GRABBINGSAND

a man smoking crack.
an alligator’s delight,
preferrably nude.

Los Angeles. August 12, 1973. A 23-year old veteran of the US Coast Guard chats in studio with the husband-and-wife hosts of KPFK’s FolkScene radio show. He’s been playing out every Monday night at the Troubadour since 1971. His debut album sits fresh on record store shelves, but few will find it. Most folks outside of L.A. won’t even know his name until another year passes. That’s when his Asylum Records label-mates, The Eagles, record a cover of “Ol’ 55.”

About halfway through the chat, Howard Larman asks Tom Waits a simple enough question: Did you always want to be a musician?

Waits answers, “Yeah, I guess so, I couldn’t think of anything else I really wanted to be, seems to be today nobody wants to be anything but, nobody wants to be a baseball player anymore or anything – everybody wants to be a rock & roll star.”

The host keeps asking Waits to play this one song off Closing Time. His favorite, apparently. Eventually, Tom leaves the piano, picks up his guitar, and politely relents …

Tom Waits – “I Hope That I Don’t Fall In Love With You (Live on KPFK, 1973)”
[audio:waits_hopethati_kpfk.mp3]

The original, studio version of “I Hope That I Don’t Fall In Love With You” appears on Closing Time. If you don’t have this album, you should. Without question, it is one of his the best ever.

11-28-06_1636.jpg
Originally uploaded by grabbingsand.

Clones! Spotted at Fresh Market.

(Not purchased.)

After Alyssa’s polite insisting, I’ve been listening to the latest musical offering from former DC Comics intern, Gerard Way. His band is, of course, My Chemical Romance. They’ve been accused time and time again of being emo-this and emo-that. Frankly, I don’t know what emo is supposed to really be, particularly since emo used to mean one-man milksop-angst groups like Dashboard Confessional. If that’s emo, then I didn’t like it then and I don’t like it now.

But I’ll be damned if I don’t like this. A whole lot. The Black Parade is dark, epic, imaginative, bombastic and unabashedly derivative of something, but I just can’t put my finger on the specific source. Alyssa says they sound like Queen. Sure they do, but there’s other stuff in there. Like original-recipe Yes, the early stuff around Going For The One that was packed with multi-tracked choral breaks all bookended with Rick Wakeman’s keyboard and Steve Howe’s guitar. Mr Way likes The Beatles, too. And Faith No More. But there’s a heaping helping of straight-up glam-metal in this mix. They make sounds that wouldn’t be out of place on an ’80s hard rock compilation. And why does the production make me think about American Idiot? Oh, yeah. Because both this album and Green Day’s recent magnum opus were produced by the same fellow: Rob Cavallo.

But I’m still missing something. There is a specific wellspring of inspiration in there. I’ll think of it eventually.

I didn’t mention Mr Way’s nascent comicbook connection for nothing. Using his celebrity for leverage, he’s getting back into the game with his own series for Dark Horse called The Umbrella Academy. Could be good. Could be just so-so. He does list Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison as influences, so here’s hoping his heart is in the right place.

Besides, I don’t think he’s quitting his day-job anytime soon.

Spent most of yesterday in Mario Heaven. Why? Well, I’ve been experiencing some flakiness with my video card, particularly whilest playing City Of Heroes, so my PC gaming activities have shifted in focus.

Oddly enough, the video card — a two-year old Nvidia GeForce FX5900 XT — performs just fine not only during normal day-to-day work, but also under heavier load activities like Counter Strike: Source. It would appear that City Of Heroes (and City Of Villains) has the enviable position of being the only game to stress out my graphic resources so much that the inevitable result after anywhere from five to ten minutes is a total system shutdown. No warning, no blue screen, just nothing. This annoyance occurred a little bit last year, mostly during the summer. The fix at the time appeared to come in the form of an additional 120mm fan mounted in the back of the case. The fan is meant to act like an exhaust, something to move hot air out and away from the motherboard. This solution no longer works, apparently. And while it seemed like a few more minutes of play were gained from running the system with the side panel removed, the result was the same. After a little more makeshift testing, I determined that while the video card’s GPU was probably fine (it sits beneath a pre-installed heatsink and fan), the RAM chips surrounding the GPU weren’t covered by the heatsink, weren’t being cooled at all and were becoming very hot to the touch when taxed by City Of Heroes.

While a simple fix might come in the form of a a different video card, I’m not ready to sink so much cash into new components, no matter how cool they might be. So after an afternoon spent splitting my time between browsing through a hundred or so reviews and running downstairs to check on some homemade soup I had simmering on the range, I determined that the least I should do would be to replace the card’s stock heatsink and fan. While the Zalman line impressed me to no end, particularly with the clarity provided by their website, I ended up going with an offering from Arctic Cooling. The Arctic Cooling NV Silencer 3 was designed specifically for my FX5900 XT, right down to the RAM placement. And the price was very right: about $9 at FrozenCPU. I should have the Silencer in about a day or two.

And now I’m on a cooling kick. My AMD CPU is working under the stock heatsink and fan, but I’m wondering if a replacement might help out even more. We’ll see.

Anyway. About Mario. With City Of Heroes no longer an option and Counter-Strike: Source growing tiresome (mostly due to the online behavior of other players), I started looking into other, far simpler distractions. Remembering that I had a Nintendo emulation application somewhere either on my hard drive or backed up somewhere else, I decided that some Super Mario World was just what I needed.

The emulator I found on hand was a bit rough around the edges, so much so that I can’t recall the name of it. I sought another. What I found was a vast improvement.

• NESTopia is a straight-up Nintendo Entertainment System emulator. Games open in a window that can be resized on a zooming scale of 1x to 3x. Unlike some others, NESTopia is easier to configure, particularly the inputs for the keyboard-bound among us (like me) who might not have a joystick on hand. The ROMs I had on hand were packed in a downloaded folder from years ago. There are 80 of them, but only the various flavors of Mario hold much interest to me … and to Nikki as well, who was reminded instantly of her one-time glory as a Super Mario Bros 2 master.

Not satisfied with only 8-bits, I expanded my emulator horizons until I found …

• SNES9x – a Super Nintendo Entertainment System emulator. Very basic, but who needs much more than an application that can read even the most bastardized SNES ROM. It even has the courtesy to let you know if a ROM was found wanting with a bad checksum or some other glitch. If you’re feeling really proud of your throwback gaming, you can record an AVI or Movie for later viewing.
• ZSNES – another SNES emulator, but with a more “console-looking” user interface than SNES9x. This has pros and cons. On the con side, the attempt to look all retro jars horribly against the rest of my Windows XP desktop. Even the mouse pointer turns into a chunky mess. That being said, one of the pros is how deep the configuration is on ZSNES. If you can suffer through the blocky fonts, almost any variable can be adjusted. Makes great screenshots, too. Both SNES9x and ZSNES are small downloads, each weighing-in at about 2MB a piece for the Windows installs. However, neither as as tiny as …
• Kega Fusion – an all-around Sega emulator, Kega Fusion will run ROMs for every Sega console from the Master System to the Game Gear and beyond. I know, this is a bit of a derail from the All-Mario, Nintendo-Lovefest, but as I can’t think about Mario without considering his competition in the form of Sonic The Hedgehog, a Sega emulator was only inevitable. And this one is pretty incredible, as it will handle just about anything the least bit Sega-fied you throw at it.

Naturally, the next question is “Where does one find ROMs to play on these fantastic emulators?” The answer is simpler than you might think, but I’m going to be a little cagey about it all the same. My readers are savvy folk who don’t mind a little homework, a little investigation on their own, so don’t let me down. Google is your first friend, but realize that your better bets will be placed at more specific search engines that specialize in finding torrents. Another thing … ROMs travel in packs. Big ones. If you look around for a bit and still come up empty, get in touch with me directly.

Think of me like Moses. I might not take you directly to your own Mario Heaven, but I can surely point you in the right direction.

(One last thing … you know what I said up there about not having a USB-capable Nintendo controller? Well, for $30, such an item could indeed be yours. Or you could spend about $17 and retrofit your own.)

Amber borrowed this meme from Joe, so I’m borrowing it from her. These are logos, each representing a metropolitan rail system that has had the singular pleasure of transporting me from one place to another. Shame it doesn’t include a few more in the state or country category. Go here to build your own “Metros I Have Known” badge.

Got at b3co.com!

And in the spirit of celebrating municipal transport, here are a couple of classic tunes involving just such activity. The first one, you probably know. The second? You should.

Berlin – “The Metro”

The Jam – “Down In A Tube Station At Midnight”

Ideotique
Originally uploaded by grabbingsand.

I wish my iPod were just a little smarter. I know that it was already home to Radiohead’s Kid A album, but when I re-rip the album at a higher bit rate and copy over the new mp3s, why would it ever think that I wanted to keep both versions? Now, when I select Radiohead and then the album, I’m seeing double. Of course, the one benefit is that I can easily listen to the first few seconds of a track at 192kps, then the same track at 256kps, thus confirming a difference in sound if such a difference exists.

And it does. Higher ranges are clearer with less subtle distortion.

But never fear. I figured out a simple enough way to get around the lack of continuity. The iPod has the On-The-Go playlist function, activated per song by scrolling to the title of a track and holding down the center button until the highlight blinks. This feeds tracks in order of selection to the aptly-named On-The-Go playlist. So with just a little effort, I can experience a morning at work awash in Kid A, just like I planned.

1. “Through The Wire” – Kanye West
2. “Moaner” – Underworld
3. “Jesus Walks” – Kanye West
4. “Greenday Massacre” – Dean Gray
5. “Not Ready To Make Nice” – Dixie Chicks
6. “Sometimes” – Jennifer Nettles
7. “What Goes On” – The Beatles
8. “Masters Of War” – Bob Dylan
9. “Leaving Home Ain’t Easy” – Queen
10. “I Thought About You (Live)” – Miles Davis
11. “Mary” – Scissor Sisters
12. “Thank You” – Christina Aguilera
13. “Beautiful Struggle” – Talib Kweli
14. “Remind Us” – Over The Rhine
15. “People Get Ready” – The Housemartins
16. “Famous Blue Raincoat” – The Handsome Family
17. “Run Run Run” – Velvet Underground
18. “Time Out From The World” – Goldfrapp
19. “One For The Road (Break)” – Cee-Lo

Lois liked to see the bullets bounce
off Superman’s chest, and of course
she was proud when he leaned into
a locomotive and saved the crippled
orphan who had fallen on the tracks.

From Monday’s Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor, an excerpt from Ron Koertge’s poem titled in honor of The Man Of Steel’s mineral nemesis. Read the rest at the source, as well as a brief biography of a superhero of a different sort, Saint Augustine.

(If you’re watching Heroes, this post will make more sense. If you’re caught up to this week’s episode, read on. If not, you might wish to take anti-spoilery precautions, though I’ve not revealed too much. Most of this is speculation.)

The trouble with time travel is causality. Causality has little mercy, so the life you leave behind in the present will undoubtably be affected by your actions in the past. By the same token, anything glimpsed during a leap to the future is put in jeopardy the instant you return to now. Of course, one could certainly take up the opinion that fate and destiny will overcome all interferences. Even if you were able to step back to Dealey Plaza in November 1963, tackling Lee Harvey Oswald before his pulls the trigger, some other bullet from some other gun would put an end to President Kennedy’s life before the day was out. Grassy knolls excepted, of course.

In NBC’s Heroes, we have a hero who has seen the future.

Hiro Nakamura, a young salaryman with his head in the stars, discovers through a series of small victories that he can not only stop time, but he can teleport from place to place. Overwhelmed by the drudgery of another day at work, Hiro flexes his time-space muscles during his morning train commute. When he opens his eyes, he is no longer on the train, but rather in the center of Times Square. To make an amazing feat all the more spectacular, particularly to a geeky fanboy, Hiro picks up an issue of his favorite American comic book at a newstand and finds himself on the cover! All of this excitement and discovery is brought to a disturbing end when Hiro realizes that not only did he move through space, but forward through time. Hiro manages a last minute escape back to Japan, but not before seeing enough of the future to know that something must be done to prevent it.

This brings us around to causality and the traps of cause and effect that Heroes has laid out for itself. Because of what Hiro knows (and what we, the audience know) about the future, several events have to happen. (more…)