nickd

so i’ve had the privilege of listening to the beatles’ digital remasters a few days before they’re set to be released. without offering my opinions outright on the subject, let me offer some of the perspectives, both positive and negative, offered by many of my friends over the past couple of days. these are the most common beliefs surrounding this release, and i think that it’s possible to ascribe to a different set of them depending on your own morals and views on music. really, this can go either way.

the cash grab. the beatles’ catalog has been remastered, recontextualized, and reissued dozens of times in the past four decades. how is this any different? would they do this if not for the money?

historic preservation. the beatles’ recordings belonged to a specific time during which they had far greater (or at least far more appropriate) effect than they ever will have. remastering and reissuing them so frequently doesn’t pay enough respect to the context that they came from.

device-appropriateness. people listen to most things on ipods and itunes these days, which means they’re downsampled to mp3 format. in comparison to this market, very few people own the original LPs of beatles albums. remastering them so they sound clearer and crisper on these devices is at the very least a concession to technological progress. it’s also a signifier of public demand: lots of people want the beatles’ recordings to have a higher treble and louder peak.

device-appropriateness corollary. why the fuck are the beatles still not on itunes?

other beatles-related works. why not provide the same treatment to zapple albums, or the plastic ono band, or john lennon’s solo work? on one hand, you’re ignoring the other corpus of work that these people issued, and you’re strengthening the beatles’ “brand” which dilutes their original spirit. on the other hand, people give a much larger crap about the beatles than the plastic ono band.

stereo vs. mono. the remasters are coming out in both stereo and mono versions. (as of press time, i have only heard the stereo version.) but why remaster these albums in stereo at all, when the band expressed significant hesitance towards the form?

stereo vs. mono, pt. 2. take a song like “eleanor rigby,” one of the most loved in their catalog. everyone knows that paul’s vocals are multitracked in it. during each verse, one track shifts to hard right, while his other tracks are around 20% left (or at least that’s what my ears tell me). then, each chorus features all voices dead center. what does this tell us about the song’s feelings of loneliness and alienation? does it help to give us this, or is it right to color the song in this way in the first place?

couch:

Here’s why: when nickd cares about something, he will research that thing ad nauseam. This is why he’s a beer aficionado. I will almost blindly trust him with any recommendation he makes, and he’s seldom led me astray — much to my taste buds’ enjoyment and wallet’s dismay. With interaction design, he’s doing the same […]

i am drinking interaction design.

i am standing in a backyard on kimball avenue and basically world war three is going on - per usual on the 4th, i know, but the sun has just set and so we’re watching what is probably the annual peak of people blowing up their country. after yesterday i have a theory, which is that the poorer the neighborhood the more likely they are to blow up their country right proper on the 4th, which means going to indiana on july 06 the year before and buying a truly world-ending quantity of fireworks at 8% retail (buy 1 get 11 free) and leaving it in the basement for a year. the people in the yard immediately to our left are setting off some sort of blinding strobe thing on the ground, while the house behind us is lighting proper mortars, a few purple but the majority red.

it rained 3 hours ago and you’d never know if not for the deep fog that set over the city, one of only a few times a year that that happens in chicago, which diffuses the fireworks’ light in ways about as strange and unpredictable as the fireworks themselves - this of course (given the probability of fog here) being the first time that i’ve ever seen fireworks in fog, seeing them in such a different way brings on a degree of wonder that clichéd-ly brings on a lot of happy memories of childhood. this persists for most of the evening.

then at ~9:30p i have to bike from the party on kimball/belden to a rooftop party on grand/noble. you can take many routes to get there, and they’re probably all good, but the way i decided on involved taking kimball to homan to grand. this route involves going through west humboldt park. i’d qualify logan as a middle/working-class neighborhood but west humboldt park as a full-on poor neighborhood, which (according to said law) naturally means that the fireworks will go from innocuous world war three to possibly harmful world war three, people lighting mortars off in the middle of the street because they can, because there’s no way for the police to handle the level of widespread fireworks consumption at hand here, because the police are busy dealing with shot-off limbs at this time of night anyway, etc. and so every so often a mortar would go off less than 15ft away from me and i’d look up and behind me on my bike and almost plow into parked cars because of how damn amazing the mortar in question just was. or i’d bike past an alley at near-full speed and peek down an alley just long enough to see a dozen apparently-unsupervised kids fleeing a tiny spark which of course belongs to a fuse that is slowly dwindling into a mortar the size of my fucking torso; and of course the mortar is located under power lines but like hell anyone cares today, it being the day of hilariously wonderful and inadvisable decisions, etc.

kimball/homan are narrow-ish, major-ish residential streets; grand is a much wider street that goes through heavy industry, the metra engine shop is located at grand/california and a few random metal foundries and factories dot the strip, some warehouses, etc. they’re all very tall and tend to front the street with all bricks and no fanfare. this means grand at times becomes somewhat cavernous for a non-downtown street. sound traveled interestingly here, last night; fireworks shot 1,000 feet off (in residential areas) would travel into the cavern and sort of ping-pong around the building walls. when i biked past the metra factory - which is entirely covered with aluminum siding - the explosions took on this almost galaga-esque flanged metallic character, each bang returning two fast echoes afterward, pew! pew! and of course the whole street is empty because it’s a holiday and nobody is at work at the factories, they’re too busy blowing up their country. i think 2 cars passed me for the entire 2.5-mile stretch of grand between homan and noble. it was one of the best bike rides i’ve ever had. easily top 3.

once i get on the roof things have died down a little bit, but the area i just came from, you can see that in the far distance such that all the explosions looked about 3mm tall and you could like hold them between your thumb and pointer finger and crush them like a purple or green or red or white hairy lightning bug. it all persists for another hour and two witbiers into it i head back home. i think, living where i do, that the 4th of july is my favorite holiday. i hope you had a good one too.

the yard sale went well. erin and i sold about $180 worth of junk, which helped tremendously towards getting a few more things that i need to do a proper lit review in advance of writing my book. thanks for coming out if you did.

what i want to discuss today is condo associations. our building is a u-shaped courtyard building, not unlike many in chicago (especially around rogers park and edgewater, but also on some boulevards - erin and i live on palmer square, part of the original burnham-devised boulevard system). it’s unique, though, in that our half of the building is rental apartments, and the other half is condos. one side has a plaque saying “managed by ______”; the other has a slightly fancier-looking plaque with “_____ condo association”.

so at like 9:30a we start setting up, putting stuff out there on our building’s front yard. it’s perhaps worth noting that our building’s yard is similarly bifurcated, with a clear-cut lawn on the condo side and a few little bush plants on the apartment side. we set up our stuff spanning both sides. around 10:45a, a resident from the condo side comes out to walk his dog and voices his concerns about the existence of a yard sale. he walks his dog around the block and comes back to apologize and say “i personally think it’s great that you’re selling, but there are a few other residents who don’t want this sort of thing happening.” he then tells us about how a cadre of three condo residents set up a palmer-square-wide yard sale at the end of the summer, and routinely call the police and cite obscure laws to get any “competitors” to fold.

none of this is illegal, but it’s underhanded and offensive all the same: basically, it’s entirely possible to be a jerk to your neighbors within the bounds of the law, and you can either choose to do so or not. i don’t want to wait two months to put on a yard sale; neither do any of the several other households that have teamed up with us to sell, and neither do any of the dozens of friends who came by to check out our wares and grill some meats with us.

in the next two hours we receive two similar warnings from two other residents. both were on our side but expressed worry about the aforementioned three residents. one even apologized for the existence of these residents. during this period a middle-age-looking woman is spotted at a second-floor window staring directly at us, talking on the phone, and looking pretty pissed.

around 5pm, three hours before the yard sale is supposed to end, one of said residents comes by and says “nobody wants you here” and leaves. ten minutes later a cop car pulls up, asks what’s up, we tell them we’re holding a yard sale, they laugh and leave. i’m guessing if you call the police as frequently as this person does, in an area much more known for gang turf wars than bourgeois complaints, then the police believe you’re the middle-aged woman who cried wolf, and stop taking you very seriously.

also: “nobody wants you here.” really? that’s funny, i thought the several hundred folks who came past, smiled, purchased merchandise, and thanked us for putting this on would indicate otherwise. perhaps they should have been more honest and said that the only people that didn’t want us there was them. perhaps they should know that living in an urban context means accepting the actions of reasonable neighbors. none of us were making any noise beyond talking. we planned to fold up the yard sale before sunset. nobody was in the way of these peoples’ existence, and yet they made the decision to raise a stink about it. and for what?

oh, but this isn’t the end of it, boys and girls. on tuesday, on my walk to work, the exact person who i saw in the second-floor window was outside our (our!) building, reseeding the lawn that we had a yard sale on only 72 hours prior. the lawn that, mind you, was already almost entirely dead because a densely leafy tree was choking out all the sunlight and water on the grass. the lawn that she reseeded, with the tree that she didn’t prune the branches of. and then a day later, this passive-aggressive sign was posted, gloriously replete with snarky, self-righteous tone, right down to the “i’m” as if they alone owned the lawn:

, the final sentence of which is likely aimed at another neighbor on our half of the building, whose dog routinely relieves himself on a corner of said yard. apparently people keep dogs, and apparently they have to pee.

this isn’t the first time that i’ve witnessed such disrespect for urban contexts out of people who live in them. living in a dense environment like this means respecting the intentions of other people, meeting them halfway and holding a conversation with them that involves more empathy and rationality than writing off their existence and wasting the police’s time. a majority (and as of press time, over two-thirds) of humanity has lived like this for hundreds of years.

if you’re going to treat your environment like this, then maybe you should sell your condo to someone that gives a legit, impassioned crap about their neighborhood, and harbors greater tolerance for the actions of their neighbors. then you can move to bolingbrook and tend your meadow with all the other sheep. nobody wants you here.

two things of note these days.

1. erin and i are organizing a group sale, to take place this saturday june 27 from 10a-8p at 3026 w palmer square. we’re on the north side of the square, just west of sacramento. quite a few people will be selling. we’d love if you came out and bought our lightly loved second-hand hipster merchandise. we’ll be grilling and killing some beers, too. maybe i’ll even pull out a frisbee. shock! horror! intrigue!

2. i just got an aim client on my phone that 1) persists when you quit; 2) pushes notifications of new instant messages from buddies when quit as if they were SMSes; 3) archives conversations; 4) short of file transfers and DCing, is about as fully-featured as any proper computer-based client out there. the client is not the important thing (though if you own an iphone, let me direct you nyuh-wise); the important thing is you should add nickdisguise to your buddy list if you want to yell stuff at my phone in a slightly different way than texting. if you do so, you should let me know your aim screen name/google talk name/etc so i can add it myself and we can be “friends” on the “cloudsync paradigm.” so what’s yours?

they make crazy expensive buds, but i’ve worn their earplugs to what must be several hundred shows by now, and this past week i filed a warranty claim with them that was handled with immense grace and prompt, unflagging service. can’t go any longer without giving them high marks for the way they treat other people.

i really wish there were a dashboard widget i could install that tells me precisely how much sleep i need and how i can get to a point where i figure out my circadian rhythms, like if you wake up opposite to the apex of a sleep cycle (which in average people is like 90m) you will feel like shit all day, or if you wake up at exactly the right time you can basically greco-roman wrestle a dragon. i wish there were some way to systematize the process, is what i am saying here. it’s plenty easy for me to check how much ram remains on my phone or how much bandwidth i’m taking up on my computer, but i can’t for the life of me figure out how little or much caffeine i should need to take in order to not fall asleep riding my bike out and still not get a headache and feel like death and take it out on any living creature i see, out of the thousands of living creatures i encounter on my commute out alone. or maybe, like, telling me to switch to black tea, or taurine, or just fucking off and popping no-doz. or some widget that would remind me on a daily basis that mountain dew amp tastes like someone pissed into a green jolly rancher. or maybe some popup that would disable my web browser and splay a message all over my monitor that reads “WARNING: IF YOU SPEND FIVE MORE MINUTES AWAKE YOUR BRAIN WILL FEEL LIKE IT HAS BEEN WRAPPED IN ITCHY SALLOW WOOL FOR THE REST OF THE WEEK” in bold italic red all-caps 72px helvetica.

i want there to be some easy, constructible answer to all of this, basically. i spend almost all of my life entrenched in the very logical constructs that technology affords, and then when i’m forced to somehow confront the constraints of my own body i just sort of flounder around and yell a lot. in the past my body just did the work for me without thinking much about it, and willpower (which i’m pretty sure i have an above-average quantity of) made up the rest. as i age this is less and less the case. but you don’t care about this. you care about this other thing: i’m going to see telepathe at the bottle tonight. i’m showing early because i heard that the opener kills it. i hope i can see you there. bring a pillow if you come, ok? we can take a nap to the vocal harmonies.

erin and i were in new york this past weekend, which was very good. but up came out this past weekend, which means we could not see it until tonight. so we saw up tonight. when we arrived at the movie theater we saw a familiar bike in front. erin pegged it as anna’s. here is a picture of anna, “remixing” her “wardrobe”:

so we texted her all like WE SEE YOUR BIKE LOL HI and she texted back that she was getting barbeque across from the movie theater and also hi. anna just stopped being vegetarian and so i think that is why she is just eating a lot of barbeque.

then we saw up and i cried during every single part that did not involve either tension or action. this means i cried for a combined total of about thirty minutes. then we came out of the movie theater to a very very familiar bike, clipped right next to mine: finch’s. i wrote some stuff on one of my cards and stuck it between her front spokes, then went to unlock my bike and found this, stuffed in my helmet, torn out of a 5x7 moleskine:

so i guess what i’m saying here is that if i walked down logan boulevard and kicked everybody who walked past me in the crotch, it would only be a matter of time before i kicked one of my friends in the crotch.

dear austin warner,

thank you for the note. her name is spelled “erin.” we are sorry that your pen ran out at an inopportune time. we hope that you enjoyed your movie.

warmest regards,
nickd (and erin).