An eight year old picture I took as part of a portfolio review requirement for UMBC. It’s the bell tower in Baker Park in Frederick, MD.

I had no idea what I was doing. My dad’s Nikon happened to have film in it and happened to have been dialed in to shoot in the conditions, I just attempted to focus and push the shutter. I wonder if I could acheive this affect intentionally now. The composition is very rigid.

In my basement:

Note the seat is about mid-way between the floor and the 7’ ceiling.

Amanda wants a puppy in a few years. As much as I yell at my cat when he jumps on her cats with claws out, biting for their necks, it is nothing compared to the amount of yelling “NO!” it takes to poorly train a dog. I don’t know if I’m up to the challenge yet.

They can be pretty damned cute though. That’s my Mom and Bill’s dog Buster. His name is actually Buster-no! I think, and they call him Buster for short.

A book of Fugazi photographs by Glen Friedman is available for pre-order for $30.

Updated

“keep” has asked for a review. Here goes:

Keep Your Eyes Open’s official release date is September 3, 2007, 20 years after Fugazi’s first show. I received my copy early on the 14th of August. The finish and binding of the book is nicely executed.

I’ve only seen Fugazi twice—once at Ft. Reno, and once at 9:30. The photographs captured by Glen Friedman, especially of the Ft. Reno shows, capture the energy that I remember of a Fugazi performance. I’m from the burbs. Seeing Fugazi in the District for a free show was a major event only possible for kids like us if we happened to be in the right time and place to hear about it. The band did not promote - a friend of a friend heard about the show that evening. All us happened to be working morning or day shifts at our crummy jobs and were able to leave in time to make it downtown for the show. The pictures in Keep Your Eyes Open had me looking at every face in the crowd.

I was surprised how many press-kit looking portraits were in the collection. Most of the pictures are captioned with comments from the photographer. The motivations for the portraiture is very likely not for press kit materials but wasn’t otherwise explained save a caption that non-obvious DC locales were often goals of the Friedmen and Fugazi shoots before local shows. Why shoot at all before shows?

My only other Fugazi experience was an all-proceeds-to-charity 9:30 show near the very end. Jerry Busher was on a second drum set, and Guy and Ian were electrified. My roommate and I were on stools stage-right at the bar remarking over and over again on the musical interaction between the two guitar players. It was amazing.

I’m probably not a serious Fugazi fan. I love the music, the lyrics, and the energy. I liked that I could enjoy a show without the moshing and crowd surfing already going out of fashion. But I was young and late to the scene. I had a FUGAZI t-shirt that I picked up at a merch-booth at a Moody Blues show of all places, not knowing that the band didn’t “do” that sort of thing and that it was bullshit. I had another one styled after the Repeater artwork that I bought from a rock-T’s magazine. Wearing a FUGAZI shirt wasn’t that much different to me than wearing a NIN shirt or a Led Zeppelin shirt.

I was approached twice by strangers about the shirts. In Bethany Beach a Vietnam veteran asked if I knew what fugazi meant. In Frederick, MD outside a store an older ex-punk approached to tell me that Ian MacKaye was an asshole, and that they’d worked together flipping burgers before Minor Threat formed and that Ian MacKaye was a sell-out-motherfucker.

Only a band so set on their ideals and on their message can have that sort of effect on people. “Fugazi fans are pretentious assholes”. “The guys in the band are assholes”. Wait, what? “Fugazi sucks because they yell at people starting pits at their shows”. So?

Back to the book, and the foreword written by a pretentious asshole Fugazi fan and one of Glen Friedman’s “favorite people on the planet”, Ian F. Svenonius. The introduction is not to my taste. I would like to think I can dig somewhat strange music writing; I enjoyed Paul Morely’s Words and Music for whatever that is worth. Svenonius gives us an essay in the format of an interview with a person with multiple personalities, in a DC coffee shop. Hip. Long. Not enlightening about the band to any fan; and not adding anything to the book. The man’s words about Fugazi carry to me the maturity of a young adult. Maybe I’m not getting some sort of slathered on irony? When a character in the interview describes avoiding early Fugazi shows because they were too popular, or finally going to a show but only due to laziness bothering to not listen to it from the bathroom of the club, I think: this is the kind of asshole I couldn’t stand in that fucking scene. This is the kind of douche that would swear off local groups as soon as conformists got into them. That’s the kind of dick I failed to avoid being, I’m sure. The ultimate poseur or the worst? I haven’t read anything else by Svenonius. I don’t know his relationship with Friedman or the band, or the community. I’m specifically reacting to the introduction of Keep Your Eyes Open.

Friedman’s closing remarks are much more aligned with what one would expect for the introduction and would have served well in Svenonius’ place. I wish the textual content provided more insight into the group. I wish there was more than just name dropping Rites of Spring and other pre-Fugazi groups, which carried more of their sound forward into Fugazi than any of Ian’s previous bands; maybe I’m just a Guy-fan.

The font used on the cover and in all of the captions works nicely. The same font (I think) is used in the body of the introduction and in the closing remarks. It is a poor selection in those formats and doesn’t work well with the page size or line length making for difficult reading.

The book cost me thirty bucks. Is it a thirty dollar book? Definitely. It’s great. Don’t buy it to gain any insight into the band, buy it for the pictures. You can see more of Friedman’s work on his website.

The Hipster Olympics.

Emphasis mine.

Dynamic Network Services, Incorporated has come to a difficult decision regarding the handling of locally-generated non-delivery reports (NDR), also known as “undeliverable mail” or “bounce” messages. DynDNS will no longer deliver locally-generated NDRs from any MailHop systems.

It is through our operational experience that we believe that the exploitation of this behavior has begun to far exceed its original informational purposes. Specifically, spammers and other Internet-abusers are using this behavior to distribute spam, malware, and to otherwise cause troubles for e-mail systems It has become common for spammers to forge originating e-mail addresses and to then send large spam runs against different servers. When this happens, DynDNS sometimes receives these messages, which cannot be delivered or worse, get bounced back to the original forged sender, who now gets the spam in his or her inbox (a.k.a. spam blow back).

We simply feel that this is not the right thing to do.

I’ve been doing this for a few years for clients that used the spam filters I set up in front of their exchange servers. All sites should do this. RFC’s are not holy territory; they were designed by teams and committee’s operating under assumptions that do not at all match the internet infrastructure or user-base.

King Crimson (and more) live shows. Some at a price, some free.

I’m listening to a show from 1982 that was a free download. Matte Kudasai I think is my current favorite tune of theirs, but I’m just getting around to getting into them.

We are adults, we don’t have to BLEEP.

Wired news picked up an article from the Huffington Post (which is running a where-are-we-now update on a two-year-old Salon article about a stupid movie), bemoaning society’s slippery slide into psuedo-pscience…

All of which, in my mind, goes a ways towards explaining the un- and pseudo-scientific thinking that seems to be on the rise in our culture. If we can’t trust studies, documentaries, talking heads, newspapers, the only thing we have left is our own experiences. Once upon a time, media of communication were tools to raise our eyes up from our individual experiences and focus on the larger concerns of a nation, a city, a cause. Now, all they do is leave us disgusted, pointing our eyes back down. It’s no wonder we don’t know any better.

Maybe I’m an optimist, but I don’t see this trend. My experience tells me actually that people today are a bit savier than their forefathers. No we can’t all be at the level of specialists in every field. And knowledge from some fields, especially those contrary to common sense or one’s upbringing, tend to be resisted. By all of us.

Ken and Erica had an old Kenwood combo amplifier to get rid of, I had a a home theater system powering my living room audio kitchen audio and and the TV powering the TV audio.

Great upgrade, Amanda thinks it is ugly.

Old 2004 Onkyo:

New 1973 Kenwood:

The Kenwood also has a Phono input, which will be great with the old Dual record player my dad gave me. I need to get some DeOxit to clean up all the pots and connections and it’ll be perfect.

I’m going to move the home theater amp to the basement to go with the old PolkAudio loudspeakers my Uncle Tim gave me, pics when it gets set up.

We also had new deadbolts put on the front and rear doors, my step-father Bill happens to lock-smith. It was neat to watch, here he is picking out tumblers so that the keys match:

We also pulled up the carpet in the middle-upstairs bedroom.

The hallway pine floor looks like this:

Under the carpet we found completely unfinished pine:

We can’t decide what we want to do with it as this room is around the bottom our list of priorities and pulling up the carpet was just an itch I wanted to scratch since doing it was free and relatively easy.

I knew I wasn’t the only person to dig the new coke can:

I had a can collection in middle-school that got tossed in a move due to poor packing choice: I put them all in a large lawn bag instead of boxes. Guess what the movers thought. Into the trash went cans of coke, new coke, coke II (remember the roman numeral design?), coke classic, old pepsi logo and old diet pepsi logo cans, crystal pepsi cans and bottles, old mt. dew and mellow yellow logo cans, redskin bottles and cans of coke, and more I’m probably not remembering.

Seeing coke cans evolve over time is neato, check it out.