Alas, you'll have to settle for this
Friday, December 6, 2002 - 21:35

Dude, this computer is so fucked up. It thinks it's December 1. Do you know whose fault that is? It's Bill Gates's fault. This crappy operating system has serious problems with the clock. When you restart it, the clock fixes itself. But then it just slowly fucks itself up again.

I was just kidding about it being Bill Gates's fault. He probably hasn't coded anything for like 15 years. But maybe it *is* his fault, like it's caused by some vestigial code that's just never been erased that he wrote back in 1987. Damn him!

Out of the 15 or 20 CDs that I've bought in the last month, my favorite is Pearl Jam's Riot Act. (Big surprise there, right?) I was quite surprised by it the first time I heard it, since it wasn't what I was expecting at all. But after listening a few times I love love loved it. I loved it so much I had to keep myself from listening to it too much. I wanted to slowly build a solid relationship with it rather than blowing my wad right at the beginning (nice mixing of metaphors there, isn't it?). It has been hard to keep from listening to it too much. But I do have a plethora of new CDs to listen to. Right now Miss Kitty and I are listening to Sleater-Kinney. Sleater-Kinney makes Miss Kitty want to bite and scratch. Most music does that to Miss Kitty. But Miss Kitty really likes Sigur Ros.

I listened to all of my Pearl Jam records in order last Sunday, starting in the morning with Ten. Maybe my record is crappy, but I was really surprised at how little depth Ten has. It sounded so two dimensional, like it was tall and wide but had no depth. Strange. I was also surprised to find how much I liked all the other albums. I'd always sort of thought that I didn't enjoy Vs. and Vitalogy as much as No Code and Yield, but that turns out to not be the case.

I was also reminded of how experimental they've always been. Some people apparently just ignore Master/Slave or Oceans or Release and other songs on Ten. Then they're surprised by some of their more recent songs and talk about how they've sucked ever since Vs. Those people, though, are full of bah humbugs, and, as I've recently taken to saying frequently, everything sucks if you have a bad enough attitude.

Oh yeah, I keep forgetting. We saw Beck and the Flaming Lips this week. They were really good. Excellent performers. Completely different in their approach to performing than my favorite band (who I've already talked about enough in this entry). My favorite band is quite minimalist in their performances. The stage is pretty simple and they don't dress up or have sychronized dance moves or anything. But Beck and especially the Flaming Lips are the opposite of that. The stage was quite elaborate and they had a screen behind them showing images--the Flaming Lips had movies for each song, and Beck had like painted images. The Flaming Lips also had big bouncy balls and spotlights and confetti and a smoke machine and a singing puppet and stuff. It was great. It wasn't better or worse than Pearl Jam, it was just different. Probably if they did a Pearl Jam type concert it would suck, because it wouldn't be them. Likewise, if Pearl Jam did a Flaming Lips type concert it would suck, because it wouldn't be them.

Not better or worse, just different.

Etc. etc.

I had some really deep entries in my head the last couple days, but I didn't write them and so now they're lost for the time being. But they were really thought provoking. I probably would have won awards with them. Alas.