München or bust

As alluded yesterday, I’m about to board a plane for a week of business travel in Munich. Or, more precisely, I’m currently seated on the floor of Terminal E at Logan Airport, near gate 8A where apparently national security considerations have precluded providing sufficient seating for transatlantic traffic. Not that it matters. I will be sitting down for an awfully long time.

I should be fairly gleeful; I’m fairly resigned. Partly because of exhaustion—I drove Lisa and our dogs to the Jersey shore last night so that she could attend a family wedding today, and our dogs could have some supervision next week. Meaning that I drove the five hours back from New Jersey today, then caught my breath and started packing.

Partly, I think, because I’m just plain exhausted. When talking to my sister on Wednesday, she observed that I didn’t sound like myself. I’m tired. And this time I don’t have a job search, a coast-to-coast move, or anything else to blame. I’ve been on edge and anxious for months for no good reason.

The one thing I know is that I will be among colleagues when I get to Munich. Our company’s German office has sent more than a few people that I work with on business travel to the States in the past six months. So even if I don’t understand a word that anyone else says in the next week, I’ll at least understand my coworkers.

Right now, though, I’m hoping I can just get some sleep tonight. I need to meet my colleague, the company’s other product manager, tomorrow night in Munich for a beer, and it won’t look good if I’m passing out in the middle of a biergarten a full week before Oktoberfest begins.

I could write more—about the miserable failure of the iGo system, about pedal to the metal from 9 in the morning to 1:45 in the afternoon, meaning that I was coming close to some speeds I’ve previously only driven in Death Valley—but I’m probably saying enough considering that I probably won’t update this blog for another eight days. Feel free to use this as an open thread, all you regular readers (yes, you four). But if you’re a comment spammer, I hope you drown in your own pork by-products while I’m gone.

Nada Surf: The Weight is a Gift

nada surf the weight is a gift

Two years ago, a Nada Surf review would have begun by mentioning their 1996 novelty hit “Popular,” and their subsequent fall from grace (and the majors). Today, any review of a Nada Surf album has a different reference point: their brilliant 2002 release Let Go, held by Blogcritics and other reviewers to be one of the top 5 albums of 2003 after it was re-released on Barsuk. This shift in perception is both a blessing and a curse for the band. On the one hand, they spent years trying to escape the shadow of “Popular.” On the other hand, following up an album as richly melancholic, quietly epic, and idiosyncratic as Let Go is a tall order. With The Weight is a Gift, Matthew Caws, Daniel Lorca, and Ira Elliot have produced a worthy album that, while not on the same plane as the desperately yearning Let Go, has its own rewards.

If there is less desperation on this release, it is for a good reason: the band is tighter and more self-assured in its playing and songwriting than before. (They would have to be, to put in an 11 song set in under 40 minutes.) The band’s songwriting focus is more outward looking at the same time: where much of Let Go felt like internal monologues from one side of failing relationships, The Weight is a Gift paints a series of portraits of people in different stages of disassembly, from the burned out loveless loser of “Concrete Bed” to the control freak of “What Is Your Secret.” The elliptical, closely observed writing can sometimes mislead, as with the apparently happy “Oh f*ck it/I’m going to have a party” that starts “The Blankest Year,” before it becomes a a darker set of observations set jarringly against bouncy pop rhythms: “i”d like to return this spell/it’s not my size/and your lies are so much bigger/than my lies.” Other interviews with band members have suggested that the songs are inspired by Matthew Caws’ unspecified difficult experiences over the past year, but the lyrics escape the narrow focus of the personal to suggest universal pains and fears.

The standout cut for me at this stage is probably “Your Legs Grow,” which seemed forlornly out of place on last year’s polemic Future Soundtrack for America but which gains immeasurably by its surroundings on this album. Freed of trying to read political meanings into the lyrics, it reads as a lifeline thrown out to a troubled friend.

On most of the songs, the lyrics stand in contrast to the music: incredibly compact pop songs that veer from rocking to quiet ballads while burrowing a groove into your ears. This is some seriously catchy songwriting, with smart performances aided and abetted by the skilled production of Death Cab for Cutie’s Chris Walla at his Hall of Justice studio in Seattle (as well as some time in über-multitracker John Vanderslice’s Tiny Telephone studios in San Francisco). There’s a depth to these recordings that repays deeper listening, both on the purely sonic level and lyrically.

If there is a flaw to the record, it is its insistence on keeping its true feelings difficult to find. Unlike Let Go, The Weight is a Gift doesn’t wear its heart on its sleeve, and where it gets guarded, it gets difficult to approach. But at the core it is a worthy successor, musically and emotionally, to an excellent album, and I don’t think I could personally ask for more.

The album hits stores on Tuesday the 13th. In the meantime, you can visit the band’s website to listen to three tracks and download “Do It Again,” the first single.

This review was also published at BlogCritics.

Note to Bloglines users

I have griped in the past about the dangers of lock-in, but never figured I would be directly impacted myself. A few weeks ago, my RSS feed started having problems in Bloglines. I’m not sure what caused the problems, but I suspect the Added Values plug-in, which redirected permalinks and may have redirected my RSS feed, is to blame.

At any rate, my feed stopped updating in Bloglines. Now here’s where it gets fun. I contacted Bloglines about the problem, and they said they fixed something with the feed and that it should now work. Unfortunately, it didn’t. So Craig pinged them. This time, Bloglines deleted the non-responsive version of the feed, and said that re-subscribing should fix the problem. Now the number of people subscribing to my feed in Bloglines—or at least the “working version” of my feed—has gone from 41 to 4. At the same time, my average daily traffic has dropped substantially. I think there are a bunch of people who only saw my content through Bloglines and who aren’t coming to the site to check in.

If this were an RSS issue, I might be able to do something to correct it at my end. But since it’s a Bloglines issue, I have no way to notify any of the subscribers of the problem—except to post it here and hope that someone comes across it. Please re-add me to your subscriptions if you want to continue to get information from this site!

The Publick House: great beer in Brookline

After months of cajoling, I finally convinced Lisa to try the Publick House, which I got excited about a year ago after reading the recommendation in the Globe. The reality: the beer is every bit as good as they say; the food is good, but not quite up to my elevated expectations; and the crowd is much much younger than I would have guessed.

Lisa and I arrived on Sunday night and hit the first hard reality: the place was packed and there was no host to give us an idea about wait times. Fortunately as I hovered I spotted a couple leaving the back room and we pounced on the table. Beers, in the meantime, were quite good: we started with an Ommegang Hennepin and a Whale’s Tail Pale Ale, both on draft, both excellent.

Perhaps it was just a “back to class” night, but we were just about the oldest people in the room, which isn’t a normal experience for me at beer-related venues. We shrugged and ordered, sticking on the “pub grub” side of things. Lisa’s andouille sandwich was excellent as were the fries; my upscale mac and cheese, topped with some undistinguished sausage or other, was good but not the “great 8” wonder that I was expecting from the menu. I wonder what the food experience would have been if we had tried some of the other menu items — sadly, the mussels promise in the Boston.com article were not on the menu.

Good fun. I think I’ll have to find someone else to go back with me next time, though. Niall, you interested?

Is 5

A new version number for an old friend, amidst news of nano iPods and iTunes capable phones: iTunes 5.0 is out. UI changes, major: you can now have playlists in folders (what a relief). UI changes, minor: the volume slider no longer sits under the forward/back/play/pause buttons. (For the latter: why? Perhaps people were hitting the big buttons by mistake when adjusting the volume, or vice versa.) UI changes, gratuitous: on Windows, the window now blends seamlessly into the title bar, which is good, but actually looks a lot less cool. Probably it will just take some getting used to.

Scary installer moment: this ad, which I first saw at an Apple store. I don’t really think the young woman looks happy to be sharing her tunes with her friend:

ipod ad. with woman who looks alarmingly like jessica alba.

More scary installer moment: the installer crapped out during the QuickTime install when it told me I needed to close Firefox—somehow it got trapped in an endless loop. I had to force quit the installer and reboot, and rerun the installation, at which point everything was fine.

Other impressions: parental controls ok, shuffle calibrator should put conspiracy theories of “is it really random” to rest, or at least confuse them, search bar looks useful, lyrics in tags looks good. Look forward to playing with the search bar on my home library.

Lush Life, John Coltrane and me

john coltrane lush life

The CD Project proceeds apace; yesterday I finished ripping all my John Coltrane CDs to Apple Lossless format. As I looked at each disc in turn, annotating the files with session notes and musician info, I found myself drawn into memories of my self-education in jazz.

Growing up I listened to nothing but classical music until I was maybe 12 years old, when I discovered the Police—angry yet mannered, literate rock. At the time I wasn’t totally comfortable with the angry part, but I latched onto the mannered part. Listening to Sting felt rebellious but safe. A big part of that, particularly in the subsequent solo records, was the jazz influence. I decided I needed to learn more about jazz, and so I started at the logical jumping off point of Branford Marsalis, who at that time was playing with Sting.

Exploring jazz through Branford—a young player who was trying to establish his own identity but who provided few direct links back to the old tradition, simply because he generally only played his own compositions or a few standards—was difficult. But I liked what I was hearing, the interplay of the horns with the drums, and decided I needed to go deeper. By this time it was 1988 or 1989 and Bono was name-checking John Coltrane and A Love Supreme on U2’s grandiosely overblown Rattle and Hum—which naturally I also loved. (I was 16. Whaddaya want?) So I went out and got a copy of the pivotal Trane album.

I wish I could say that I was immediately blown away, but the truth is it took some time. There were things about the record that I thought were cool—the chants and the blazing solos on “Resolution,” made my hair stand on end. But I didn’t really get the modal melodies and couldn’t appreciate the extended drum solos at the heart of the piece. But I kept listening.

In another year or so, I was a first year at UVA, and shoring up my insecurity and loneliness with CD shopping at Plan 9. I desperately wanted to be cool and to be listening to things that no one around me was, and so I spent a lot of time spelunking throught the jazz racks, anchored to the few artists I knew anything about, which at that point consisted of Trane and Branford (and, somehow, Thelonious Monk—but that’s another story). I had no education, didn’t have the sense to start listening to jazz radio, so I used the copy on the back of the CDs to decide which ones to take home. This brought me to the Prestige and Fantasy releases (the so called “Original Jazz Classics”), which inevitably contained review capsules on the back cover of the CD with raves or claims of “instant classic.”

And that was how I came to pick up Lush Life: it was the Coltrane Prestige recording that had the highest ratings and the most stars on the back.

I took the disc back to the dorm and started listening. My then-roommate Greg was in the room and we soon were both listening: to the tremendous blown run that begins the album and “Like Someone in Love,” to the percussive experimentation of “I Love You” and the walking bass of “Trane’s Slo Blues.” And then the title cut, introduced by Red Garland’s piano followed by perfect choruses by both Trane and Donald Byrd. Partway through Byrd’s second chorus, Greg turned to me and asked, “How do you find this stuff?”

I wish I could have told him the truth, but I think I just mumbled something about being lucky.

I went on over the next few years to discover the rest of Trane’s work and to branch out into Miles, avant garde jazz, and the great blowing sessions of the 50s. I’ll be digitizing all of it in the weeks to come, but I think that none of the tracks will be as often as the five tracks from this set. I can’t even guess how many other versions of “Lush Life” I’ve found over the years (at least not without sitting in front of my home computer, though I can think of versions by Roland Hanna, Bobby Timmons, Joe Henderson, Duke Ellington (of course), and Johnny Hartman in a subsequent date with Coltrane), but this one remains the gold standard.

Son of the beach

parallel lines: interdunal grasses filter the view of the beach from the boardwalk

Lisa and I paused from house stuff long enough on Sunday to head out to Crane Beach, and I’m really glad we did. Lisa had already visited a few times and liked it enough to become a member of the association that maintains the property. But I hadn’t been able to visit until this weekend. Compared to some of our other beach visits, this beach was an Intercontinental property: prime location, impeccable facility, and really expensive ($22 to enter without a membership).

The sand was smooth and fine, almost like talc. We set up our sun tent and basked for a little while in the 80° weather, then headed for the ocean. Which was about 58° F. I couldn’t bear to immerse my whole body, just stood knee deep with my teeth chattering, while Lisa pointed out the other amazing thing about this particular beach: the water was so clear that we could watch streams of minnows zipping past our knees in a continuous flow. It was absolutely amazing.

I didn’t get my camera out while the sun was really bright, but managed to get a few decent shots in spite of increasing cloud cover. My greatest disappointment was that I wasn’t able to capture the luminosity of the water against the cloudy sky in a photograph, though the first one in the set gives a hint of what I saw.

Warm water, with gas, despite everything.

viessmann

A few projects drew nearly to an end this past week. Most notably, the installation and activation of the new gas-fired high efficiency boiler finally brought to a close our year long experiences with oil-burning heat and hot water.

As frequent readers of this blog will recall, our experiences with oil-fired steam heat have not been rosy. After a while of this, plus the expenses of oil (even on a monthly budget), we started thinking hard about other options. When we talked to the contractor who put in our Unico system, he suggested we consider a high efficiency gas boiler in its place. We considered, we thought, and we bought. And the installation, occurring this week when gas (and oil) prices jumped almost beyond recognition, seems to have come in a timely fashion. We’ll see how the bills work out, but right now it seems like a good move.

One funny note from the installation. We had the boiler on line by 3 pm on Friday. Lisa and her family came back from the beach at 4:30, and took a few showers. We ate, and later Lisa’s father reported that the water from the kitchen sink seemed cool. In fact, it was cold. My initial investigations suggested that all was well, just not working. The contractor said he would send someone out in the morning.

The next morning, Lisa took a shower and reported delightedly that there was hot water. Shortly thereafter, the contractor knocked and asked, before, I could even say anything, “You have hot water now, don’t you?” It turns out that, as he explained to me, there were two settings that were failing us. One, a power-saving setting, was set at the factory to turn off domestic hot water production between 10 PM and 6 AM. The other? The clock, which was still apparently set on German time. By my calculations, hot water had stopped at about 4 pm, and the 50 gallon tank had run out by about 9 pm—five hours later. Not too bad, all things considered, and even better now that the clock is set to the proper time.

Trackbacks are Dead.

house of warwick: Trackbacks are Dead.. Having started a regime of checking my Trackbacks every two weeks (particularly necessary since Manila provides no notification when trackbacks are received), I would have to agree with the sentiment here.

I would also hope that, when Steve asks Jake at Userland to look at Radio’s code to provide some spamproofing in Radio’s Trackback code, that the code will migrate to Manila as well. We sorely need it.

Update on The CD Project: 108 down, about 850 to go

The Great CD Ripping Project continues, after a brief hiatus while I was out of town on business. New totals: 108 albums, 1317 songs, 4:04:52:01 total time, 28.02 GB.

I’ve had to add a few new smart playlists to keep up with The Project. I still want to listen to all the music as it comes in, but the large lossless files won’t all fit on my iPod. So I’ve had to build a small Never Played playlist, limited to 100 or so tracks, to manage. I also built a smart playlist where “kind” contains Apple Lossless so that I could easily identify all the tracks that have been ripped as part of the project, and I could easily track my progress.

I’ve also had more than one occasion to bitch about the CDDB, and more particularly, about people who mangle the data for classical CDs. One version of the rant is contained in this comment on a MacOSXHint. The hint claims to provide a good way to manage classical tracks, but instead actively encourages inaccurate data.

The worst, though, is people who use the Artist field to put the movement name and put the name of the work in the Title name. This is all over the CDDB. It’s driving me up the wall, because it’s taking me at least three times as long to rip a classical CD. I’m afraid if I import the tracks with bad data, I’ll never be able to find them to reconcile them again.