It was sun-showering in State College today and, as a result, I had probably the most amazing happenstance moment involving my iPod Shuffle. For those of you who haven’t had experience with a Shuffle, the little guys and their cute randomizing algorithm have a weird ability to read their owners’ minds. Most of the time, though, this is at least partially a product of owner intent. For instance, I’ve added “Chosen by No One” by Nachtmystium to my iPod Shuffle with the idea that “if I’m in a bad mood, this is what I’m going to want to hear.” Since its safe money to beat on me being in a bad mood, I’m usually able to find that my mood and my Shuffle’s selection match up fairly well.

On a more prescient note, today, as I was saying, it was sun-showering. A light rain fell as the sun shown brilliantly. Further, it was the Friday afternoon of a rough week and I was leaving a bar after meeting a professor and a few friends for drinks. As this rain fell, “Breakfast On the Moon” by Lindstrøm came on my iPod. Surprisingly, that song’s bubbly, space disco style fit well with my general mood of elation and the incongruous weather.

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I’ve decided to start self-identifying as a Mountain Goats fan, now. I don’t know why that seems so important to “officially” “declare,” but I’ve always, before, considered myself an appreciator of Jeff Darnielle’s brand of precocious, lo-fi folk music. Like many actual fans, I questioned his move to 4AD. Like others, I thought Tallahassee was not as solid as his earlier lo-fi work. Then Get Lonely happened. I’m not going to suggest that I got into this album at the appropriate moment in my life, but I could (and, this review on PFM suggests that I could make such an observation).

Anyway, thanks to the “magic” of the internets, I am listening to the stuff I missed between writing John Darnielle off as a sell-out and my encounter with his newest album. Somewhere around the third song on We Shall All Be Healed, I had my epiphany wrt my self-identification as a fan of the Mountain Goats. This whole experience, got me thinking, though, about what it means to be a fan, on a cognitive level.

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I watched the Catalan film, “El Habitante Incierto,” this evening and the movie is quite a creepy treatment of loneliness that, sadly, collapses under it’s aspirations to be a David Lynch film. The plot, as such, is the story of an architect named Felix who finds himself living alone in a mansion after his girlfriend unexpectedly moves out. The film uses unexplained knocks, shuffles, and creaks to convince the audience that Felix might not be as alone in the house as he thinks. Sadly, as a review in Variety pointed out, the film is twenty minutes longer than it should be and blows its wad trying to be “realistic” in its conclusion.

The thing about the film that struck me, though, has more to do with my living conditions at the moment than anything to do with the filmic quality of a movie that you probably won’t ever see but probably should. I was watching the movie in my bedroom on headphones and would occasionally, especially during the first half of the film, hear people knocking around in the rest of the house. Inevitably, I confused bumps on film for bumps in the house. What really bothered me, though, (because I’m so over the technological confusion of reality) was the fact that before watching the movie I had mentally noted the fact that living with my roommates is a lot like living with ghosts. Nice ghosts, of course, but ghosts nonetheless.

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… has gapless playback!

(sorry, that really made my day (and my week)).

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I would imagine that none of you watch as much teevee as I do (because you have “jobs” or “school work” or something else I could put in scare quotes that takes away from leisure time (and makes you a servant of The Man)). Anyway, rather than reading Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, I opted to watch the new episode of The Simpsons (it wasn’t as bad as last season, but that’s not saying much) and the new episode of Family Guy (surprisingly good). Before The Simpsons, this ad came on and I really enjoyed it (I don’t know, but it’s kind of a new favorite commerical (is there some sort of commentary on life in postindustrial America in the fact that I have a favorite commercial?)).

Point is: my roommate (the one I don’t like) asked me who recorded “Spirit in the Sky,” the song featured in the clip. I said I was pretty sure it was Norman Greenbaum (it is), but in proving this point, I started searching around on the internet and discovered that Norman Greenbaum has the greatest website ever.

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I’ve been reading a lot of Situationists recently and one of their big things is the idea of the “dérive”, which is basically a theoretical construction that justifies purposeless wandering in an urban space. As a digression, I also really love that the Situationists claim to want to valorize leisure time (being a graduate student, I’m all for this). Anyway, yesterday I was bored and it was lovely outside, so I decided to see if the Situationists could put their money where their mouths were.

I set out from home with a vague plan to wander around downtown State College. I ended up wandering down Calder Ave. for something like 15 blocks. It was really fun. At one point, I got lost in a parking garage. I found an abandoned building that was pretty groovy. Also, there was some generic sports bar on that street that has the sign, “absolutely no stick ball,” painted on the outside. I can’t decide if that’s for serious or kitschy (which is probably a sign (bah dum bum cha) that we’ve moved beyond the postmodern as a civilization). Anyway, I’ve also never noticed how many highrise apartment blocks there are in this town. It’s sort of like a kitschy, quant, downhome housing project.

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I’ve been stuck in a rut lately. Or, if I wanted to expose my nerd, a “feed back” loop. Things have been going poorly and every little annoyance just seems to add up to yet another example of a vast, global conspiracy targeting me. Little things (like the lid of a new bottle of soy sauce breaking) add to the bigger things that are bothering me. Then I feel even worse because I feel bad for myself when one of my best friends in the whole wide world is deployed to Iraq in the infantry. Anyway, befitting a “down” mood, I keep encountering things that just seem to make my mood even worse.

Item 1: I’m watching the Pusher trilogy at the moment. I highly recommend it to you, but the first one (which is the best, I think, so far (still haven’t watched #3, yet)) is so abrupt and brutal in its ending that I can’t help but feel empty after seeing it (which is especially odd because the main character, Frank, is completely unsympathetic). The second is a major step forward in terms of plotting and technique but it lacks the “raw wound” quality of the first film. Anyway, the movies are going to be showing in some domestic markets soon and I would recommend seeing them if you are so lucky.

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I know this is hella nerdy and, well, whatever. I’m really enjoying WordPress. While it doesn’t have as nice a user interface as Mephisto, it works a lot better and the plugin support totally rocks. I now have all my page statistics from Feedburner and Google Analytics loaded directly into the administrative interface. Further, I can still use Textile (which is great because I’m too lazy to type HTML code).

So, anyway, I guess if any of you ever set up blogs on your own, I would totally recommend using wordpress. It’s very awesome.

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There were some issues with Mephisto recently. Namely, I can’t figure out how to upgrade the stupid software. It’s a long (and boring) story and I’ll spare you the details. So, sadly, I’ve migrated the content to WordPress which doesn’t suck as much as I remembered. I was going to leave this super secret, but I’m having trouble getting the old comments ported over, so I guess I can go ahead and let you in on the secret.

The other major advantage of WordPress over Mephisto is that we no longer have to deal with how incredibly slow Mephisto ran on Dreamhost (due to whatever weirdness Dreamhost did to get Ruby on Rails working in the first place).

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All of you in Atlanta, if you don’t go to this concert, I will never speak to any of you again. You’ve been warned.

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It’s sort of great when things like this happen. Not only is it that “Prestige” (Christopher Nolan’s new feature (he directed the amazing remake of Insomnia, that Batman movie, and some horrible film noir whose name I can’t remember)) looks totally awesome, but now we find out that David Bowie is playing Nikolai Tesla. One of the coolest living people playing one of the coolest people to ever live. I imagine it can’t go wrong.

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