i traded away my gmail invite, actually not to anyone at gmail swap (there are lots of people now & decent offers get snapped up almost instantaneously) but to someone on imn. she's supposed to send me "a shiteload of a/v mags" because i suggested i would like magazines to cut up for collaging. so that should be cool.  ¶ 6:04 PM

i am pretty tired. & i think i might be the slightest bit hung over (it's hard to tell if the shadow of a headache i have this morning is from sheer exhaustion or from the 4-5 ciders and 3 buttery nipples. probably both).

doors opened at 10 & we listened to the dekoy cd. it's synthpop. i don't like synthpop. so i didn't really like the dekoy cd. but copper top seems pretty into it, so it's probably good for that style. plus it's totally self-released & self-distributed. nuff said.

next up, at 11:15 or so, was fission 451. his set was described as "psy-trance". i don't like trance. so i didn't really like fission 451. but out of all the performances, he was the only one who had people dancing, so he has that going for him. nuff said.

telephone from minneapolis went on around 12:30. they're electropop or electroclash or technopop or something like that. i'm not much of a follower of those styles either, but i definitely enjoyed their set. & not just because lolly pop (the vocalist) is hecka hot. total eye candy, but on top of that she's charming, outgoing, & has plenty of charisma (very helpful if you're "frontin'" a musical act). on stage with her was dj dynamo, busting out the turntable skills (at one point drbmd said "that's the quietest scratching i've ever heard" but i thought he said "whitest", so that was amusing).

i finally took the stage at something like 1:45 (45 minutes past my usual bedtime, which is itself probably much too late). because this was essentially a new crowd (& because the other acts were all far more accessible than i), i opted to focus primarily on playing some studio tracks, with freeform improv noise in between tracks (as opposed to, say, my set at rr8 where the whole performance was freeform improv noise). i had borrowed a portable cd player from my niece's friend (both of whom are visiting us from sacramento) so that i could have 2 working cd players instead of just one... & i wanted to record the set to minidisc but i couldn't find another 1/8" to rca cable with which to hook up the md recorder (i don't know why; i was pretty certain i'd packed two such cables). there were a couple minor technical issues (like misplacing one of my cds, or somehow accidentally switching my numark cd deck to "free wheel" mode & not knowing how to switch back), but i don't think anyone else would have noticed. attendance wasn't that great overall (maybe 30-40 at most?), & by that hour half the crowd had left anyway, but some of the few who were still there seemed to enjoy it... particularly lolly pop.

it was late, i was pretty buzzed, & i didn't really keep track, but here is a setlist compiled from memory: it's probably at least a little out of order & i might have forgotten a track, but whatever:

blue screen of death
boo!
live-in butler
ludacris remix
critical stop
we will iraq you
skin to win
discount dysentery
security disruptor
open as raw  ¶ 10:46 AM

because i'm an "active blogger user", i have a free invitation to gmail (i guess passive users don't get invites). i didn't think much of it until i realized this morning that gmail is still relatively exclusive (not open to the public; you need an invitation to get an account) & in high demand... apparently these invites go for $40 and up on ebay.

so i've been browsing a site called gmail swap, where you can barter away your gmail invitations to people who want them. those who are looking for invitations will post a solicitation listing what they will give you, do for you, etc. if you hook them up. unfortunately that requires leafing through a lot of crap... i haven't seen very many interesting offers, & the good ones are snapped up extremely quickly (within mere minutes sometimes). but i still reload the page faily often to keep up with new offers. hopefully i'll be able to catch one where someone sends me a cd of some unusual foreign music or a strange magazine to cut up, or something along those lines... but we'll see.

the worst is the people who say they have nothing to offer... come on people, if you spent 30 seconds looking at the site, you would see that very few people are offering anything of any real cash value (& the ones who are probably are scammers). they're offering curiosities, exotica, kind gestures, and so on... & if you can't think of something then you clearly don't deserve a gmail invite. i mean, these people are getting invitiations for offering up silly jpegs that they've downloaded from the net, or simple snapshots of their pets or their hometown. if you don't even have that much to offer, i have to wonder whether you even exist.

(note: if anyone wants to directly offer me something for my gmail invitation, i'm very open to suggestion.)  ¶ 1:49 PM

oh yeah, one other thing...

several years ago i went to clowes hall to hear ray bradbury & the late douglas adams speak. adams was disappointing; he mostly just read excerpts from the hitchhiker's trilogy... it was nice to hear the passages read by the author, but come on. bradbury was a much better speaker, telling fun anecdotes about the day back when he was writing fahrenheit 451. he was a charming old coot.

well apparently bradbury thinks michael moore is a "horrible human being" for naming his new film fahrenheit 9/11:



well, some people would call that an homage or tribute... some would say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. but bradbury's just pissed off.

he's also totally delusional about how the media works these days:



if by "nobody will see his movie" he means it will be the biggest documentary ever in the history of ever then he's right. because fahrenheit 9/11 is virtually guaranteed to be more successful than bowling for columbine.

but okay, we can forgive the old man for a little bit of naivete about how things work nowadays. after all, he really just made a stand about principle, right? how dare moore appropriate his title from bradbury? i mean, ray bradbury thunk up all those titles in his own head, never appropriating from anyone, right? (well, except for something wicked this way comes which he took from shakespeare... & i sing the body electric, taken from walt whitman.)

oh well, he might be a total hypocrite, but he's a charming old hypocrite, so at least he has that going for him. but by my logic, if moore is a horrible human being for his appropriation, then so is bradbury (& so is just about every artist everywhere).

  ¶ 2:11 PM

fahrenheit 9/11 is still in the news, ensuring it will be not only the most controversial film of the year, but the biggest documentary ever.

in current headlines, moore is fighting the mpaa's R rating in hopes of getting it bumped down to pg-13. anyone who knows anything about the mpaa ratings system knows it is very vague & subjective, but not having seen the movie yet i can't comment on whether it really deserves an R... maybe, but moore has a point when he says



by the same argument, i think anyone old enough to serve in the military is old enough to drink. but anyway...

moore also recently announced that he had footage of american GIs abusing iraqis for months before the abu ghraib scandal came out, & that he had wondered whether he did the right thing by holding onto that footage instead of releasing it publicly.



did he make the right call? i'm not sure. but at least he's man enough to publicly own up to his ethical conflicts... something that bush has never done, to be sure.

you also might have heard about a california group that is leading a boycott of the film, begging CEOs & executives at cineplex companies not to show it. not surprisingly, the group & its whole campaign is just a republican PR tactic:



speaking of anti-moore pr campaigns, there's also an anti-moore documentary coming out called michael moore hates america. i have no actual evidence yet, but the film just smacks of a PR damage control campaign: it has all the telltale signs of republican spin, so i have a very hard time believing that it's not at least funded (if not totally orchestrated) by gop front groups... i could be wrong, but it's incredibly suspicious.  ¶ 10:27 AM

yahoo has expanded their email offerings in order to compete with gmail (google's new gigabyte email service). yahoo is expanding inbox space to 100mb, improving mail search, expanding max message size, etc, & all with fewer privacy concerns than those surrounding gmail (fewer, not none).

this is good news for me because i've been using yahoo mail since 1996 when i first signed up for geocities. of course, geocities hasn't been much use to me for years, but i've had that yahoo email for so long i don't really want to get rid of it. this yahoo expansion will also give me enough inbox space that people can send me mp3s & large images without me having to immediately delete the message after downloading the attachment. i'd been saddled with a tiny 6mb inbox for quite some time (& those who hadn't been signed up for as long only had 4mb!).   ¶ 9:41 AM

just stumbled across this: someone called wxm has done an edit of awia's a prayer for cold turkey... it's not exactly a remix since they just edit pastor tim out & loop the first 50 seconds or so of the track. i don't know what the "eight minutes plus" comment is about since the original is only 3:56, but there you have it. if you like amens & hate text cutups, maybe that's the version for you.  ¶ 10:26 PM

i finally figured out how to get rid of that damn indentation at the beginning of each post! turns out there was actually a space there in the template, that is being used for the permalinking function on the blog. i moved the space & voilâ!

i never would've figured it out either, if i hadn't been playing around with alternate designs... i am really in the css zone these days. (if you look at that design, let me know if it doesn't give you a headache...  ¶ 1:28 AM