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July 31, 2006
Quick and dirty Pitchfork Festival
Two days of peace, love, music, sweat and B.O. aren't exactly the best way to psych yourself up for the last week of summer employment. Still, I had an absolute blast, despite the oppressive weather. Some snap impressions:
Art Brut. Makes me. Want to rock out. Sure, they're a one-trick pony, but they're damn good at what they do. Sadly, Eddie lost the 'stache, but I think the band will go on, especially with some awesome new material. "Blame it on the Trains," indeed!
The Walkmen are better in small spaces. They're also better when "Blizzard of '96" doesn't sound like such a tease to the thousands of sweaty people in line for ice cream during the set.
Ted Leo was probably good, but my Chicago friends don't like him and I didn't want to be separated, so we hung back on the sidelines.
The Futureheads are much better suited to large crowds. They were really good. I was fairly tipsy.
Tapes n' Tapes started Sunday off with a fairly good set in front of a fairly small audience. Still, I was sweating bullets a half hour into it.
Bonde do Role brought some biale funk energy to the second stage, energy that was cut short when the lead singer took out her arm during a nasty fall following a failed crowd-surf-to-stage transfer. CSS finished the BdR set.
CSS was freakin' awesome. Talented? Ehh. But energetic and exciting, absolutely! Best Brazillian web-design related band ever.
Spoon came off as really, really flat. Also, how do you play a festival in Chicago, at night, without playing "Chicago at Night"? How do you avoid playing anything from Girls Can Tell? WTF?
Os Mutantes was a big of a mixed bag, but I'm really glad I got to see them. Call me short-sighted, but I think that bands have a shelf life, even if they do spend three decades in cold storage.
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July 27, 2006
Bitchfork
We may need those water bottles for water instead of filling them with vodka like we did at Intonation.
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July 26, 2006
Worst investment ever
David Jamieson writes for Slate this morning about a shocking realization that I had just last month: that the baseball cards we used to collect as kids are now worthless:
Baseball cards peaked in popularity in the early 1990s. They've taken a long slide into irrelevance ever since, last year logging less than a quarter of the sales they did in 1991. Baseball card shops, once roughly 10,000 strong in the United States, have dwindled to about 1,700. A lot of dealers who didn't get out of the game took a beating. "They all put product in their basement and thought it was gonna turn into gold," Alan Rosen, the dealer with the self-bestowed moniker "Mr. Mint," told me. Rosen says one dealer he knows recently struggled to unload a cache of 7,000 Mike Mussina rookie cards. He asked for 25 cents apiece.
Kids these days!
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July 25, 2006
Oh-No C.I.
Oh, what a wonderful week. Aside from the escalating debacle surrounding the blinds I'm trying to install in my bedroom, I have to select classes for next semester using a brand new baffling point-bid system (think Ebay meets "The Price is Right") and I have to select employers for On Campus Interviewing (think high-stakes speed dating). All this will be explained soon.
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July 21, 2006
Straight outta Lakeview
After 12 hours of backbreaking labor, the move is almost complete. In the space of one day, we moved three apartments into the new pad, unpacked a good amount of it and didn't break anything of consequence. Horray us!
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July 19, 2006
Have you ever been called a knob?
I must admit to a certain ambivalence about the ignominious defeat of bible-thumping and money laundering pro-gambling consultant Ralph Reed. On the one hand there's little doubt this a victory for fair-dealing, truth, justice, America, not being a complete knob and various other good things. But I also have to face the fact that it also means the loss of a substantial amount of quality muckraking copy...
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July 18, 2006
The partisan mirror
It's finally here - BIZARRO BLUESTATE!
| Bluestate | G.O.Palooza | |
| Venue: | Occasionally abrasive but accessable Black Cat | Occassionally abrasive an usually exclusive Smith Point |
| Drink(s) of Choice: | Greyhound/PBR | Blood of the Poor/ Johny Walker Black |
| Access: | Come as you are | Strict guest list |
| VIPs: | Matt from Fluxblog, Dance Commander Jeff | "Special V.I.P. Guests from the Republican World" - probably G. Gordon Liddy |
| You're likely to hear: | "Daft Punk is Playing At My House" | "Let the Eagle Soar" |
| Sense of entitlement: | "Give me a faceshake, now!" | "I don't want to pay taxes on daddy's money when he dies!" |
| Sexuality: | Pan- | Anti- |
| Afterparty: | Streetcorner sing-along | Protestat the New York Times |
(h/t: Zunta)
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This week in stupid
Somewhere between City Hall and work, I lost the residential parking pass I spent 20 minutes in line to get.
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July 17, 2006
Hot enough for ya?
Frankly, I don't really mind the mid-90s temperatures we've been having as much as some people because the humidity is far lower than on the East Coast and I don't have to take the subway. Sure, I come back home drenched in sweat from head to toe, and sure, I drive with the window down and the AC up just to teach that uppity Al Gore a lesson, but I've seen worse. Like right after finals during freshman year of college, when my computer's innards melted in my no-AC third-floor dorm room.
Not to mention that this week's heat is nothing compared to the Great Chicago Heat Wave of 1995, when temperatures reached 106 degrees, killing hundereds:
Because of the nature of the disaster, and the slow response of authorities to recognize it, no official "death toll" has been determined. However, figures show that 739 additional people died in that particular week above the usual weekly average. Further epidemiologic analysis presented by Eric Klinenberg (author of Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago) showed that blacks were more likely to die than whites, and that Hispanics had an unusually low death rate due to heat. At the time, many blacks lived in areas of sub-standard housing and less cohesive neighborhoods, while Hispanics at the time lived in places with higher population density, and more social cohesion.
So if you're wondering why all the signs on the highway tell you to check up on elderly friends, family and neighbors, it's a result of the disasterous response to the heat wave more than a decade ago.
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July 16, 2006
North Avenue Beach, Saturday, 3 p.m.
At the exact same time, editors in every newsroom in the city had the exact same idea for a puff piece.
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July 14, 2006
So you're about to become a....
*
... now what?
At least one person has asked me for advice, so I thought I'd foist it on you, the incoming 1L who doesn't no better than to read what I, a rising 2L of unknown (to you) academic merit, has to say about succeeding during your first year in law school. Taking Kristine's lead, I'm going to offer you some advice on how to survive your first year.
1. If you have this book, throw it out. And this one. And this one. And this one, even though it was co-written by my Property prof. I wasted a perfectly good afternoon at the beach reading Law School Confidential, and all it did was make me think I couldn't do the work. There is no need to schedule your days as 18-hour marathons of class-prep, reading in advance, eating high-protien meals in 10 minutes and outlining in September. Law school is hard - it might be the hardest thing you've ever done - but it isn't some sort of superhuman accomplishment. There are more than a million lawyers in America. Nearly all of them went to law school, and a good percentage of them are complete morons (to wit). Just stay focused, keep perspective, don't get too far behind and don't let your own paranoia eat you alive.
2. When you need to be studying, you shouldn't also need to run out and buy toilet paper. In the weeks leading up to orientation, you'll want to get a head start on something, even if you don't have any books and don't know what a tort is (hint: it is a small pastry, and also some legal thing of some sort.) You can save yourself a lot of hassle by going out to Costco or Sam's Club before things get hectic to stock up on printer paper, soap, frozen dinners, spare light bulbs and all the other stuff you don't want to be making errands to buy when you should be in the library. This may seem silly, but I certainly spent weeks at a time not venturing more than three blocks from the route between my apartment and my law school. It's something you can do now, and it gives you piece of mind.
3. Do the reading on schedule, but don't outline until late in the course. It's nearly impossible to catch up if you are more than a day or two behind in a class. This isn't undergrad, and you can't slack off until the week before the final, but you know that already. Still, don't waste your time, as I did, study-grouping in October. You won't get anything accomplished because you have no idea what a study group actually does. Just call it a happy hour and be honest with yourself.
4. When a helpful 1L offers you their old outline, take it, but make your own anyway. You'll find that the process of making an outline brings out the parts of the course you aren't solid on and forces you to understand them enough to make them fit within the framework of your outline. This is where the learning happens. Someone's old outline may help you understand the material, but only in the context of writing it your way.
5. There is no such thing as an ideal outline format. Some people use full sentences, some people use trigger words, some people use pictures. The outline is for you and it isn't graded, so do it to your specifications, not those of your 2L buddy, your study group or your mom.
6. Get out. You need to meet your fellow 1Ls outside of lectures, so you see them as people and don't get quite so furious at them for contradicting your brilliant argument in class. You will probably either work with or against your classmates for the rest of your career, so a little bonding is always in order. Also, don't treat bar review like a networking cocktail party - buy your friends a round of shots and purge your brain of the one word that haunts a law student's days and nights: reasonable.
7. Tread the gunner line lightly. Many of the country's best, brightest and most motivated students go to law school, and when they get there, they often turn from self-starters and overachievers into the slackers in the back of the classroom who want to get out early to smoke behind the gym when in comes to classroom participation. Sure, it's OK to raise your hand once in a while, but if you do it more than once a week, you're a gunner. This term should be reserved for the kind of person who stands up in class to give lectures on the finer points of his or her political philosphy, but most 1Ls expect their professors to have a one-sentence answer to the entire field covered in the class, which they are waiting to grace us with as soon as Mr. Loudmouth finishes asking for a clarification on UCC 2-207. If you want to play word games with your professor, wait until after class, but if you have a legitimate question or statement, don't be afraid to raise your hand. Just don't do it too much, or you'll be branded a gunner (perish the thought).
8. Chill out. Yes, it's hard to know where you stand when your only graded exercise is at the end of the semester, but everyone is facing the same uncertainty. Worrying about it won't make it better.
* A Juan-El. Get it? No? Oh well.
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July 13, 2006
News you can't use (because it's from the 1970s)
God bless YouTube. Seriously. If you didn't see it with your own eyes, would you ever believe that there would be a website where you could find just about every music video ever made, plus thousands of video clips of everything from movies to... TV news opening graphics?
Yet here they are. This one, from WNEW Channel 5 in New York in 1979, has perhaps the best TV news music ever. It pulses with energy, reinforcing the notion that yes, something happened in the hustling, bustling city today:
I would go so far as to say that the music and graphics are rockin'.
A little less stylish, but perhaps more evocative of the times, this WBAL opener from 1976 looks like the inspiration of Anchorman, sans the mugging for the cameras.
Classic. Total waste of my time, but classic.
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July 12, 2006
Be thankful
My roomates and I selected bedrooms in the new apartment by using a random number generator. I got the mid-sized room, which is only smaller than the biggest room by a hallway and a little bathroom space - I can live with that. I sort of freaked out about not getting the little room, probably for no good reason.
So, why all the S/FJ style urban decay and textures? My job is getting busy all of a sudden, right when I'd rather be researching on-campus interview firms and sneaking out to round up boxes for my books from local liquor stores. Combine that with my recent discovery of Cinemocracy, and you have one busy dude.
Alas, I have eight days to box up my life. That should be enough, right?
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July 11, 2006
The reality sets in
I am moving in nine days. I need a van. I need boxes. I need tape. I need bubble wrap. I need to not have quite so many sweaters. I need to ask myself why on earth I bought a glass-topped desk.
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July 10, 2006
July 06 Bluestate sets
Until the Mothership posts, here's what I played this weekend:
Set 1
Beck, "Ghettochip Malfunction (8Bit Mix)"
Maximo Park, "A Year of Doubt"
Os Mutantes, "A Minha Minina"
Chromeo, "Needy Girl"
Franz Ferdinand, "What You Waiting For (Gwen Stefani Cover)"
Wire, "Options R"
"Billy Idol, "Dancing With Myself"
Hard-Fi v. The Clash, "Clash Machine (Team9 Mashup)"
The Jam, "Art School"
David Bowie, "Modern Love"
Set 2
James Murphy and Nancy Whang, "Kick Out The Chairs"
Prince, "Let's Go Crazy"
Bloc Party, "Helicopter (Whitey Remix)"
The Rapture, "Out of the Races and On to the Tracks"
Goldfrapp, "Slide In (DFA Remix)"
Death From Above 1979, "Little Girl (MSTRKRFT Remix)"
Panthers, "Thank Me With Your Hands"
Talking Heads, "Take Me To The River (ATOM's Depth Charge Distortion Mix)"
Judas Priest, "Living After Midnight"
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Let's Go Crazy, Let's Get Nuts
First of all, a huge thank you to everyone who came out on Saturday, and an even huger thank you to those of you who danced, which, from my vantage point, was most of you at some point.
Saturday's Bluestate was a very interesting experience, for several reasons.
First of all, I had a law school posse in DC to see me spin, which made me nervous for no good reason. For some reason, I thought I might dissapoint them somehow and then get a reputation back in Chicago as a mediocre amateur DJ. They seemed to enjoy themselves, but missed my second set, which was far more energetic and danceable than the first due to a little sister who was unfamiliar with the Black Cat's strong mixed drinks.
Second, I got to meet Matt from Fluxblog. He had an interesting set with a lot of material not usually used in Bluestate that fit in well anyway. More Baile funk next time? Sure, why not.
Third, this must be the irony N.M. has been seeking all this time. My sets almost didn't happen, since one of our CD players didn't accept CD-Rs, and my LPs didn't cover all the gaps. When I put in my first CD-R into the player that was supposed to work, it didn't. After about 10 seconds of freakout, I threw on a record to buy some time - I was that close to dead air. Eventually, I figured out that the other player worked, so I did some mid-mix plug-switching (note: don't do that, it's very bad), using my iPod to fill in for the malfunctioning CD. Of course, I was very close to not being able to use my iPod, since a pre-gig soundcheck revealed that audio from my iPod only came out of one speaker. The Black Cat audio tech figured out what was wrong and solved it with this little doohicky:
You may remember it as that thing nobody could identify from our flyer. How is that for synergy/irony/fate?
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July 7, 2006
Guilty of Being Awesome
Everybody had better be at the Black Cat on Saturday...
(if you don't get it, here's the original.)
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Gross-out story of the week
Click below for the rest. If you're not interested, I'm not going to subject you. (Safe for Work)
The scene: I'm getting out of a cab with two female law school friends after a long-ish trip across town. We each chip in, but before one of the girls can give the driver the money, he says, "hold on a sec" and bolts out of the cab, opens the trunk about six inches and stands there. In my obliviousness, I thought he was under the impression that we had luggage in the cab. When she goes around to give him the money, she shreiks. The cabbie says, "I told you to wait!"
Now, she runs around to the other side of the cab, thrusting the crumpled bills in my face, telling me "pay the man! just pay him!"
I stick my hand out, and he sticks his hand out - it's dripping wet. Then, it makes sense. The man is urinating in a jug in the trunk of his cab, lacks the aim most boys learn by age 4 and in the process exposed himself to my cab companion. I toss the bills on the hood of the trunk and try to catch up with the women as they run across the street.
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God Bless Fritz (and Fluxblog)
WaPo still loves us:
In the last week, Matthew Perpetua has posted MP3s by Gang Starr, Unrest, the Fiery Furnaces, and German art-rockers Can on Fluxblog, his incredibly popular MP3 blog. He's also written about the female Brazilian electro band Cansei Ser Sexy and Swedish indie rockers Envelope for his Hit Refresh column on the Associated Press's ASAP site. That's why we're curious to see what, exactly, Perpetua will play as the special guest DJ at Bluestate tonight. Perpetua has been at the forefront of the MP3 blog scene since launching Fluxblog in 2002, posting a cross section of everything but focusing on up-and-coming indie bands. Bluestate started as a collaboration of four local bloggers who, not surprisingly, frequently write about music and post audio samples, so this is a natural fit. Bluestate is free and it gets underway at 10 on the Black Cat's backstage.-- Fritz Hahn (July 2006)
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July 6, 2006
David Brooks on Why I'm in Law School
David Brooks sheds some tears, crocodile or otherwise, for blue-collar journalism:
It's hard to imagine now, but in Chicago, even 20 years ago, the working class was portrayed more vividly in the newspapers than the upscale consumer class, and workers weren't depicted as members of the noble but oppressed proletariat — objects fit for genteel compassion. The old neighborhoods were portrayed uncondescendingly, as scrambling menageries, where aspirations of lace-curtain respectability competed with the hoodlum's ethic: where's mine?[...]
Most of all, there has been the great upscalization. In 1981, [Mike] Royko moved from his bungalow near Milwaukee Avenue to a high-rise along the lakefront, and that was really the death-marker of the old style. America's cultural tone is no longer set by aspiring working-class novelists who grew up above a tavern. It's set by globally savvy college grads, who, even if they visit the Billy Goat from time to time, see the world from a different vantage point.
Why do college-educated elites populate the field of journalism to an extent unknown just a few decades ago? Of course, the glamor of the All The President's Men era, the trendy new journalism of Thompson, Wolfe and Southern and the legitimization that allowed upper-midddle-class parents to proudly admit that their kid is a journalist all contributed to it, but the real answer is money. There are far too many people who want to be journalists than there are regular non-freelance jobs out there. As a result, starting pay is very low. To get one, you either have to take a series of unpaid internships or work at a college newspaper, options not available to college students who need to work their way through school. If you do land a job, you won't be very well rewarded, especially in high-rent markets where you either have to pay $1,000 a month for an apartment or get a car and pay for parking. Let's look at some listings:
- $30-35k for someone with Japanese language skills in DC? Land a consulting job and you can have an apartment without roaches.
- You could freelance for $25-30k for a tech publication in Boston... or you could eat something other than cat food until they take you on full time.
One of the things you notice scouting JournalismJobs.com is how few listings have salaries attached, either because they're embarassingly low, or because they're so low you have to be too desperate to care. I was a journalist for two years, supplementing my income with tutoring on the side, which was only possible because I had a gig that didn't require me to work very long hours, which is often the case and makes second jobs with set schedules nearly impossible for others in the field.
When it became clear that I didn't like my old job, my old boss and my chances of advancement at my old company, I had a choice. I could go to grad school and make a life for myself beyond the paycheck-to-paycheck treadmill, or I could take my clips and get a slightly better job somewhere else for marginally more money, work at it for a few years and climb for a decade or more before I could think of buying even a modest house. Newly-minted college grads with more debt than I had aren't willing to wait, which is why they don't become journalists. As for me, I prefer yelling at journalists rather than getting yelled at by lawyers who aren't my boss.
UPDATE: In retrospect, that last line was fairly dumb. I'm going to get yelled at by judges, by opposing counsel during discovery, and probably from other associates who are not my boss. So much for ending on a cute note.
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July 5, 2006
Where have all the rude boys gone? To watch soccer, apparently
Has anyone else noticed that Ted Leo's blog has switched to an all-soccer format?
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They hate us because of our Freedom (Tower)
Peter Mehlman on why "Freedom Tower" is such a bad name for the structure going up on Ground Zero:
The hurdle to picking a new name lies in those who insist this new structure must (!) stand as constant reminder of our freedoms. As if pedestrians will look up, see the tower and suddenly remember, "Wait a minute. I can do whatever the fuck I want." The truth is, when pedestrians look up and see the tower, they will think, "Shit. I thought I was walking Uptown."
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Scum
In 2006.
In Delaware.
I may have to stop drinking Dogfish Head in protest.
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This weekend, I...
- Went camping in rural Ohio with my two future roomates;
- Spent $170 at Wal-Mart buying equipment for said camping adventure, including the necessary (tent, bug spray) the useful (hot dogs, s'mores ingredients) and the downright silly (dull machete, air pistol);
- Cooked hot dogs on a fire, ate s'mores and drank mass quantities of bad beer until the wee hours;
- Inexplicably said "git-r-done" quite a lot;
- Drove to Cleveland to see a friend's former band with no plans on what else to do or where to spend the night;
- Met the manager of the venue, which is a former pentacostal storefront church complete with pews and a pulpit, who told us we could sleep in the basement;
- Got a cooler full of beer stolen by a crackhead;
- Met some people at a bar in Cleveland who between them had a full set of teeth;
- Rocked the hell out to the band, which has been described as "prog rock for the ADD set," with about two dozen Clevelanders.
- Drank and watched the band jam around after the show until everyone went downstairs to pass out;
- Drove back to Chicago in record time using all manner of creative shortcuts to avoid the construction on I-90 and the Dan Ryan;
- Flickr'd the photos from the trip even before I took a shower, causing great concern on the part of friends who thought we had actually purchased a real firearm;
- Saw the same band again in Chicago the next night, which may or may not make me a groupie;
- Went to Taste of Chicago, ate a turkey leg, a churro and a frozen banana dipped in chocolate;
- Watched the fireworks from a Lake Shore Drive apartment building's roof;
- Sung "Yankee Doodle Dandy" in a crowded elevator in said apartment building;
- Got champagne spilled over me without even winning the World Series;
- "Lunches, brunches, interviews by the pool" to recover from the hangover; and
- Caught the "neighborhood" fireworks on the West Side on Tuesday.
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