Snake Valley Downs

Oh, hi.

2009-05-27T16:43:00.002-04:00

I'm doing my infrequent posting over here now: blog.lalitree.com.

Recipefilter

2007-09-03T14:04:00.000-04:00

Captured so that I don't forget it: a ridiculously simple and yummy peanut salad dressing that I just now improvised and enjoyed over fresh veggies from our CSA --

1 tsp peanut butter (I used Trader Joe's chunky Valencia stuff)
~1/2 tsp soy sauce
~1/2 tsp brown rice vinegar
~1/2 tsp water

Adjust amounts to taste. Mix until emulsified. Enjoy over lettuce, peppers, tomatoes, etc.!

Zorn

2007-08-30T19:13:00.000-04:00

In case you don't get enough John Zorn in your life, or you think that his music is all squonk and no sweetness, or maybe have yet to be exposed to the man, try this:

John Zorn: "In the Mirror of Maya Deren: Filming"

(From Filmworks. I note with sadness while trying to get a purchase link for this stuff that the Tzadik catalog seems to have disappeared from Emusic. That's a shame, wish I'd gotten more while it was available. You can buy this stuff from Tzadik directly, or pick up the excellent Filmworks Anthology from iTunes.)

Written on a plane

2007-08-23T10:27:00.000-04:00

DFW -> RDU August 22 2007 8:55pm ET

We just passed an amazing sight. In the near-dusk above and to the right of our plane, a gathering of several large thunderheads rising out of the broken cloud cover below. Each of them lit up like a lantern every few moments with lightning, and occasionally sending orange-colored bolts to the ground. Really, like a lantern--every charge would light up the whole cloud from inside, the dusky-blue shape of which I could still see in the fading daylight and the rising moonlight. Gosh, it was cool. The plane banked to the left to just skirt the edge of the system, from my seat on the right side (30F, across from the flight attendant station) I had an excellent view of the whole thing as we turned to avoid it and again to resume course. As we slowly (so it seemed, in relation to the massive clouds) moved around the storm, I imagined we were instead underwater, passing giant colonies of coral jutting up from the sea floor. How I really wished I'd not decided to leave my camera at home for this trip. Now, as it has grown dark, patches of light flicker on and off ahead of us, revealing sillhouetted clouds rather than illuminated ones, with the occasional bolt lighting a path through the dark shapes. Sure, the $5 mini-bottle of red wine is helping, but I've never been as stoked to be in an airplane as I am right now.

More Rock

2007-05-17T21:10:00.000-04:00

How's this for just wrong: my tshirt surgery pic is the #1 most 'interesting' photo matching the search term propagandhi on Flickr. Sure, it's a fairly interesting photo if I do say so m'self, but Flickr has some outstanding concert photographers, and so I'd expected some spectacularly interesting live photos of Propagandhi to show up at the top of the search results. There are a few nice live shots if you dig a bit deeper, but not many. If I had to guess why, it's probably a mixture of: they play in fairly dimly-lit places (guessing), standing at the front of the stage with expensive camera equipment at a punk show is a risky proposition, and they just haven't played that often in 'the Flickr age' (i.e. the last three years).

Last night I watched their newly released "offical bootleg" DVD Live from Occupied Territory. It's a recording of a benefit show they did in Winnipeg in 2003, and proceeds from the DVD sales will also go to their chosen charities. It's a barn-burner of a show, a mix of songs mostly from the then-new Today's Empires and their classic Less Talk, More Rock, with a few rarities, covers, and guest appearances. It reminded me how much, even if their newest record Potemkin City Limits isn't my favorite thing they've done, I love this band, have loved them for at least 10 years now. I'd be surprised if it's made it to Netflix or your local video store yet, but in case it has--do check this out. It's worth it even just to marvel at the huge sound they get out of the simple lineup of guitar/bass/drums. To wonder how lead singer/guitarist/songwriter/evangelist Chris Hannah gets that sound out of his guitar, how me manages to shred on the guitar and on the mic pretty much at the same time.

Dataphilia

2007-04-05T21:43:00.000-04:00

I think way too much about Last.fm. I spend way too much time ogling my page there, watching my stats rack up and seeing how the data paints a picture of my listening habits (and consequently thinking about how you cannot observe something without altering it).

The people who run Last.fm have been making some great improvments to the site recently, cleaning up the design and adding some features. I love the events feature (my events), and the newly-added Flickr integration means that I can tag my photos with a unique Last.fm event ID and have my photos show up on that event's page. Of course, this can't happen until the event is over. But they encourage users to write event reviews, and have given past events enough page-time that I'm noticing people coming back and commenting on past events. Example: the page for this show (Xiu Xiu/Shearwater/Casiotone FPO). They've also got pages for venues and links to related Flickr photos for those as well.

I'm intrigued by the idea of having a record of every show I go to, with links to every photo I take there, in addition to data on every iTunes and iPod play I make. I'm also finding myself using Last.fm as a reference when I want to find out about an artist--the wiki-based biographical info on each artist, while a work in progress, is handy. Combine that with democratically-determined artist photos, event info, user and track data, album tracklistings and song previews, similar artists, charts, tags, journal mentions--it's a remarkably rich resource. I can't get enough.

Recipe time again

2007-03-27T21:45:00.000-04:00

For dinner tonight I made a soup. I suppose you could call it a kind of pho maybe? It was a mushroom/veggie broth with rice stick noodles, egg, and napa. For someone like me, whose tastes tend to run toward the mildly spiced, it was quite yummy. It may look similar to the tricked-out ramen I posted earlier, but it tasted completely different. The ingredients:

a handful of dried oyster mushrooms
two shallots
two small cloves of garlic
1/2 cube of vegetable broth
handful of maifun rice sticks
1 egg
couple handfuls of coarsely chopped napa
tamari
sesame oil
salt/pepper/ginger

I soaked the mushrooms and shallots in ~two cups of water over low heat, for maybe 20 minutes. I then removed the mushrooms and shallots and added the broth cube and the finely chopped garlic, a splash of tamari, a splash of sesame oil, a wee bit of salt and some pepper. I also added a sprinkle of powdered ginger (in a fit of laziness; I had some fresh ginger and it would have been super included in with the initial step). I turned up the heat to medium and added the rice sticks. Once they looked to be nearly done, I scrambled the egg (vegans: cubed tofu can be deliciously used in place of the egg, I only used egg b/c we were out of tofu) and drizzled it into the simmering broth. I then dumped in the napa and let it all simmer for just a few minutes. That's it! Easy, not bad for you, delicious.

Shooting shows

2007-03-26T22:20:00.000-04:00

I haven't been to a rock show with my camera in months (quite a drought for me, I've been ill), but I've been thinking about concert photography lately. I've recently come to a realization about what kinds of concert shots I like best and which particular kind I am beginning to find rather stale. This particular decision is probably something that pros might feel is rock show photography 101, but to a rank amateur like me, it's something of a watershed.

So here to the left is a good example of the type of photo I've realized I no longer really like (I'll use photos of mine to illustrate, since I don't want to use others' photos as examples of stuff I don't like (we're all love here at SVD)): a singer, often with a guitar though not always, standing in front of a mic on a stand, in the act of singing. The singer's mouth is always very close to the mic, so much so that the mic is obscuring part of their face. Because the singer is standing singing into a mic on a stand, and often playing a guitar, they're usually not doing much else.

Here (to the right) is another example--from slightly different angle but fundamentally the same deal. There isn't much motion in these, real or implied, and that's precisely why I've taken so many like this: I'm most likely to get a crisp photo and not a fuzzy blur when the singer has paused to deliver a line. That's just practical, but it's also kind of lazy. Sure, in some low-lit clubs, I'm just not going to get much else without a super-fast lens or a camera that goes up to 3200 ISO, but it's not impossible: looking over my Flickr set of rock show photography, I see that even in the darkest club in town I've had some luck.

And what good is a rule (for lack of a better word; in no way do I claim that this is an actual rule) without exceptions? Of course there are great photos of this type, though I'm pretty sure I haven't taken any. I do like this one, though. I also have noticed that I don't have this same distaste for photos of singers actually holding mics, but I suppose that's easily attributable to fact that they're usually doing something interesting with their hands. This is going to sound corny, but like so many things in life, I guess the best path is to keep challenging myself, to keep constantly trying new ways of approaching a situation and not to ever let myself feel like I know what I'm doing. April is a good month for shows here, I can't wait to get started (all over again).

Have mercy on these poor fools

2007-03-20T22:14:00.000-04:00

Everywhere I turn lately I read someone else dumping hate on the new RJD2 album The Third Hand. Which is a shame to me, because I think it's a great record. I mean I understand--if you love an artist over the course of several albums, you can be forgiven for having a hard time adjusting when that artist fundamentally changes their sound. As a heretofore only casual listener to RJD2, I certainly had fewer barriers to liking a record made entirely of songs from a guy who's loved as a DJ and hip-hop producer, but I think they're good songs, and ones that I'd hope even those with serious misgivings about the format change could come to love. It's funky, synthy, catchy stuff; I liked it instantly. Seek out a track or two and see if you agree with me.

Avant

2007-03-10T21:51:00.000-05:00

I've been listening to quite a bit of contemporary classical and avant garde music lately. Much of it came to me courtesy of The Avant Garde Project, which provides high-quality digital files of avant garde music that was only issued on vinyl and is now out of print. The list of recordings offered for download (as full-size .flac files) from the site is impressive: composers such as Morton Subotnick, John Cage, Jacob Druckman, Toru Takemitsu, and many others. New recordings are made available on a regular basis, first through bittorrent, and then subsequently archived on the site. If you're interested but don't want to make the harddrive space committment of downloading the .flac files, the Analog Arts Ensemble's ANAblog makes .mp3s available of some of the tracks from these collections.

Tricked-out ramen

2007-03-05T18:18:00.000-05:00

This time when I had ramen for dinner, it wasn't quite so lazy. And boy, it was delicious! My recipe for tricked-out ramen is as follows:

1 bag of ramen (I used a mild-seasoned mushroom flavor)
a handful of cubed firm tofu
a handful of chopped mushrooms (I used fresh enoki)
a handful of chopped napa cabbage
a splash of sesame oil
a couple splashes of tamari or soy sauce

Boil 1 - 2 cups of water, add the tofu and mushrooms. Add the ramen seasoning packet and a splash of soy sauce. Cook for a couple minutes and then add the noodles. As soon as they begin to soften add the cabbage. Cook for 2-3 minutes. Remove noodles to a bowl, add back some soup according to your preference. Drizzle with sesame oil and soy sauce/tamari. Enjoy!

Other possible additions: finely chopped garlic or ginger, green onions, spinach, or other veggies.

The Moon Rose Red

2007-03-03T19:57:00.000-05:00

Spectacular lunar eclipse tonight; I watched it rise through the trees, already in total eclipse by the time it came into view. It was beautiful, overwhelmingly so. The neighborhood dogs were going nuts. Now higher in the sky, it has brightened and whitened almost back to its full self.

I made zucchini muffins today, but I had ramen for dinner. One blow against laziness and one truly knockout blow for it. It's okay because I had fresh juice for lunch: two carrots (one medium, one quite small), one pear (bosc), one tangerine, some wheatgrass. Very sweet, super delicious. Still, I need to find more non-orange sweet things to juice.

Oh hi

2007-03-01T19:26:00.000-05:00

Remember me? It's been some time. I abandoned this blog after I got my own domain & started writing there. But soon I started feeling very self-conscious about my posts over there, paralyzingly so. I'm not sure why, I think it has something to do with the fact that the domain name is my own name, and I felt like each post was presenting me to the world. That, and I didn't update that often, so each post was up for so long that I was feeling the pressure of making it good enough to withstand the test of time. And in internet time, a month is forever. So I redesigned my site into more of a personal portal, with links to my various internet presences--my pages on Flickr, Last.fm, etc. I only wrote on my LJ, and not that often.

So yesterday something possessed me to check out my old blog here, and I was surprised by how relaxed I sounded in those old posts--a quality that was certainly missing from my recent writing. I decided to revive this, because I think it's a good exercise for me to write more often, even if it's about everyday stuff like movies and music.

2004-08-12T11:14:00.000-04:00

I don't know what to do with this blog now that I have my own vanity domain: lalitree.com. Seems like updating here would be spreading myself a bit thin, and while I like blogger and the page I've made here, I think I am going to send any new visitors over to the new, all-mine lalitree.com for the foreseeable future.

xo
L

Lost Memories

2004-07-25T22:05:00.000-04:00

This past Friday night we went to see 2009: Lost Memories [N.B.: sound, flash], a high-budget Korean action film. In it, the Japanese and US were allies in WWII, and in their triumph Japan had colonized Korea entirely and Seoul became their capitol (the movie is almost entirely in Japanese). Ethnic Koreans were a minority, but a small, militant group called the KRA (yep, Korean Republican Army) was crashing parties and killing a bunch of people, without clear motive. Enter a couple of JBI (Japanese Bureau of Investigation) agents, one ethnically Japanese and one ethincally Korean, to figure out the KRA's motives. Hundreds of thousands of bullets later, things get crazy, issues of ethnicity, family, and identity are raised, lifetime friendships are betrayed, and--time travel! Unfortunately there are also more than a few cheesy scenes, and the ending is a tad confusing in that yeah-but-if-he-travels-through-time-then-X kind of way.

I liked it, though it was flawed. It seems like it might have been a great movie if it had been shot with a smaller budget, so that we might have been spared some of the embarrassing cheesed-out parts. A remarkable number of people get shot throughout its course. All in all, a worthwhile $7.50 for an interesting plot that makes for good after-movie conversation, some nice camerawork, and an example the Asian take on the big Hollywood action/sci-fi flick.

2004-07-23T15:01:00.000-04:00

A few years ago I gave my original 233MHz Bondi blue iMac to my sister, since we'd gotten a flat panel iMac G4. I said if they ever didn't want it, I'd take it back, since I was kinda sentimental about it (my first real computer). Last year sometime they too upgraded to a flat panel iMac, so they shoved the 233 back in its box and put it in their basement. Last week, my mom was at my sister's to visit and no doubt instigated some massive basement-cleaning operation, and she uncovered the iMac and called to ask if I wanted it. I sorta waffled on the answer--I did want it, but JD didn't want anything extra cluttering up the house. I said I'd call her back in a day or two, and I figured in the meantime I'd try to convince the hubby that it wouldn't just sit in its box taking up space. I didn't call back, but when mom next called she said she'd gone ahead and sent it anyway. Now I'm in trouble, and I have to somehow get the iMac to earn its keep in our house--anyone know of a way to put an old machine like that to use? It's only got 4GB of HD space and 192MB of RAM. Our DSL comes with a static IP but we only get 128KB upload speeds, or I'd use it as a web server. I need to come up with something other than "you know, for guests to use", or I'm gonna be in the doghouse.

2004-07-07T20:49:00.000-04:00

I don't know, I think it takes all the fun out of it. If I were an mp3 blogger*, I'd bristle at the notion that people just want to scrape the songs, and not read what I'm spending my time writing. Sometimes I'll even download something and not listen to it right away, and then wish I could remember where I got the song from so that I could read what they'd said to make me want to download it (often this happens when I listen and think "ick, where the hell did I get this?").

*So yeah, I don't think I'm going to jump on the mp3-blogging bandwagon, because really, the mp3-blogs-come-lately have sorta been subpar. I still enjoy the ones I read (StG, TtIKTDA, LHB, MoeRex, FluxBlog, lacunae, MFR), but some of the new ones just seem like mediocre attempts to be a scenester/net luminary. The best ones are still great though--StG has a really well-written paragraph today about a Weakerthans song, and he nails it, describing exactly what's great about that song in just a few sentences. Seems like it'd be a shame to just get the song and not read the eloquent description. And yeah I gotta be honest, it's not just taking the fun out of it, it's just taking it, and that's kinda shitty to the artist and blogger both.

New audioblog

2004-06-12T11:11:00.000-04:00

Douglas has started audioblogging. His approach is slightly different from most mp3 blogs however: all his mp3s will be posted with permission of the artists (and Douglas knows lots of artists), all tracks from 7" singles, not available on CD in the US. Get this on your regular reading list if it's not there already.

Coolest thing of all time.

2004-06-04T20:47:00.000-04:00

My newest article of clothing, from the geniuses at Neighborhoodies.com.

2004-05-25T21:16:00.000-04:00

The other night I saw Okkervil River and Shearwater play. These two bands share three members, with O.R. adding a drummer and Shearwater adding a double-bassist and a drummer/vibraphone player. The three shared members play a mixture of guitar, keys, bass, lap-steel and mandolin, and sing. The main singer/songwriter in each is different and was the reason I really liked Shearwater but didn't quite groove on O.R. I do like O.R. fine, but Shearwater are special--Jonathan, the wünderkind-leader of the band, has a gorgeous voice and uses it, belting out the emotional parts with clarity and power, whispering the soft parts with grace and control. It's everything Bright Eyes should have been, but just aren't gifted enough to pull off (and with none of the pretension). Shearwater's songwriting is great, and the live arrangements are wonderful--the vibraphone is gorgeous and added an incredible quality to the songs in which it appeared, the lap steel blew me away, and the upright bass was solid.

They've made some songs available on their website, including this one, a standout from their latest record Winged Life (Misra).

--[[ Shearwater, "Whipping Boy" ]]--

OWNED.

2004-05-22T20:54:00.000-04:00

Michaelangelo Matos destroys the latest "Wednesday Morning Download" column, something that I wanted to write when I read that column last week too. Matos does it much better and more thoroughly than I could have, though. The upbraiding starts in paragraph 3. A juicy excerpt:

"...writing a weekly column for a national publication and repeating yourself three times in the space of a paragraph, or professing astonishment that the music industry works the way it's worked for the past two decades, or being flabbergasted that publishing a review page devoted almost entirely to indie rock might lead to a readership that listens nearly exclusively to, what's this, indie rock--that's incompetence.

There is more. "I've never been fond of Modest Mouse," Bartlett writes, "and I can't really explain why, except to say that Isaac Brock's voice doesn't appeal to me." Guess what? You are, nominally, a writer--specifically, a music critic. That means your job is to explain why you do or don't like something. If you can't really do this, perhaps you should learn to do your fucking job. And failing that, perhaps you should find another line of work. "

Here's a song then

2004-05-21T09:58:00.000-04:00

Inspired by the excellent David Byrne/Rufus Wainwright song posted over at TTIKTDA today, I thought I'd share a little Rufus song that many of you might not have, as it is from a movie soundtrack. The song is from the opera Le Roi d'Ys by Edouard Lalo (1823 - 1892), and this song "Vainement, ma bien-aimé!" comes from Act III, wherein the heroic soldier proclaims intent to marry the daughter of the King of Ys. It's a gorgeous song, and well-suited to Rufus's solo piano treatment. Also, I have a particular weakness for Rufus singing in French.

--[[ Rufus Wainwright: "Vainement, ma bien-aimé!" (Le Roi d'Ys) ]]--

Step by step

2004-05-20T20:19:00.000-04:00

Snake bite update, 12 days later: I can sorta walk now. Yeah, every step hurts, but it's a pretty great feeling just to be able to get across the freaking room without those awkward crutches. I still use one crutch on my left side when my foot is really hurting, but hopefully there's just a couple more days of that. The darn foot is still quite swollen and sore up to about mid-calf. Ugh. Moral of the story: don't wear sandals in the woods.

Oh boy

2004-05-20T12:57:00.000-04:00

StG says that Blogger is offering Gmail accounts again. *crosses fingers* Y'know, I really hope that once Gmail goes global, .Mac ups their storage space. 15MB for $99/year begins to look like a bum deal in the face of 1GB.

Lights are blinding my eyes

2004-05-19T15:53:00.000-04:00

I think I have a huge crush on the way Mike Skinner delivers the line "That tastes like hairspray".

Like a shoe, or a drain full of hair

2004-05-18T11:39:00.000-04:00

It's hard to resist the temptation to become (at least in part) another one of those new-fangled mp3 blogs. They're popping up everyday lately, so while I wouldn't be among the first, I'd certainly be among the first girls to do it, for what it's worth. Thing is, I'm not a SoulSeeker so my access to non-legit pre-releases is nil. But it might be fun anyway. Maybe I'll mix some songs in with the regular entries.

Also, I've decided that those mp3 blogs need a better name than "mp3-blog." Here's my first idea: if weblog=blog, then musiclog=clog. Clog! Whaddaya think?

This is the start of what was

2004-05-17T21:10:00.000-04:00

Tomorrow should be a good day, even though I'll be hopping around clumsily on my crutches yet again. It's my birthday! The last birthday of my 20s. Also I hope to get the new Morrissey CD and an actual copy of the new Streets CD that's been rocking my world for the past month or so--both records are released tomorrow.

[ Stream the entire Streets record here ]

High on the hitlist lately has been my new favorite practice of sitting out on the deck in the evenings, when the temperature is neither hot or cold. It's a darn near perfect experience.

This is getting bizarre

2004-05-15T16:15:00.000-04:00

There is a bird trying to get into the house. It has smacked into the window five or six times now, and I have no idea why. Each time it comes flying up to the window, each time whacks its entire body on the glass and falls down to the windowsill looking slightly dazed.

I think this bird is nuts--now it's sitting on the railing staring off into space. I know, how can you tell when a bird is staring into space, right? Well, birds don't usually stand still, they are constantly looking around and twitching. This one is just standing there with its head cocked at a funny angle. What is this crazy bird doing on my porch?

Now that I've had some time to look at this bird, it appears that it's missing a large portion of its tailfeathers or something--it doesn't look quite right. Maybe it can't fly straight without those feathers, but that doesn't explain why it wants in the window so badly. Still just hanging out on the railing. It's been sitting there for so long now that the cat has lost interest.

Whee!

2004-05-14T23:01:00.000-04:00

Two Tylenol 3s later, things are mellow as a mushroom. My damn foot still hurts though! But at least I don't care as much. Too bad those Percocets make me nauseous, or it would be a party.

It goes on.

2004-05-14T20:36:00.000-04:00

You know, you just don't appreciate how truly disrupting it is to be on crutches until you have to be alone in a two-story house for two days. I almost didn't eat dinner tonight 'cause I didn't want to go through the trouble of hobbling downstairs, balancing on one leg while carrying food from fridge to stove, finding condiments, dishes, silverware and napkins, and trying to figure out how to carry a beverage at all. It's difficult.

Post two

2004-05-11T11:12:00.000-04:00

I think I like Blogger--it feels more like I'm typing in a vacuum than when I post to my LiveJournal, since the community is really LJ's strongest feature, but I guess that's okay, they're not really the same thing. LJ has always seemed like a group of friends; BlogSpot feels more like self-publishing.

I started this blog on day two of being laid up in bed due to a bite by a copperhead snake. Now on day three, slight progress has been made in healing of my foot, swollen from knee the bite spot on my left pinky toe. I still can't really stand up or even sit up, since lowering my foot from its elevated position causes it to hurt like mad.

Getting to be a total bum and lie in bed all day is great, but I'd like to be able to get from here to the bathroom without assistance soon. It's good to have goals.

Ahoy hoy

2004-05-10T19:40:00.000-04:00

This is a test, y'all.