The Return

    March 31, 2006 – 6:15 pm ·

    If this is the top post when you’re reading this, I’m probably on a plane to L.A.

    Please return your tray tables to their full, upright position

    By will | Posted in daily drift, travel | Comments (0)

      New Mexico Post Script

      March 31, 2006 – 4:22 pm ·

      I’m on my way back today folks. So hide the silverware and all that. It’s been the longest week I’ve had in some time. It’s the key to eternal life, I think. Keeping busy. Don’t slow down. Avoid ruts. You’ll live three or four lifetimes.

      This is the sky from the driveway of my parents’ home. The sky was clear and cold and the moon was the most slender ship of silver I’ve ever seen in the sky.

      New Mexico Sunset

      By will | Posted in cool pics, daily drift, travel | Comments (1)

        Santa Fe Webcam

        March 30, 2006 – 2:53 pm ·

        By coincidence, my brother calls me when we’re downtown Santa Fe this afternoon, so he checks the plaza webcam. There we are (I’m the one on the right doing the weird dance.)

        Santa Fe Webcam moment

        By will | Posted in cool pics, travel | Comments (0)

          Burbank To Hollywood

          March 30, 2006 – 8:30 am ·

          Damn. I just lost my ride back from the airport. Anyone in the vicinity of Burbank Friday at nine PM? Pick me up! Thanks, Mandy!
          Airliner

          By will | Posted in daily drift, travel | Comments (0)

            Montezuma, NM

            March 29, 2006 – 9:31 pm ·

            Dorothy

            This is Dorothy Keightley. She gave birth first to my dad, then to his three brothers and two sisters. She lives in Montezuma, which is a few miles north of Las Vegas, which is about sixty miles east of Santa Fe. She’s the one I always brag about to others over drinks at parties and at bars. She’s the one who, at eighty-two, still paints and hikes and laughs and tells stories and scraps with the locals and carries a hefty opinion about live and love and politics. And dogs.

            This is Annie:

            Annie

            As I mentioned, Keir and Joy and I visit Dorothy yesterday. I haven’t seen her in four years. It has been way too long. For as long as I’ve known her (perhaps even as long as I’ve been alive) she’s lived in a house just up a dirt road from an old seminary (now the United World College.) Things have changed over the years. The spacious, illuminated room where we shared many, many important family dinners has become her studio. She has always been an artist, but it’s only recently that we’ve come to really appreciate her considerable talents. And at eighty-two, she shows no signs of slowing down.

            Dorothy Keightley

            Last Thursday she had her gall bladder out. Three Band-Aids is all she has to show for it. She feels kinda funky, but she’s on her feet and itching to get out of the house and merge with her normal life again.

            Dorothy Keightley

            While Keir and Joy chat with her, I step out of the house to snap a few pictures. Rural New Mexico is a dry and woodsy place. Especially lately, with the crippling lack of rain. But it still has a rich, lush look about it. In back of her house I find an old treehouse that never ceases to amaze me. It was a two story affair, built in a bit of a hurry with little thought to the future. Not much is left of it now, but I distinctly rememeber the amount of pure chutzpah it took to clamber up to the second story.
            treehouse in New Mexico

            As you can see, the first floor is completely gone. In a couple more decades, I suspect all that will remain will be a few nails and a scrap or two of wood. But once upon a time, believe me, there were a couple kids playing on this thing. Here’s how those kids look today.

            Grandsons

            .
            .
            .

            Well, sort of.

            And for the record, a couple more shots of her studio:

            Paints

            watercolor palette

            I love that one of the pencils is colored “turquoise.” How very New Mexico.

            By will | Posted in daily drift, travel | Comments (1)

              Tortillas

              March 29, 2006 – 8:12 am ·

              If you’re ever in doubt as to whether you’re in New Mexico or not, just check the local grocery store shelves. The tortillas are all locally made, with the exception of a teeny tiny stack of one particular Texas Brand. Choices are good.

              Tortillas

              This is in a Lowe’s market in Las Vegas, New Mexico. My brother and his wife and I have stopped off here to buy some lunch to take up to Montezuma, NM, where our grandmother lives.

              I love small town grocery stores. They tend to be a nice blend of the perfectly mundane and the perfectly bizarre. Witness, the creepiest, loneliest teddy bear of all time, which I spot in one of those claw-grabber machines:

              teddy bear from hell

              (Notice me in the background? I’m staring at the poor thing in shock and awe.)

              By will | Posted in daily drift, travel | Comments (0)
              • Music

              Back to Santa Fe

              March 28, 2006 – 7:33 am ·

              New Mexico, north of Las Vegas, south of Raton

              On Sunday I leave Joy and Denver behind and head back down to Santa Fe. This is the playlist for the drive:

              • William Orbit: Hello Waveforms (mellow, contemplative, somewhat depressing, which is appropriate for one leaving Joy behind.)
              • Dane Cook: Harmful If Swallowed (a bit of sparkly comedy to make me giggle.)
              • Earlimart: Treble and Tremble (one of my all-time faves – I’m not breaking new ground here; I need the familiar.)
              • Nick Warren: Global Underground 28: Shanghai (excerpts, especially from disc 2)
              • Mary Lorson & Saint Low: Realistic (Lauren calls me later that night to tell me how much she likes this album.)
              • White Stripes: De Stijl (their bluesy stomp hits my sweet spot. … like a ballpeen hammer.)
              By will | Posted in daily drift, Music, travel | Comments (2)

                Balloon Man

                March 27, 2006 – 8:19 pm ·

                One more photo from Boulder. This guy’s making fun balloon animals. He has just asked the girl what she wants. I don’t know what she answers. But I would have asked him to make me Ebola.

                ebola

                By will | Posted in cool pics, daily drift, travel | Comments (0)

                  Boulder

                  March 27, 2006 – 8:13 pm ·

                  Joy and I spend a fine weekend together in Denver. You can’t tell how much fun we’re having by our expressions in the photo below, which is actually taken on Saturday’s jaunt to Boulder. You’ll just have to take my word for it.
                  Will And Joy

                  Odd thing: seconds after this photo is taken, a pigeon falls from the sky and lands on the pavement in front of us. Plop. Dead. We look up. Seated on the street light above is a very large, very black crow. We look back down. There are pigeon guts on the pavement surrounding the dead bird. We look back up. What is in that crow’s mouth? Why, it’s a pigeon foot.

                  Deprived of its meal, the crow has no choice but to take off. It launches into the air and is gone, pigeon foot and all.

                  Aside from that little bit of trauma, we have a good time in Boulder, cruising Pearl Street and soaking in a bit of the sunshine. Here are a couple pics of some of the more unusual locals:

                  unicyclist in Boulder, Colorado

                  contortionist

                  By will | Posted in daily drift, stories, travel | Comments (2)

                    Nuevo Mexico

                    March 24, 2006 – 11:21 am ·

                    Arizona from the sky

                    In need of a break, I’ve taken a week off work and hopped on a plane to New Mexico. I grew up here, so it’s sort of a homecoming for me. At the same time, my parents have sold their San Luis Obispo house and are exactly in the middle of a move back. My brother and his wife are arriving today, as well as a family friend. The main task at hand is to build a new floor in the living room of the new house. My brother,my dad and the friend will be doing the building. I’ll be providing comic relief.

                    The beautiful bridges of New Mexico

                    That all comes later. I rent a car today. It was supposed to be an economy Yugo or something like that. I guess they’re out of Yugos so they upgraded me to a Jeep monster with, like, 80 miles on the odomoeter. It came straight from the dealership to me. It even has a cd player, which is an enormous frustration for someone like me, who has thousands of albums but no actual discs. After I finish posting this I’m gonna hop in the Jeep and drive to Denver.

                    The New Mexico Sky

                    It’s a six hour drive, so I’ll have plenty of time to fret about how poorly written this post is…

                    By will | Posted in cool pics, daily drift, travel | Comments (0)
                    • Music

                    Nest

                    March 21, 2006 – 11:15 am ·

                    Nest on deck

                    I’m headed for The Land of Enchantment on Thursday morning. I’ll be taking some music with me. Are you surprised? I’ve got some hip-hop that Deep picked out for me. I’ve got some old-school Joe Walsh (if you scoff I’ll know you’re a Philistine.) I’ve got some stellar progressive house tracks picked up recently from beatport.com, including a groovy tribal mix of “Miss Thing” by James Benitez. Good stuff.

                    And I’ll be tossing the E.P. by Nest onto the pile, too. This is actually something I’d been meaning to pass along to you all some time ago, but then the blog got all screwy and then the aliens invaded and then I had a weird dream about bricks, so I put it off. Nest is a local band. Several weeks ago, head chanteuse, Ayana Haviv, actually drops a copy of their e.p. off at my flat in the hopes that I’d write about it. I actually think that’s a pretty gutsy move. What if I don’t like it? What if I think it sounds like someone stepping on a sodden saltine? Because if it does, I’m gonna write about that.

                    As it happens, I rather like it. A lot.
                    Nest EP cover

                    Its best moment comes very early, in the song “Ultraviolet,” which, fortunately, bears no resemblance to the emaciated belly of Milla Jovovich, sonically or otherwise. After coasting along on a tripping rhythmic motif, minute 2:56 finds Ayana and company just blooming into a marvelous little whorl of lilt and honey. I’d post the tune here and urge you to visit cdBaby to buy your very own copy, but I’m a bit gunshy about bandwidth for the moment (see previous post.) For now, check out their MySpace page. “Ultraviolet” streams automatically upon entering. And then visit cdBaby to buy your very own copy. The rest of the EP shows serious promise. I’m partial to “Emergency Landing,” whose melodies and structure hit me where I like to be hit. The EP isn’t perfect, but that’s a good thing. What’s important is that it hints at some very cool things to come. It’s a very polished, slick affair, perhaps too much so, for my tastes. I keep wanting them to fray at the edges a bit, but I suspect, in time, they will. To me, this sounds as if the band is just dipping its foot in the pool and that true glory is on its way.

                    By will | Posted in Music | Comments (1)
                    • Hollywoodland

                    Hotlinkers

                    March 17, 2006 – 1:56 am ·

                    Man, what a pain. Now I know this site ain’t exactly boingboing, but I’ve got my fair share of readers. Even so, my bandwidth allotment at ipowerweb, who hosts HOLLYWOODLAND, has never set foot past the 15% mark. Imagine my surprise when I check my stats tonight to see that bandwidth has suddenly jumped to over 50% in the past couple weeks. A thorough check reveals that, apparently, mp3 search engines have gotten pretty savvy in the past month or so. What this means is that all the music I’ve got sitting on my server for the enjoyment of my visitors has been discovered. One can type in, say, “U2 New Year’s Day” on some mp3 search engine and a direct link will pop up that grabs the song from my own servers and delivers them to the net-surfer on a silver platter as if hauled from their very own vaults. Not so. I’m paying for that transfer. You’re welcome.

                    (UPDATE: Check out this foreign site I discovered this morning that does just that.)

                    Hotlinking image stolen from 100magicbunnies.com
                    (image stolen from 100magicbunnies.com)

                    What’s really interesting is when I check the stats page for all the other links to the site. Apparently, MySpace is a big fan of sixsquare.com. But then, not really. People are hotlinking my images like mad over there. Again, what this means is that when MySpacers post a pic on someone’s page, they just grab it from the Net and drop the link to it wherever they want it shown. It’s funny to see stuff from my own site peppering MySpace boards.

                    But then, it’s not really MY stuff. For example, a commonly hotlinked image is this one. People LOVE Rilo Kiley. but it’s not “mine” in the purest sense. I didn’t take the photo. I found it somewhere on the net. I may have done that pretty lavender tinting and cropped it “just so” and re-sized it all by my lonesome, but it’s not MINE. However, I do happen to host the image. I provide this version for visitors to my humble little site to enjoy. It doesn’t seem fair for someone to send browsers to my server to show it to others. Copy it, fine. That’s what I did (giving credit where credit is definitely due.) But stay away from my servers.

                    Especially, if you’re looking for music.

                    The sad truth is that since I don’t have my own home server and I don’t have unlimited funds, I’m going to have to put a cap on the mp3 posts. I’ll still post when I can, but if there’s the possibility that what I’m posting is going to be popular (like this particular post, or this one) I’m going to have to limit the time frame. There’s gonna be a deadline on this stuff now, folks. If you see an mp3 on this site, grab it, enjoy it and then go buy the cd. I’ve had to go through my media folder and deliberately break some links to keep from exceeding my bandwidth allotment for the year. Savvy websurfers will still be able to find them all, but I’m not worried about them.

                    Heck, I’m one of them. We deserve the world. And in the meantime, hotlinking has been disabled. Sorry, folks.

                    By will | Posted in Hollywoodland, internet, mp3 | Comments (2)
                    • keefe
                    • Music

                    Michael Keefe’s January Reviews

                    March 14, 2006 – 12:52 am ·

                    Uh… a little late. The January blog ovehaul messed up a lot of things. One of the casualties was my scheduled posting of music reviews by wandering minstrel, keeper of the flame and spinner of wild tales, Michael Keefe. But here they are, at last, for your enjoyment and edification. Included in this month’s collection is a cool mini-essay on The Strokes, a very positive look at the new Arctic Monkeys disc and an open-spit roasting of Chantal Claret and her Morningwood bandmates. Click here to enjoy.

                    Arctic Monkeys

                    Coming soon (I hope): Keefe’s February reviews.

                    By will | Posted in keefe, Music | Comments (1)
                    • Cinema

                    The Descent

                    March 12, 2006 – 8:22 pm ·

                    It’s about time someone comes along with a decent horror flick. Neil Marshall, the Brit responsible for Dog Soldiers (which no one really saw,) has upped the ante. His new one is about six women, adventure sportswomen all, who dive into some hithertofore unexplored caves in what looks like New England. What transpires from the point they unclip from their rapelling lines to the scrolling of the end credits should be the stuff of movie legend.

                    The Descent

                    It’s smart, it’s honest, and it doesn’t take us for suckers. Marshall knows that what we DON’T see is scarier than what we see, so the shadows reign supreme. And there are moments of such utter claustrophobia that my skin crawls even upon reflection.

                    The Descent

                    The film was released months ago overseas. It’s already on DVD in England. We’ll have to wait to see it on the big screen here in the States, but we’ve got import copies on disc at Amoeba. Now, those of you who followed my recent material liquidation know that I don’t buy stuff anymore, but there are a few things for which I’m willing to throw down a little cash. An incredibly good horror movie is one of them.

                    Jeremy Wheeler over at Allmovie.com:

                    Thanks to its heightened sense of claustrophobia and desperate human drama that ratchets up the first half of the picture, the director proves that he’s learned what it takes to thoroughly engross an audience and then scare the living hell out of them. With fine casting and pristine makeup work complimenting the ingenious production design and stark cinematography, the film is a home run on all sides of production and sets the bar for small-budgeted indie shockers (the budget ended up only being around six million dollars). Modern horror films don’t even begin to match what The Descent has in store for its viewers — which is a good thing, because one wouldn’t want it to get any better than this.

                    By will | Posted in Cinema | Comments (1)
                    • Hollywoodland

                    Hablamos

                    March 12, 2006 – 12:50 am ·

                    Cat & FiddleThis is the sort of thing that happens on the Mezzanine at Amoeba:

                    A woman approaches the counter. She asks timidly, “Habla Espanol?”

                    Now, some of us do speak a little Spanish, but often it’s not just a little Spanish that’s needed, but rather a complete grasp of the grammar and vocabulary, as well as a working knowledge of colloquial usage and a keen grasp on all of the capitols of every country in South America (the capitol of Uruguay is Montevideo.) So we page someone who knows Spanish and has a free moment and who has been to Montevideo and that person huffs it up to the Mezzanine and finds this timid Spanish speaker and asks “Que quieres?”

                    And she says, “Tiene Patch Adams?”

                    By will | Posted in amoeba, Hollywoodland | Comments (4)