan. he predates the beatles — he’s an american singer who got his start as an teenage expatriate in london in the ’50s. if you can imagine it, his music sounds as if englebert humperdinck did a set composed entirely of leonard cohen songs. fantastic stuff, and the singer, david driver, performed it wonderfully. i’m a david driver fan now, but a bigger fan of scott walker. i love it when something surprising, new and cool gets unexpectedly thrown at you — you gotta be open to that possibility, though.

the evening wrapped up with the t. rex tribute. quick t. rex story from back in the day: when i dj’ed at einstein-a-go-go in jacksonville beach in the mid eighties, there was a huge t. rex poster behind the booth. some kid came up to me and asked, “who’s trex?” pronounced as one word. evidently he missed the period. i told him that “trex” was robert smith’s first band before he formed the cure. so he went and told all his friends, and word spread like wildfire, and suddenly all the black clad youth were requesting “trex” songs to be cool. so i got to play lots of marc bolan, and the younguns were none the wiser, at least for a while.

anyway, the t. rex tribute was so much fun. patti smith did “children of the revolution” — how perfect is that? lots of new york rock royalty performed — here’s a list from the joe’s pub site:

An All-Star Collective of musicians including Clem Burke(Blondie/Drums), Tony Shanahan (Patti Smith/Bass), James Mastro (Ian Hunter-Patti Smith/Gtr), Jane Scarpantoni (Lou Reed/Cello), Dave Amels (Mary Weiss/Keys), Tish & Snooky (Manic Panic/Back Vox), Geoff Blythe (Dexy’s-Black 47/Sax), Rob Youngberg (Honeycomb/Percussion), and Claudia Chopek (Violin) will back a glittering array of special guest singers. Performers who will be singing the praises of Bolan & T.Rex include Sylvain Sylvain and Steve Conte of the NEW YORK DOLLS, Richard Lloyd of TELEVISION, Tony Winner Michael Cerveris, Jake Shears (Scissor Sisters), Justin Bond (Kiki of Kiki and Herb), Ragga, Robert Gordon, Richard Barone, Lloyd Cole, Willie Nile, Ivan Julian (The Voidoids), Keanan Duffty (Slinky Vagabond), The Bedsit Poets, Screaming Orphans, Justin Tranter (Semi Precious Weapons), and Marc’s son Rolan Bolan and featuring special guest of honor the legendary T. Rex/David Bowie/Morrisey producer Tony Visconti.

ivan julian was especially good — he sang and played the guitar while seated, and it’s been a while since i saw someone command a stage like that. the chair barely contained his energy, and he was a kick-ass guitarist.

and lloyd cole was there, with his son william. william is a great lead guitarist and has perfect emo hair — the kid is going places. i used to play lloyd cole’s music a bit at einstein’s and i sat there racking my brain trying to come up with the song i loved. and it popped into my head this morning. the song i was so desperately trying to think of?

“you dirty rat”

by scruffy the cat, not by lloyd cole. jeebus. i’m getting old.

but “you dirty rat” is an incredible song — one of my favorite einstein’s-era songs. listen to it — catchy as all hell.

anyway, aging brain notwithstanding, it was a fantastically fun evening. gotta do more stuff like that. david driver does lots of loser’s lounge stuff — maybe i should check that out. i’ve always wanted to.

update: hilary, who stage managed the show, has pictures, a detailed set list, band info, and more on her blog. check it out.

our iphone is updated and perfectly fine, thank you

we updated kirk’s iphone on thursday night. completely without incident. he synced, the update installed, it restarted and relocked itself, and it now works perfectly with lots of added functionality. as we expected, because we didn’t ever attempt an unauthorized hack. not even the so-easy-a-child-could-do-it ringtone hack. however begrudgingly, we paid 99 cents for the ringtones on the phone.

i treat my mac the same way. applications only. i try not to install anything that modifies the system, even though these mods are authorized, as opposed to the iphone, where all mods are unauthorized. self-contained apps only, as much as possible. less trouble that way, come update time.

of course, the media coverage of the update makes it seem that the vast majority of iphone users are howling, wailing, and bemoaning the loss of their precious at the hands of the evil apple empire, which willfully turned their functionings into non-functionings.

give me a break.

if you are savvy enough to be able to unlock your iphone, which is in itself not the easiest of processes, then you should have been savvy enough to have found and read the admonitions of apple, who implored people not to update modified iphones lest they become unusable. that news was all over the internet for days before the update was issued.

and you are also savvy enough to have found and read the news that the dev team that produced the unlock method implored people not to update unlocked phones lest they become unusable, until they come up with a workaround.

and you are also savvy enough to realize that, if your phone is locked but you have installed third-party apps, you should heed apple’s advice, not install the update, and wait to see how everything shakes out. or, at the very least, restore your iphone to pristine condition before updating.

so, in spite of apple’s warning’s and in spite of the dev team’s warnings, these people updated their iphones anyway. guess what happened? in some cases, their iphones were unusable. unlocked phones were definitely unusable. gee, what a revelation. if only they had, somehow, been able to know.

oh, that’s right. everybody on the internet told them, but they didn’t listen.

if you don’t update your modified phone, will it still work? yes it will. the people with hacked phones who didn’t apply the update are still merrily using their iphones on tmobile or using their third-party apps or whatever, and are completely unaffected.

is apple legally responsible for the non-functioning iphones? hell no they are not. you can argue whether or not apple should have been a better corporate citizen in all this, and i personally think that it’s not only bad form but bad business for apple to have done what they did, but the fact remains that no one held a gun to anyone’s head and made them update.

is it legal to unlock or modify your phone? sure it is. it’s your phone. you paid for it. do what you want to with it. but when you modify your iphone, you are taking a step down a lonely road. no matter how small or insignificant the hack may seem to be, the first mod you make means that you are assuming full responsibility for maintaining the hardware and software, with whatever assistance the unauthorized third-party developers who produced the hacks you installed choose (or choose not) to provide. and it’s your responsibility, once you have hacked, to keep yourself updated on the status of that hack, and how the hack affects your use of your iphone.

responsibility. you assumed it when you hacked. you can’t then whine because apple bricked your iphone. apple didn’t brick your iphone. you did.

from the ny times article:

Jennifer Bowcock, an Apple spokeswoman, said that when people went to update their software with their computer through iTunes, a warning appeared on the computer screen, making it clear that any unauthorized modifications to the iPhone software violated the agreement that people entered into when they bought the phone. “The inability to use your phone after making unauthorized modifications isn’t covered under the iPhone warranty” Ms. Bowcock said.

from the same article:

Ross Good, a student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, had added several programs, including one for instant messaging. After the upgrade, the phone went into a semifrozen state.

When Mr. Good called Apple, the reception was cool. “They said I put third-party software on my phone, and so it was my fault no matter what.”

Joel Robison, a systems network engineer near Seattle, said his phone stopped working immediately after he installed the upgrade. He said that when he took it to an Apple store, he was accused of having unlocked the phone. But he said that with the exception of one aborted attempt to install a piece of outside software, he had made no modifications to the phone.

“Their accusation was very damaging to my opinion of Apple’s service,” Mr. Robison said.

stop whining. start taking responsibility. apple did. the producers of your hacks did.

you didn’t.

update: daring fireball’s john gruber and i arrive at the same conclusion at independent times, but of course he states it more elegantly. hopefully his broader reach will prompt some people to think twice about their entitlement.

going to the picture show

tickets for a 6:00pm showing of “into the wild”, the sean penn movie about the guy who starved to death in the wilderness of alaska. that shorthand version of the story, of course, does it no justice whatsoever.

i vaguely recall reading a long piece about this guy, maybe in the new yorker, and being absolutely fascinated by him. it’s the old ditch-your-possessions-and-escape-the-world story, taken to an extreme. and sean penn is an artist i respect, even if i think his politics are themselves a bit extreme at times. anyway, reading about the movie made me want to see the movie.

and that happens less and less, lately. there was a time, not so long ago, that i went to the movies several time a week. now, not so much. maybe once a month, probably even less. i watch a lot of movies at home, via netflix, but rarely go to a theater.

i don’t have the standard complaint about noisy awful obnoxious audiences. for the most part, new york movie audiences are well behaved. i go at odd times, and i (for the most part) don’t go to movies that attract large crowds of teenagers. but even when i do, i find that those teenagers are noisy and rowdy in context of the movie. you can hoot and holler all you want if it’s appropriate, and that’s fine with me.

maybe i’m being provincial with this next comment, and i’m the first to admit that my sample size is small to be making it. but the bad experiences i’ve had in movies recently have been outside the city. kirk and i saw that last awful m. night shyamalan movie “the lady in the water” somewhere in new jersey about a year ago. the theater was so full of kids running around talking to each other, talking on the phone, running laps around the theater, etc., that we went and got our money back about 20 minutes into the movie. it was clear that they had been dropped off by the parents on the way to dinner or whatever — no supervision whatsoever and the theater management could have cared less. it was impossible to hear the dialogue in the movie over the din — that’s how bad it was.

but i’ve not had similar experiences in the city. yet, anyway.

hopefully all will go well tonight, and i expect it will. and hopefully, “into the wild” is as good as i think it will be.

briefly noted

» the last piece of the kitchen renovation puzzle is almost in place. the final cabinet (the one that replaced the microwave cart) has been assembled, and rafael our super cut the countertop to size. he did an incredible job — you can’t tell which is the uncut side and which is the trimmed side. kudos, rafael. we just need to screw it on, along with one side trim panel, and it’s done. except for replacing the fluorescent lights in the header. that comes much later. pictures to come.

» upgraded to the new version of wordpress, which includes tags. zim, who in a brilliant bit of thinking sees the world as a series of tags, rather than being separated geographically, will be pleased. if that thinking took hold in a widespread way, there’d be hope for us all.

» had a great dinner with our real estate attorney on tuesday night — she’s become a good friend. she says we were lucky to buy our apartment when we did. the mortgage situation is really touchy right now, and if we were trying to get the same deal now it would be difficult or perhaps impossible. thankfully we had good timing.

checking out my google stats

i use google analytics to get aggregated info about the people who come to my site.

aggregated means that i’m not gathering personal info about you, just to clarify. i could care less about you, really. it’s just an interesting snapshot of where site visitors come from, how long they spend when they get here, the pages they like to visit, and so forth.

here are some fun facts about my traffic:

» by far, the most search engine traffic comes from people looking for info about kristen hall. there’s not a lot of kristen hall info here, other than my voluminous mad ravings about how wonderful she is. but if you googled “kristen hall”, odds are you already know that. still, i guess people hopefully click through and, if nothing else, get some affirmation of their opinion. a lot of the visitors spell it wrong, as “kristin hall”, just like i used to.

» i get a good share of hits from people searching for “celeriac disease”. the term is “celiac disease”, but i jokingly referred to it as “celeriac disease”. so i get a bunch of traffic from people who can’t spell, or alternately from a tiny subset of the world population allergic to an obscure root vegetable.

» 15% of my new visits come from an semi-obscure portal page at home.bellsouth.net — i’ve searched the site trying to figure out why to no avail. there must be some reference to this site somewhere, because the hits keep on coming and have been for several years. but i’ll be damned if i know why.

» the other weird post that’s rocketed to the top of google results is my post about benjamin moore paint. i listed the part numbers for the shades of paint that we bought, mostly so when i repainted i’d know what went where. still, that level of specificity seems to attract people looking for information about aura paint. hope i helped, paint lovers.

» the rings and the tattoos are still very popular items as well. amazing to me that people still are such hedwig fanatics, all these years on.

» i get traffic from five continents. i learned in school that there were seven continents (north america, south america, europe, asia, africa, australia, antarctica) but at some point either the rules changed, or google just decided to remap the continents. as powerful as they are, it wouldn’t surprise me. according to google, from what i can tell there are six continents, and i get traffic from five (americas, europe, asia, oceania, africa). maybe there are 5 continents, and they are lumping antarctica in with oceania. who the hell knows. next you’ll be telling me that there are only eight planets. i don’t like that south america is evidently no longer its own continent — zim should rightfully be upset.

» the daily search term list (which of course changes daily) is a nonstop evolution of amusement. here are a few search terms through which people found my site within the last couple of days:

— Lawnmower killed cat (never did such a thing!)
— “standing on cold concrete” (definitely did that!)
— why does my cat poop outside of the litt (i’m assuming they meant litter box and got tired of typing)
— liza minnelli gay fans (finally, some accuracy!)

anyway, the fun never stops. get a blog, and do some aggregate tracking. you’ll be glad you did.

distracted easily by shiny objects

now that the coop renovation is nearly complete, kirk and i are trying to get our financial house back in a bit of order. nothing outrageous, but we want to watch it a bit on the large expenses. don’t eat out so much, don’t buy expensive electronics like an iphone.

things like that.

anyway, we did pretty well over the weekend. didn’t spend much at all. helped along by my sickness and i didn’t feel like going anywhere, but that’s a minor point.

but, self-imposed rules be damned, there are times when money must be spent. and when one’s name is drawn from the magic hat, and one is given the opportunity to buy playoff tickets for one’s favorite baseball team, then one must buy tickets.

one must buy four, to be exact, and sell two at cost to a friend. which we are doing. and they are great seats, relatively: game two, loge reserved section 18. nice sightlines. you can preview your seats’ sightlines on the mets website.

assuming, of course, the mets get to the playoffs. given the team’s abysmal play recently, that is by no means assured.

but it’s probable.

probably.

Lessons on the surge from economics 101

via daring fireball, an economics professor explains a dollar auction:

Economics professors have a standard game they use to demonstrate how apparently rational decisions can create a disastrous result. They call it a “dollar auction.” The rules are simple. The professor offers a dollar for sale to the highest bidder, with only one wrinkle: the second-highest bidder has to pay up on their losing bid as well. Several students almost always get sucked in. The first bids a penny, looking to make 99 cents. The second bids 2 cents, the third 3 cents, and so on, each feeling they have a chance at something good on the cheap. The early stages are fun, and the bidders wonder what possessed the professor to be willing to lose some money.

The problem surfaces when the bidders get up close to a dollar. After 99 cents the last vestige of profitability disappears, but the bidding continues between the two highest players. They now realize that they stand to lose no matter what, but that they can still buffer their losses by winning the dollar. They just have to outlast the other player. Following this strategy, the two hapless students usually run the bid up several dollars, turning the apparent shot at easy money into a ghastly battle of spiraling disaster.

sound familiar? ghastly battle of spiraling disaster, indeed.

kinda loving the iphone

even though it’s kirk’s iphone and not mine, he’s generous and shares, and i get up before he does, so i get some time to monkey around with it. and i know his passcode.

i made a ringtone out of “stigmata” by ministry and kirk’s under strict orders to use it for when i call. actually, of course, i asked nicely.

it’s still tough to type on it, i have to say. but i also don’t use it that much. i’m sure if i had one and used it constantly i’d get used to it.

of course, there’s tons of crap being written about the iphone on the internet. and i’m contributing to that, in a noneffective and useless way. the macalope had the most interesting comment i’ve seen in a while:

Here’s the one thing that makes the horny one think that Apple might announce a 3G phone before the end of the year: the iPhone was still selling briskly at $575…when the company cut the price to sell even more. There’s plenty of room at the top end of the market for more features.

If you were having a hard time imagining what the so-called “iPhone nano” would be like, all the while laughing yourself silly at the idea of a rotary-dial scroll wheel, maybe it’s because the iPhone as we know it is the “iPhone nano”, at least for 2007.

So, iPhone Pro anyone?

that makes sense. i’ll bet you all the iphone buyers thus far did buy the iphone nano. i’ll be damned.

but it matters not. we’re enjoying what we have. you can’t delay a purchase of technology because the gadget might get better. if you did that, you’d never buy anything. you have to pick your point of entry, and jump in. i think that right after the $200 price cut wasn’t such a bad time.

and i know i always swear that i’ll never buy version 1.0 of anything, but this is a bit different, because it’s a gadget that’s infinitely upgradeable via software. the gadget itself might be 1.0, but it’s as polished a 1.0 gadget as you’ll ever see, and it’ll just get better as apple pushes out new uses for it.

and i promise not to get envious when the next, speedier, better version comes out.

i promise.

no, really.

fucked without a kiss

i had to laugh at this quote from a ny times story about distraught iphone customers who feel that they overpaid:

“I just felt so used as a consumer,” he said. “They hyped up the iPhone for six months and built up our expectations, and then they grabbed our extra $200 and ran.”

leave it to some random apple fanatic with a blog to “feel so used”. it’s like the hooker stole his wallet while he was in the bathroom or something.

god knows i’d never waste my time obsessively blogging about a company and its products.

and just because kirk and i bought an iphone last night doesn’t mean that i buy into the hype.

and just because we wasted $69 on apple care for it doesn’t make me a mindless fanatic.

and just because we spent the entire evening oohing and aahing over it’s fantastically well-thought-out capabilities doesn’t mean that i have lost my perspective.

and just because the first thing i did this morning when i got up was rush to turn it on, baby, doesn’t mean that i don’t have a well-honed sense of life’s priorities.

it, after all, was a very practical purchase. made perfect sense. no other alternative, you know.

steve jobs is a marketing genius

don’t tell me that apple and steve jobs didn’t have this whole thing planned.

» step one: sell hundreds of thousands of iphones at $599 to enthusiastic early adopters.

» step two: lower the price by $200 two months later.

» step three: wait for the outraged early adopters to blather their outrage all over the internet and in the msm.

» step four: a day later, issue $100 store credits to all those early adopters, ensuring that they’ll buy yet another apple product.

» step five: bask in the love from all the early adopters who once again love you unconditionally, and from the bloggers and the msm and the analysts and so on.

apple tweaks the consuming public better than any other company. but with that said, at $399 we’re probably taking the plunge and buying kirk an iphone. his motorola razr is dying a slow death, and it’s as good a time as any.

goodbye snap guy

just walked down 6th avenue to the bank, and the snap guy has been replaced by, to all external appearances, grandpa jones.

no one passed out flyers like the snap guy. hopefully he’s moved on to something better. perhaps in an advisory capacity, or training. spreading the snap gospel, as it were.

unsolicited aerogrow recommendation, part two

i’ve previously sung the praises of aerogrow, an exceedingly well-run company. and now i have to again.

we bought a second aerogrow. it’s a hydroponic growing system — perfect for a new york apartment. we’re using one to grow tomatoes, and a second one to grow various types of basil. the tomato-laden aerogrow was working fine, but the l.e.d. readout was a bit wonky. it kept telling us to put in water, but it didn’t need it.

now i’m not such a helpless idiot that i can’t grow the tomatoes without the l.e.d. readout. or, more accurately, kirk isn’t, because they are kind of his baby anyway. but we like things to work properly, and we know how wonderful the company has been in the past.

so kirk sent an email, explaining what was happening and asking what to do.

aerogrow tried to call him with the answer. and when he didn’t pick up, they followed up with an immediate email, pinpointing the problem — a cracked water detector thingy inside the aerogrow. who knows how it got cracked? more importantly, they diagnosed the problem accurately with a minimum of information and no fuss whatsoever.

and what’s more, they are sending the replacement part at no charge. and they also supplied us with detailed instructions on how to work around the wonky l.e.d. in the meantime.

i deal with crappy customer service all the time. we all do. and never have i seen a company so responsive, and so proactively out in front of any possible problem. i’d buy a hundred of these things, if i could afford them.

once again, kudos to aerogrow. keep up the good work.