right on bro!

Wow, it’s been a week since I last wrote in this here blog. It doesn’t seem like a week has passed.

I saw Metallica: Some Kind of Monster at the Arclight last night. It was pretty dope, although I think I lost empathy with the band about halfway through the film, due to their constant need to express their feelings. But I guess there’s a lot of baggage in 20 years of being together as a band that needed to get worked out. I just didn’t expect it to be so…un-rock-and-roll. Maybe it was the giant tub of popcorn that I ate as “dinner,” or the drink I slammed down ten minutes before the show, or maybe I was just thinking, “Hey guys - just shut the hell up and play your guitars.” I’m not all that familiar with Metallica, beyond what’s been played on the radio, so I didn’t really come in with a fan’s perspective.

Also, I saw the Magnetic Fields at the Wilshire Ebell Theater this weekend. It was an amazing show, very quiet and relaxing. This time around, there was no percussion, just four of them with piano, guitar, cello, and ukelele. The songs from the new album sound so much better this way, and there were lots played from the 69 Love Songs albums as well, which, besides Get Lost, rank as my favorite albums from them.

Okay, so when I was on vacation, I ordered this WipeOut! CD repair cleaner thing to try to repair a couple of scratched and skipping discs. I was totally skeptical but figured that for $15 it was worth a try, and if it hosed my discs, they were already hosed to begin with. Well, it arrived, and I tried it out on a Mogwai CD that had a pretty deep scratch on it, and a couple of tracks were skipping badly. That shit actually worked! Apparently, there are two layers to a CD, one inside layer with a “wafer” of information, and an outside surface. If the wafer layer is scratched, you’re hosed. But if the scratch isn’t too deep, the cleaner “re-surfaces” the outside layer, and it’s fine. It doesn’t get the CD shiny and new, but it made two CDs playable now. So, if you’re in a jam with a scratched CD, this is recommended.

Part 5 of Yeti Sports has been released. It’s super fun.