iotae.net

I like a good videogame, but I really only play them once or twice a year when I am on vacation. So I am not really up on gamer culture. Nevertheless, I occasionally enjoy reading Penny Arcade, even though I don’t really get the jokes. I suppose this it has the same appeal that Austin Powers movies have for a 16-year-old who has never seen a Bond movie without Pierce Brosnan: you can laugh at the existence of parody without a relationship to its source. So I was surprised last week when I saw a Penny Arcade that descibed my life. I realize that there were only seven years in which Saint Louis didn’t have a pro football team, and I wasn’t even living there for all of them. But somehow I never developed the passion for watching football games. In theory they are packed with both action and strategy and should be interesting. But I unmoved. Plus, most football is watched on television, and I don’t even enjoy watching sports I like that way (except for eight-ball).

So Seattle was in this big game, which was a great accomplishment. And we lost, which was too bad. People were broken up about it. There was front page news in the local papers. And I thought that would be the end of it. So I was surprised when I was walking by the stadium at lunch last Monday, and scores of fans in Seahawks jerseys were streaming in to welcome the team back with a big rally (kind of the opposite of a victory rally). And that was touching, I just didn’t know people did that kind of thing.

The next day I was waiting for someone to show up at a meeting, so I was looking out a window at the Seattle skyline. After staring at the buildings for several minutes, I noticed that none of the flags I saw were flying at the tops of the flagpoles. And I began to wonder if our city commemorated losing a sporting event by flying the nation’s flag at half-mast. That seemed unfathomable to me, but I couldn’t think of anything else we were publicly mourning. Maybe cities do this, like the defeat rallies I didn’t know about. But it still seemed like conflating the loss of a game with real loss of human life was pretty extreme, even if it was a big game. So I lost some faith in the city of Seattle.

I was pleased to quickly discover that Seattle is fine, and I should have been doubting my memory.

I keep seeing trailers in theaters for the new Terrence Malick movie and hope that they are for The Fountain.  While the real Fountain trailer doesn’t change my opinion of the film, it doesn’t really have to.  It already tops my shortlist of movies I want to see in the next year, so there is no need to make the wait unbearable the way certain other trailers have.

BTW, I am exploring writing postings with Writely, which is turning out to by a great middle ground between doing them in the crappy editors that come with blogging software, using dedicated client software, and just writing in Word.  Then again, at the frequency I am writing I might as well just be typing them out on my Treo.

It turns out that Writely does bad things to the formatting while posting. Hopefully they will improve this; I like the feature.

Today I happened upon a website that told me exactly what I was doing ten years ago. How weird is that? I was actually one of the better shows I have ever attended, and I remember it clearly. Yet it still feels like it has been a decade. That is even weirder.

I am incredibly excited to see tonight’s Sleater-Kinney show. It is in a theater, which is less intimate than a club but it increases the chances that I will be able to sit down. And I have listened to the new album several times already, and it is fantastic. Not that they have ever recorded a bad album, but the past few have not been particularly memorable; the songwriting is much less inspired than the Call The Doctor through The Hot Rock. The new one is loud and raw and complex and weird and sounds strangely like Led Zeppelin covering Sonic Youth. Suddenly they seem urgent again. And even as their album quality was stalling, their live show has gotten consistently stronger every time I have seen them. Plus it is a quasi-home-town show, and the opener is Mary Timony, the driving force behind the excellent band Helium. (This is my third Mary Timony or Helium show, and they have all been as opening acts. I assume she tours on her own at times.)

The show did not disappoint. Check out the tour or album if you get the chance.

How is there not a bad flash animation called “Captain Beefheart and Tenille”?