Weblog

Hello. We are back from our world tour.

Last Tuesday we saw Ben Folds at First Avenue in downtown Minneapolis, which was a total powerhouse show that blew my tiny little mind. I had forgotten just how freakin’ good that guy is at slammin’ down those ivories. Had I known about Ben Folds, or had he even existed, back when I was taking piano lessons I would have had something great to work towards. As it were, I redirected all my energies into saxophone. Then I redirected all my energies into writing. I have since redirected all my energies into goofing off. Soon enough we’ll see how far this new focus will get me in life. To this point it’s been pretty dang effective.

Ben Folds. Great. The Fray opened. They were okay. The guy was wearing a funny hat, I remember that much. By the looks of it he should have been selling newspapers on the street corner about one hundred years ago.

Thursday night we went to Psycho Suzi’s in the Nord’East Minneapolis neighborhood, to celebrate Andrew’s 25th birthday and subsequent introduction to the world of cheap car insurance. Psycho Suzi’s is a kick-ass tiki lounge with tacky drinks and snappy waitresses and a huge outdoor seating area that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense on a cold October night, but apparently roxxorz joor boxxorz on those July evenings when everyone is sticky with sweat and rum. I will have to imagine what it would have been like out there with 200 people slurring their speech and spilling their drinks on each other.

I got a specialty drink known as the One-Eyed Willy, served in a pirate mug that was so unbelievably tacky that I had to walk away with it. The drink’s iconography implied that its consumption would turn me into a tiki god bedecked in nothing but a towel and a wooden mask, whooping and hollering and spinning my towel around over my head, sloshing my drink (strategically located to shield my sensitive tiki bits) all over the place. It didn’t get quite that bad. Or it got quite worse, depending on your point of view.

Long story short, Psycho Suzi’s rocks. If their hefty specialty drinks aren’t enough to make you puke, the abhorrently tacky decor will more than finish the job. It’s awful. It reminds me of one of my roommates in college.

Friday night we hit up First Avenue again to see Broken Social Scene. They were awesome. They have, like, 20 people in their band and I’m not sure if they’ve all met one another, but no matter. Their music is great, this hugely epic stuff with horns or four guitars or two drummers or everything else at once. This one gal in the band had her hair done in this huge and freakish way that made it look like she had two heads. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t shake that image. Maybe it’s a personal problem, but I find two-headed people to be just a little bit creepy this close to Halloween.

A guy got excited and flung his beer at the lead singer and got kicked out.

Feist opened, who was pretty cool. She used to sing in a punk band before that killed her voice. She wanted to know what her band should go as for Halloween. The audience decided that they should go as The Arcade Fire.

Friday also happened to be the proxy night for celebrating Halloween in downtown Minneapolis. We saw Beaker and a drunk bus. We saw a drunk light rail transit system. We also saw a really short skirt. Everyone else saw everything else.

Sunday I drove down to Madison to visit family, and we went to see Nickel Creek at the Orpheum Theatre. They were super fun, all dancin’ and hoppin’ around stage and everything. Their bass player did a tap dancing solo. I’m not kidding. The Ditty Bops opened, and geez, those guys alone were worth the price of admission. They had put together a special Halloween show, complete with secret costumes and pirate sea chanties and an accordion.

One of their band members was dressed up as Frankenstein and he spent much of the show carving a pumpkin on stage. After the show he was walking around on four-foot stilts, all grunting and growling at people to go out to the lobby and buy their stuff. Tyler got me their “bikinis and bicycles” calendar, which has been signed by the gals in the band with hearts and everything.

Monday, I swear to god, Starbucks sabotaged the power adapter to my laptop, bringing the productivity of Brainside Out to a screeching halt. I drove to Milwaukee to pick up a new power adapter (covered under AppleCare) at the Apple Store, and wandered the mall for an hour while waiting for my turn at the Genius Bar, which is a cool concept that could be improved by the use of more bar, or at least a liquor license. This particular mall had a cell phone kiosk every fifteen feet. For how great and dense this population of cell phone kiosks, and for how irritating the salespeople were at these particular kiosks, very little blood was spilled. I take pride in my restraint.

On Tuesday I turned a Panera’s into my personal office for approximately five hours. That evening Tyler and I returned to the Orpheum to see Guster. They were great fun and played an awesome set, but I was really there for the opening band. I’ve been a huge fan of matt pond PA for a bunch of years, now, but since I’m pursuing an epic and transient lifestyle I’ve never had the opportunity to see them live. Last night I finally got around to it, and geez, what an amazing experience. I was mashed against the ridiculously tall stage for their entire set, singing along and going deaf in the wash from their monitors. All I could think was, Cello, man! I’m losing all my hearing to cello! How great is that? Cello!

They played a lot of songs from their new album Several Arrows Later, which I love more every time I listen to it, but they also played stuff from Emblems, and even a chart from as far back as The Green Fury. After the show I had a chance to talk with a couple members of the band, and they are some of the coolest, most genuine, down-to-earth people you’ll ever meet. I hope they come back. I hope Guster doesn’t flay them alive and wear their skins on their next tour or something. I know that The Current has been playing matt pond PA in pretty high rotation, which may be enough to pull them back to this neck of the woods.

It’s been a busy October, so much so that it’s not even October anymore.

It’s a creepy, chilly October night. The night air is blowing like crazy, sending dead leaves skittering across the pavement. The porch door keeps slamming shut in the wind. If I was evil and undead (or rather, if I was evil and undead and unemployed) I would totally be out tonight, munching on live flesh. As it is, I’ve got work to do, and the freezer is full, so it’s tough to justify a night on the town.

Today was 75 degrees. Yesterday was 65 and windy, so I drove out to Waconia for a killer kiteboarding session. I haven’t gone kiting since last spring when I was living in Hood River, and holy geez did it feel great to get on the water again. The launch is a bit tricky and the weather is a bit gusty at Lake Waconia, but it’s a huge lake with a reach measured in miles, so you can get a heck of a lot of kiting in once you’re out on the water.

I was out for a couple hours, just smilin’ and slicin’ back and forth. At one point I caught a huge gust and nearly ate it, but I dug in my heelside edge like crazy and held on for dear life. With teeth clenched I waited for the gust to taper off, but it kept blowing and I kept accelerating to insane speeds. I rode that gust forever, driving across my two-mile reach in record time, and I never got railed by it.

I should have taken my victory as an indication to get off the water, but now I was greedy and would do whatever it took to get whatever I could. Sure enough, the wind absolutely died on me while out in the middle of the lake. My kite Hindenberged and there wasn’t enough wind to get it relaunched, so I began the slow and arduous process of swimming back to shore. After a spell I emerged from a drainage ditch with my kite, and hiked half a mile back to the launch site to grab my car and drive back for the rest of my gear.

All in all, it was a great session. I got a ton of kiteboarding in, notwithstanding my Walk of Shame. It wasn’t the first, and it certainly won’t be the last. I absolutely love this sport, even though she can be a harsh mistress. Afterwards a bunch of us smelly kiters went out for beers, hittin’ up Floyd’s in Victoria, Minnesota, a one-horse town if I’ve ever seen one. Once I got home, I spent three hours untangling my kite lines.

I’m forever optimistic, but it’s possible that our unseasonable warmth is drawing to a close, and with it the kiteboarding season. Fortunately, as soon as the snow flies we can start thinking about the snowkiting season, which is supposed to be absolutely epic in this neck of the woods. Lake Minnetonka is the big hang in this area, kiting out of the wind shadow formed by Spirit Island and Wayzata Bay. It’s a shame that Wayzata is five minutes down the road. I’m so used to living in Hood River, where Kite Beach is only three minutes away. Yes, I’m a spoiled brat, and I deserve to be punched in the gut. I would have it no other way.

The contact form is fixed.

My most recent reentry to civilization has been more graceful than the last, and I’ve been working hard on a little something I call The Brainside Out Urban Renewal Project. I won’t go so far as to say that our infrastructure was in shambles when I came back from the border country, but after four months of neglect there was definitely a lot of work that needed to be done to get things running smoothly again.

Two years of nomadic lifestyle, coupled with a season of abandonment, has definitely taken its toll. Fortunately, we’re reaching the tail end of this new phase of modernization, and with any luck things will start settling into a more comfortable rhythm over the next couple weeks.

You may be wondering what The Brainside Out Urban Renewal Project entails, exactly. In short, it’s a multi-pronged effort to modernize the existing technological infrastructure of Brainside Out proper, with the primary goals of outfitting it with the technical and socioeconomic frameworks necessary to compete effectively in an increasingly global market.

Whoa. I can see why marketers write junk like that, because I just got a serious head rush while doing it. Sheesh. The straight dope is this, yo:

I’ve got crap that sucks. It needs to be replaced by new and better crap.

This is done, for the most part. The new computers arrived and have been hitched to the wagon. The new software is installed. My Windows machine has been hurled off an overpass into traffic. I got a sweet neoprene sleeve and an awesome shoulder bag for my laptop. I resampled and imported the vast majority of my music collection (more than 400 albums, at last count) at 256 kbps, putting to shame my old sample rate of 192.

I wish that CDs were a far more archival type of media, as many of my CDs are scratched to hell and won’t import, and some won’t even play for that matter. Besides scratches, my entire Bob Dylan collection suffers from an affliction that I call ‘CD leprosy’, where the surface of the disc is intact but the foil itself has flaked off horribly over the years. Great sad hunks of rhythm and song are missing.

I also got a new cell phone, which was long overdue. My old one was nice and small, yes, but it only had enough space to store 12 characters for each person’s name. As my contacts list grew I knew that this would become an unmanageable problem, and before I knew it I had five ‘Brians’ with no distinguishing last names. Fortunately, phone manufacturers learned something in the two years since I got my phone, and my new one holds an unwieldy 32 characters. Also, sometimes when I was trying to manage contacts my old phone would suffer from a sudden bout of Tourett’s and bark cryptic warnings like ‘PHONE NUMBERS ONLY!’ This insensitive UI seems not to have made it into the new phone, about which I am deeply grateful.

This new phone takes miserable pictures, too, which is really exciting! ‘Hey! Hey you girls! Wanna see a really blurry picture of ya’ll? I can do it with this here phone! By some impossible twisting of space and time, this phone can produce a photo that bears no resemblance whatsoever to its subject! No wait. Don’t leave, you gotta see this! What, you’ve got a phone in your purse there? Can I take a look? Hey, that’s no phone, that’s pepper sprAAAUUGGGHHHHH!’

Camera phones are God’s way of telling us that’s he’s still plenty pissed about a lot of things.

Anyway, things are coming back together. In the meanwhile, I’ve been having such a blast down here in the Twin Cities that I’m not even sure I’m going to make it back up to Duluth. I totally dig Duluth and all, but I’m getting totally addicted to Minneapolis. There’s so much going on in this town, so much music and culture, so many friends, that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to justify a move to Duluth. This has come as a complete surprise for me, and I am continually flabbergasted by how much freakin’ fun I’m having down here.

My calendar for October alone already has 20 shows that I want to get out and see. There’s no way I’ll see all of them (seeing as how most of them overlap), but what results is a fun fun game of prioritizing. Meanwhile, someone needs to announce a kick-ass Halloween party, and I need to get my act together and figure out a costume. Last year’s Zombie Undead Trucker was a stroke of genius, and thus the bar is set pretty high.

Yay for October!

The Mates of State show last night was absolutely stellar, despite the fact that an ambiguous something overflowed in the gal’s bathroom and flooded the entire dancefloor with nearly a half-inch of water. Some people ran for higher ground, but a lot of us paid no mind and just kept dancing and splish-splashing. The classic image was one of the guys from the Triple Rock furiously stabbing at the floor with two mops, trying to keep the floodwaters back from a rack of sound equipment.

Mates of State played a bit of stuff off their new EP, plus a bunch of songs that are brand-spankin’ new. Charts from Team Boo had a strong showing as well, and while I would have loved to hear more songs from the older Our Constant Concern, I’m still ecstatic that they played my favorite song from that album.

These guys are a total riot to see live, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard two people make so much noise. Well, come to think of it, there was that one hot summer night while I was living at Lava House, where everyone on the street had their windows wide open and our neighbors were…

Nah. Mates of State were louder. It’s hard to compete with drums and organ.

This explains a lot, and explains why I was getting a hundred messages a day from [email protected] regarding “Ffdsafgfds.” When I disabled my contact form they went away, much to the annoyance of anyone trying to get ahold of me. Apologies. Remember that you can always shuffle through a thick stack of Jacksons and the sound will send me runnin’. Failing that, there’s some RegEx validation I’ll plug into the form to secure it from injections. Until then.

I played a gig with the Como Avenue Jug Band the other night, and I got to play sax (and jug, and hambone) seeing as how they already had a bass player. I wrangled up another musician along the way, the infamous Silent C (also known as Mark the Hot Chick), who played a kickass mandolin solo in the middle of an Irish drinking song. That’s the thing about the Como Avenue Jug Band… it’s all songs about drinking and fighting and crawdad huntin’ and catfish noodlin’ and outright raunchiness, and that’s what makes it so awesome. Plus, playing jug is so much damn fun.

Ahh, jug life is the life for me.

Meanwhile, The Current continues to be the best radio station ever. They play matt pond PA and Junior Senior and Halloween, Alaska and The Bad Plus and Atmosphere and a ton of other stuff I love but have never heard, before.

Oh. And Minnewiki is pretty cool, too, if you’re into that whole "Minnesota music scene" kinda thing.

Na, na, na, na.

Holy geez, is there a lot to say.

I’m done guiding trips for the summer.

It was about a week ago that I finished up, and this time around I feel really good about being done. It was truly an incredible experience, one that I wish to repeat over the next couple summers, but now there are other things afoot that command my attention.

All in all, I spent four months this summer living up the Gunflint Trail, and spent 50 days out in the wilderness. As I’m doing the math, that nearly doubles the amount of time I’ve spent in the wilderness, up to this point. I saw moose and otters and beavers and bald eagles. I never saw a single bear, even though at the beginning of the season we had one wandering around camp, breaking windows and eating grease. Over the course of 11 days on Isle Royale we hiked more than 100 miles and saw seven moose. I saw sunsets and sunrises and meteors and satellites. I saw the moon.

The new Great Big Dreams album is stellar.

Tap Solo Just Kidding is so fine and polished that it’s runnin’ #1 down in Plano, Texas.

89.3 The Current is the best radio station. Ever.

The Current is a radio station from Minnesota Public Radio, newly created since I moved to Oregon more than two years ago, and they seriously play the best music that I have ever heard. Many times when I’m listening to The Current and jammin’ around town in the Geo Tracker I need to check and make sure that I’m not inadvertently listening to my iPod, their sets so closely parallel my own music collection. Other times they play stuff that’s so freakin’ hot and esoteric that I can’t believe I don’t have it, already.

It’s an incredible and eclectic mix that sandwiches Duke Ellington between Atmosphere and Modest Mouse, and I honestly would have it no other way. I’m listening to it right now, through an internet stream broadcasting wirelessly to my PowerBook.

Oh. And that’s another thing.

I’m an Apple guy, now. And I’ve never been happier.

I have been a hardcore PC guy since 1987. I was a Windows jockey even before there was such a thing. I’ve been building my own PCs for nearly ten years. And you know what? I gave it all up a few days ago, and I’m ecstatic. From a hardware standpoint, this PowerBook is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. The wireless card is built in, the antenna hidden in the screen. The keyboard knows when it gets dark and lights up, respectively. Not only does it light up, the light fades on, or fades out, depending on the situation. The trackpad scrolls windows when you use two fingers. The LCD screen is huge and bright and lovely.

As for the software? Tiger is spectacular. I have already transferred over 4,000 photos into iPhoto, I love Exposé beyond all words, and I catch myself giggling in glee whenever I dive into Terminal to tweak the OS. The focus on design and the attention to detail with these things, both in hardware and software, is absolutely staggering. After switching from Windows XP (and a fast computer running Windows XP, mind you) I honestly feel like I’ve been catapulted 50 years into the future. I finally have a system that is built around the way we use computers today, not the way we used them ten years ago. The difference is significant.

I’m moving to Duluth.

Good friends, Lake Superior, a season pass at Spirit Mountain, snowkiting in the Harbor, Sir Benedict’s Tavern, and Fitger’s Brewery were all deciding factors on this one.

I’m starting my own business.

Make no mistake about it, we’re goin’ at this thing balls-out. The threat of starvation can be a source of great motivation.

More details to come.

I turned 25 yesterday.

Does anyone else find it ironic that the cost of your car insurance goes down at the same time that you are allowed to rent a car? Have you ever seen how people drive those things? My brother-in-law tried to drag his rental sedan to the summit of Mount Hood.

That should do it for now.