*record scratch noises*

tonight i am going to this guy's show. partly because he is a friend of mine, partly because it is at someplace i have never been, but mostly because i actually think he's really good. i never really gave a whole lot of thought to deejays and what they do mostly because i have little to no interest in dancing. and most remixes i heard tended to annoy me. but it is possible to do some pretty cool stuff, apparently. lots of people i have met here are deejays of varying skill and experience. i have not gone to a party without someone spinning for most of the time since i got here, i don't think. it definitely changes what kind of records people buy, but what fascinates me is how many different directions it can go in. on the other hand, there is an awful lot of music out there with a lot of variance, so if you're just manipulating music, the palate starts out pretty diverse. in my opinion, when it is done well, there is no reason to disparage deejays the way some people do. looking at things honestly, all music draws heavily on what came before in the natural way of things. well, whatever. tonight should be fun: there will be lots of people i know, there is no cover, and drinks are allegedly cheap. i'm trying not to spend much money, but i am bad at being at a place and doing nothing for two minutes, let alone two hours. also, no smoking in bars here, so that leaves me with one less distraction. we'll see how it goes.
in other music news, i just keep getting more and more into tea leaf green, that band i saw way back when i first moved to this apartment. they have a lot of good shit on archive.org and my download speeds at school have been ridiculously fast, so i've built up quite a collection. one appealing thing is the enormous catalogue they draw from. they've been around less than a decade and have already written like 120 songs. pretty prolific, especially for a band that gets lumped in with all the other supposed "jam" acts. also, they occasionally play acoustic shows as coffee bean brown, and that serves as an excellent change of pace for a band whose style includes a generous helping of synthesizer and organ, not to mention effects-laden guitar. so i've been enjoying a bit of that; not difficult to do when everyone is such a great musician and the lead vocalist has one of the best voices in the business. if anyone is curious, i can point you in the right direction for some good recordings. also, wilco fans past and present, there is a torrent for a '97 lounge ax show of jeff tweedy and bob egan that just got upped on etree today. looks pretty promising.
today i went to a talk by the 122nd person exonerated from death row in the united states. harold wilson is his name, and he has a story to tell. it is not a feel-good tale of fun and excitement. it is awesome that dna evidence cleared him, but how he got to where he was in the first place is pretty outraging. the asshole who prosecuted him is best known for a training film for new philly prosecutors where he instructs them to avoid selecting black jurors in death penalty cases. the bloody coat in evidence, which somehow appeared in his mothers basement (mysterious to this day), was much too small. but they never let him try it on at trial. his bloody sneakers? the "blood" turned out to be hot chocolate stains. the parade of bullshit just kind of kept going. the guy became a public speaker because he had something to say, not because he was the best public speaker in the world, but i found him effective. the one thing that gives me pause is that he was speaking as an anti-death penalty advocate, which is great and makes sense. however, the real problem for him was that he was wrongly convicted. this country has killed plenty of people wrongly, i'm sure, but i think most of the people we wrongly convict aren't sentenced to death. the speaker did 17 years, which is a travesty that can never be made right, but what about someone who does 50 without being sentenced to death? who is there for the wrongfully convicted who aren't on death row? being put to death is arguably the worst thing that can happen, but the dehumanizing experience of spending decades institutionalized could be arguably worse. this is why suicide is commonly attempted in prison. so, plenty of great things to think about there.
i accidentally started reading stranger in a strange land again. i honestly didn't mean to. i picked it up the other night when i couldn't sleep and went through the first fifty pages or whatever. there was no turning back. i am always surprised when i re-read a novel at how different the experience is. different things stand out, i feel differently about different characters. fascinating commentary on the interaction between the reader and the text. lots of deleuze and heidegger in there. i wanted to do a phenomenological evaluation of that sort of theory through the lens of the dead and/or phish, where the same was always different, with ascriptions to time and place and other contextual factors. it made great sense to me and i thought i had the makings of a really good paper, but my professor said that someone considering graduate study should not force a prof who would probably be writing a letter of recommendation to tell admissions committees that this student wrote an important senior paper on hippie music. he then credited both bands and mentioned that everyone in phish had a phd in performance for their respective instruments. i told him no, but he was sure. i was right. so instead i wrote a paper on derrida's "force of law", which wound up steering me toward law school. i was still under the delusion that legal eduction included a somewhat academic aspect. anyway, back to undergrad, where i got my phish kick by writing a mythology paper about the gamehendge saga and the feats of hercules. in the spring, i wrote what i still think is the best thing i've ever done by a long shot, a paper on perspectivism in nietszsche. maybe that was the fall... in any event, it was a hell of a lot better than the derrida paper was, and probably would have been sufficient to get me in someplace decent. but write the derrida paper i did, which played an undeniable role in landing me in my current predicament. who knows, i probably would have hated grad school too, but i don't think i could hate it as much as i hate law school. hard to say, really, because it brings us back to the original point that experience is dictated in large part by context while drawing on all prior experience. i think all i really wanted to say was that i am not upset that i am reading a book i love less than six months after i already re-read it because some things are different every time. so i am going to do that for a little while longer and then go to the show.