technical difficulties...

please stand by. better technical difficulties than tangible, practical ones, i guess. i've missed posting, believe it or not, but i have actually been somewhat occupied for the past few days, more so than usual at any rate. and that all began last wednesday. i did go to that tea leaf green show. like i had mentioned, i kind of figured i might meet some people from the neighborhood there. i didn't. instead, i met somebody right as i stepped out of my front door to begin walking to the show. this guy offered up a very friendly what's up and he looked like a likely suspect, so i asked him if he was going to the show. he wasn't, but mentioned that he was going to baltimore this coming weekend to check out a sts9 show. we had been talking for less than a minute and he was like well, i live at this house we're standing in front of, stop by some time. so i was free to go enjoy the show without feeling like it was some twisted social networking event. the walk to the show itself was actually amazing. i try not to be a big weather-talker, but there is some serious nice autumn shit going on around here right now and i just love it. the whole walk was a delight for all senses though. i walked through upenn campus on the way there, which looks nice enough on its own but i had never been through at dusk before. there is a very nice lighting effect as you walk through, and so many different people to see, food and flowers to smell, bizarre things to hear. my favorite overheard quote of the walk was "if you pureed her, she would totally fit in this purse". the only bump in the road was being berated by a cadre of overdressed young penn students that i had the misfortune to be walking in the same direction as at the same time at a similar pace as. when i split off to go where i was headed and was a good distance away i started to hear cries of "goodbye moe! goodbye trey!" and some other shit about longhairs. lame on so many levels. i was sort of tempted to go back, act really strange and ramble on about not knowing who people are in a big city and the relative concentration of crazies, but it really wasn't worth the time. i hope they laugh at a homeless person who stabs them with a rusty phillips head screwdriver full of tetanus. anyway, i was more confused than anything, and simply made my way to the show. i was skeptical of the ticket's alleged start time of 8:30, but they weren't fuckin around. by like 8:33 the band was on and in full swing and with a relatively modest set break they didn't quit until almost twenty to twelve. those guys really do kick a whole lot of ass, more than i had even really imagined. the overall heaviness left me more satisfied than i had dared hope for. they oscillate between spacey trance rock and good ol' rock n' roll, only rarely touching on trite cheesy generic "jamband" sounds falling in the middle. the guitarist clearly graduated from the eddie vanhalen school, but had a good range of influences to complement it. the drummer fired on all cylinders and the bass player definitely stepped beyond the role of metronome and was really animated and conscious that he was playing an instrument capable of occupying its own space. the drummer was a machine, clean and perfect execution and transition. the keyboardist, however, is like the centerpiece of the band, or at least i'd like to think so. he and the guitarist split lead vocals for the most part, but he seems to have written a little more material and makes dramatic use of the wide sonic palette at his disposal. the man knows his way around a synth, but has some pretty classic piano chops. if you're curious, the show itself is on etree in lossless format and you can stream or download it at archive.org as well. all in all a unified band with a delightful range, and while the space covered may be unique, i don't think they have the incredible original sound that will propel them to lasting greatness. this is not to say that they weren't a hell of a band to see live or that they make boring music. far from it. i just feel like there was something missing to convert people into acolytes. originality is tough, and everybody out there is drawing on lots of other things, but sometimes the amalgamation really seems to give birth to something somehow apart from everything else. and some people really push envelopes. but none of that seems strongly correlated with how successful a band is or how much buzz they generate. i miss back forty. but in the end, tea leaf is energetic, hungry, into what they're doing, and really good at it. i had a bitchin time. three dollar magic hat pints from a really friendly bar staff, band on fire, intriguing crowd, most classes for the following day canceled. rosh hashanna rules! definitely an unforeseen benefit of moving out here. on my way home i stopped in at a pizza place to grab a beer lest my local store close at midnight and got carded for the first time since i moved (only upon prompting by the trainer to the trainee, and only then because he couldn't ring up a beer and a bag of chips). the dude was like, what are you doin' out here? i was kind of surprised since the place was all but on penn campus and half the ids he sees have to be from someplace else, but on the other hand i guess i'm don't really have the air or appearance of a typical penn student. so anyway, i told him i was going to law school and he said "good for you". i hate that phrase, partly because it is particularly difficult to respond to, but i think i nailed it on this one: "i hope so...".
so the next day was really chilled out, thanks again high holidays, and i got to sleep in and didn't really have much urgent to do after the one class. got a few drinks at this bar and restaurant on campus with some law school folk. they all went to get expensive dinner and i went home eventually. i didn't really have too much going on, so i went a few doors up to say hey to the guy i met the other night. i picked out what i thought was the right door, gave it a knock, and a girl came up, gave me a friendly hello, opened the door and walked back into the living room, no worries. see, people aren't less friendly than the midwest after all; she didn't even know who i was, i guess i just looked like someone who would be there. i asked about the guy i met and he showed up in a minute or two, but everyone was very nice, i hung out for a while and had a good time. interesting mix of people, i liked them because they were just people doing their thing, no one could be pigeonholed into some subculture or another, just like real life. they invited me to this performance art type thing they were doing the next night, but i wasn't sure about it and didn't want to shell out the cash for the ticket. instead i spent the next day hanging out with my sister and ben some, and that was nice. in the afternoon we were going to go on an expedition involving a philly car share vehicle, but when we got to the car we couldn't get it to co-operate. turned out the reservation was for the next day, oh well. we were gonna check out this brewery right by where the car was, about seven long blocks up from me, but they weren't open at the time so we both went home. i didn't have much going on, so i went back when i knew the place would be open. it is called dock street brewery; they've been around in different locations for quite a while. they were one of the early craft breweries in this neck of the woods and there are a lot of pictures/endorsements with michael jackson (no, not that guy, the beer and whiskey guy who just passed away a couple weeks ago). awesome to have michael jackson promote you, but if he was calling it "america's gourmet beer" with a bottle of amber ale in front of him it had to be pretty early on in the game. anyway, their current location is in a renovated old firehouse pretty close to me, so i can dig it. the space was cool, the beer was quality and somewhat adventurous, but the clientele, staff, space, and beer could never live up to founder's like i had dreamed it might. which is not to say it is not a good place in its own right, which it is. i had a rye i.p.a. and a dark cherry ale. both were very well-made, well-balanced, well-planned beers. i'm sure i'll go back again. i hear the wood-fired pizzas are not to be missed from a multitude of sources. one of these days...
the next day, saturday, i endeavored to assemble my one remaining unassembled piece of furniture: the bed frame. i figured it was time to give it a shot. things seemed to be going well until about halfway through, when it became apparent that i had, in short, fucked it up. i'll try it again later. i had better things to do: the guy i had met the other day called to say his girlfriend was having a barbeque and i should go, she lives around the corner. so i went. the little block she's on jogs away from where the street should line up, so i hadn't actually been on it, but it was absolutely gorgeous. the rowhouse she and a couple roommates share was super cool. so i hung out with all those folks again and more, and with free beer and food. good times. they introduced me to lion's head beer, which is the beer i was looking for but never knew it. a month or two ago i was back at mully's sitting with either stephen or donny and this older guy asked us about the old styles we were drinking. he wanted to know if that was the one with the puzzles under the cap, and we were both like what the fuck are you talking about, puzzles on beer caps indeed. never heard of such a thing. so as it turns out this is that beer. the puzzles are like old-school picture word puzzles. and the beer, well, is apparently twelve dollars a CASE! and doesn't even taste like it! in fact, these folks showed me that if you put a little chunk of fresh ginger in there, it actually tastes like good beer. fridge space has been reserved.
while i was hanging out with these folks the conversation eventually turned to the performance thing some of them were in (the what-have-you?) and that saturday would be their last night. i decided i would go, and then the dude offered me a cheap ticket. it turned out to be totally worth it. all in all, pretty interesting. it was part of the annual(?) philly fringe festival(?). the piece entitled "ashes" and was about the apocalypse. weird, semi-abstract projections onto the stage through most of it, prevalent super loud (most people accepted the complimentary earplugs) noise/drum track to back it up, lots of dancing, giant bird puppet. sequences demonstrating evolution and warfare... culminated with the bird puppet giving birth to a human (the show's creator, ass naked) and space aliens turning up and making him into a cyborg. that was about it. this is the sort of thing it is difficult to describe and is better seen (allegedly touring to other cities in the near future), but i hope you get an impression for it. overall, a good time. i went to the cast party afterwards, which was a friendly scene but a little strange considering i wasn't in the show, but there were plenty of other people there who weren't either. and more free beer. and the first two-ended joint i've ever seen people smoke. basically stuck butt to butt with a gapped filter rolled into the small end of each, the gap providing the spot to hit from. weird, but i guess if that's your deal go right ahead.
apparently the real shindig on saturday was a going-away thing for a friend of my sister's. when i went to quizzo sunday with all those folks almost all of them were not drinking due to still riding out hangovers. sounded like they had fun, but quizzo was also a good time as always. we managed to come in second, which is good enough for twenty bucks to the bar/restaurant its at. that'll take care of a couple of those can't-be-beat five dollar yuengling pitchers next week, and maybe i'll get to cash in on this win after missing the subsequent weeks after we came in first a while back and got the big prize of forty bar dollars. looking forward to it. quizzo, if i haven't explained it, is basically a team trivia game which is conducted without the aid of a network and electronic "playmakers", but rather a live deejay. good variety of questions, and also my least favorite round where you try to identify fifteen pictures of somewhat famous individuals. i regret that such a thing was not available back home, i think we really could have run that shit.
so it was back to school today after all that. things still seem to be progressing alright. more of that intimidating legal research and writing to be done. i worked on that for a while today, first time doing the research purely solo, and it went alright, i think i have the kind of stuff she wanted us to be looking for. i guess we'll find that out in spades soon enough. as rough as it seems, this is really the best way to learn how to do it, just jump right in. things are also getting a little more interactive in the other classes as well. for torts, the prof mentioned a recent incident in philly where a bus passed through a shootout and the driver and a passenger got hit and told us to make up a couple extra facts as we saw fit and list off the various torts that were committed. my scenario worked in my favorite tort title thus far, trespass to chattels, which is basically interfering with someone else's property. i had a guide dog get shot, but don't worry, he's okay. if he died, it might have even been the full-on tort of conversion. i love terms of art. hehe, trespass to chattels. i hate it when people trespass my chattels. in contracts, we have made it to the infamous carbolic smoke ball case. it is a strange one, i guess strange enough to be ubiquitous for intro contracts courses in the common law tradition for quite some time; it is an antiquated case. i like the old british manner of speaking "took cold and caught the influenza". diseases sound somehow both more humorous and dread when preceded by "the". inexplicable.
speaking of inexplicable, i made a very strange discovery today. i was sitting in my upstairs room in the chair i am sitting right now where i always sit. i've become quite used to this room, even moving things around in the smallest nooks and crannies, including under the radiator (yup). so while i was sitting, i looked down to my left to grab something and noticed something strange sitting on the ground next to a bunch of my shit i had recently left and moved around there. i have no idea where it came from because there is no possible way i could have not seen it until now, but lo and behold, there on the ground was a small, approximately two inch tall pewter dragon figurine with hands that look like they should be holding something (20 bucks says that something is some sort of an orb). it is pretty cool, not as cool as i would have thought it was six years ago, but i can still dig it. i just can't figure out how in the hell it got there, or if it had been there, how i could have missed it so many times. it wasn't even under the radiator, it was a couple inches from it. not quite a chess piece hitting me in the head in the middle of the woods (ask reynolds, if he'll tell) but still pretty strange. perhaps it was to make up for the resolution of the previous metallic mystery of the household, the rack-looking thing below the window in the kitchen. i can't recall how the thing came up, but when i was at that barbeque it did, and the guy totally knew what it was because he had undergone a similar experience with a similar rack-looking thing in a friend's house. turns out it is supposed to be a fire escape ladder. who knew? certainly doesn't look like it would hold me up, but hey, as a last resort it beats some other options. overall, i am a little disappointed by how much sense it makes.
this already lengthy post will be closed out not with a link to, but a full display of creedence lyrics, as a celebration of my current connectivity and tribute to this blog's history of getting lyrical:
Now, if I was a bricklayer,
I wouldn't build just anything;
And if I was a ball player,
I wouldn't play no second string.
And if I were some jew'lry, baby;
Lord, I'd have to be a diamond ring.

If I were a secret, Lord, I never would be told.
If I were a jug of wine, Lord, my flavor would be old.
I could be most anything,
But it got to be twenty-four karat solid gold, oh.

If I were a gambler, You know I'd never lose,
And if I were a guitar player,
Lord, I'd have to play the blues.

If I was a hacksaw, My blade would be razor sharp.
If I were a politician, I could prove that monkeys talk.
You can find the tallest building,
Lord, I'd have me the house on top.

I'm the Penthouse Pauper;
I got nothin' to my name.
I'm the Penthouse Pauper; baby,
I got nothing to my name.
I can be most anything,
'Cause when you got nothin' it's all the same.

i opted not to include the random stuff he says, especially at the end (pigpen could have run his mouth for like half an hour with this stuff), but all you gotta know is:
"laaawd, look at mah penthouse!"





yes, in the sandwich.