A while back, I clued you guys in to the sort of thing I read for a living. This week brought another doozy: 86 pages of instructions for installing an evaluation version of one of our products, written by a guy in Germany who, so far as I can tell, never sleeps.
I'll spare you too many stories of how this resulted in sentences like, "In the case that you are having to transfer the files to the driver that you are not having, for sure you need to locate the document onto the other server of the CD that you came in."
Let's pretend neither of us ever had to read that.
But we can definitely talk about how many terms used in this beast of a document sounded like sweet new band names:*
- Static Librarian
- MAD Plugin
- Boot Scenario (albums: Flashing the Bootloader, Boot Project)
- Second Skin
- Radio Button (albums: Skins Button, Needles Button)
- The Prebuilds
- Power Cycle (album: Out/Off)
- Image Project
- Hot Plug and Play
- Pin1
- Core Dump Connection
- Command Shell
- Flash Bank (album: Bad Block Management)
- Speedbar
Tell me you can't imagine at least a few of those plastered on telephone poles in your downtown. Tonight! Static Librarian opens for Second Skin and The Prebuilds.
And believe me when I say that entertaining myself like this is how I got through pages 2 to 86.
* No words were altered or harmed in the creation of this list.
I've been thinking lately about the gradual death of the word "album." And how high-tech might wind up being strangely responsible for its comeback.
When I was a kid, everybody had records—there are a few stragglers left next to my stereo now, and most of the musicians I know still collect vinyl—but it's probably been 15 years since I've called anything round that holds music a "record." Nobody ever really called tapes "tapes" too often ("album" usually won out), except in the early hip-hip and electronica scenes, where underground mix tapes and DJ demo tapes helped spawn new stars. But starting in the late 1990s (a little too late to help tapes much), it seemed like folks began talking about albums in terms of media, rather than content: You went to buy a CD or buy vinyl, not an album. When I worked at Rasputin in 1998, customers would ask for "the new Garth Brooks CD" or, more often around here, "Do you have Lauryn on vinyl?"
Artists talked about recording CDs or discs, and the staff at Rasputin compared the size of their CD collections. One manager had more than 800, with his favorites stored in a rotating, programmable 250-CD changer. Sort of like the iPod of stereos.
Then came digital music. Most of us have actual iPods now, and even though we download music at staggering rates, I've never heard anyone say he just got the latest Kanye download or MP3 file. Instead, he downloaded the latest Kanye album. My guess is that "MP3" and "download" (as a noun) both sound too much like an impersonal technology, and not enough like a song, for us to embrace it as musical language.So, we're back to our good old universal signifier. "Album" is the only word we have that can refer to any form of media we manage to dream up: 8-tracks, records, tapes, CDs, mini-discs, MP3s, MP4s. Every collection of music in any one of those formats is an album.
Vinyl and tapes may already be collector's items, and CDs well on the way there—and good luck doing anything with those dusty 8-tracks in your parents' basement—but albums, thankfully, will always be albums.
Caveat emptor: I'm not a professional gastronomist or even a seasoned amateur like this lady or this gent. And yes, I'm still a vegetarian. Even so, I feel this burning need to review the amazing meal I got lucky enough to eat recently at 1550 Hyde, a classy neighborhood spot in San Francisco that's now at the top of my semi-splurge list.
Every great dinner starts with great company, of course, so hats off to the ever entertaining A. Nomad and Miss C. Mobtown, who gets extra credit for wearing her new spring shoes in the pouring rain. If you believe hard enough, girl, it'll come sooner.
On to the food. After deciding to pass on their tempting prix fixe menu (including a seasonal maple tart) and California wine flight, I started with the arugula salad with Meyer lemon vinaigrette, pine nuts, and shaved pecorino—just the fresh taste I needed after braving the apocalyptic weather. A little salty, but I'm pretty sure that's more the fault of my palate than the dish. The other ladies started with the green garlic soup and praised it to the skies.
There was only one vegetarian entrée (and a pasta that could probably have been tailored), but I can't really argue with green garlic polenta with snap peas, asparagus, and parmesan. It was light, simple, flavorful, delicious. Wouldn't change a thing. A. had the hangar steak with cranberry compote (after rejecting the heritage red wattle pork shoulder because "certain words just don't make you want to eat something"), and C. had a gently prepared kind of fish whose name escapes me right now. RIP, anonymous fishie. It was a beautiful way to go.
C. suggested we might be too full for dessert—until we saw the cheese menu. They had an Abbaye de Belloc that would have been criminal to skip. Then our cheerful waiter made a lucky error on the ordering machine, and we wound up with a sampler plate of all three cheeses: Humboldt Fog, the Abbaye, and potatoes in...um...a melty thing. Raclette? [Dilettante food writer slaps own wrist.] Whatever it was, we ate it all up until there was none left.
And we drank wine. Left the choice to C. and her Italian roots this time—since she also picked the restaurant for us, clever boots—but I can vouch that the California and French lists looked equally good. Three cheers for the 2002 Rosso di Montalcino "La Palazzetta." A. had the California flight, but I couldn't read over her shoulder from across the table, so she'll have to enlighten you on that another time.
A picture of this feast should go next to the word "feast" in the dictionary, and it didn't even come close to bankrupting us. In the BCB's book, it gets a bucket of stars.
You don't have to tell me. I know.
There you were, with bated breath, just waiting and waiting to see what I was going to name my car. And I dropped the ball. I did not deliver.
Forgive me. Ahem.
Introducing . . . the new terror of the open road, the green golfer, the one and only green dragon, the green jellybean, the lean mean speedy green vaseline where-have-you-been machine:
Gibson.
No, not the actor.
Like, the guitars. What do you take me for?
Hee hee. Mine.
This year, Passover was early and smaller. Instead of the big Sebastopol gathering of three families and a host of friends that we all honored for almost a decade, the second generation kept it going this spring in a quiet way: The comfortable living room of two old friends from past seders and years of interconnection.
Instead of sitting down with 25 or 30 people at a sprawling, gracefully laid table on the deck of a house overlooking the valley, the eight of us curled up on pillows and papasan chairs at a low coffee table with tea lights and IKEA wine glasses, creating a new version of an easy, familiar ritual. Miriam got a pottery mug of water. We put Elijah's cup over on the bookshelf so nobody would drink it by accident.
We kept the potluck tradition alive, salmon and asparagus, a moment in the sunshine on the deck to wash and dry each other's hands. The haggadah was a little shorter, the wine went a little more quickly. We pooled our memories to come up with all the tunes, the readings, and the usual tangled, interesting discussions that religion inspires in mostly secular, political, skeptical twenty and thirtysomethings with a deep respect for their past. The warmth was the same as always.
But we did eat brownies at the end. Shhhh. Don't tell the rebbe. They were so good.
eliyahu in stereo
My nomadic friend Amy and I braved some evil weather to drive to Yosemite this past weekend—mainly because she's about to move back east and had never been there, but also because it's an awesome place to see any time of year.
I only have my black-and-white roll back so far (color to come eventually), but I thought you might like to see some photos from the trip.
After an extra-long ride in the pouring rain, we spent Friday night at a comfy hostel about 30 miles from the park:
This graceful tree was somewhere near the parking lot:
Then we woke up Saturday morning to a miraculously sunny day. It was chilly, but it didn't rain at all. Our first stop was the unavoidable and amazing Half Dome:
In case you don't believe we were really there . . . see?
This little guy was perched on the bridge railing by the dome viewpoint. I managed to get his portrait before he melted into the River of Mercy (real name) below:
Around the corner from Half Dome, you can stop and gawk at Yosemite Falls, raging like nobody's business this time of year:
At the falls viewpoint, we saw a sign that made me appreciate the sunshine even more:
But the clouds were hanging low all morning, so everything looked misty in a cinematic way:
We thought we missed El Capitan, but now I think this might be it. Or it's another enormous, awe-inspiring hunk of stone. Embarrassing that I have no idea. Anyone?
During our afternoon hike along Mist Trail and John Muir Trail, we kept seeing these funky smoke trails shoot up like arrows. Not sure what they were all about—flight testing in the park?—but they disappeared quickly, so it took a few tries to get this shot:
Along the trail, we saw some bizarre and beautiful shapes randomly cut into rocks. Probably by nature, but Amy theorized the pipe-like ones might have been for dynamite:
I loved the sprawling, finger-like roots of this big ol' tree:
And we passed this view near the end of the hike, when the light began to fade and the snow got too slippery and steep for us to keep going:
Then we took our soaked, tired feet back to the hostel for a well-earned rest by the fire.
