So, to follow up on this entry about seeing three representations of the number 23 on Mission sidewalks at 23rd, I discovered that on the opposite corner of that intersection are two more mosaics: one reading |||| |||| |||| |||| |||, and one with three staggered rows of 8, 7, and 8 dots. Two on one corner, three on the opposite corner. No significance, I'm sure.

That Beca of mine knows how to put things.

Firstly, she gets me back into jeans. Good move.

Then, months later, she gives me a HIGHLY effective compliment - about a look i didn't particularly like -- on how i cuff them. (Wide cuffs, instead of pegging them 80's style. Yes, yes, i know it's outmoded, but i like pegged jeans!)

A week and a half later, and i haven't pegged my jeans since.

The fruits of my labors were posted live today. Download it now. Or later. But now you know. ;)

Startling - a productive day for both Apple and for me.

Not only did i go to work, but Russell and i cut out all the pieces for his kimono for the O-bon party in a few weeks. I revv'd up the sewing machine, stopped for some supper, and started sewing the seams. Fantastic! This thing really is going to look like a kimono!

Later in the evening, we had a chance to develop the sake rebecca - David and Andy joined us as taste-testers, and we came up with a pretty good recipe. Two drinks down for the party, a few more to go.

I returned to the sewing, and the kimono is ready to have the collar/neckline attached. Onwards!

So. A week from Sunday, Russell and i are going to get up relatively early (for us), and tromp 10K in the sun for a good cause. Would you support us?

We're walking the San Francisco AIDS Walk, and are proud to be part of the SF AIDS Foundation team. I'll spare you Russell's short clever plea for donations, and my longer, more poignant (but less funny!) request, and just set you towards the salient URLs....

To sponsor Russell.

To sponsor meriko.

Ordinarily, on a day wherein I did something like assist in the grinding up of 8 pounds of pork and beef in the pursuit of homemade sausage, that would be the most interesting thing that would happen to me all day. And in all honesty, it was pretty cool, and I'm looking forward to eating the fruits, er, sausages of my labors later today.

But I'm not here to talk about sausages. Sausages didn't leave me hung over, ears ringing, legs achey, and smiling. Last night we went to see Meg Lee Chin at the remote but reasonably cool Pound SF.

Meg is one of our two or three favorite currently-recording artists. Her stuff is hard to classify — it's a mélange of industrial, electronic, hip-hop, post-punk, and occasionally just plain rock-n-roll — in other words, it's interesting and difficult to market. She's signed to Invisible Records, which has some definite benefits (e.g. exposure to new potential fans via participation in Pigface, having Martin Atkins produce, mix, and cowrite most of her debut album), but on the downside means she doesn't have much of a marketing or touring budget, which is why you've never heard of her.

Discounting one or two Pigface shows, we'd only seen Meg play once before, at a dot-com sponsored party in San Jose a couple of years back. There were about 90 people there for the party and about 10 there for Meg, so we were right up on stage for that one.

A DJ from The Requiem was playing some reasonably good music: this new industrial techno crap that all the kids are listening to these days was being alternated with some old stuff: a remix of Switchblade Symphony's "Clown" ("Damn, I didn't recognize it in time to start dancing. If I go up there now I'll look like a poser."), and PWEI's excellent "Ich Bin Ein Auslander", which took the dancefloor population from 1 to about 6, which surprised me — PWEI hasn't been cool since 1988, if even then. Of course, this song was released on Trent Reznor's Nothing Records, so it's okay for goth-industrialists to like it. Or maybe I should give them more credit and assume that, like me, these kids intend to keep listening and/or dancing to that song until the day every culture on earth stops persecuting foreigners. When they come to ethnically cleanse me, will you speak out? Will you defend me?

5000 Fingers was the first opening act. Their "bio-chaotic electronic music" was okay, I wouldn't mind having a CD of it, but it just wasn't interesting to see it made live. The band consisted of two guys hunched over mixers and gear fiddling with knobs and one (standing-kit) drummer in the back adding accents to sequenced percussion tracks. The frontman, T.bias, had a great dreadlocked-priest-of-the-unknown-god-Squonkus look to him, and had a mic going through an effects chain that gave him a great distorted robotic voice, but he didn't sing ten words through it during the set. He kept going back and forth between a rack and a mixer adjusting knobs, and it kept looking like he was going to bust out into vocals any second, but he never did. I insisted to meriko that he needed to sing — sing complete gibberish if need be. I was about to go up and demand the guy give me the mic if he wasn't going to use it. An alien possessed me briefly and I began rapping to meriko, over the music. I'm not sure she was convinced that I would have been beneficial to the performance. One or two of the tracks they played was pretty cool, but visually they just weren't that interesting. I was greatly amused by the inclusion of the sample "Mom, Dad! Don't touch it! It's pure evil!" from Time Bandits, which meriko and I should see sometime.

Their set ended; the DJ put on Skinny Puppy's "Glass Houses". I'm not sure of the exact sequence of events, but before Meg's set meriko and I had had three drinks each. meriko helpfully pointed out to me that I was getting drunk.

Next up was Psyclon Nine. They're a bunch of kids playing kinda old school snarly electronic industrial. Two of the three band members — spikey hair, black clothes, one of them wearing a filter mask — were manning synths as they ran into a couple of audio hitches. Finally they started to get their groove on, the spikey-haired, eye-linered, face-painted frontman stormed onto the stage, snatched the mic off the stand, and started to growl into it. Silence. A nice series of surprised, disgusted, and finally amused expressions crossed his face. From that point on
they pretty much had no way of maintaining a threatening industrial image. As the crew started fussing with the gear, the singer dropped his vinyl pants to show us his white boxers, entertaining us as best he could in the interim. Finally they got things working and started over. Raar raar snarl snarl snarl! Necrophile! Fuck the dead! Raaaaaaar! But they kept grinning — boy-this-is-a-gig-we'll-never-live-down-but-hey-we're-having-fun grins rather than fear-us-we-are-demented-and-will-eat-your-children grins. I give them a C for originality, F for engineering, but an A for good sportsmanship.

They finished up, plugged their upcoming gig with ex-KMFDMers Slick Idiot here in a couple of weeks, and rejoined the audience to pass out flyers. Including one for, wonder of wonders, Meg Lee Chin and Chris Connelly at the DNA Lounge on September 5th. That'll be very weird, as Chris is into this drum-machine-plus-acoustic-guitar ballad thing in a very big way these days, but anything that gets him out of Chicago, I'll be there to see.

When we first saw her, Meg was backed by a drum, guitar, and bass lineup. I think the bassist was the same last night, but the drummer and guitarist were new — the guitarist turned out to be Seibold from Hate Dept., who seems to be who everyone calls to fill in these days. Additionally, a DJ scratching two turntables filled out the sound a bit. Meg joined the band on stage, they did a little sound check noodling (Meg singing "save us" over and over — a prayer for nothing to go wrong in the gig?), then launched into "Heavy Scene". Next was "Sweat", which is one of the tracks off Piece and Love that has really grown on me. I'm not sure of the order of the rest of the set, but they played "London", "Nutopia" (her "Pigface song"), "Swallowing You" (with the bassist hollering bizarrely dissonant notes), and "Bittersweet and Sour". Their penultimate number, "Thing" (the song that got me leaping madly at our wedding), seemed hampered somewhat by the fact that they were already at maximum volume and so had no way to jack it up on the chorus (which is just explosive on the album); they compensated by stretching the song out by about three minutes of repeat chorus. They went offstage as I yelled for "Civilization" over and over, a song I'd been denied at their previous show. The drummer and the DJ and Meg returned in short order and unveiled a dry, minimalist version of that very song. Some of Meg's vocals earlier in the show had been swamped by unsubtle effects (guitar pedals), but this was clean and clear. This was the song I'd come for, and it was a nice surprising departure from the recorded version. Everyone seemed to love it. They finished up, Meg strangely apologized for the reverse sexism of the song, and they left.

I'll let meriko fill in more details. We gots to run and eat sausage.

While i was there for all the wrong reasons, watching fireworks from the roof of my building at work was pretty cool. We were able to see about 8 different shows (the De Anza show being the closest and thus the largest), of varying intensity and size. I think we saw the Great America show, the downtown San Jose show, the Shoreline show, and we think one of the others might be the Santa Clara show. Most of them kindly held their finales during different minutes, so we were able to watch several end-game blowouts.

I've seen lots of fireworks in my time, but never just stood and slowly rotated, watching so many at once. Pretty neat.

We had a lovely time last night going to Neil Gaiman's Coraline launch event. Coraline is his new novella aimed at young adults (though spooky-minded grownups will like it too). A recording of Neil reading the book was released on CD a couple of weeks back, but yesterday was the official launch of the hard copy version. Cody's Books sponsored the launch event, which consisted, mainly, of Neil reading Coraline aloud to us. The whole book. Three and a half hours of it.

If you've never had the chance to hear a good reader and author reading their stuff aloud, you've missed out. This is the third time I've heard Neil reading live — the other ones consisted of short stories and didn't run nearly as long — and I have to say he is a really good reader. He comes through loud and clear, he paces his reading well, he does funny character voices without overdoing them, and he delivers the funny bits in a nice English deadpan.

The story itself, I'll try not to spoil; it's a slightly creepy little fairy tale about a strong and smart little girl named Coraline. It's good fun. It's targeted at kids; it might not be complicated enough to fully engage adult readers.

This is about the longest imaginable book that you'd want an author to read to you in one sitting. There seemed to be a definite "I can't believe I ate the whole thing" feel to the event, from Neil answering a few FAQs in advance in order to avoid a longer Q&A afterward (a staple of his short-story readings) to his hasty exit at the end. The massive applause he got when he first appeared on stage, a bit more and louder than I think he was expecting, seemed almost to be thanking him in advance for attempting such an ambitious performance. The reading was held in a church in Berkeley, and while pews offer a bit of lateral ass-sliding space, they aren't very comfortable for long sits, and we were actually packed into our particular row a little too tightly for ass-sliding. The acoustics weren't great, with a hard echo that made things aurally uncomfortable at first, but I adapted after a little while.

Neil's account is in his journal, naturally.

Henry Selick, who directed The Nightmare Before Christmas, was in the audience, as well as Neil's kids. Selick's going to be directing the film version of Coraline, starring Michelle Pfeiffer as Coraline's mother(s). Normally I'd be worried about something like that, but the fact that the director was there to sit through the author's reading helps a lot — he now has an additional layer of interpretation of the author's intent to keep in mind. He can't screw it up out of ignorance, in short. How many directors of films adapted from books get to hear the author read the whole thing? I found myself visualizing the movie in my head as Neil read. Should work quite nicely. Nothing will need to be cut, really — a book that can be read aloud in three, three and a half hours can be filmed into ninety minutes pretty easily, I think. It's a pretty visual story.

Meriko keeps threatening to sew black button eyes on me so I can stay with her forever and always. It's like she doesn't understand that (a) I'm planning to stay with her anyway, and (b) I like my damn eyes.