The Temporary Californian
Aug. 27th, 2003 06:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mangosteen[edited for grammar and identities]
Note: The subject line is the appellation that was used by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tigerbright to describe me upon appearing at Diesel on Tuesday. I can think of at least a couple of union cards I'd have to tear up if I was actually a Californian for any length of time.
So, when we last left our hero, he was enjoying his weekend in the SF Bay Area for all the reasons that one might enjoy walking out of a Boston-sized sauna and into a beautiful late summer day, among other things.
Observation: It doesn't take more than a few days to be convinced that Californians are the way they are because it's easy to be in a good mood when the weather doesn't sap your will to live for 4-5 months out of the year. Don't mind me, I'm just going to sit here in a corner and repeat "I like four seasons" several million times until I believe it again.
Sunday morning was spent staying pleasantly pre-verbal and laptop-enabled until around 11am, whenxeger and I went out for brunch, came back, dealt with other stuff, and then headed up to San Francisco to do some music shopping. 27 miles, slightly fewer minutes.
Observation: Traffic on 101 has really cleared up since the dot-com bust.
We ended up going to four stores that sold music. The easiest one to describe was Amoeba Music. Um, well, it's big. Really big. Picture a space with about half the square footage of your average Best Buy, packed cheek-by-jowl with racks of new and used CDs, vinyl, and, um, more CDs and vinyl. I use roughly the same metric for the comprehensiveness of a record store that I use for the comprehensiveness of a textbook, the latter being "find the answers to two questions you know, and one you don't know", and the former being "find two CDs that any self-respecting music store would have, and one they likely wouldn't." Amoeba Music passed on both counts. I escaped with a whole bunch of CDs (really low used CD prices), and minimal financial damage.
The other three stores were of a kind that I'd likely find in NYC, if I knew where to look (which I don't). Two of them were stores that sold clothing and other stuff, and the other was a hole-in-the-wall that just had music, but all three had a rack of empty CD cases in the back with numbers on them, and a 200-disc CD changer with decent headphones hooked up. It was all electronic music of various kinds, andxeger was kind enough to give me a basic education in what the landscape looked like, and did some basic screening for me, trying to figure out what I liked. There was a very interesting boutique-like feel to the process. In the end I ended up purchasing something that makes for kick-ass driving music as well as being fun to relentlessly bop around to with headphones on.
Note To Self: "Bop around" and "145 beats per minute" are somewhat incompatible concepts. Find better phrasing.
The music mission accomplished, we headed back down the peninsula to meet up withsrc and dine upon of the tastiest dead raw fish I'd had in a while. After that, we went back to the house, I managed to transcend the laws of physics with the amount of stuff that I wedged into my backpack, and thenceforth got myself and my rental car (which I ended up needing not nearly as much as I thought) back to the airport, in order to experience the bizarre concoction of sleep-deprivation and transportation-stasis known as the "red-eye flight back home".
Four hours and fifty-seven minutes after takeoff, the plane disgorged our hero from its belly into surprisingly non-disagreeable weather in Boston. More about the observations and realizations from the trip later. I wanted to prove to myself that I could get a day-to-day trip report out of my head and into words. Ever onward.
Note: The subject line is the appellation that was used by
tigerbright to describe me upon appearing at Diesel on Tuesday. I can think of at least a couple of union cards I'd have to tear up if I was actually a Californian for any length of time. So, when we last left our hero, he was enjoying his weekend in the SF Bay Area for all the reasons that one might enjoy walking out of a Boston-sized sauna and into a beautiful late summer day, among other things.
Observation: It doesn't take more than a few days to be convinced that Californians are the way they are because it's easy to be in a good mood when the weather doesn't sap your will to live for 4-5 months out of the year. Don't mind me, I'm just going to sit here in a corner and repeat "I like four seasons" several million times until I believe it again.
Sunday morning was spent staying pleasantly pre-verbal and laptop-enabled until around 11am, when
xeger and I went out for brunch, came back, dealt with other stuff, and then headed up to San Francisco to do some music shopping. 27 miles, slightly fewer minutes. Observation: Traffic on 101 has really cleared up since the dot-com bust.
We ended up going to four stores that sold music. The easiest one to describe was Amoeba Music. Um, well, it's big. Really big. Picture a space with about half the square footage of your average Best Buy, packed cheek-by-jowl with racks of new and used CDs, vinyl, and, um, more CDs and vinyl. I use roughly the same metric for the comprehensiveness of a record store that I use for the comprehensiveness of a textbook, the latter being "find the answers to two questions you know, and one you don't know", and the former being "find two CDs that any self-respecting music store would have, and one they likely wouldn't." Amoeba Music passed on both counts. I escaped with a whole bunch of CDs (really low used CD prices), and minimal financial damage.
The other three stores were of a kind that I'd likely find in NYC, if I knew where to look (which I don't). Two of them were stores that sold clothing and other stuff, and the other was a hole-in-the-wall that just had music, but all three had a rack of empty CD cases in the back with numbers on them, and a 200-disc CD changer with decent headphones hooked up. It was all electronic music of various kinds, and
xeger was kind enough to give me a basic education in what the landscape looked like, and did some basic screening for me, trying to figure out what I liked. There was a very interesting boutique-like feel to the process. In the end I ended up purchasing something that makes for kick-ass driving music as well as being fun to relentlessly bop around to with headphones on.Note To Self: "Bop around" and "145 beats per minute" are somewhat incompatible concepts. Find better phrasing.
The music mission accomplished, we headed back down the peninsula to meet up with
src and dine upon of the tastiest dead raw fish I'd had in a while. After that, we went back to the house, I managed to transcend the laws of physics with the amount of stuff that I wedged into my backpack, and thenceforth got myself and my rental car (which I ended up needing not nearly as much as I thought) back to the airport, in order to experience the bizarre concoction of sleep-deprivation and transportation-stasis known as the "red-eye flight back home". Four hours and fifty-seven minutes after takeoff, the plane disgorged our hero from its belly into surprisingly non-disagreeable weather in Boston. More about the observations and realizations from the trip later. I wanted to prove to myself that I could get a day-to-day trip report out of my head and into words. Ever onward.
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no subject
Date: 2003-08-27 03:19 pm (UTC)The irony here is that you picked the one weekend in August when Boston got absolutely fscking perfect weather to do so.
"I like four seasons"
Boston doesn't have four seasons, it has three if you are lucky. Spring ? I see no spring here.
no subject
Date: 2003-08-27 09:25 pm (UTC)Boston has a perfectly good spring. Come visit my garden if you don't believe it.
no subject
Date: 2003-08-27 10:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-08-27 05:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-08-27 05:38 pm (UTC)Edited appropriately.
The place for used CDs in NYC is....
Date: 2003-08-28 07:48 am (UTC)