The Wily Filipino

Two Movies With Nothing To Do With Each Other, #3.

There's nothing like a sci-fi film in space: the impossibility of giant tin cans floating in the void and the people stuck in them. Danny Boyle's Sunshine is the latest addition to the genre. It's a visually stunning film, first of all: spaceship interiors floodlit and bleached orange by the sun, golden shields rotating in space, creepy subliminal flashes, plus a damn good-looking cast (Michelle Yeoh! Rose Byrne! Cillian Murphy!). The sun is apparently dying, and an intrepid (of course they're intrepid) multicultural (of course they're multicultural) team of astronauts are burdened with dreams of the apocalypse (of course they're burdened with dreams of the apocalypse) and a bomb the size of Manhattan, which they plan to drop on the sun to create a new star. (My students, who apparently know better, told me it wouldn't work.) Alas, all this agreeable tension gets ejected into space after the introduction of a total wild card in the third act, which subsequently turns the film into something it shouldn't be. (Plus you don't put Michelle Yeoh in a film and not have her kick some ass.)

Jaume Balagueró's Fragile is a more than competent horror film with the requisite elements: a creaky children's hospital with a boarded-up second floor, ailing children who see things, and the tough heroine with the fragile exterior. The said protagonist happens to be Calista Flockhart minus the short skirts, and she plays the replacement night nurse -- her predecessor got spooked and left -- who then witnesses what the kids repeatedly warned her about. Fairly gripping and atmospheric all in all, though marred by an ending that seemed too much of a Street Fighter-like showdown.

The July 2007 Mix.

It's the end of the month, so... my favorite music of the last 30 days.

1. Chatmonchy, "Otogino kuni no kimi"
from the 2006 album Miminari

No idea what it means, unfortunately (lyrics are here), but my heart just leaps once Hashimoto Eriko gets to the chorus about 35 seconds in.

Amazon link.
Official website.

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2. Chatmonchy, "Joshi tachi ni Asu wa Nai"
from the 2007 Joshi tachi ni Asu wa Nai single

I believe it's roughly translated as "There Is No Tomorrow For The Girls" (or "Girls Will Not Have Tomorrow?"). Chatmonchy is my new favorite Japanese band.

YesAsia link.
Video on YouTube. (Fantastic, by the way.)

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3. Chillitees, "Sama Na"
from the 2006 album Extra Rice

CHORUS
Sama na
Wag ka nang magtanong
Lapit na
Ipikit ang mata

Ibigay mo ang yong damdamin
At ibibigay ang iyong hiling
Walang tayong mapapansin
Walang iba kundi sarili natin
Magdamag tayong magsasaya
Nakatitig sa iyong mata
Hangang maabot natin ang ligaya
Kaya't sa 'kin ay sumama na

[repeat CHORUS]

Mula ngayon ay wala ng iba
Ikaw lang ang tanging kailangan
Wag ka nang mag-alinlangan
Sa buhay ko’y ikaw lamang

[repeat CHORUS]

Ako magbibigay ng ‘yong kaligayahan
Hawakan mo aking kamay di kita pababayaan
Gagawin ang mga bagay na di pag sisisihan
Lumayo kaman mananatili pa rin sa 'kin
Ang pusong inaalay at malalim na damdamin
Kahit anong gawin hindi ito maisasalin
Sumama ka at libutin natin ang buong mundo
Ang oras ay ating limutin
At ating ipanalangin na itong paglalakbay
Tuloy tuloy nating tahakin
Wag nang pag isipan pa
Lumapit ka’t tanggalin ang pangangamba
Pagkat ikaw at ako punung puno ng alaala

[repeat CHORUS]

No need to translate the lyrics, really; of course it's about sex.

Amazon link.
Official website.
Video on YouTube.

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4. Some Tweetlove, "La Nostalgie Des Hauts-Fourneaux"
from the 2006 album Cafard Mondial

First heard it on a Wire compilation, and it's been running through my head ever since.

Matamore link. (Couldn't find a US distributor for some reason, so I bought my copy here.)
Official website.

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5. The Thermals, "A Pillar of Salt"
from the 2006 album The Body, the Blood, the Machine

We were born to sin
we were born to sin!
we don't think we're special sir
we know everybody is
we built too many walls
yeah we built too many walls!
And now we gotta run
a giant fist is out to crush us

We run in the dark
we run in the dark!
we don't carry dead weight long
we send them along to heaven.
I carry my baby
i carry my baby!
Her eyes can barely see
her mouth can barely breathe
i see she's afraid
she could see the danger
we don't want to die
or apologize
for our dirty god
our dirty body

Now i spit to the ground
i spit to the ground!
i won't look twice at dead walls
i don't wanna white pillar of salt
I carry my baby
i carry my baby!
Her eyes can barely see
her mouth can barely breathe
i can see she's afraid
that's why we're escaping
so we won't have to die
we won't have to deny
our dirty god
our dirty bodies!

I'm jumping on the Thermals bandwagon late (thanks Allan!): a scary song from a scary album. (Though the song and the video sound awfully cheery.)

Amazon link.
Official website.
Video on YouTube.

The Polyphonic Spree, The Great American Music Hall, SF, 7/17/2007.

(No, it's not an attempt at poetry; just notes.)

And so, the beginning stages:

gimme some truth on red cloth
"I've had enough of watching scenes
Of schizophrenic, egocentric, paranoiac, prima donnas"
heart-shaped hole for the black-clad
fragile army to step through

and they wake up slowly to the american dream
they're running away and younger yesterday
they hang around the day and watch us explode
we crawl and get up and go
we gather around the campfire for "it's the sun"

and a slow departure:

as we, the audience
(all in good time)
raised our voices

procession of white robes
through the screaming crowd
together they're heavy

and the audience goes nuts at lithium
tim jumps into the crowd
beer spills
people jump
sweat flies
i like it
i'm not gonna crack

and the big 1-2-3 punch of total bliss:
soldier girl hold me now light and day

and frozen bodies wake as the fool becomes a king

and at the end of two hours
i got my religion
courtesy of The Polyphonic Spree

The first time I saw the Polyphonic Spree (perhaps a couple of years ago, at Bimbo's), I thought it was one of the best concerts I'd seen in my life. (It helped that I was close to the front, as I was this time, where I dragged Romeo.) Their two-hour Great American Hall concert was no different -- a perfect example of Durkheimian collective effervescence, with the crowd singing and cheering and jumping as one. A total antithesis to the dignified head-nodding at the Slint concert I saw a week later: with the Spree you learn to drop that indie hipster facade quickly.

If the spectacle of 24 musicians and singers crammed onto a stage (and showers of confetti!) doesn't move you, then perhaps Tim DeLaughter, working the crowd like a gospel preacher, will. It was then a welcome sight to see the band return for the encore not in their black militia uniforms, but in their choir robes. This was church, after all.

And the music never ends. As in the previous concert I saw, the band members left the stage one by one, leaving the audience singing "All in good time, raise our voices" -- all throughout until the Spree returned for the encore, walking through the ecstatic crowd. And that was the point: we were the choir too.

The highlights: a crowd-pleasing "Soldier Girl" / "Hold Me Now" / "Light and Day" sequence near the end (DeLaughter lists the songs, asking if the audience wanted to hear any of them, and goes, "Ah, let's do all three!"). John Lennon's lyrics projected onto a red banner covering the stage, then DeLaughter cutting a heart-shaped hole in the center and unveiling the band. And a fantastic cover of Nirvana's "Lithium," where DeLaughter jumps into the pit in front of him, the audience going completely batshit.

(YouTube video here.)

Weekend Link Roundup.

1. Via Kerim Friedman at Savage Minds, Alton Thompson at Conductor's Notebook:

Half the students who begin school do not finish.

If this statement described an American inner-city public school system, the story would already have made headlines. Outraged parents would be asking hard questions of the mayor at the next press conference. If it described undergrad athletes at your local collegiate sports factory, the NCAA would already be leaning on the program to change something.

But this statistic is not about those students. It describes students enrolled in American Ph.D programs.

This dirty secret, long known to officials at universities, is gradually becoming public. For decades, half the students who begin doctoral programs at American universities have been walking away.

...

The secret is dirty because the students who walk away are not failing. They are successful. The grades non-completers earn are as high as those of their colleagues who complete their degrees. Recent research shows the undergraduate GPAs of female students, in fact, to be higher among the walkoffs than among their colleagues who finish. The secret is dirty because these are adults who have already completed at least two college degrees just to get where they are. Their competence for academic work, and their willingess to follow through, is established. The secret is dirty because these are adults who have invested enormous amounts of time and personal resources into the very programs they decide to abandon.

And from the original article, Barbara E. Lovitts and Cary Nelson on grad student attrition from AAUP's Academe magazine:

As we begin to think through the differences such practical programmatic changes can make, a more fundamental conclusion begins to take shape-that the real problem is with the character of graduate programs rather than with the character of their students. Yet most faculty assume that the best students finish their degrees and the less talented and qualified depart. Those who leave are often called "dropouts" to emphasize both volition and inevitability; the term suggests the problem is with the student, not with the program.

Everything about the way students depart reinforces this conviction. Most leave silently; they simply disappear, without communicating any reservations about the program to faculty or administrators. Exit interviews or follow-up contacts with departing students are rare. Moreover, students are effectively discouraged from voicing complaints while they are still actively enrolled. The "successful" student is "happy" and compliant; such a student is more likely to receive financial support, good teaching assignments, and strong letters of recommendation. A student who criticizes the program is a problem. Of course this reasoning is circular and self-fulfilling, since complaining students may well be turned into problem students by neglect or discrimination. Meanwhile, the accumulated silence of previous "dropouts" reinforces the view faculty prefer to hold: the problem is with the student, not the program.

2. Playing around with the Jing Project. Easy as pie -- I just used it to walk a student through the U.S. Census Bureau website, using City College's address for the demo. My first attempt.

3. And via Stereogum: the dance routines of inmates of the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center. It's funny, yes. But this isn't funny: the massacre of Muslim prisoners at Bagong Diwa Prison is only a little over two years old. And the Philippines seems hellbent on pushing more people into prison, including children -- a 30 square-meter cell in Quezon City Jail, for instance, that holds 20 has 180 to 200 inmates crammed in it.

4. My brand strategies professor handed an article out yesterday from the Washington Post by Karen DeYoung about "boosting the image and effectiveness of U.S. military operations around the world" and "establishing a brand identity." The $400,000 monograph from the Rand Corporation -- though the discounted web price is $27! -- argues, among the following (this is from the DeYoung article):

[Todd C.] Helmus and his co-authors concluded that the 'force' brand, which the United States peddled for the first few years of the occupation, was doomed from the start and lost ground to enemies' competing brands.

Helmus added "that it could be too late for extensive rebranding of the U.S. effort in Iraq." I think my professor was amused by all this. I wasn't.

5. Going to hear Slint perform all of Spiderland at Bimbo's tonight. And I'm representin' by wearing my "SUPPORT PINOY ROCK" t-shirt from SaGuijo.

Unpacking My Library.

Right now I'm reading this excellent -- no, fantastic -- book entitled It's All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff by Peter Walsh. No, it's not exactly about organizing your clutter -- it's about examining your emotional attachment to objects and why you still hang on to them. And yes, it sounds like a self-help book, despite my misgivings regarding the genre. But it absolutely works. The only reason I haven't finished it is that I'm going on a decluttering rampage at the apartment right now.

Two things though: you have to be disciplined and ruthless. If that heirloom is so important, then what is it doing inside a box that's in the back of a closet? Give it the respect and honor it supposedly deserves, or throw it out. Haven't worn those clothes in a year? It's on its way to Goodwill. Saving those clippings / ticket stubs so you can put it in a scrapbook later? Later = the future; what about the present? Too busy? Then why is it OK to paw through the piles on your desk for ten minutes looking for a document? (That's me.)

I can't throw that away; it's too expensive! One of my friends who shall remain nameless has been paying $85 a month to store crap he hasn't looked at in three years -- that's almost $3000 worth of "too expensive to throw away" right there! (Getting rid of my clothes were easy, though my T-shirts are increasing. The CDs I've been steadily culling, though I could be doing it at a faster rate; the DVDs are kind of hopeless right now.)

And so I took a good look at my books, wondering what I was really going to use in the future, wondering if I'd ever assign them to students, and thought about how academics are supposed to have good libraries -- no, are supposed to surround themselves with books, and I figured that most of those books will be in the library anyhow, and I already had good detailed notes on them, and so...

Not shown: two bags of garbage, two boxes of clothes, ten shopping bags full of papers and magazines to be recycled (my landlady will have a fit), and three more stacks of books, raising the total to almost 300 books in total. All the above books to be driven to Moe's in Berkeley tomorrow.

Those with good eyesight will spot Bourdieu's Outline of a Theory of Practice and Foucault's Madness and Civilization side by side -- and look, there's Robert Bellah's Habits of the Heart peeking out from underneath! Is that Anthony Giddens I see? A.R. Radcliffe-Brown's The Andaman Islanders? And underneath it, Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment? A beat-up copy of Tristes Tropiques? (Just so it's clear, Distinction, Structural Anthropology, and Discipline and Punish are staying.) Habermas, Goux, Derrida, Jameson, and Baudrillard won't be darkening my door again. But Freud stays. All of Freud.

Gregory Bateson's Naven, even E.E. Evans-Pritchard's The Nuer, too many books that I bought because they were "part of the canon" but never got to read -- gone. Almost all of Malinowski's out-of-print books -- except for Argonauts of the Western Pacific -- into the pile. Only Coming of Age in Samoa and an excellent copy of Growth and Culture are all that will be remaining of Margaret Mead. Victor Turner, however, is staying at the Wily Filipino's apartment.

I love James Ellroy, but am I ever going to read The Big Nowhere or L.A. Confidential ever again? "But it's part of the collection," the devil on my right shoulder protests. No matter -- out it goes. Some time when I'm retired, won't I go, "Darn, I used to own Infinite Jest and never read it and now I want to read it and now it's gone and I can't believe I sold it?" Nope. (I'm keeping my copy of My Dark Places that he signed for me though.) And there's that Roddy Doyle trilogy I'm never going to get to, and that John Irving novel (in hardback, alas, which Moe's probably won't buy). Calvino, Lovecraft, Ligotti, De Lillo's Underworld and Vollmann's The Royal Family, both of which took me months to read -- out the door.

And three science-fiction books I loved, but will probably never read again, are going into the pile: Valis, Snow Crash, and Dhalgren. (Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, John Crowley's Little, Big, and my signed copy of Octavia Butler's Bloodchild aren't going anywhere, however.). The same goes for -- oh, the Poeta will scream blasphemy -- Mike Carey's Lucifer collections. The Sandman's staying, though!

I'm keeping most of the Philippine stuff -- pretty impossible to find here -- but there are probably a few titles that I have no earthly use for (which I bought "just because"), and so they're going too. Almost all of the Southeast Asian ethnographies get to stay, as do the Asian American books -- at least until the next culling.

So yes, it feels good to get rid of stuff -- but the real victory is in not allowing the stuff to enter your house in the first place.

And so some grad student in the East Bay, poking around at Moe's sometime this week, will be the (un)lucky beneficiary of all this clutter. If I'm lucky. Just don't ask how many books I have left.

Pages 1 and 2.

Well, it's done. Three hundred and six pages, on their way via Federal Express to my editor in Philly later today. Just don't ask about how long it took to research and write, because the whole process cost me more than you can ever, ever imagine.

(In comparison, my first book -- I was younger and had more energy, plus it was before I was of drinking age -- came out only a little over four years after I started writing the first paper that led to the whole project. But 90% of it was written during one humid Ithaca summer.)

Despite (or because of) the advance contract, I'm still legitimately fearful of the dreaded "You know, I'm so sorry, but it just doesn't look like what we envisioned" telephone call. I'm still worried about whether it all hangs together. I'm wondering whether I deleted enough of the theory. I'm wondering whether I deleted too much of the theory. And of course there will be more revisions, perhaps even more revisions that I'm prepared for.

But for now, it's done.

(I told my students at City College -- a wonderful bunch of kids, by the way -- that I was going to celebrate by going to Costco and buying myself a new vacuum cleaner, and they laughed. But I was only half-kidding. There really was this nice Electrolux canister vacuum that I saw last time I was there.)

So... if the book ever comes out, and it shows up on Amazon.com, this is what you'll probably see if it has a "Search Inside!" feature. Probably, anyway, if it survives the first round of editing, or if it gets moved somewhere else, and I'm already seeing things I should have changed. Then it's all (hee hee) downhill after the first two pages.

Ahem:

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Chapter 1: A Repeated Turning.

One will hear the joke told, eventually, though it hardly ever sounds like one. It's almost always delivered casually, thrown out like an offhand rhetorical question, as a matter of incontestable fact:

You know why it's always foggy in Daly City, right? Because all the Filipinos turn on their rice cookers at the same time.

The particular teller of this joke (Wally, a newspaper photographer) and I (a student of anthropology) are sitting in scuffed plastic chairs in the living room of his cramped apartment in the Filipino capital of the United States. We are both among the 33,000 Filipino residents of Daly City, California, where one out of three people are of Filipino descent.

It is a freezing afternoon in late August, and we are looking through the damp glass of the window that faces out onto the quiet suburban street. Outside the fog swirls, tugged by the wind into gentle twists of cotton, spilling over the roofs and parallel-parked Hondas. But inside, it is warm, as it does not take much time to heat up the small room cluttered with boxes of bulk food purchased from Costco, cassette tapes, photography books, and an open balikbayan box addressed to Wally's parents in Quezon City. Wally, with a half-consumed bottle of beer in one hand, leans back in his chair after delivering the punch line, and waits for my reaction. I grin widely, because it is hard not to. I've always found it really funny.

Wally is not the first person to tell me the joke. Almost every single one of my interviewees inevitably asks me the question about fog and Daly City. There is very little variation in the way the joke is told, whether in English or Tagalog, whether there is a pause between the question mark and the answer. There is nothing here for linguists to savor or puzzle over. In this instance, for the anthropologist, perhaps what counts most is the teller, not the tale; it is in the teller that the kind of cultural difference worth studying lies. The tale is something we all already share.

And yet, despite its silliness, despite its meteorological absurdity, the joke begins to acquire a sense of both political and semi-religious gravity: to envision the peculiarly affecting image of thousands of Filipinos depressing the rice cooker switch simultaneously, about half an hour before dinner is served, in a daily culinary ritual that comes almost as naturally as breathing. And the steam collectively rises up and out, the fog as a unanimous, quiet declaration of ethnic presence.

In this city, you may not always see the Filipinos. They may be hard at work at their jobs; they may be huddled in privacy behind their drawn curtains; they may be inside the warmth of their kitchens. But they are there. The fog proves it.

Seona Dancing, Again.

I swear, I still keep getting hits on my old blog entry about Ricky Gervais and Seona Dancing. A quick google search revealed that some enterprising soul had linked to my blog on Seona Dancing's Wikipedia entry. No wonder.

Alas, the mp3 for "More to Lose" isn't there anymore (server was simply too small) -- but technology has changed and all. Twist my arm, why don't you?

YouTube video of a live performance.

The lyrics, so emo in their heartbreaking New Wave melodrama:

We used to cry
About the day when one of us might fall
Weak and blindly into another's arms

Demands are gained from jealousies
Would flow like water drowning us
But leaving us with just another
Lover's false alarm

And now it's over
Both of us free
But I feel colder

A thousand tortured lives have fallen
Wounded dying cut down by the
Questions that we've sharpened
Just to save our losing days

We thought we'd nothing more to lose
We'd tear our hearts with jagged truths
And everything we'd hung to for so long
Just slipped away

And now it's over
Both of us free
And I feel colder

I was tired of thinking that
Our love can shine your thoughts
Of our arrangements
Were really not like mine

I thought it over
And it was plain to see the love you said
You once needed
Could just not come from me

And now it's over
Both of us free
And I feel colder

And now we're moving to new beginnings
But as we move we looked once behind
To see what we might find out
Lost loves and old thoughts of our nights of winnings
That lunge, tear and grasp
at lost wanting minds

And finally, the song, which you can all listen to via streaming audio now as often as you want if you haven't already downloaded it from numerous mp3 blogs:

Threadless Pinay.

A Pinay from Cagayan de Oro (Kristy Anne Ligones) just had one of her designs picked for a Threadless T-shirt:

(Her portfolio is linked above, but I think I like her other Threadless submissions better, not to mention this lovely vector illustration of Audrey Tautou.)

Fiddling.

1. It's amazing how much time I can squander trying to learn how to become more productive and more organized. Luna absolutely nails the experience in a blog post from last month. The problem with me is that I implement GTD and various "lifehacks" in spurts -- organizing my desk, or whittling my email inbox to zero -- and then watching it pile up until I get all GTD-frenzied and do it again six months later. I never even got to finishing David Allen's book, but hey, at least I got my folder system set up.

2. Freeing myself from the tyranny of Outlook isn't as simple as it sounds, especially if you're chained to a Palm-Outlook setup like me. I love how the rest of Office 2007 looks and works -- Word is just fantastic, for instance -- but Outlook 2007, despite its aesthetic qualities, is unforgivably slow, even with something as simple as previewing a newly-arrived email in a separate pane. Like most people, my Outlook is burdened with a huge .pst file that I really have no intention of archiving at the moment. (Organizing the inbox emails into folders is one thing; actually deleting and/or archiving the email in those splinter folders is another.)

First, I fiddle around with Plaxo. This web app seems to synchronize with just about everything, so I download the Outlook plugin and perform the sync operation. It's absolutely seamless, dumping my contacts, to-do lists, calendar events, and notes into Plaxo. (It also syncs with Google Calendar.) But I realize this doesn't solve my Outlook problem -- indeed, it only really works as an online "backup" of sorts, and I don't want another entry point. (It also doesn't help that the interface seems a little slow in loading the events, in contrast to the faster Google Calendar.)

Second, what to do with all that email. Prior to leaving for the Philippines for vacation with Izzy, I set up my SFSU account to forward all my email to my Gmail account. It works perfectly.

Since most of my online activities seem to be centered on Google anyhow (Google Talk, Google Maps, Google Reader, etc.), I take the plunge and migrate all my mail in Outlook to Gmail via gMOVE. (And in case I'm offline, Google Desktop puts all those emails at my fingertips in any case.) gMOVE is ridiculously easy, moving all my email messages (though I did that folder by folder, just to be sure) to Gmail, and most important, preserving the date and time they were originally sent. (One drawback: it doesn't keep the Outlook folders I placed them in, so I had to do searches for some keywords / names and label them -- which practically work as different "folders" anyhow.) gMOVE also transfers calendar events and contacts to Gmail / Google Calendar.

So far, so good -- everything in my Outlook has now been successfully migrated online. (I then deleted -- yes, I did -- most of the non-essential email from Outlook, now making my .pst leaner and meaner. Hopefully. The program certainly loads up faster now.) But that's the main problem with Google Calendar: it doesn't deal with Outlook to-do lists. (Yes, I know Remember The Milk works with Google Calendar, but there's no way I'm retyping my to-do lists.) So now I had my task list in Plaxo, but my online calendar of choice was Google Calendar. (And it still looks nothing like the general purtyness of the Outlook Calendar.)

And you folks (if you're still with me) realize I'm forgetting something here, right? That's right -- my Palm Pilot.

I use Agendus on my Palm -- surely one of the best programs made for the Palm, period -- but Agendus for the Windows desktop just looks kind of clunky. Lots of bells and whistles, to be sure, but there's something about it that looks Windows 95ish. After messing with the sync options -- you don't even want to know about how I was trying to make it play with My Life Organized (it doesn't) -- I finally got it to work properly. So now I could work with a Palm-Agendus setup -- except that it doesn't sync with Google Calendar or Plaxo. (No, I don't have a Treo or any of the later Palm models, so I can't sync wirelessly.) And that Win95 interface was getting on my nerves.

Still, there was something about the idea of having everything online that was still appealing to me. The next step was CompanionLink for Google Calendar, which, amazingly enough, lets you sync directly between your Palm and Google Calendar, bypassing Outlook and Palm Desktop altogether. This worked well too, except that I was getting duplicate entries, and... again, that lack of a task list in Google Calendar.

To make a long story short, I've ended up with my old Palm-Outlook setup -- no more mail though, just everything else (mostly that beautiful Outlook Calendar). The Plaxo plugin in Outlook still syncs with Plaxo, which in turn syncs with Google Calendar -- in short, the contact lists / calendars located online will simply serve as backup (or as different data entry points if I'm without my Palm and away from my home desktop). I may still go with the Palm-Agendus setup, but there's little point in paying for another program.

3. Plus I've (temporarily) ditched my Twitter updates -- didn't work well with Facebook, seemed to be down a lot, didn't work well with web feeds -- and moved to Jaiku.

4. And yes, you got that right -- I finally took the Facebook plunge after receiving three invitations in a week (and three years after D from 12 Mile told me about it). I need more friends to add to my 36!

5. Also, I'm sending a nice big package to my editor by the end of this week. It's really getting done. I hope it works out.

Lightning.

[Phone ringing.]

Me: Hello? Izzy?
Izzy: DADDY! I CAN'T TALK TO YOU!
Me: Why?
Izzy: IT'S GONNA LIGHTNING!
Me: What do you mean?
Izzy: IT'S GONNA LIGHTNING AND I DON'T WANT TO BE SHOCKED!
Me: What do you mean? [forgetting that it's the summer] Have you been learning about lightning at school?
Izzy: Yes. [pause] BUT DADDY! I CAN'T TALK TO YOU!
Me: Is it still raining really hard there?
Izzy: IT'S GONNA LIGHTNING AND I DON'T WANT TO BE SHOCKED!
Me: Aren't you on a cordless phone though? I don't think it works the same way, baby.
Izzy: BUT DADDY!
Me: Okay, okay. I love you!
Izzy: I love you too. BUT IT'S GONNA LIGHTNING AND I DON'T WANT TO BE SHOCKED!

[End of call.]

SUNN O))) / Earth / Weedeater, The Independent, SF, 7/4/07.

1. This was my second sold-out show on a weekday (the first was the amazing Battles show, sold out on a Monday night). I arrived too late for Wolves in the Throne Room, a shame.

2. Weedeater: trio playing big lunkhead stoner riffs for the trucker cap and Bud (and bud) crowd. Most hardcore rock-and-roll moment: the lead singer / bassist (Dixie Collins from Bongzilla) turns to one side, proceeds to casually vomit at his feet, and continues playing as if nothing happened.

3. The first time I saw Earth was with the mighty lineup of Circle / Merzbow / Growing. And I thought they were rather dull before, though they must have been touring right after Hex came out. This time there was less fuzz, with Dylan Carlson creating entrancing desert soundscapes with his guitar.

4. And finally, SUNN O))). The setting: a fortress of amps, fog machines running full tilt, colored spotlights barely able to cut through the clouds of smoke. The players: five musicians in monks' robes. (Later the lead vocalist would return wearing a cowl and what looked like a bloody potato sack.) And the sound -- I could compare it to pinning your ears to a jet engine, but I've never done that myself. At some points I could feel a breeze on the hairs of my left arm -- and realized that the "breeze" was coming from the speakers. I can't emphasize enough the physicality of sound as a crucial element in SUNN O)))'s concert; I left the venue feeling pummeled and physically exhausted, though I was hardly moving. The series of YouTube videos from SUNN O)))'s Berlin concerts should give you a good idea, though they're not foggy enough. =)

The "set" itself is one long epic sludgy piece, but there's a beginning and end, to be sure. Guttural Lovecraftian chanting and cymbal scraping at the beginning; ear-piercing caterwauling and decaying piano at the end; time collapsing vertiginously in a black hole of bass rumble and guitar feedback in between.

(If this were an Italian horror film, the ministrations of the servant-monks would cause the altar of amps to crack open with an earthshaking roar, with the audience members convulsing in ecstasy and voiding their bladders in pure holy terror. Shafts of light would pierce through the opening, instantly blinding the audience, but not before they are bestowed with the vision of the gibbering, blind idiot god on its throne.)

SUNN O))) is clearly aware of the theatricality of their very deliberate musical gestures: raise the guitar pick high in the air, lifting it up for all the congregation to see, and bringing it down on the guitar with a flourish. Yes, it's cheesy and obvious, but such is the nature of ritual and worship. And if ritual's function is to unite its participants in collective, transcendent solidarity, SUNN O))) did just that: for 30 minutes (or 60 minutes, or 120 minutes, who knows), everything -- ribcage, cardiac muscle, nasal septum, bass, speakers, walls, everyone -- was vibrating and trembling as one.