All of this great Husker Du concert footage is showing up on Youtube. This is from a SST Records showcase. The mix isn’t great, but the power of the show comes through. The ending’s a lot of fun, as members of SWA, Saccharine Trust, The Minutemen and The Meat Puppets come on stage and tear apart “Louie Louie.” Here’s a zine article that reviews the show, declaring that “clearly, this band is God.”
The footage, which unfortunately isn’t the whole show, is divided into three sections:
Diane / Hate Paper Doll / Green Eyes
Divide And Conquer / Pink Turns to Blue / Eight Miles high
Many people are writing about David Foster Wallace’s death, quoting beautiful and weighty words he delivered in a Kenyon College commencement speech a few years ago. My memory of the man, and his writing, is a much less serious event.
He was one of a number of writers reading at a “Downtown For Democracy” event at UCLA, sharing the stage with Michael Chabon, Dave Eggers, Anne Lamott and Alice Sebold. Emily bought us tickets as surprise birthday present. He was reading a short story he’d written which, as far as I know, remains unpublished. I’ve forgotten the plot of the story, but the main character was a goody two shoes kid. The part of the story that’s important to this anecdote is a conversation between the child and the child’s school principal (who detests the kid). The child is getting more and more wound up in the conversation while the principal is quietly seething. Wallace read the child’s dialog in character, mimicking the child’s hyperventilating. He starts to smile as he reads, and quickly the smile turns to an attempt to stifle laughter. As he quickly shifted between the child’s excitement and the quiet hatred of the principal, it seemed to crack him up even more. People were laughing out loud, both at the story and with Wallace’s obvious enjoyment. He was unable to keep it up, forced to walk away from the podium and take a drink before continuing.
It was a charming scene, and I loved the fact that after obviously having written and rewritten this countless times, he was still able to crack himself up over it.
Some guy went warflying over the Los Angeles basin. Wardialing is/was having a computer call larger numbers of phone numbers in sequence looking for modems, wardriving followed and was driving around a neighborhood with a laptop and a wireless card looking for open wireless access points. the logical extension of this is warflying, using a gps and a hardcore antenna to look for open access points.
It looks like he flew right over my apartment, as well as another I know that has an open access point, but neither of them show up in his list of APs. I have to imagine that the 2200 or so access points he found were a small fraction of the ones he flew over, and that a huge number had signals that deteriorated significantly due to concrete and the antenna didn’t pick them up.
