Sunday, November 8, 2009, 07:37 - General
I arrived in Tel Aviv at 5:30am Friday morning to Galia waiting for me at the airport. I love it here.[ add comment ] | permalink |
( 2.9 / 78 )Sunday, November 1, 2009, 20:39 - General
Friday night when I got home from the office I was greeted by my neighbors' open door to their Halloween party. My new neighbors are pretty much super lame frat boys who listen to bad music and drink bad beer. I don't really care cuz I don't really know any of my neighbors anyway now that the Swedish girls are gone, other than the music sometimes (though they're on the opposite side of the apartment than my bedroom so it's not so bad usually). The music was pretty loud this time though, so I drowned them out for a couple hours with my guitar but that only served to egg them on. Thus I switched to blasting our stereo, first with Russian Circles, and then to the suggestion of Arthur when he got home, some "really annoying" stuff like Big Black and Ministry. This lasted til past 1 when Can got home and wanted to go to bed, so I ended up staying up til 2 reading this history of Nabokov's Russian life that Lewis bought me and then having my earplugs mostly do the trick. Now, I didn't complain to them or the management cuz I wanna be consistent with respect to the fact that I think the people who live in my building should be able to have loud parties on weekends, but a nasty note left on their door by some other neighbors apparently shows that not everyone feels as I do.Woke up sort of late Saturday, and luckily my budding sore throat had disappeared. I got an email from Galia about a discussion on free will and God which she'd had with her friend and wrote up a huge response to that and then made plans to discuss it with her when she got back from visiting her grandfather, and thus to kill time til then I biked over to the tin can and practiced drums for like 40 mins and guitar for like 1.5 hours. Then it was back and we talked on Skype for quite a while. It was a good talk, and for those who don't know, I'm tentatively supporting the position that free will is an illusion but one that, in the daily psychological context, we necessarily adopt and believe in order to function. However, underneath it all are just the deterministic laws of physics and thus free will is actually impossible. And yes, I still believe that morality is compatible with this thank you for asking. However, all of these positions are somewhat tentative as I haven't read enough or thought enough in depth about the matter to fully form a view, though I imagine that no matter what view that were it would have to be only tentative due to intellectual honesty.
Anyway, after that I played guitar for another many hours while talking to Can after spending some time working on my Depth Qualifying Exam reading list and presentation. I have to give a big oral exam on Dec 1 which includes a presentation on around 15 papers which form the background context of my own research work, and then also present my own research itself, all of this to a committee consisting of my advisor and 2 other faculty members. I'm really not worried about it, I just have to make sure I'm fully prepared. After I pass this, I'll be awarded a Master's from NYU (which would be my first, as I still never wrote my UvA thesis). Around 9 I decided I needed to get out of the house and hit up this Wooden Shjips show at a new music venue quite near where I lived my first year in New York though a little more removed in the warehouse district (good for noise reasons). It was raining a tiny bit which almost scared me too much to venture out on my bike, but I braved it, and it was great as the rain was very very mild and it was warm. The venue itself was really cool with little rooms with couches in the main hall and a big rooftop for smoking and admiring the Kosciusko Bridge and the Manhattan skyline. I ended up being there alone for like 5 hours or so, seeing Religious Knives, Vivian Girls, and Crystal Stilts in addition to the headliners. The other bands were quite missable, though I sort of like RK and really didn't like the others. I just hate garage and this is a special variety called shitgaze. I consider the name apt. Anyway, I had a few gin and tonics, took a walk around the hood during a break, and was home by the second 1am. I'll definitely be going back there as it rocked. The place was also insanely crowded with people in costumes and some guy during the RK set offered me mushrooms from a baggie out of which he was eating them and then a "hit" from his beer. I declined both offers, but thanked him graciously.
Today I got up before 10 which in the past weeks is early, talked to Galia for an hour, and then rolled into the office. I mostly just worked on my DQE prep. Now I'm about to meet Lewis at Earthmatters for dinner and then he, I, and Nguyen are gonna see Bellini at Bowery.
I fly to Israel on Thursday morning!
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( 3.2 / 68 )Friday, October 30, 2009, 19:37 - General
Let's see, I think I'll write about more recent events as those are fresher and their details are more likely to be lost.Last Thursday I went to a CMJ concert headlined by Cinemechanica but I was there to see The Bronzed Chorus, a 2-piece post rock band from North Carolina. Lewis was thinking about joining me but couldn't make it til 10, and they went on more like at 8:45. Thus I saw them myself. They were a little sloppy but it was still cool, and they inspired me by having 2 Fender amps for stereo delay effects (cue the foreshadowing music). The main problem with them was just that they were way too loud for the space, and a few times it felt like I was going to fall over cuz I was dizzy from the mind-blowing loudness. I had a beer there and for some reason felt like lots of girls were checking out my butt while I stood there alone up front and I then let Lewis know that I was ready to roll and we met up at Burp Castle instead of the show. We had 3 beers there in the new outdoor terrace which we both think is a significant downgrade from the previous setup. On the bike ride back we were rather tipsy and sort of got into a race over the Williamsburg Bridge which I decidedly won, even after having to stop and check out some glass I'd run over. I then just went home while I believe he continued the revelry at some other venue.
Friday I gave into temptation and called up a guy who was advertising an early 1968 Fender Super Reverb on Craigslist for $1100. This is one of the older silverfaces which still had the blackface circuit (though of course they're still not as "desirable" as a pre-CBS one). I called up Sal to see whether he'd be down to give me a hand with his van with picking it up and that was a go so we went over to the West Village. I was able to pull out $1000 in cash from the ATM in one shot which was surprising and then we went to the oldish (50?) dude's place and I beat on the amp but it was tip top so I was sold. We then drove over to the practice space and I set that and the pedals up in stereo and we jammed for a while, and then we brought my Orange back home so I can use it as my practice amp until I sell it, though it will be sad to part with it. I'd much rather have a real practice studio and a nice Fender guitar than the Orange however. Anyway, I took Sal out to eat at Fabiane's in payment and it was nice though we noticed that they serve foie gras by which we were both instinctively repulsed. This caused me to look up the production of foie gras and I found that outside of France there are some producers which simply kill the geese or ducks at the time of year just before migration would occur and thus when their livers would naturally be at their fattiest (though French producers claim that this produces clearly inferior meat). I only hope that Fabiane's uses such meat and not the traditional stuff. Anyway, after that I went home and played guitar for another hour or so before Sal called me up again and had me come over to the bar where he used to clean to hang with him and his friend who owns it. We headed over there and hung for a while, mostly being entertained by her adorable new puppy that she'd just gotten that day. After this it was decided that we'd go to the gallery opening of the dick chicken exhibition at 3rd Ward (the one at Lorimer and Metropolitan). For those not in the know, dick chicken is some dude who's been tagging Williamsburg and various other areas of New York with said moniker but also this cartoon drawing of a chicken with a penis for a head. It's pretty much all over the place, and everyone seems to know about it and have an opinion about it, and lately there have been some imitators (Pussy Ham: said phrase with a ham and a vagina in the middle of the ham and blood seeping out; Taint Turkey: a turkey stick figure with a line to its taint and the word taint written there; etc.). I was curious to "meet the man behind the cock", and the exhibition flyer suggested I'd have the chance to do. Sal was really against going, calling it the Britney Spears of street art, but in the end neither of us had anything better to do so we went. Outside the place we ran into a friend of Sal's (of course, he knows everyone) who apparently is friends with dick chicken himself and had helped set up the show. We chatted with dude for a while and then went in to find a super packed little gallery with tons of people. I immediately realized that Sal was right, and the art itself was just like advertisements for dick chicken pizza or dick chicken mcnugglets, and so I sort of was kicking myself for having gone. We didn't even meet the man behind the cock. I did however make my way back to the open bar and luckily, it turns out, they were out of cups. What they did have was a bunch of lemon vodka and some empty 1/3 litre sparkling water bottles, so the guy just filled one of those with like 6 shots for me and gave me that free of charge. With this in tow we just left and went across the street to Kellog's Diner and got dinner and I drank my "water" with my omelet and fries. After this I was quite jolly and we continued the party over at Barcade where I had another 2 beers and we played a bunch of video games, all the while Sal wanting to get on Dig Dug but these dudes were hogging it for well over an hour and a half. When we eventually got on it he showed me this trick you can do to get the game to lock up and not advance to the next level, the only way out being rebooting the machine. We thus sat back and watched the hogs' frustration and then walked up to Bedford before parting ways. At home were Shlomit and her cousin Talie waiting for me as they'd come down to New York with some others on a road trip to see the Leonard Cohen concert. I chatted with them for a while before hitting the hay.
Saturday morning I slept in quite late and then brought Talie over to meet Shlomit at the Roebling Tea Room for brunch. We sat in the back corner and had our cheesy eggs and discussed the tension between research and teaching in academia and then they went off on their own while I went home and relaxed. I was quite tired from the night before and resolved not to drink anything alcoholic that day. I ended up chilling at home, talking to Galia for a while, playing some guitar, etc. Around 7:30 I got a text from Shlomit asking to meet up at Union Sq. and so I braved the pouring rain with an umbrella and waterproof shoes and left the house. I actually really enjoyed the rain and the amazing warmth of the evening, just not so much the wetness of my pants after many blocks of walking. We had dinner with Talie as well at the Vietnamese place to which I went with Galia and her friends a few weeks ago on University and 13th. From there it was Grey Dog's and then a wander through the East Village with the beer bars I'd had in mind vetoed due to a lack of seating and then us ending up at Beauty Bar for a drink. I stayed true to my resolve while Shlomit and Talie each had something. Talie really liked the place while Shlomit and I were very skeptical (I mean, we'd been there before, but I'm pretty convinced now that the place sucks - both the crowd and the music). After the drink it was home and to bed.
Sunday morning Shlomit left really early but Talie stayed in New York for another few days. She went off to a museum or maybe Chelsea while I went into the office cuz I felt sort of guilty about skipping Friday to buy the amp and stuff. I can't remember much of the day other than the working. Alex was in the office too so we had some productive coding going on. That evening I think was the one when I came home to Can having consumed a whole bottle of port and then he and Talie keeping me up for a while before he got her to go to Bagelsmith with him at like 1 in the morning.
Monday I again went to the office and feverishly worked. Alex and I are trying to connect our two programming components in what Dennis calls the Union Pacific. We ended up not getting that done before our meeting with Dennis that evening, but we'd worked hard to get there so it was cool. When I got home I found an empty house around 8:30 so I turned on my amp only to have Talie come back after not to much longer. After a little subtle coaxing I decided to go out with her, after having bragged to a very tipsy Galia not much before about how I'd not drunk any alcohol for 3 whole days. She and I met Can in the elevator and he decided to join. The three of us first went to Foodswings, the vegan fast food place, where they had dinner and I had a rootbeer float with vegan ice cream. We then went to Spuyten Duyvil. We got the usual window seats and then Talie asked me how one picks people up in a bar. I thought about it and said all you need is some "in" to start talking to them, so an obvious tactic is to go with a group and stand next to another group of people with attractive members of the obvious sex. I then resolved to demonstrate how one talks to said members and chatted it up with the bartender a few times. It was rather amusing. Can left after the second drink but Talie and I stayed for a third, which as I had warned her previously in the evening caused me to start going off about how amazingly awesome my girlfriend is. I advertised some Zvoov on the chalkboard in the bathroom and we rolled home.
Tuesday was another office day. I know I didn't make it home until something like 9, at which point I played like 2 hours of guitar. Lately I've decided to try and play for at least 1 hour every single day if not more. Consistency is very important to my improvement on the instrument I've noticed.
Wednesday I talked to Galia for quite a while in the morning and then went to the research lunch with Dennis's group. From there I went back to the office and drew up some slides presenting mistakes that were made a lot on the homework I'd corrected for the Advanced Database Systems class I'm TAing. Next office hours, next class and said presentation (which Dennis says he liked), then more office hours, then home for more guitar playing.
Thursday morning I decided to head into the music practice space for my practicing, thinking that I could just work late and that the space closes at 6 so practicing there isn't an option. Well, this turned into me playing guitar for like 3 hours and drums for like 1.5 hours. The new setup is so amazing, I just can't wait til we have the real practice space and thus I can practice in the evenings. While I was drumming, mostly listening along on my iPhone to Nirvana and Tool and trying to replicate what was going on, a dude who works at the storage place and was cleaning the floors walked by and wanted to watch. I got sort of uncomfortable cuz, well, I'm not a drummer (even though he seemed to think it sounded good, it most definitely did not) so I switched back to guitar and showed him each of the pedals and so forth. He was very interested in the mechanics of how each part worked and I like explaining things so it was fun. By the time I got to the office it was almost 5, and then I just talked to Galia for an hour before getting to work. Sleepiness got the best of me early and I got into bed by 11 to read some of this history book on Nabokov that Lewis bought me and I was dozing off by 12, but then I had trouble actually falling asleep and woke up today at past 10.
I've been sleeping really late for the last week or so and I'm not sure why. I'm sort of considering quitting caffeine, maybe due to reading on his blog that Josiah had done the same recently with alcohol and cigarettes. I've had this weird feeling of anxiety deep in my stomach ever since I left Switzerland and I can't really tell why, but I imagine being hopped up on caffeine can't help. Today I again started the day with a full litre of coffee however and then talked to Galia on video skype (which is really an amazing resource I must say) for something like 2 hours before she had to roll to Shabat dinner. I then biked into the office, running into Dennis in the hallway and then also stopping by the NYU library to pick up a couple books on current philosophical thought on the idea that logical contradictions might not necessarily be fatal to arguments - i.e. that there are multiple classes of contradictions, some of which might be ok. It's a topic in which Galia and I are both interested so I'll bring them along to Israel. Speaking of which, I'll be headed there in less than a week, staying for 12 days this time, and I'm rather excited about that.
This weekend I've got a couple shows in mind: Wooden Shjips Saturday in some new space in Greenpoint near where I lived my first year here; and Bellini Sunday night at Bowery Ballroom. I also learned that this guy Todd who played a few times at parties in my basement in Madison is in this post rock band Cougar, one of whose albums I've had for a while now, and he'll be playing a show at Mercury Lounge after I get back in late November. I also just installed the new Kubuntu which was so far painless. I'm pretty happy to have last.fm scrobbling working again on Amarok.
I came across this quote of Vonnegut which I quite liked while reading Mother Night (which was great, as all Vonnegut is): "Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile."
Ok, I'm gonna try and work a little now.
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( 2.8 / 77 )Wednesday, October 28, 2009, 09:47 - General
So the morning of Thursday October 1 Galia and I caught a cab up to La Guardia and flew nonstop to Minneapolis. The ride was the bumpiest either of us had ever experienced, and the weather caused there to be only one operative runway at the MSP airport so we had to circle in the bumpiness above Eau Claire and we both felt pretty nauseated. When we finally did land we went and picked up our rental car and had the dude giving us our PT Cruiser talk our ears off for like 15 minutes for no reason while Galia had a smoke. Eventually we ditched that guy and got on the road. I was quite pleased to find that the car's stereo had an aux 1/8" jack so that I could swing by Best Buy and pick up a car charger for my iPhone and then we'd have good tunes on our road trips. We drove down to Oronoco but Galia was feeling a bit sick from the plane ride so we stopped at one of the few options along the way: a Country Kitchen. She was wowed by the huge portions and the unlimited refills and the grease. When we got to my parents' everyone was hungry and waiting for us to go out to eat at this new pizza place in town so we headed there: Galia and I, my mom and dad, and Chelsey and her beau. The food was good and afterward we headed back home and just hung out talking for a few hours with my parents until Galia's eyes started to close due to jetlag and lack of sleep so we hit the sack around 11 or so I think.Friday morning I went to get a physical exam but the doc basically just looked at me and said wtf you're fine and so he and I chatted about random crap that was bothering me like my elbow and my backne. On the way back I picked up the car charger and then found Galia still sleeping so I hung out for a while eating waffles. We then drove into Rochester the two of us and ended up in the Galleria of all places cuz I couldn't think of anywhere else to go. We bummed around there for a bit and then just took off and drove around on country dirt roads cuz duh that's way more interesting. We stopped home briefly and then continued up to Minneapolis to catch a Tortoise show. We found the venue easily courtesy of my iPhone and then I predicted that Minnesota drivers would stop and wait for us to cross in the middle of a busy street and I was right. We had our IDs checked at the venue which struck me as strange at first cuz it seems my ID has been getting checked far less in New York these days. We had a couple drinks and sat for the opening act Prefuse 73 which was just sort of lame I thought. The main act, though, was just amazing, and Galia really liked it too. I think with bands like that the live show really shows you how cool the music is in a way that's hard to get from just the instrumental recordings. They played a long set, finishing their three song encore with Salt The Skies (my favorite), and then we were off. I was supposed to meet up with my brother at this point but he didn't answer his phone and I was just so exhausted that I was already doubting how well I'd make it home. Galia passed out and I was left to fend for myself and was also sort of nodding off by the time we made it back at like 1:30 or something.
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( 2.9 / 55 )Sunday, October 25, 2009, 18:12 - General
On Sept 22, a Tuesday, Arthur, my officemate Alex, and I all had tickets to go see Pelican, Earth, and Sunn O))) at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple in Fort Greene. Arthur and I were stuck in a huge line to get in so that people's IDs could be checked (one dude doing it, and further adds fuel to my European-minded hatred of the American alcohol puritanism) and thus walked in after Pelican had started. They've switched from old Sunn amps (I think cuz theirs broke and they couldn't find replacements, or maybe it's related to their tour van being stolen) to Marshall half stacks, but man was it way too loud. After being in the front surrounded by meatheads in a venue with seemingly no ventilation at all we climbed up to the seated mezzanine and sat for Earth, which while slightly cheesy was actually rather enjoyable. The drummer was always behind the beat which annoyed Arthur, but overall it was nice and slow post rock stuff (though I always think bands with a Rhodes player would be better off without said Rhodes player). When they finished Sunn O)) set up their 6 full stacks of loud and did a sound check and then turned on some Tibetan chant track on repeat and turned on these huge smoke machines which billowed out smoke until the entire place was chokingly filled. It was absurd, and is impossible to appreciate unless you were there, but this smoke and chant nonsense lasted at least 30 minutes. Arthur and I were rather tired and not so interested in seeing Sunn O))) anyway, so we just left before the smoke thing was over and they actually started playing. I later learned that Alex, who didn't know any of the bands at all, had showed up just when the smoke thing was starting and was thoroughly baffled and bewildered which is an amusing thing to picture. A G train ride, my first in a while (I think since I saw Tera Melos in May), and it was bed time.On Sept 29, also a Tuesday, Galia's Dutch friend from when she went to Montessori high school in Amsterdam spent the night up in my loft. She's spending 2 months or so in New York doing acting classes and needed somewhere to crash for one night before she could move into her sublet. She showed up in the evening, and then she, I, and my roommates all went out to Spuyten Duyvil for a couple drinks. I ended up getting far more intoxicated than I thought my four beers should have made me, but oh well, fun times.
The next morning I went to pick Galia up at JFK. She'd spent the previous night at the Paris airport, and had some mild adventures there including being taken into the bowels of the place by an airport worker for a smoke break. Also when she arrived she'd forgotten her passport on the plane and had a rather arduous time convincing the airline staff to let her back on the plane to retrieve it but in the end she was the last one to come out into the waiting area. We went outside, she had a smoke or two, and we took the J back to my place and lazed around together for a couple hours until I had to head to school for office hours and class. I came back to her asleep in my bed (not an unpleasant thing to come home to I must say). We had some wine and went out to this maze / concert at Death By Audio which was surprisingly cool actually, with this weird band which was sort of a cross between soul and experimental punk. We stayed there for maybe an hour and a half, then stayed up rather late in my room even though we had to get up early the next day in order to...
... fly to the Midwest. Stay tuned for part II...
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( 2.9 / 47 )Sunday, October 25, 2009, 18:03 - General
So it's been over a month since my last real post. Lots and lots to catch up on, and it's nearly impossible I'll remember even most things I deem blog-worthy, but here goes. I guess I'll start with a list of things, sort of like a table of contents, and then dive into the text-making.* Galia came to visit, first one day in NYC, then 6 days in the MIdwest (Oronoco, Minneapolis, and Madison), then another 9 days in NYC. Was awesome, though obviously too short.
* Shlomit and her friend Efrat were here during Galia's final week, with Shlomit staying another couple days after the other two left.
* Shlomit and her cousin came down Friday to go to Leonard Cohen and now her cousin's crashing with me for another couple days.
* I went to an art exhibition with the theme "Dick Chicken: come meet the man behind the cock".
* I went to a huge warehouse/art space party with Galia, Shlomit, Efrat, and Morann and it was quite cool.
* I, along with Arthur and Sal, put down money on a lease for a real, soundproofed, 24-hour access music practice room being built in a 1-floor old factory on N. 14th and Berry next to Gutter. Should be done in like 3-5 weeks.
* I bought two vintage Fender Super Reverb 4x10 amps, sold my pedalboard and my Digitech Whammy, and am now rocking stereo loops and stereo delay. My Orange has become "just the practice amp".
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( 2.9 / 56 )Tuesday, September 22, 2009, 17:21 - General
Man, what an awesome autumn for new music: Russian Circles, Pelican, Om, Do Make Say Think, The Mercury Program all have new albums coming out.[ add comment ] | permalink |
( 2.8 / 63 )Monday, September 21, 2009, 19:15 - General
Last Monday my Macbook Air did arrive at the office while I was out to lunch, and I spent the afternoon happily setting that up. I met with Dennis and Alex for the first time in the late afternoon and then went home to play with the Mac. Even now after a week I'm still not very used to it, and I'm pretty disappointed with the NFS performance between my music server and iTunes, but the thing is so light and sexy it's awesome.Tuesday I attended a meeting which explained the changes NYU made to grad student pay structures, and this involves TAships being paid positions above and beyond the standard stipend of in our cases $12.5K/semester. This totally changes the way things work, in that before RAships were awesome cuz you were paid the same and just didn't have to TA, whereas now the TAships carry around 50% more pay than you'd otherwise get. I happen to be a TA this semester, and with my plans to keep up my transatlantic jetsetting this is obviously welcome news. In the afternoon I went to the Apple store in Soho and bought an iPhone. It was a pretty crazy place - it was huge, with tons of toys for people to play with and tons of very well groomed people waiting in line for Apple tech. Like a hipness factory or something. I played with that a bit, but soon found out that I couldn't sync it via Linux. I then worked until I met Sarah, my ex-breakdancing partner, at some bar in the Village which ended up too loud for our purposes so we went back to Vol de Nuit which happened to be where we first met with Caitlin and Shlomit etc. While I was waiting for her outside the first bar I noticed an internet cafe with its sign (saying internet cafe) in 5 languages: English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Hebrew. A rather strange choice of languages to represent. We ended up drinking 4 Belgian beers and got rather tipsy, waxing about her love of Apple and having a good time. Biking tipsy is always fun.
Wednesday morning we went to practice in the storage locker and it was awesome. Sal is really good, and it's just so fun to play again. I then had group lunch, worked, and went to the class I'm TAing (Advanced Database Systems) before going home to play with my new toys.
Thursday evening I biked over to Bushwick to a gallery opening to which I was invited by Matt. I was there for around an hour before he showed up, and my iPhone wasn't able to pick up phone service after I'd upgraded the firmware so I couldn't really tell what the deal was. I was able to get data so I chatted a bit with Galia as she was still up after having gone out, and eventually Matt came and it was cool. There was free booze, and the paintings were actually pretty cool (lots of urban decay and dead deer in them). Julie came too, along with her new boyfriend and Matt's new girlfriend. The boyfriend plays jazz guitar so we talked quite a bit about music. The five of us picked up a guy Joel and went to this place Roberta's in the hood which is a quite cool pizza place with a backyard beer garden. We weren't allowed to order food in the outdoor area for some reason and indoors was full, so we just got drinks for a while before going to a falafel joint rather buzzed and then heading home. Good times.
Friday I went to practice in the morning again, then went home and talked with Galia for a while, and reflashed the firmware on my phone to fix it. I also reinstalled iTunes to try and get rid of its memory of my huge server-based library as it kept rescanning it annoyingly, but that caused iTunes to erase the contents of my phone so I'm again syncing music to it - still even now. Whatever. That evening I went to Julie's apartment to a Rosh Hashanah dinner party. I accidentally ate something non-vegetarian for the first time to my knowledge in a while - rice cooked in chicken stock - but I didn't get overly upset about it. The party was fine, pretty low-key, drank a bunch of wine, talked some philosophy etc. New Yorkers are conversationally ruthless and I'd forgotten, so I had to crank up the wit a notch but after that it was all good.
Saturday morning was again band practice, with Sal and I getting there around 9 and Arthur coming closer to 10. We again played for a number of hours and it was again awesome, this time having the oscillating fan out in the hall to keep the power from cutting out. Things are starting to come together, but the songs are pretty complicated to it won't be an overnight thing. That afternoon after practice we all went over to this practice space being built out of an old factory on north 14th next to Gutter and it was so cool. The rooms are only framed as of yet, so we won't be able to move in until early-mid November, but man it's gonna rule - 9x11 room to ourselves, 24hr access, like 40 other bands all around us. Think nonstop loud ass party. We signed the lease and paid the deposit and I can't wait. I kept playing around with my Apple stuff and then at 8 Nguyen came by to drop off my drill and saw (he took the subway with them, walked 12 blocks, and then had to walk up 5 flights of stairs cuz the elevator is broken) and then we went out to eat at Lodge before heading over to Gutter to drink a few and bowl a couple games. We both sucked it up really badly, and toward the end of the second game Sal and his friend Andy came by and we all hung out for a while in the bar area.
Sunday morning I talked with Galia and then had brunch with Dafna at Fabiane's which she loved. We then meandered along Bedford, me showing her El Beit and the bookstore on the corner of 5th. I did laundry, annoyingly finding the spin cycle broken and thus having to pay for 3 dryer cycles instead of 1 to get my clothes dry, restrung my acoustic guitar for the first time since buying it like a year ago (I'd restrung my Les Paul and it sounded awesome so I was inspired), and then Ian, Joscha, and Tim came over at 7 for some beer and Settlers. I won the first rather handily, and then Tim left and Joscha won the second. I blame it on very favorable die rolls but whatever. Good times.
Today talked with Shlomit for a while, went to the office, had lunch with Y-Lan which was nice, and then programmed some before meeting with Dennis. It's almost 8 and I'm debating whether I can stay focused enough to be productive or whether I should just head home. I think the latter.
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