I’ve spent a good deal of time tonight working while listening to Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians. This piece of music fills me with such joy… the pulsating patterns wash over so I can just relax and get some work done. Ideal focus music.
Just came back from Area2—got to see David Bowie and Moby. Bowie is one of my favorite musicians, and he put on an amazing show. It featured quite a few oldies, including Ziggy Stardust, one of my favorite Bowie tunes. He also sang about half of the songs on Heathen, although he didn’t do Slow Burn which is (IMHO) the best track on the album.
The Moby set was OK. I love Moby’s albums, but his particular brand of tecno-gospel does not translate well to a live show. The man compensates for the lack of real instrumentation by running around the stage like a maniac for no apparent reason. The music is also a lot more aggressive than on the albums, with tons of distorted guitar—which I found to be an unwelcome addition to most of the songs.
Last night I bought Bjork’s Vespertine. One of the tracks (“Unison”) has the following lyric:
You gardener, you discipliner
Domestically
I can obey all of your rules
And still be
I never thought I would compromise
I never thought I would compromise
Mind you, I heard this lyric as I was driving my lawn mower to be repaired. My lawn mower. I never considered the possibility that I would own, much less use—and break—a lawn mower. I guess my combat boot days are officially over. I’ll be damned.
It used to be that I would always be experimenting with new technology, especially on my computer. (Of course, I would be constantly having to reformat my hard drive as a result.) Now I feel like I’ve achieved a working environment that I’m comfortable with and that can live with for a long time without much tweaking. (I’m using WinXP. Still have SuSE on one of the partitions, but barely ever use it.) Is this a bad thing? Does this mean that now I’ll be able to focus my energy on actually doing something with what I’ve got rather than toying around with the core stuff?
I gotta pick up the lawn mower on Monday.
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