a jihad I'd be willing to fund - Wednesday July 10 2002

This morning there was a movie being shot at the Grand Army Plaza entrance to Prospect Park, the entrance I pass every time I take Sally for a walk. It astounds me how much effort goes into the shooting of a one lousy scene that might easily be done with a handheld digital videocamera. They had at least a half dozen trailers parked up and Prospect Park West, a crane, a make-up tent, a huge white reflecting sheet, guys with walkie-talkies redirecting pedestrian traffic, and a food booth with fancy catered cuisine that no one was eating because everyone was either too busy or too obsessed with losing weight. I saw one of the actresses getting her eye makeup touched up, but movie stars aren't really celebrities to me and I didn't recognize her. All I know is that it wasn't Catherine Keener or Drew Barrymore.

Lately my peer-to-peer file sharing software of choice has been Kazaa, heir to the Morpheus empire (after Morpheus made the mistake of switching to a Gnutella backend). I don't actually use Kazaa, I use Kazaa Lite, which doesn't install spyware or harass me with advertisements. In the past I used file sharing mostly for getting music from familiar bands or bands that others told me about. More recently, though, I've been making extensive use of the "Find More From Same User" search, which allows me to look through the entire music collection of someone who already has something I like. It's a little like using the classic Firefly music-matching database system of the early web (a system acquired by my old employer Launch.com and then, in turn - along with me for a time - Yahoo!). Having worked at Launch and seen the databases underlying it, I'm aware that the Firefly/Launch music-matching system is unnecessarily expensive in terms of database efforts. It makes recommendations after comparing your interests with those of every other user. But nearly equal results can be obtained by comparing your interests with only three or four others who share a single common interest. This is why I can find so much interesting new music on Kazaa simply by looking at the music of one individual who shares an interest in a single slightly obscure band. By this process I've discovered two new bands that I've been listening to a lot lately:

Neutral Milk Hotel - I would call this music "dark folk," or perhaps even "folk gothic," though its darkness is shrouded by a cocoon of circumscription, cerebral tangents, and peculiar pronunciation. It reminds me of Songs: Ohia, though it's faster and the chord changes have nearly the emotional power of the Jayhawks. An odd thing about this music is that much of it is done in a waltzy 3/4 time. "Two-headed Boy" (as in "I can hear as you tap on your jar") and "Where You'll Find Me Now" are two of my favorites.

Treble Charger - if you appreciate complicated, frighteningly overproduced punk rock with lots of what is sometimes glam and sometimes geek, this is your band, although (as with the Foo Fighters) it's best not to tell anyone but trusted friends. My favorite songs are the moody, anthemic "Red," "Kareen," and "Brand New Low," a sort of geek-grunge "Stairway to Heaven" for the new Millennium.

In the evening I met up with Jami at an East Village pasta restaurant called Centosette (3rd Avenue and 13th Street) and, as usual, our conversation kept getting sidetracked from her romantic problems of the moment (which, for now anyway, seem not to be problems at all) to her concern about me. Sometimes she thinks I'm sick, sometimes she thinks I'm crazy, but mostly I think she thinks I'm depressed and on the verge of offing myself. "You need to get a job," she kept saying, and each time I'd agree enthusiastically. But, sadly, there appears to be no demand for what I do. On a somewhat related note, Jami was recently out west driving a convertible around in the desert and, in the process, was so cast adrift in time that when she returned to civilization, she found herself wondering "do people still make websites?" To her it seemed that by then the whole process should have been automated.

Jami and I thought about seeing a movie if The Bourne Identity was playing at the big UA Union Square Stadium 14, but it wasn't, so we picked up a six pack of Brooklyn Lager and drank it from Jami's sixth floor balcony above 4th Avenue, the shortest avenue in Manhattan. Periodically Jami would draw my attention to invisible clouds of popcorn fragrance escaping from the UA Union Square Stadium 14. The weather was absolutely perfect: almost cool and Hubble Space Telescope clear. We stayed out there watching the cabs go by until 9pm and then went inside and watched the premier episode of Big Brother 3. Since I last saw Big Brother (the first version), plenty of bugs have been worked out, new mindfucks have been added, and now I'd venture to say the show stands a chance of being reasonably entertaining, particularly if some brave Islamic extremist manages to crash an airplane into the compound. Now that's a jihad I'd be willing to fund.