More Indian-American Jazz

Apti, by Rudresh Mahanthappa and his Indo-Pak Coalition. I love the title composition.

Domain Live for Another Five Years

Probably...

pairNIC has an absolutely clunky payment interface, which among other things warns you to not click finish multiple times, as your credit card may be billed over again, but then rejects your submission several times on trivial nitpicks, such as not listing the name of the bank issuing your card! Who does that, really? And I have my card from Discover.com, the issuer. They are not a bank. Are you going to reject my payment after you see that I listed Discover.com as the bank to get your stupid form to accept my input? Really? Or are you just going to try charging my card multiple times, once for each FAIL you created?

This is not the first computer failure I've experienced today (it is the third, after trying to do some online stock option manipulation and failing [they wanted my employee id number, fer crissakes], and then trying to import bank history into Moneydance and seeing all accounts duplicated and intermingled). So yeah, figured I'd gripe.

But if the basics go well, I get to hang onto terebi2.org for five more years.

Historicity

Newest album from Vijay Iyer, Historicity is a collection of homages to compositions in other genres. Gotta say I really dig his version of Galang.

Silver Blaze

Renee had a project to read a bunch of Sherlock Holmes over the last few weeks. She's almost done, but as she started with The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, I grabbed it from Project Gutenberg and followed along on my iPod Touch. She then started on The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, and I just finished the first story, The Silver Blaze. I don't think that she's going to read the entire collection this time, but I'll probably work through it slowly as it is a pleasant nostalgia trip for me.

Tualatin Hills Recreation Park

Just remembered one other cool thing we did last weekend, and which I hope we can do again. We drove to Jean's workplace, the Portland Clinic, and walked from there to the Tualatin Hills Recreation Park. Even though it's in the middle of Beaverton/Hillsboro, it's a pretty sizable nature park, and you can walk around in it for forty minutes without hitting the other side. It was very fun. Renee was enthusiastic and pining for pre-industrial days...

Recent Movies

Jean and I went together to see Up In the Air, and were mildly disappointed.

We tried to watch the DVD Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, which was an HBO production, but while it tried to be multi-narrative, it was just disjointed.

I tried to watch a movie from my childhood, How to Murder Your Wife, and Jean gamely tried to watch along. It's rather dated, misogynistic humor, but Jean said the real problem was that it was so predictable. I only saw this once before, when I was nine years old, in the back of my parent's station wagon at a drive-in in Washington, D.C., and the parts I remembered were the kid-fun parts, where Jack Lemmon acts out the stories of a super-spy. Figures.

And, last weekend, as a solo outing, I went to see Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, which felt a lot like the early, imaginative, vibrant Gilliam.

New Music

First, a rather kicky modern jazz album: Renegades - Nicole Mitchell's Black Earth Ensemble.

And now eMusic has The Cure! But I've run low on credits, so for now, just three of my favorite songs:

• Pictures of You


• Just Like Heaven


• Why Can't I Be You?

Update

And it turns out, if I leave for work early enough to beat the traffic, three Cure songs exactly cover my commute! Nothing quite like pulling into the parking lot as Why Can't I Be You? is ending it's final riff...

Recent Music

Since I've been lazy as usual, I'll update the music in a bunch:

• Bang On A Can Meets Kyaw Kyaw Naing is an album of music by a traditional Burmese musician, Kyaw Kyaw Naing, as performed by the same group which turned me on to Terry Riley


• Experience Hendrix - Jimi Hendrix. Just a pile o' Hendrix since eMusic started carrying him. To tell the truth, I've only really listened to it once since I picked it up.

Twitter

For any friends who are on Twitter, I've opened an account, @dpwakefield (since I can't get the account ThePhin, which was taken). I don't plan on 'tweeting' much, if at all, as my main reason for starting one was to get a discount on a money management package that I'm thinking of switching over to from Quicken...

Two More Movies

Today put two more movies under my belt. Streaming from Netflix, I watched Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, which is one of three films by Chan-wook Park on the theme of vengeance and how people get trapped by it, and how it affects them. While I'm sort of glad I finally watched this film, let me say that it is more or less unrelentingly bleak. Not much happiness for anyone. There were moments of humor, and quite a few of surreal oddity, but mostly bleak, bleak, bleak.

The other movie I saw was in the theater with my family: Sherlock Holmes. While they took some liberties with the characters, I felt most were in harmony with the originals. The story was similarly sinister to those of previous film adaptations, the setting was rendered very believably, and the music just felt right (thank you Hans Zimmer). There are a couple of scenes foreshadowing a follow-up movie, and given the panache with which the first was delivered, I can't say I would mind seeing the second. Guy Ritchie turns out to be good at mass-market escapism.