Albums: two by We Were Promised Jetpacks

Here I'm going to depart from my usual album review format where I discuss a single album that I've been listening to for years.  Instead, I'm going to talk about the new album by We Were Promised Jetpacks, In the Pit of the Stomach, and how it's different from their first, These Four Walls.

Here's the song that got me hooked on the band, Moving Clocks Run Slow from These Four Walls:

The lyrics are catchy nonsense (is it about special relativity?) and the vocals and drums are up front in the mix.  The sound is spare, the pace propulsive.  It has groove.

I bought the new album because WWPJ played at the Grog Shop on November 1st.  Here's Medicine from In the Pit of the Stomach (not a live version):

The sound of this song, and most of the rest of the album, is grander, more epic.  The rest of the mix has been brought up alongside the vocals and drums, and there's just more going on.  More layered guitars, more effects, everything.  It feels like the difference between a live record with four guys making disciplined noise and a studio album where full advantage was taken of the multitracking.  Sadly, the new one doesn't play as well against background noise:  in my car, I can't hear enough of the detail to really get a feel for the song; instead I want to listen to it on the good stereo at home.  The popping, high-dynamic-range songs on Walls never needed that.

In the Pit of the Stomach feels more mature to me than These Four Walls.  Maybe this is the sound of a band growing up:  graduating from playing in bars to playing in studios.  Sadly, they didn't play Moving Clocks Run Slow at the Grog.  It was a great show anyway.

Cleveland Beer Week capsule reviews

Cleveland Beer Week is over.  We have now entered Cleveland Water Week.  Seriously, that was like running a gauntlet.  In chronological order:

My wife attended the opening ceremonies, "Grains Versus Grapes", though I did not.  (The link to the main Beer Week page above has the official descriptions of all the events.)  It's a simultaneous pairing of food with both beers and wines.  Alice reports that there were some flaws with the execution of the event:  it wasn't clear that there was both a beer and a Cava served at different stations to start, and nothing was said about the wine and beer for each course until after the course was over.  She'd have preferred to know why they were chosen to go with the food.

The next day, Buckeye Beer Engine trucked in a mess of oysters and served them with Rogue beers.  The oysters were pretty good and we got flights of Rogue beers on tap, which is a special treat.  My wife stayed to watch the Illini play football while I went on the Magic Hat Liquid Hunt.  It was a bar crawl with a scavenger-hunt theme.  We walked three miles west on Detroit Avenue through the city of Lakewood, stopping at ...um... four bars along the way.  It was a little blustery but a good time and I'd never been to any of the bars.  The organization at the start of the event left something to be desired - trying to process hundreds of people through an already crowded bar was not the brightest idea.  (Why take tickets in the *back room*?  Why not the foyer?)

On Tuesday, I had the great privilege of meeting Larry Bell of Bell's Brewery, whose beers I've been drinking since probably before I could do so legally.  The occasion was Bell's Eccentric Cafe On Tour, a six course beer and food pairing at the Beer Engine.  The food was made by the chef who mans the Touch Suppertruck, and the courses ranged in quality from quite good to sublime.  Several of the pairings were very good, and made me see some of Larry's beers in a new way.  (I never liked the Oarsman Ale much, but now I appreciate it.) The only hiccup was timing:  during one of the intermissions between courses, the Q&A went on too long, and it upset the kitchen's ability to get courses out.  The event started at 7 and we didn't get out until after 10:30.

Friday came, and with it an event Alice had missed in previous years:  Ales On Rails.  Beer is served on a train traveling south to Akron along the Cuyahoga; there's a new beer every half hour and a boxed meal.  Our group had a good time, but I'm glad we bought tickets for the cheap car, because we had space to move around.  The more "luxurious" cars were prettier but more crowded.  In the end, I was disappointed that we couldn't see out:  when the train got underway at 6:30, it was almost dark outside.

Finally, on Saturday, we went to Brewzilla.  I was on the fence about going because I had heard that in previous years the crowds were intense.  I needn't have worried - or perhaps the warning served to reduce my expectations.  We had a great time.  There were 60 or so tables, each serving samples of four beers; a ticket system for servings kept rampant consumption in check.  I discovered some beers I'll definitely be looking for in the future:  Liefmanns Cuvee Brut and Goudenband were outstanding.  The food was just OK, but I had taken the preemptive step of eating a heap of french fries at happy hour beforehand.  Oh, did I mention that before the event I had Bell's Batch 10000 on tap at a local bar?  I did.

It was a great week - but not the sort of thing I could do all the time.  A friend of mine takes beer week off as vacation every year, and I can see why.  Between the main events and all the little side celebrations at local bars, it's a great opportunity to broaden your beer horizons and taste some special offerings.

Fonts and their meanings

Much has been said about the need for a "sarcasm font". What does a font tell you about the tone of what's written in it, or the personality that chose it?  Here's a pictorial guide.

Comic Sans:

Old English:

Copperplate:  (note - copperplate is the font on my personal card.)

Courier:

Harlow Solid Italic:

Papyrus:  (my company used to have a safety poster about forklifts written in this font.  really.) 

Showcard Gothic:

Stencil:

Do you have any to add?

Swans at the Beachland Ballroom, 9/23/11

Swans are a band.  I'm somewhat at a loss to describe them in more detail; Allmusic has a lot of words about them at this link here.  I'm just sitting here opening and closing my mouth like a fish.

I can't say I wasn't warned.  The opening act, Sir Richard Bishop, graciously accepted some applause during his set and muttered, "Swans are gonna **** your faces off."  And they did.

Swans' set started out loud.  It got difficult to talk over the looped synthesizer, but we didn't see anybody on stage so we weren't sure they were actually playing yet.  A guy stepped out and started hammering repetitively on some hanging bells, adding to the noise.  And another guy.  And another - six total.  It was arrhythmic, throbbing, and glorious.  It droned.

Drone music is usually soft, like late afternoon in a meadow, or like bread that's fallen into dishwater.  Not like this.  Swans are to drone music as the Navy's active sonar is to whale speech.  Actually that's a very good analogy.

Confetti fluttered down from the cieling of the Ballroom.  It had probably been there since New Year's Day, if not longer.  Every square inch of my clothing vibrated, including the soles of my shoes.  I wouldn't have been surprised to look down and see an outline of dead skin cells on the floor around me.  I felt physically lifted up like a puppet on strings.  With every follicle on high alert, the sensory overload wiped out all my thoughts and pushed my consciousness into my body.  My beer went warm. 

God help the poor bastard who was trying to put on a show in the Beachland Tavern in the same building.  (It was the Schwartz Brothers.  Glen Schwartz was one of the early guitarists for the James Gang, and he's kind of a savant.  I figure he either thought the noise was just in his head, or else he went ballistic and preached hellfire from the mic all night.)

Go see Swans.  Bring earplugs.

How did they know???

I regularly caused consternation among the nuns at my Catholic grade school.  During one religion class, we were being taught what "AD" and "BC" meant for calendar dates.  I raised my hand and asked how the people back then knew what to call it.  The teacher reiterated, "it's After Death and Before Christ, Jeffrey.  Now moving on..."  And I said:  no, no, back in 100 BC, how did they know to count the years backwards?  Did they know Christ was going to show up in 100 years??

The class erupted, of course.  This was a head-scratcher.  Nobody really had the presence of mind to tell me that they probably called the years something else back then.  I guess it's hard to see out of such an ingrained way of looking at things.

And now I have my answer:  over at The Renaissance Mathematicus, thonyc tells us that the use of "AD" started around the year 525, and "BC" came into use in the 1600s.  Apparently beforehand, they had numbered the years by the reigns of the popes.

And that's your history lesson for the day.

The Permanent Floating Cocktail Party

A strange thing has happened in the Cleveland meetup.com scene:  there are a dozen or so groups with similar themes throwing large social events practically every day of the week; the same people show up to every single one; and you can't tell them apart.  It's like a permanent floating cocktail party.

Author Larry Niven once wrote of a "permanent floating riot club" that developed shortly after the invention of teleportation in a fictional future society.  Once any kind of disturbance broke out anywhere in the world, word got out, and immediately thousands of people teleported there to break things and loot the place.  It got to the point where there was always a disturbance somewhere, and there was a steady flow of people joining and leaving this flash mob, so it became a full-time riot moving from place to place.

That's kind of what's happening here, but with drinking instead of looting.  And the Internet instead of teleportation (which, admit it, is almost as good).  Cleveland has a beer group, several wine groups, a spirits group, a happy hour group, a nightlife group, a "social" group, a 20s and 30s group, a 30s and 40s group, a "party connection", etc - this is nowhere near an exhaustive list and I don't mean to single anyone out.  My point is that most of them make little or no attempt to differentiate themselves.  To further blur any distinctions between them, events are usually cross-posted to multiple groups.

Is this necessarily a bad thing?  What should we expect from a meetup group? 

The value of meetup.com is that it's a filter:  the people who come to meetups are the ones who are open to meeting new people.  In contrast, if you just go to a bar here and try to make new friends, you might get suspicious looks and cold shoulders.  For the most part, I think that's still true in the Permanent Floating Cocktail Party, though I'm no longer new here so it's hard for me to say from personal experience.  Some of my friends, though, have had bad experiences:  territorial behavior, gossip, that sort of thing. 

And this shows us something interesting:  the party has gotten large enough that it's no longer intimate; some people have begun to treat other attendees as though they were random strangers.  There's a strange transition that happens when a group gets to a certain size:  you sense that you'll never know some of the people in it, so you present a persona, a public face, that establishes a reputation for you among the people that you do know.  You start treating people less carefully, because they're just part of the scenery that you're projecting yourself on.  That is clearly happening in Cleveland.

My wife fumes with indignation that there's more than one wine group.  She takes it as a personal affront that anyone might find hers wanting in some way, and she says that the other groups' themes are feeble.  I keep telling her that meetup groups don't really have to have themes, though it's a nice way to bring new people in.  What really makes a group a distinct thing is the personality of the organizer, which sets the tone of the group.  The organizer determines what kind of behavior is acceptable, what kind of activities will take place, and in general how rigid or freeform the events will be.  In the Permanent Floating Cocktail Party, events are very freeform and the organizers make little effort to use the force of their personality to set a tone.  That's one thing that my wife does very well, and it sets the group she co-organizes apart from the others.

Most meetup groups, to be clear, don't involve alcohol or parties.  They're strongly focused on their themes, like book clubs or exercising or blogging.  That's the outsider's view of meetup.com:  that it's a way for geeks to find each other and share their obsession in person.  The vast majority are small and meet infrequently, and that's what their members want.  In that context, these giant themeless social nights are pretty odd.

When it's all said and done, you can go out any night that your schedule is open and have a drink with some strangers who will be willing to chat.  The event itself won't have a lot of personality, and you might encounter some high-school-like behavior, but it can be a lot of fun.  You never know who you'll meet, and in an unscripted live encounter, anything can happen.

The hatchet man

This post is fiction. My objective was to bring together three story elements in 500-1000 words.

Harald didn’t recognize the bartenders. He hadn’t been to Newark Airport in over a year but he remembered this bar having long-timers. That might have been too much to hope for in a place full of fungible employees selling disposable distractions to captive audiences most of whom will never return.

Tourists obstructed the place like arterial plaque. He picked a quick path to an empty stool. Down the center of a high countertop for laptops, a philodendron wound between the spindles of a decorative railing. It was real. Somebody must have been working here long enough to keep this plant alive, he thought, unless travelers have been pouring unfinished Guinnesses into its pot.

The low railing provided a symbolic separation from the person across from you, but it wasn’t enough for privacy. It was there to keep a self-entitled road warrior from pushing his laptop straight back into somebody’s fries. Across from Harald, a birdlike man in purple divided his attention between a small spiral notebook, a wrap sandwich, and the contents of his pockets, darting from one to the next without any apparent plan or smoothness of practice but without tension.

“Joe? Joe Calcioni?” Harald tilted his head with the question. When the man’s face came up, Harald was sure, and he extended his hand. “Wow ... Harry ... I haven’t seen you since high school,” he said. A little blood drained from Harald’s face at that. Joe had been a friend of a friend, and that friend had snapped, as males between the ages of 18 and 20 are prone to psychosis. He hadn’t used guns like some action movie revenge fantasy. He had killed like an animal, rabid, with the superhuman strength of rage and an axe from a fire extinguisher kit. Harald had seen his friend that day, through the windows between the office and the hallway, but their eyes had not locked.

There had been a lot of funerals. And no reunions.

Blinking hard, Harald released Joe’s hand. “So, what brings you to Newark? Are you coming or going or just on your way through?” “Going. I live in Philadelphia but I was in New York for work.” “Me too, Trenton. Environmental consulting for the state government. I live in Chicago now.” Harald took a sip of beer and the great purple bird nodded, the heavy contents of his breastpocket swaying from his shoulder like a sling. Joe had always loved baggy clothes. He’d wanted to look like that singer Bryan Adams but lacked the swagger. “A lot of us moved away. I kept track of a few people and they all went to college out of state and never looked back.”

Harald considered that. “My first year in college is pretty hazy. I was, ah, living in a state not conducive to memory. But I met a girl, kind of a modern hippie, a big environmentalist. I like numbers so I went into engineering. You would not believe some of the post-industrial wasteland this state has to heal.” Harald shook his head, and Joe said, “You ever work with Vertical Power?” “Yeah! They had a big layoff last year though, no big new jobs.” Joe pursed his lips and touched each of his pockets. “What?” said Harald. “How do you know Vertical?”

Joe cleared his throat, looking down. “That was my gig. The layoff. I’m with a human resources services firm. Outplacement.” Harald straightened, his eyes widening. “You’re a hatchet man!” He had practically yelled it. “Hey. I come in to patch things up after the cutting’s already been done. My job is triage.”

The two regarded each other. Cuts echoed forwards from the bodies of their friends through the economy and the Earth.

“Maybe we should plan a reunion.”