The Holy Chao

New Home on the Web

2007-02-23T05:28:00.000-08:00

I doubt I will post much here anymore. You can find me here, if you like. I may or may not port the archives over there.

peace
Matt

Lowe's Meme

2007-02-16T07:35:00.000-08:00

Lowe says that someone called E-Dog submitted this meme, whatever that means. You can read Lowe's version here, if you want. The idea is you're stuck snowbound for eternity. What would you want with you?

Novel You've Read: You Bright and Risen Angels

Novel You've Never Read: I don't know; I haven't read it yet. Something surprising, funny, sad, long, and complex. Ten Thousand Years of Solitude has a certain thematic appeal, being snowed in forever...

Book Series You've Read: The New Sun/Long Sun/Short Sun cycle

Book Series You've Never Read: I don't know; I haven't read it yet. Something surprising, funny, sad, long, and complex. Would something like the complete works of Shakespeare count?

Autobiography You've Read: Golly, I can't remember that I've ever read an autobiography

Autobiography You've Never Read: How to Make Love Like a Pornstar - sure, I'll go with Lowe's choice. Or Grant's Civil War memoir, the edition with the other guy's memoir, too.

Nonfiction You've Read: Psychotic Reactions and Carbouretor Dung maybe. Maybe How the Mind Works or The Language Instinct. Those might end up being too head-trippy for eternal immobility, though.

Nonfiction You've Never Read: I don't know; I haven't read it yet. Can I get snowed in at a Barnes and Noble?

Book on Tape You've Heard: The Killer Angels

Book on Tape You've Never Heard: The BBC production of Ulysses

Snow-Themed Movie: Fargo maybe?

Non-Snow-Themed Movie: Blade Runner or The Princess Bride

Movie Sequel: Toy Story 2 maybe? Or Aliens

Movie Remake: I don't know. The remake of Psycho just for academic reasons

Movie Trilogy: LOTR - again, I'll stick with Lowe on this one. The extended releases, naturally. I mean, hell, I'm snowed in forever! I'll probably watch them back-to-back!

TV Channel: Wow, can I pass on this and take another book? How about some music? Music is notably lacking from this meme...

Season Pass on DVR: I don't even know what this means. How about more music?

Cartoon: Bugs Bunny - I'm with Lowe again

Home Movie: The bit with Luke where he's on the playground and starts lecturing me about his school's playground and wagging his finger at me. It never gets old.

TV Collection on DVD: Meh. Pass. How about the new Battlestar Galactica, once they end the series? I hear it's supposed to be pretty good.

TV Season on DVD: Wow, you people and your television. Am I really missing something? How about... No, I just don't care. How about another book, please?

Magazine Subscription: Either Scientific American or something so dirty that posting its name would get me banned from blogger for eternity.

Photograph: Gosh. Um. I guess the pic of Nancy in the kitchen.

Appetizer: Does a rotating tapas order count?

Entree: Something Thai. How about chicken green curry?

Dessert: I don't really go for desserts. How about another book? OOOH! Or the Internet! That would be useful while eternally snowed in.

Fast Food Item: Buffalo wings from Goodfella's Pizza down the road.

Beer (Patrician): Hm. How patrician do we want to get, here? I'll go with the most patrician: Thomas Hardy's ale.

Beer (Plebian): PBR, man. PBR.

Wine: Not really a wine person. How about more beer? Newcastle Brown, to cover the gap between patrician and plebian.

Booze: I'd say Booker's, but that's just by reputation. Maybe the other B bourbon, the name of which I can never remember? I'll look it up later.

Drink (Chaste): Diet cola of some stripe.

Video Game System With Complete Game Collection: Eh, how about the XBox 360? I don't actually care, but it would either be that or the PS3. The XBox has been out longer, so it probably has more games.

Single Video Game (regardless of platform): Morrowind GOTY Edition for PC and unlimited access to all the mods anyone has ever done ever. Also the construction kit. That's entertainment for a snow-bound eternity!

Card Game: Shanghai. If it counts, I'll take Mah Jongg

Board Game: Go

Pet: Pavel, I guess

Non-Spouse Family Member to Keep You Company: Luke

Writerly Figure to Keep Your Conversational Company: Wow. Depends on my mood. Gene Wolfe, William Vollmann, Steven Pinker, maybe Jeff VanderMeer from the current generation of young turks. Michael Moorcock, maybe.

Sports Figure to Keep Your Atheletic Company: Does Strip Weathers count? Okay, okay. Um, what's his name. Barkley. Charles Barkley or however he spelled it. Oh, or Jackie Chan.

Famous Figure to Keep Your Fabulous Company: Is Siddhartha fabulous?

Historical/Sports/Famous Figure to Keep You Conjugal Company: Janis Joplin. The easiest question in the meme.

Band to Play Every Night: Live? Gosh. The Traveling Wilburys. As long as I get to jam with them. If not, Tool.

Album: Now, see, that's not even fair. A) I'd get bored eventually with any of them, and B) No album I can think of adequately covers all my moods. Maybe the White Album.

Song: See, this isn't even a question. How can you only have one song? "Wings for Marie/10,000 Days"

Piece of Gym Equipment: Kick bag

Exercise You'd Do Every Day: Beat the shit out of the aforementioned bag

Medicine: Imitrex or however you spell it.

Sports Team You'd Follow: More books please

Game on Tape You'd Watch: More books please

Pair of Shoes: Doc Martens

Water Brand: Tap. Or, hell, we're snowed in, right? Open the window, Scoop up some snow, and wait.

Crime You'd Wish You'd Committed PreSnow: I think I'm done with crimes. Don't really need to commit any more, thanks.

More music and books, please. Less TV.

peace
Matt

Society for Creative Anachronism

2007-02-08T04:52:00.000-08:00

As I may have mentioned before, Nancy and I are active in the SCA. I'm formerly the seneschal of Azurmont, which is a canton in the Roanoke area. I passed that off as quickly as I could, but I'm now the chronicler and webminister for Azurmont.

In pursuance of which duties, I put together Azurmont's new website. I'm pretty happy with it, although there are things that need to be tweaked (the title on at least one of the pages is still "template," and the times on some of the calendar events are AM instead of PM... what do you want, it's an unpaid gig.)

There's probably more SCA stuff to mention, but I won't right now.

Except to say that "seneschal" = president, "chronicler" = secretary, and "webminister" = webmaster. But you could probably figure that out if you tried.

Pax Atlantica
Matt

Loot, Updated

2007-01-25T12:25:00.000-08:00

Since writing my loot list, I've updated some of it, commented on some of it, and ignored most of it.

Here's the update you've all been waiting for.

I know!

You're welcome.

I have now listened to Rockin' Bones, and I find it listenable. Even enjoyable. It's not terribly consistent, and it's better as a historical document, I think, than as a collection. But once I have a place to put music that randomizes and so forth, I'll probably rip it and be happy enough when any given song gets played.

The Gene Wolfe book is a fine thing. I loves me some Gene Wolfe, and Soldier of Sidon is certainly that. I expect that it's not the end of the Soldier series, which makes me happy. I like Latro.

Love the leather jacket. Still not very Rock, but it's a great jacket.

I like the Nick Drake just fine, but it requires a certain mood. And it is overproduced. I like him best when it's just him and his guitar, or at most a fairly minimal arrangement.

Thom Yorke remains Thom Yorke, which is a good thing. But he's done more appealing stuff with Radiohead (to my tastes) than the solo album.

The Stray Cats and the Johnny Cash are pretty much as you would expect: professionally done anthologies of musical acts that had a lot of Stuff. Nancy likes listening to them, so my work here is done.

Finally, I forgot to mention that Nancy and I got a mutual gift card from relatives, of which my half has now been spent, on Thomas Pynchon's new opus, Against the Day. It's effin' brilliant. I can't enthuse enough about Pynchon, so I'll just not do that, but I love it.

A propos of nothing, I just got two job offers in 24 hours. It's a nice feeling :)

peace
Matt

Luke Discovers Christmas

2006-12-28T09:08:00.000-08:00

Big Boy Bed

2006-12-28T09:00:00.000-08:00

Dora?!?! CANDYLAND?!?!?!?!

2006-12-28T08:58:00.000-08:00

A Little Stunned

2006-12-28T08:57:00.000-08:00

Loot

2006-12-27T04:37:00.000-08:00

Well, the good news is that my amazon.com wishlist is down to a mere 100 items, exactly. The bad news is that I'm blogging it. I mean, what the fuck, Matt? Don't you have anything more interesting on your mind than shopping?

Yes. Yes, I do.

But I'm not going to tell YOU fuckers about it.

So, the List of Loot, Year One (Annotated):

Rockin' Bones, an anthology of rockabilly stuff. Haven't listened to it yet.

Soldier of Sidon, Gene Wolfe. Haven't read it yet.

Bone, Jeff Smith. Wow. This thing is great.

Akira, Vol 4, Katsuhiro Otomo. Just keeps getting better.

Goat, Jesus Lizard. Haven't seen whether it holds up to memory yet. The great thing? My in-laws gave me this. No, they have no idea.
Update: It totally holds up to memory. Don't get me wrong. He's a nice guy, I like him just fine. But he's a mouth-breather.

Cosmic Encounter, a game. This is the Avalon Hill version. Haven't yet seen whether they managed to fuck it up or not.

A leather jacket. It's warm, stylish, and comfy. Not very Rock, though.

Nancy, my wife, does calligraphy, and she calligraphed and framed a reading from our wedding ceremony, Ogden Nash's Tin Wedding Whistle.

Lagos No Shaking, Tony Allen. Quite funky, very listenable.

A puzzle. Nondescript.

Ah, forgot the Fullscreen edition of The DaVinci Code. And how could you not forget such a thing? I mean, really. Haven't watched it, yet.

I think that's it for Things Other People gave me. My folks gave me some money, which I promptly went out and spent, on:

Player's Handbook, v 3.5. Yeah, I'm playing DND again.

Runequest, the Mongoose version. I'm playing DND again, but I'd RATHER be playing Runequest ;)

You know, I hate to say this, since I'm a Glorantha man through and through, but this new DND 3.5 edition is really good.
You know, like, the rules?
Looking through this Runequest book, I'm like, "Wow, these rules are clunky. Why don't they streamline them and make them more like DND?" I guess, really, DND just needs to come out with a world that's more like Glorantha...

Illuminati, Deluxe Edition. Looks excellent. They brought back MegaBucks, though. WTF? Like I didn't have enough tiny pieces of cardboard in my life?!?! I've got a 3-year-old!

Eraser, Thom Yorke. Haven't had much of a chance to listen to it, yet. First impression, just fine.

Bryter Layter, Nick Drake. First impression, overproduced.

Some Stray Cats anthology.

Some Johnny Cash anthology.

A Barnes & Noble membership. I certainly shop there enough.

Maybe some other stuff.

Later

peace
Matt

Eris

2006-12-17T12:21:00.000-08:00

May as well document Eris, too, while I'm at it ;)

peace
Matt

Tezcatlipoca

2006-12-17T12:20:00.000-08:00

More than 2 years ago, I got this tattoo. At the time I said, "when I get a digital camera, I'll post it."

Got a digital camera yesterday :)

peace
Matt

Black Friday

2006-11-29T09:25:00.000-08:00

In theory, I just posted a new song to myspace. It's a Christmas song, Matty-style. Which is to say I'm contrasting the lifestyle of a guy who sat outside all night trying to buy a PS3 to the lifestyle of a homeless person.

The dream Chris and I had while writing and recording this thing is that it's the first salvo in a mini recording project with our new musician friends Lex & Linda, whereby we intend to make some holiday-themed recordings and then do something with that recording session. Like distribute it to friends, or what-have-you.

Anyway, if you want, you can listen to it here. It's set up to play by default, but it's called Black Friday.

peace
Matt

Marlon Brando is Out to Get Me

2006-11-29T07:02:00.000-08:00

I started telling my co-worker about this, but then I was, like, "you know, your co-workers don't want to hear about your dreams. Random strangers do!"

So, last night, I had this dream. It was cinematic, I wasn't actually a participant in the action, although I ended up watching some of the action from the little dude's eyes.

Anyway, there was a Big Scene going on. A professional basketball player, extremely tall athletic guy, was having (or more accurately, perhaps, leaving) a press conference, where I believe he was announcing an expansion of his endorsed shoe line. He was obviously famous for playing in these shoes, and was unbeatable.

He got involved in trash talking with this little dude, a street player, who was all about "your shoes are crap. I play barefoot!" The street player used some kind of stickum stuff that came in a wad in a bag, and you smeared it on your feet, and played barefoot.

I don't know how it got to this, but these two players ended up having a much-publicised one-on-one game, where both players were using the stickum product.

As is quite predictable, the street player totally schooled the pro player. There was an extended sequence in which the pro player couldn't even move when he put this stuff on his feet. It was quite comical.

But none of this is really the point. The point is that both characters were played by Marlon Brando.

The pro player was Marlon in his Godfather role, much hair, neat and trim. Clearly, he was ridiculously tall, and he was athletic, which is not how I think of the Godfather Brando, but that's the head that was on this body.

Meanwhile, the street ball player was Marlon from Apocalypse Now, bald and kinda creepy. But short and athletic.

I don't know what any of this means, but all day I've been like looking over my shoulder for Brando clones...

peace
Matt

Go Forth, Ye Masses!

2006-11-07T06:25:00.000-08:00

VOTE! VOTE LIKE THE PARTICIPANTS IN THE WORLD'S GREATEST SOCIO-ECONOMIC EXPERIMENT YOU ARE!

2006-11-03T18:37:00.000-08:00

Here's me looking all rock. Pic taken by Jack Dean at the Green Dolphin Grill, 7/20/06.

peace
Matt

More Pics

2006-11-01T12:17:00.000-08:00

Some actual Halloween pics. I'm not convinced these are going to stick around after I shut down this computer. Seems too much to ask the IntarW3b, mighty though it be. But we'll see.

Pretty mighty, there, IntarW3b.

Anyhow, sorry about the blurriness of these, Luke wasn't really in a posing kind of mood. Tried to take a couple pic of us in the neighborhood, trick or treating, but the flash on my camera is for crap, and they didn't come out well.

peace
Matt

Test Pic Post

2006-11-01T12:15:00.000-08:00

This is a test. Should ideally see a pic of Nancy holding Luke in a silly dragon costume.

Ok, seems to have worked. Now we just see how long this lasts.

Anyway, this pic is the day Luke borrowed this costume from our friends, Steve and Rennell. He wore this costume Halloween. See next post for actual pics actually taken Halloween.

peace
Matt

Failure

2006-10-31T08:58:00.000-08:00

As of this moment, if you Google the word 'failure', the first link looks like this:

President of the United States - George W. Bush
Biography of the president from the official White House web site.
www.whitehouse.gov/president/ - 24k - Cached - Similar pages

As of this moment, I am ROFLOL.

peace
Matt

A Song to Myself

2006-10-23T09:14:00.000-07:00

Peace, all you hippies.

I wrote this song to myself last night, more or less as therapy, so I'm posting it on Myspace as soon as I get around to it. In the meanwhile, here are the lyrics.

I don't know
How we started
Long long ago
Or far far away

Yet we must have
Broken hearted
Looked to ourselves
To find a way

I don't know
How I got your goat
But look to the mote
In your own fucking eye

Here we are
Where we started
Long long ago
Or far far away

I don't know
How to tell you
To look to yourself
To find your own way

I don't know
How I got your goat
But look to the mote
In your own fucking eye

So in case you were wondering what the hell "Look to the Mote" has to do with feminism vis a vis my last post, well, I'm really being self-critical. I don't think it's a reasonable thing, for instance, for me to have reacted internally the way I did to the little girl's "I'm so popular" rhetoric. It's a completely irrational reaction in me to see red when someone cares about that shit, but I do. Forgive me, if you A) feel the need to B) see any value in doing so, or C) are simply feeling charitable towards a deeply flawed man.

peace
Matt

Look to the Mote

2006-10-23T06:23:00.000-07:00

Lowe posted this, in the course of a longer post - go read it over at his place, if you like...

I once co-taught a course with a fellow professor. We were teaching Lolita and the subject of feminism came up. After a rather rowdy discussion of stripping, in which one of the class members defended it as an acceptable vocation (it's basic capitalism: there's more money to be made stripping for 4 hours than working at McDonalds), my friend brought up the idea of beauty and made the argument that the biggest failure of feminism has been the fact that many women gain more by working towards the hegemony than they gain by working against it. In other words, if you are beautiful and can get ahead in a sexist world by working your beauty, than so be it.

The converse of this, of course, is that women could stop most sexism tomorrow if they simply refused to take part - stop working at Hooters; stop throwing up your lunch because some fashion mag has imparted upon you some ideal of beauty (and, indeed, stop taking work at fashion mags); stop doing stuff to "impress your man" and do it for yourself; &c. &c. &c.

It won't, of course, ever stop. What women gain from working at Hooters is more than money - as one of my students said on Tuesday, they gain self-esteem, even if it's a pretty sick trade off (what kind of self-esteem is gained by trying to live up to standards that you don't sent). But, as the song goes, "If you've got it, flaunt it."

I thought it was an interesting take on things, that the dominant hegemony plays off the combination of women's insecurity and women's poverty to reinforce the hegemony's hold over women. And women (because of the insecurity thing) tend to like the attention and "positive" reinforcement this gives their egos.

Just makes me sad.

At the camping trip this past weekend, there was this little girl who latched on to me and Luke and followed us around for a while, until I stopped playing her game and went to be with my friends. Pretty little thing, will be very hot, no doubt. And she told me the following:

that she didn't live with her mother, who was in Texas
that she was camping with her grandmother (this was at an SCA event of over 600 people, where she was wandering around by herself - I found her as the rapier guys were setting up a battle at the "castle" she was playing on - at one point, she sprinted onto the fighting field while guys were swinging swords and arrows (blunt, padded, but still) were flying around - I had to yell at her, and one of the fighters and I convinced her it wasn't a good idea)
that she lived with her dad "somewhere in Maryland" - I asked where, in interests of making conversation (I lived in Rockville, for a while, whatnot), and she rattled off her address (!), but couldn't remember the town...

Anyway, where I'm going with this is that she was all about "I'm the most popular girl in my school" and "want to see my cheers?"

And my thoughts were 1) that she would have spat on me in high school, which made me instantly dislike her (to my shame - I mean, she was like 8 years old and at an SCA event, you know - it's not like she was thinking of me as a geek, or whatever), and 2) that she is not very well-positioned to be raised up to be a critically-thinking, contributing member of society.

I mean, what are this girls' politics going to be like? Is she just going to vote with her husband? Is she even going to vote?

*sigh*

peace
Matt

Songs Uploaded

2006-10-17T12:10:00.000-07:00

I've uploaded some more stuff I've been working on. Basically Al recorded on some more songs, and some of 'em are on the myspace site.

peace
Matt

Luke's Musical Awareness

2006-10-10T07:43:00.000-07:00

I've been exposing Luke to a wide variety of music, and he of course gets the usual stuff at preschool. He's got a Doc Watson CD, and a John Denver CD of train songs, and a couple kiddie folk music CDs (you probably sense a trend...). He used to request the Denver CD and the Doc Watson CD got a lot of play for a while, but now, whenever I turn on the stereo for my own enjoyment, if he's in the room, he's like "NOT DOC WATSON!" or "NOT JOHN DENVER!" and I have to reassure him that I'm not going to put on those CDs.

On the weekends, Nancy usually takes a day to get work done, and I entertain Luke that morning, or whatever. A common destination is the zoo (at $7 a pop, we shelled out for the family membership - worth it's weight in gold), and as we drove to the zoo, a common musical background was Tool - typically the Lateralus CD, or 10K Days.

He likes Tool fine, I'm proud to report.

He's also grown recently to become aware that I make music with the man he knows as "Mr. Chris." So he often requests that CD, which pleases me, in a kind of "awww" sort of way. His usual mode of requesting that is not so much by band name (we are to him "Daddy and Mr. Chris" - Saint Misbehaving holds no meaning to a 3 year old, and probably shouldn't), but by a prominent lyric (in "the always song," I yell ALWAYS several times at the top of my lungs - in "the yoyo song," I sing about a yoyo...).

But you know, the music he seems to enjoy best is the music that I play randomly when we're doing something else (like driving to the zoo - he likes Tool). He is now acquainted with Bjork (the girl whose name is the same as a tree (Bjork means birch in Icelandic, I understand...)), and Broken Social Scene (which he informed me the other day is his favorite CD - again, a proud papa). But what boggles my mind is that last night, he requested The Mars Volta. Why THE FUCK would a 3 year old want to listen to The Mars Volta?

I'm so proud.

peace
Matt

The Mars Volta

2006-10-05T08:44:00.000-07:00

I forget how this band crossed my path. It's possible I heard an article about them on NPR, but that seems so unlikely, given the somewhat extreme music on this CD.

I'm loving this band. I bought their album Frances the Mute for my birthday (they say it's my birthday! nananananananana), and I have now listened to most of it three times. When I put it on the home stereo last night, then walked down to where Luke was playing with his trains, it squawked loudly when they hit the big volume shift on the first song, and Luke looked up alarmed, like he was thinking "What the fuck was that?!?!?" But then he realized it was a CD I put on, and he relaxed, asking casually "Who you put on, Daddy?"

But I don't think he likes them as much as he likes Tool and the Broken Social Scene...

Anyway, if you like kind of prog experimental noise rock with driving, occasionally polyrhythmic, grooves and the occasional lyrics in Spanish, then the Mars Volta is for you!

peace
Matt

The Land of the Free...

2006-09-26T08:36:00.000-07:00

...and the Home of the Brave

But mostly the home of the brave.

For those of you who can't tell, it's the same link. It's such a cowardly attempt at manipulation of the American psyche that I had to post it twice.

Interesting that the non-US cover article IS available online... But still...

I reiterate: Fuck.

peace
Matt

I Just Can't Take It Anymore

2006-09-25T13:47:00.000-07:00

It's been too long since I posted anything here, and the last couple of posts are completely irrelevant to anything in my life.

So is this one, but at least I don't have to look at the word "snark" when I load my blog now.

Aw, crap. Now I DO have to look at the word "snark."

It's not even worth it...

mutter mutter mutter...

peace
Matt