[I couldn't face the amount of work involved in doing something like Tony Pierce's 53 page(!) photo essay on last weekend's Sunset Junction, and actually it turned out I was too lazy to write even four or five paragraphs. So I asked Lori if she would, and she did. --John]
Warning: This posting contains no references to Lisp. Sorry, Lisp enthusiasts! I did try to come up with a good Lisp joke, but I think it is largely unremarkable:
Q. What's the difference between Lisp and FORTRAN?
A. People remember FORTRAN.
Stay for the veal!
This year's Sunset Junction Street Fair, L.A.'s premier rock'n'roll hipster cavalcade, did not disappoint this attendee, especially since it was fifty feet away from my apartment and proffered a delightful abundance of tasty food on sticks. I thought about taking pictures, but my fingers were coated in a sticky melange of butter, BBQ sauce and beer. If I had taken pictures, they would have featured many attractive, shirtless men in leather short shorts. And rapidly wilting drag queens, families and punk rocks: it was actually 224,000 degrees outside. Celsius. To see all those diverse, sweaty groups of people noshing and boozing together, well, my heart done swole up with love and civic pride.
There were a kajillion booths and vendors; everyone was trying to hawk something, from ironic t-shirts to Super Shammys to Scientology. Some earnest-looking youngsters passed out free copies of a novel called Wild Animus from a card table. A copy was thrust in my hand, the hand that wasn't holding food on a stick, that is, and I greasily flipped through it hoping it was desperately pornographic. Tragically, it was just merely bad. I later thrust my copy into someone else's empty hand.
Sunset Junction features dozens of excellent rock bands. This year's offerings included Ben Kweller, Love, Camper Van Beethoven, and X, none of which I saw because I was at a book reading given by my horrifyingly talented friends, Allyson Shaw and Richard Melo. Both of them have brand new books out (The Bon Bon & Love Token and Jokerman 8, respectively) and you must surely read them.
Truthfully, I only heard one Sunset Junction rock act this year: Linda Stevens. I listened to her band while I took a nap in my apartment (fifty feet away, remember); they made for lovely nap music. Although I think they should pick a different band name, or maybe capitalize on the nap angle. “Linda Stevens is gonna ROCK you to sleep!”
Posted by lori at August 27, 2004 12:09 AMI used to love Cypress Hill. Handing out Beat Downs. Smokin' on a Blunt.
Now, unfortunately, almost every type of popular music makes me extremely ill. I guess when we get older, we oscillate less and converge into a state of comfortable coolness.
I only started to appreciate classical music after learning to play the violin. You can feel the economy of movement and the sharp melody while playing, and that feeling continues with you when you listen to chamber music on the stereo.
The same feeling occurs, for me, when I'm coding in LispWorks and then I stop and read Henry Baker's META parser paper.
I don't know to which state I'm converging to, but it has to involve all the things that are important to me: emotionally satisfying music, a flash Lisp implementation, happy sex, lovingly prepared food, and, okay, since I'm being so honest, a little bit of category theory.
Oh, is it 12:30 already? I've got to go wash my hands.