My roommate Peter comes in often with stories about the wildlife found in our neighborhood. Today he saw a snake fighting a bird, right in the middle of a path in Inwood Hill Park. He also reported that there seems to be a pack of wild dogs living there. We live in Manhattan for christ's sake.

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The 99-cent stores around here are amazing. Yesterday at work I decided I needed a reasonably sharp knife to keep there, so I could cut tomatoes for the sandwiches I've been making since the best deli closed down. I went across Broadway to 99-Cent USA wondering if they'd have anything. They had a "tomato knife" that has the word TOMATO cut out of the blade in stencil letters. For 99 cents. They also have tortilla chips marked as factory 2nds.

In other news from work, I spent much of my day today photoshopping a hypothetical invention (not the robot but something else) into a picture of a nurse. So you can get paid for that, and I'm not even terribly good at it.

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After watching DiG! and End of the Century: The Ramones, I've learned that rock stars really do wear sunglasses all the damn time, even while on airplanes and in other odd places. I actually preferred DiG!, which was quite wonderful and exceeded my expectations. For me the Ramones one had a bit too much talking about being wild and crazy, while DiG! actually showed the craziness happening. At times the Ramones doc made them seem like (I know this is perverse) the Strokes with a better live act, in that they found a sound and an image, and stubbornly stuck with it. As one interviewee said, seeing them later on felt like stepping into a time machine and going back to when they first came out, because they always looked and sounded just the same as always. DiG! convinced me that the Dandy Warhols and the Brian Jonestown Massacre are much better bands than I had thought before. Beyond that it's an amazing movie for a person with musical ambitions, because it shows brilliantly everything about being in a full-time band, from the recording process to playing shows and touring to deciding when to sign on with the man. I couldn't help but giddily think at several points, 'this is what I should be doing.' Those were not the points when the band members beat the crap out of each other and the audience, or when they poured dishwashing liquid down their pants, or when they got caught with drugs on the road. Lastly, Anton Newcombe had a DreaMachine! (As the BJM band members say on the commentary, "the nightmare machine, as it turned out").

I'm doing the Flickr thing now. You can see my photos here:

mihalis's photos

and the ones from Paris are here.

I'm going to add a 'badge' soon.

Tonight I finally got around to experimenting with a technique I read about in Tape Op of producing sound by connecting effects pedals in a loop. There's no musical input here, you just connect them together and work off the transients that are created and then fed back, amplified and effected in various ways, and twiddle the knobs and select sets of effects to change the sound.

1. effect loop feedback sounds 1.mp3 (my harmonist pedal pulls a self-indulgent solo for a couple minutes)

This week a confluence of events, including the relentless cloudy weather, have left me without a quick way to tell what time it is when I wake up. This morning things came to a head with this series of thoughts:

-I think, I've woken up early (for me, this means before 10am).

-I think, my previous thought was in a dream, and it's actually 1pm!

-I actually wake up for the first time, realize both of the previous thoughts were in dreams, am relieved that it's not 1pm, then fall back asleep without checking what time it really is.

-I think, oh no, after going back to sleep I slept for a long time and now it really is late.

-I wake up again, note the previous thought was in a dream again, but that it still could be late, realize this is getting ridiculous, finally pull out my laptop and wake it from its own slumber. It's 9:47.