magicbeans. nothing if not awkward.

I got up this morning after only hitting snooze once on my alarm. But somehow, even though on some mornings I'll keep hitting the snooze button for well over an hour, I still didn't make it into the office until ten.

During the half hour that I was on the train, Daniel left me five messages telling me that avocado was down. And sitting at my desk, dealing with that, I get a phone call on my work extension letting me know that the disc of files I sent out to print yesterday was corrupt.

I checked my local copies of the files, which were fine, and attached them to an email which when I tried to send I got a cryptic error message consisting of nothing but two hex pairs and an 'OK' button. It's not the first time that I've gotten this error message, and previously, although it appears that the message has not been sent, it's turned up in the intended recipient's inbox anyway.

But five minutes later the printing company hadn't yet received it and told me that they'd send a rush messenger to pick up a new CD. 'I'll burn that right away, and double check it on another machine here just to be safe.'

Avocado, having been restarted by the tech guy in Austin, came back up. As the CD was burning I began restarting services. As I was writing a title on the CD I got a call from the printer telling me that it appears the graphics were printed last night, somehow they had gotten the first CD to work.

Then Sam calls. Or Sam's info comes up on my phone, but when I answer I get a recorded message telling me that if I know my party's extension I can enter it at any time.

Meanwhile my other phone is ringing again, and I still haven't had any coffee.

Things settled down a little in the afternoon. There were still some problems with avocado, incoming mail wasn't working, for instance, but mostly things were all good. Or at least would have been if the snack machine in the Jack Morton kitchen had been in order and I could have eaten a pack of pretzels around 4PM.

---

A few months ago I was reading music reviews online, and stumbled across something like the following, (from Staalplaat, which may not be where I originally read it, but seems like a likely source):

Behind Prurient is one Dominick Fernow, of whom I didn't hear before. He uses here source material provided by one Lindsey Watkins...

'Hmm,' I thought. I did a little bit more digging and found out that Dominick recently moved to Brooklyn from Providence. And a little more digging led me to the fact that he went to RISD, in the class year after me, although I don't believe that I had ever met him, and was in graphic design, so the Lindsey Watkins in question was almost certainly the same one that I know from Rome, but haven't talked to in at least two years.

I also heard, around the same time, that Lindsey had moved to Brooklyn as well.

The other day, when looking for things to do this weekend, I saw that Dominick, as Prurient, was opening for Wolf Eyes tonight at Northsix. Wolf Eyes are the noise rock band of the moment, The Wire cover story and all. I'm not sure I'm all that into what they're doing, but since I hardly ever buy any new music anymore, going to shows is the best way to keep up with what's going on. Plus, I figured there was a good chance that Lindsey would be there.

I also figured that there was a pretty good chance that Lindsey and Dominick were a couple, lest you get any ideas that I had any ideas about rekindling something that we were unwilling to let happen in Rome.

I got dinner after work, and then headed out to Williamsburg. Chris met me at Northsix, agreeing to come out, freshly tattooed ass and all. (Despite his proclivity for dropping his drawers at the drop of a hat, I haven't seen this new tattoo [even as of five days later] and don't know what it is of.) And as I was having a drink in the little bar part of the venue, outside of the main stage area, waiting for him, Lindsey came out looking for a friend who was supposed to meet her there.

'I had a feeling you might be here,' I told her (and later that that was one of my main motivations in coming out), 'I heard that you had moved to New York.'

'And you?' she asked.

'I've been here over a year and a half now.'

'I've lived here since January, and I've only run into maybe four people from RISD that I don't regularly hang out with. You're the fourth.'

We talked some more between acts. She is dating Dominick. She's working at a web design job that she doesn't feel challenges her. She's only planning on spending one more year in New York and then moving to Seattle.

On to the show itself..

Dominick's set was about twenty minutes of non-stop noise. He was shirtless, his back to the audience, with his hands in a case of electronics. Chris said afterward, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, 'So the point is, you've got a ripped back and a nice ass and you want the world to know. I get it.'

Musically, or sonically if you are of the mind that music needs an easily recognizable structure (I'm not of this mind, so musically) I really enjoyed his set. As a performance, which was very physical in a punk rock sort of way, I'm not so sure about. All of the sounds, with the possible exception of the unintelligibly screamed lyrics, which were pretty well buried in the feedback anyway, could probably be produced without the theatrics. Although no one likes going to a show to see someone sitting at a laptop for an entire set. And Lindsey says that his emotional involvement in the act is genuine, that he loses himself completely in the production of noise (all of which has a strong conceptual underpinning, his being a RISD design alumn after all), to the point that he doesn't realize that he's knocking things over, or cutting himself up, or falling off a stage. Which I believe, I've torn up my hands playing guitar or drawing, and not had any idea until later, after I've bled all over everything.

The next band, Sightings, suffer from the shortcoming of maybe 75% of all guitar players, the inability to focus on guitar (be it noise, rhythm, melody, or whatever) and vocals at the same time. This is the reason why the 'standard' rock band format is bass, drums, and two guitarists. Sightings is only a three piece, and when the guitarist, who is really a pretty good noise guitarist, started 'singing', they were really just a rhythm section with vocals. A good rhythm section, the bassist was particularly impressive, but still. The couple of standout songs were the ones in most freakout noise mode, with more of the guitar and less of the vocals.

Wolf Eyes really didn't do much to impress me. Or live up to the hype. (Chris bailed after their first song.) I can understand what their fans might see in them, they have a sense of playfulness and charisma that is a big part of rock music, and their more structured songs have a boiling, testosterone-fueled drive that is probably appealing to post-adolescent misfit boys (or men still in touch with a sense of that history, and I did feel a little bit of that tug). But that same structure is excessively simplistic, in spite of all the noise on top. The unstructured songs, while birthing some really great sounds, were not all that well put together. It felt like eavesdropping on a noise rock jam session, as if maybe in the studio it could be boiled down into something interesting, but which didn't do much for me live.

In all, I liked Dominick's set the best, even if the fact that he's living with a girl who I once almost fell in love with should probably prejudice me against him. Although, given the thirty seconds that I actually had a chance to speak with him, he seemed like a perfectly nice guy.