cce blog

tibet concert

Last night I attended the 14th Annual Tibet House Benefit Concert directed by Philip Glass. With so many artists across so many different musical styles, each performing only a few songs, the result gave the impression of an eclectic variety show, disorganized and messy in spots but still fun.

The show opened with a musical blessing from a team of monks, replete with those Tibetan long horns, cymbals, and throat singing. Then bluesman Keb' Mo' sang a couple of blues songs, accompanying himself with just his guitar, and he was wonderful. I heard Bright Eyes for the first time, and found his voice a little grating, and his behavior a little too silly -- while introducing the next artist, Nawang Khechog, he fumbled on the name, broke out giggling, and ran off the stage.

I'll quickly sum up the rest of the acts: Nawang Khechog played some Tibetan flute; Yo La Tengo, whom I'd never seen live before; Philip Glass's theme from "The Hours,"; David Byrne (Talking Heads) and a string quartet; a quick Kinks tribute punk medley; and Benin-born Angelique Kidjo, who got the whole seemingly-staid crowd up out of the chairs and dancing. Then there was the requisite crazy finale, with everyone on stage trying to play together -- Philip Glass dancing alongside Angelique Kidjo, David Byrne, and Keb Mo. A pretty crazy evening.

ipod engraving

the apple engraving game is the best game on the internet. lotsa people have cute engravings but no one has ascii art yet.

okay so the last one is pretty abstract, i'll admit -- and if you can't see the duck, you won't "get" any of these. key: the second one is a dude listening to music, the second to last one is a dude with a mustache, the third-to-last is a dude getting his eye picked out by a duck... okay, this is too nerdy, i apologize.

ipod

I've finally caved in, after checking out / coveting my flatmate's new ipod. So: what message should I have laser-engraved on my iPod?

The 40 gig seems like the best value, at $12.50 per gig (compared to $20/gig for both the 20G and 15G models). And it would free up a lot of disk space for the music stuff i've been doing.

Also, the linux on ipod people finally got firewire & dual-boot (can choose linux or apple's firmware ) working. The remaining roadblock to working as an audio player is that they can't decode mp3's fast enough -- they need code that splits the decoding between the two cores to boost the performance. Sounds just like our problem at work, eh? Maybe i can help?

Here's a few app ideas off the top of my head: "Tivo for the radio" where I could pre-record, say, BBC Newshour every morning so I don't miss the news when I wake up too late (sadly the iPod FM tuner got cancelled), FLAC and OGG support; roving encrypted home directory, keystore; iPod-to-iPod file-swapping over firewire.

P.S. I think I'll pick the engraving pictured here if no one has a better suggestion.

hee hee

This was pretty funny. From the Taipei Times today:

Japan `has no balls,' Lee says

Former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) yesterday accused Japan of "having no balls," being weak and appeasing China amid its opposition to Taiwan's democratization and endeavors to gain recognition as an independent state.

LTH spent some time studying in Japan, so I guess he's speaking from experience?

rockin'

This week's double-issue New Yorker is really good, especially the piece about Cheney and the David Sedaris story. Good thing you can read most of it online.

Not much to report -- got President's day off today. My sister Cathy left for Taiwan for a semester abroad, so we did hotpot to wish her off.

I saw Dopo Yume on Friday. Sean Lennon was not there, as many had hoped. It was a reasonably rockin' show. I liked this group Tarantula with a cello, violin, guitar & drums (plus chromatic perc & melodica a bit) that played crazy odd-meter rock/classical fusion, but without any hint of blues or jazz, which was a bummer for me. They had some good rockin' bits though with the cello and guitar distortion power-chordin' it. Also the Mosquitos played and they were faux Brazilian, which was fine with me. I really shouldn't go to too many of these indie rock shows because I don't want to be an indie rock scenester by any means.

Although the upcoming Ska is Dead tour (Catch 22, Big D and the Kids' Table, Mustard Plug, and the Planet Smashers) seems like a guilty-pleasure old-school show I might see. Except they'd play that "Mr. Smiley" song again, and I don't think I'd want to skank ever again.

On the old-school ska-band tip, I saw Sam from ADOZ today, which was rockin'. Rockin' is, incidentally, just the thing that the old band is no longer doing, broken-up as it is, but obviously we need to join forces and rock yet again. We then talked and hatched plans to achieve this goal some day, so that would be cool, to be playin' gigs in a band again.

In that vein, it seems I'm playing a gig in March at the Greenwich Village Bistro. I won't be rockin', though, just playing some light dinner jazz and bossa with Peter, I suppose like the last gig. I've got a lot of practicing I need to do in the next few weeks, yep.

At work, I've been drinking a lot of Brazilian Yerba Mate lately, and I think I might replace my morning coffee routine with it -- it's really much easier on you than coffee but still wakes you up. I also want to get a chimarrao (in Argentina, bombilla) gourd to drink it out of, but that's just crazy. But it's certainly improving my morning work output.

Note to self -- go see the battle of algiers at the film forum before it stops playing this week.

Okay, now I am done blogging!

test

This is a test message. You won't have noticed, but this site just got moved to a new server, and that's my current excuse for why I haven't posted in a while. Now that's it's moved over I'll start pruning some of the spam (using jay allen's MT spam plugin) from my blog and maybe moving to blosxom.

It's been a pretty good week ... very busy at work lately. Saw Super Furry Animals on Monday night, probably going to see dopo yume tonight. Also been practicing more trombone, piano, etc in preparation for a jazz gig with Peter again in the west village in March.

Apart from that I have more to report, but this is a test message, so, let's give it a test...