New Classes We are announcing new classes  ¶ 8:31 PM 0 comments

  Beck! KEXP! Blah! Enjoy this interview with Beck, just off from headlining Seattle's Bumbershoot festival.  ¶ 11:22 AM 0 comments

  I'll be your sent down girl I went to my first Xiu Xiu concert a couple nights ago to celebrate my return to the States, what an exhilarating show! I wasn't sure what to expect - their dense orchestrations , use of noise (ambient, industrial, and what can only be described as "antique-store crashings"), and punk art sensibilities make it difficult to divine just what a live show of such exquisite mess would be like. Would it be one guy onstage with a huge mixer and a bank of electronics? No, although there would be some electronic posturing from the opening acts (more later). As it turns out, the live show is three utterly possessed people manoeuvring their way through a pile of cymbals, synthesizers, deconstructed accordions, flutes, rape whistles, piccolos, drum kit, kettle drums, steel drums, drumsticks, autoharps, and a single electric guitar played by the brilliant Jamie Stewart. They were so unbelievably tight together, going beyond mere anticipation of each other's movements to pure knowledge of how be in perfect synchronicity. A gently perverse song like "Fabulous Muscles" became an anguished roaring while other, denser, songs like "Bunny Gamer" revealed the unabashedly rocking rhythmic structure underneath all of the chaotic noises. Throughout it all, you could hear these three musicians holding tightly, holding fast to each other with total confidence and total dependence. They navigate and play their jagged, asymmetrical music completely fearlessly and it is breathtaking.

And then there were the opening bands. One of them, Prurient, was, in fact, a guy onstage surrounded by threatening-looking pieces of electronics. He faced away from his inexplicably appreciative audience and assailed us all with a mass of impenetrable noise, punctuated only by his faux primal screaming and the protesting whines and crackles of the microphone that he repeatedly dashed to the floor. He was joined later on by an overweight man who was apparently meant to provide the meat behind their weirdly coy band name. He faced the audience, undid his shirt (slowly) and started playing with his flabby nipples. It was so disturbing that it nearly woke me up from my jet-lag-plus-wall-o-noise stupor. In between touching himself, he'd scream into the microphone a few times for good emphasis. Excellent work. Way to be an artist. The other band, Common Eider, King Eider, were two disaffected young men creating more wall-o-noise music, playing together as though they had never met before and didn't care to go beyond that surface intimacy. Who chooses these opening acts, anyway? I hope it's not Xiu Xiu, because I have trouble liking a band who's taste I can't respect.  ¶ 8:33 PM 0 comments

  I'm awful, too This essay from a former Olympic gymnast makes me think of a similar rant that my ballet teacher sometimes goes off on. You danced when you were 12? Oh, that's cute. Did you train for hours every day and watch everything you ate and dance through pain, fatigue, sadness, weddings, graduations, milestones of friends and family, and the severe exhortations from said friends and family to quit? Did you come back from an injury and work through the anxiety that you would never be "as good" ever again? Did you obsessively go over movements and exercises while waiting for the bus, the train, the slow-moving grocery line? Did you suffer from knowing that your whole life was inextricably linked to something absolutely fleeting and unforgiving?

As you may have discerned, my butt is hurting more than usual today and I'm desperately trying to figure out to make it through class.  ¶ 11:46 AM 0 comments

  For the Geeks Has anyone ever seen sudo access defined for the su - command? It's quite something. This is how I interpret it: You wanna be Mr. importantuser? You got the right password? No? Hmmm....well, do you have *your* password, then? Hello, Mr. importantuser!

I'm sure there are valid technical reasons for this, but it's still funny to me.

And here's the classic sudo example to cap it off  ¶ 2:07 PM 2 comments

  The Pre-Olympics I've been getting ready for the Olympics by reading articles about Games past and this musing about gymnastics by Salon.com's Gary Kamiya caught my attention:

"It is beautiful to watch, but the least deviation, the smallest error, a bad grip, a moment in which your muscles misfire, and suddenly the world is no longer a realm of effortless magic and grace, a floating world you soar through like a god. It is a world where objects exist and gravity exists, and they hit you and break you."

As for the current Olympics, the New York Times had an interesting photo gallery with vital stats of several Olympians. One heartening fact about all of them was that nobody eats fewer than 4000 calories a day. To me, that would be the most time-consuming part of training, the eating. Don't they get tired just from chewing all those calories?

Finally, to end on a sobering note, here's some more photo-journalism, this time from NPR's trip to the training grounds of China's gymnasts. It's heartbreaking enough to see kids as young as 4 or 5 living here separated from their family, but by the time you get to pictures of a grown man squatting on top of a young boy and forcing his legs apart into a split, it fills your head with all kinds of nearly pornographic horrors. I wondered at the trainers even letting the journalists photograph these things. Almost equally disturbing to me as well was the sight of an 8 year old boy with a six pack, and a 6 year old girl with sculpted leg muscles, adult physiques on much too young bodies. It's like those pictures of cows given growth hormones to develop their muscles and provide more meat.

My reactions to these photographs made me question my own prejudices, though. After all, my ballet school has students as young as 3.5 years old. The Soviet ballet system works similarly in that they do a thorough physical examination of all likely candidates before admitting the chosen few. And gymnastics being what they are, it probably is best to start people early, when their bodies are soft enough to withstand manipulations like the one I described above. Is the training in other countries any better? Bela Karoly was a Soviet-era bastard who was in charge of the US team forever. And I can't deny that the system does produce gymnasts that I personally like watching. But should the question really be "should we stand for it or not, no matter what the results are"? To make one more food analogy, is it a question of whether or not to eat veal, or dog soup, or anything else that was created through cruelty, no matter how good it tastes? In art and life, there is suffering...and there is suffering. Maybe we should allow people to suffer only as they choose to.  ¶ 10:39 AM 0 comments

  Chocolate Jesus I am referring, of course to Tom Waits, who recently gave a 2.5 hour concert and shook the earth with his growls. It even made it into the French news, normally devoted to more refined arts and bad Euro-pop. They probably wondered what that odd feeling was. Soul and dirty magic, mon frere. Check it out on NPR's Live Concert Series.  ¶ 11:20 AM 0 comments