Obsidian Noise

Casa Mono

Food: delicious
Service: excellent
Atmosphere: urban bourgeoisie, mostly older couples and careful bites, necklaces and dresses, hushed clinkiness, champagne and wine snobbery (what a robbery) mixed with perfume.
Overall: go there for a good reason, need reservations.
Total cost: $110/2 (with no wine)

It’s a small place with bar seating on one side where you can watch the chefs prepare everything, and table seating on the other (where you can look at everyone’s pretty outfits).  We took the bar so we could watch the chefs. There’s no back kitchen; everything is done right in the open. The cooks stand mostly in one spot whereby they can swivel in place and reach everything. Ovens, burners, sauces, fridges, utensils, etc. It was a real treat to watch the process and to guess at what was going to be what as it materialized into fanciness.

My date was there for fois gras.

Controversy? Indeedly. There are times when I think PETA and similar groups can be misleading, taking up unnecessary battles against traditions that are far less harmful than they preach. The natural world is what it is– we don’t go around preventing wolves from ripping deer to shreds when they need to eat, so why is it so different for a human hunter using bullets?  But, there are also very obvious times when animal rights lobbyists are extremely important, and I do think fois gras is one of them.

As mentioned, my date was there specifically to have it. When I asked her if she knew what it was, she said: “I know, I know…, but you know what? It’s delicious!” That can be a fine place to leave a conversation, and that’s where I left it.

SEE PEOPLE!! I’M LEARNING! FINALLY!! LEARNING!! HAHAHAHAHAHA

But in my mind it continued.

You can say “I know I know” and do the thing anyway, but what you can’t do is pretend something away for the purpose of doing it guilt-free. Dudes, fois gras production is awful. It literally means “fat liver”, and involves getting duck livers to swell to multiple times the normal size and become so overworked and stressed that the liver itself turns to liquid fat (while still inside the duck!) You fully restrain and then force feed said duck. Force feeding here doesn’t mean you mush the ducks face into food, it means you grab it by the head and ram a metal rod down its throat and all the way into its stomach, packing food down, over and over and over. You know, tamping it, like you’re packing a pipe.

So you force feed an animal until its liver virtually explodes, and right before it actually does, you remove it and freeze it for restaurants (except in California).

So that’s what my date had.

Fois gross. It doesn’t even taste very good for fuck’s sake.  Is it worth the torture? Is it ever?

Anyway, here’s what it looks like at Casa Mono:

We also had sea urchin, which was very nice and oceany, and some skirt steak, fantastically sauced and onioned.

Overall the whole meal was great. As will always be the case, it’s not worth $100, and no one anywhere should be eating two weeks worth of groceries in one meal.

Busy day with this and that. I feel a little out of it, maybe the weather shift is the cause. No shorts. No flip flops. It was 57 on my walk in. At least fall is really here.

Enjoy your coffees on days like today, few things are better.

Not much time today but let me quickly tell you about the Devin Townsend show.

It was tripple billed with the legendary Paradise Lost of UK and Katatonia of Sweden.  Apparently Dev and Katatonia have been been switching between headlining and opening all tour. A quick word about Paradise Lost– they’ve been around for 24 freakin’ years, formed in 1988, which is just nuts. They’re one of the first doom/death metal bands and have been through a few major detours. In their middle years they used more keyboards and became a kind of doom/death/synth-pop band, which worked in many ways, and now they’re basically a straight up gothic metal band, with slow, grinding, highly listenable tracks with occasional grooviness. I was never a big fan, but nothing but respect for their work over so many years.

Back to Dev. I wasn’t sure what to expect– I’d only seen Devin play once before, back when his only music act was the ultra-heavy Strapping Young Lad, a favorite band of mine that ended in the mid 2000s. Since moving on from that project he’s been doing his own thing, and that’s been highly variable to say the least. His last 4 albums have been all over the place, one fairly heavy, one filled with flutes and acoustics, one that was more of a commercial sound with lots of danceable tracks, and this new one, a double EP called Epicloud, which is happily heavy and filled with feel-good groovy metal/rock tracks.

If you’re interested at all, I highly recommend downloading his albums Infinity, Ocean Machine and Accelerated Evolution. Some of the best guitar work around.

He’s not a commercial musician and writes, records, produces and sells his own albums from his home in BC Canada. When an artist chooses to go that route, they typically end up with limited reach, and I meet very few people who’ve ever even heard of him, despite his huge presence in the world of progressive metal. Me, on the other hand… I’ve seen every interview he’s ever given, read everything written by or about him, and have everything he’s ever done… I’m quite the fan.

At around 8:30p, while his roadies were setting the stage up, Dev had a giant video playing on a screen in the background, with sound, and the contents were utterly bizarre. I hate taking my phone out during shows, but I couldn’t help but capture some pieces of it.

Some were giant stills of a famously hideous face he made and posted to twitter that went viral. Here’s one I grabbed:

Then there were utterly bizarre animations– nearly indescribable. And then weird little interludes starring the Ziltoid alien character he created a few years back. Here’s a clip I took of one of those:

(it’s sideways but you get the idea)

Eventually he took the stage and people were glad. He broke into Supercrush and the sound was huge. I’d say he had about 2/3 of the crowd with him from the start, and that was actually surprising to me. For some reason I assumed I’d be in a minority group here. But at Irving Plaza last night there were about 2000 likeminded fans, and it was great to see their support for Devin. The 1/3 that didn’t seem into it were probably there to see Katatonia, and when Dev began his set, they all seemed utterly confused at what was happening. It was fantastic.

As I had read about (over the years), he provides lots of commentary throughout the set, speaking freely between songs, and sometimes changing lyrics in the middle of a song, usually as a joke.

But around 10p, near the end of his set, he easily had 4/5 of the place with him, making new fans with a hell of a performance. He used 4 different guitars, including one he designed with Peavey that I was on a wait list for for over two years and eventually had to cancel on. When he brought the PXD out it was awesome. 7-string 28″ scaled V-body baritone.

Anyway, he nailed the last song and everyone was roaring for more, but as an opener, he had to get off the stage, and that was that. I didn’t stay for Katatonia and instead headed home, very happy.

I’m being treated to another schmancy restaurant tonight called Casa Mono which is actually right next to Irving Plaza. I’ll take pics and post a review for tomorrow.

OK! Overtime already. Happy Monday as always, hopefully your ears aren’t ringing too badly from all the high voltage ecstasy of the weekend.

Post about the show forthcoming, slight delay this morning.

Still flipfloppin, but the shorts have stopped. My feet are getting used to the cooler air now. We’ll see how long this can last.

One danger of full-time flipflops is the toll daily use takes on them. Mine were $40 for heck’s sake. They’re starting to feel a bit loose and floppy. I suppose their response would be pretty legit: “I’m a flip FLOP, what did you expect? Idiot!”

Racing through a spec doc today and not super happy with where it’s at. Loose ends abound. I’m distracted by thinking about what the consequence of this project will really be. Will this thing matter in the scheme of things? Will it really contribute anything? Or, like so much of what I seem to do, is it mere mental masturbation?

I’m taking the official Myres-Briggs Type Indicator assessement this weekend. I’ve taken some samples and some online free versions, and am enticed enough to see where I score on the big one. I’ll reveal it here afterwards. So far, the online ones have been eerily accurate. It describes the “Type”( you score as) with example scenarios, such as: “The XYZA type generally prefers this kind of thing over that kind of thing, except when this this happens, in that case the XYZA is likely to prefer that thing. After this thing, the XYZA is likely to seek out that thing and…” Etc. When I read the profile for my approximated (and unofficial) result, I was seriously floored by some of the accuracies.

It’s both kind of relief and kind of concerning to know that you can be “typified” accurately.

I will let you know how it goes, probably by Sunday. I wonder if any of you who already know about MBTI have a good sense of what type I am (besides primarily introverted)– feel free to drop guesses over the next couple of days.

I’m seeing my favorite musician on Sunday at Irving Plaza– the one and only Devin Townsend.

First time.

Katatonia is opening, which is odd and will be interesting. No one else is around or interested so I’ll check it out on my own. Probably the best way to see Dev anyway… his art is not for everyone.

Back to writing for now, hope you all have a great early fall weekend.

Blister on my index finger from playing bass last night after our drummer got tired and we all switched instruments. My ears are ringing a little.

We had Jack Daniels and the guitarists were down-tuned and we growled fiercely at the universe until  depleted of the energies that tortured us for the week. The walls of Hollow Way now drip with life and memories.

Afterwards I sat down and wrote for an hour. I didn’t have a plan.  It ended up being about a future earth where empathy has been evolved away as the survival requirements shifted to emotionless interaction and production. It begins by people pretending to be that way while at work for “maximum productivity”,  then with their social groups for “maximum status”, and eventually, a few generations later, it’s not pretend any more: even when they’re home alone they think of nothing but how to get what they want the next day. Eventually the genes for empathy drop away entirely and humanity becomes emotionless machinery inside of skin bags of blood and bone. But every once in a while a person is born who feels things– the recessive gene! And this story is about one of those people, and another person he meets accidentally.

I stopped after an hour, disgusted with what was there, and watched some Netflix before crashing.

No such luxuries tonight, however. I have  a major document to send around tomorrow and it’s got a ways to go. That’ll be the task for the remainder of today and tonight.

Let the coffee flow. Let the muscles heal. Let time not slip away too quickly.

I’m forcing shorts and flip flops on the situation. Hoody to restore the balance.

Visa application sent and time is passing quickly. Has it really been what it has been. There are times when it seems impossible, yet there’s no way out for checking. You just kind of accept that it’s probably real, and you move on. There’s no way to investigate otherwise because it’s all there is to interact with, no reference point besides the thing itself.

So just keep hitting the pads, it works out just like you do.

Hump day.

Last night I met up with a Bhutanese friend who’s headed back home for about a year before he matriculates into a doc program here in NYC next winter. He came up to where I was last night and brought his wife and some other Bhut friends and… containers of unbelievably delicious homemade food.

And a huge bottle of rice wine.

Bhutanese food seems similar to most southeast asian food, with lots of big meat dishes and everything laced with ultra-spicy pepper seeds. The beef dish last night was extraordinary, keeping us warm on what became one of the first mildy chilly nights of fall. It was laced with ginger and pepper seeds and the chunks of meat were very large and it reminded me very much of the food I was given at the house of my childhood best friend who was from Cambodia.

I have said this about so many things I’ve experienced: “This reminds me of that thing at my Cambodian friend’s house when I was six.”

It applies to smells, tastes and sounds, mostly.

We ate and drank undisturbed outside on a patio near where I work until it was very late and the bottle (which we kept in a bag) was empty. They gave me a traditional Bhutanese satchel and some ingenuous food containers that were handmade out of woven bamboo strips. Gorgeous and fantastic.

After our hugs goodbye I walked home alone, full, feeling thankful for knowing those guys, such good people. I’ll be seeing them all again in a couple of months, over there, in the mountains, and I can’t wait.

Can’t wait.

A friend invited me to watch the Finnish metal band Nightwish perform on Saturday at Beacon Theater down in the 70s. I had completely forgotten about this band– hadn’t heard them or anything from them in years. About ten years ago when some of the slower symphonic metal acts were starting to experiment with operatic vocals over traditional metal guitar, Nightwish was right on top of things, and essentially they set the bar against which others in the genre are still judged.

I never really got into Nightwish. The female opera-lead over metal guitar was cool, but groove is a really important criteria for what I like to listen to and this kind of symphonic/opera sound mostly lacks it. Oringally, they also liked to cover Phantom of the Opera songs which, to my 20 year old self, was super lame when they first appeared on the metal scene, and I never went through most of their other work.

As I remember it, the band really got on the map because of the original lead singer, Tarja Turunen, who was dark and gothic and had this incredible opera voice. The wikipedia page (which has a nice picture of her) has her as a “full lyric soprano” and that she has a vocal range of three octaves. She studied voice for most of her teen years and then went on to music school and that’s actually where she helped form Nightwish. All the original band members were classmates there together.

After Nightwish completely blew up and became one of the most successful Scandinavian music groups of all time, Tarja went on to start a solo career in 2006 and since 2007 the band has had a new vocalist, Anette Olzon (from Sweden). Because of how amazing and powerful Tarja’s voice was, I’ve learned that Anette had a rough start with the band, mostly because the fans had a hard time adjusting. Nightwish was all about this huge, *huge* symphonic metal opera sound that was really driven by the female lead vocals. Anette’s voice was highly trained and was great,  but had only a fraction of the raw power of Tarja’s, and some fans gave up on them after the change.

But that is no longer the case. Now in her early 40s, Anette’s voice easily rivals Tarjas in terms of power and clarity.

Though not a genre I’m very interested in, and not something I’d go out of my way to check out on my own, I must say that the Nightwish show was very good and I’m glad to have been taken to see it. The band really killed it on a few songs and the mix of super heavy and slow acoustic worked very well. They brought in some traditional Finnish instruments for various tracks and overall the immensity of their sound was awesome.

I’ve never been to a nerdier metal show. My first sit-down event, and there were easily more women than men in the audience. Age varied from late 40s to pre-teens with lots of weirdly dressed and confused teenagers. Lots of purple eyeshadow and big black boots. Pink hair here and there. Corsets abounded. As did general fatness.

Of fatness and this audience– I wondered whether the fact that opera singers tend to be large had anything to do with the average BMI at the show. Both Tarja and Annett are large women (with correspondingly large voices). I wonder if it attracts other large women to the genre, or if there’s no causal relationship there.

Lastly, one of the highlights of the show for me was that my friend, the one who took me there, lost her voice from singing and cheering along so loudly. I love seeing that kind of thing.

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The rest of the weekend was relaxing and consisted of welcoming autumn with open windows and clean closets. I trained outside Sunday afternoon and it felt great to exercise without losing gallons of water just by walking to the nearest park. Autumn, autumn. Why can’t every day be this nice.

The best time of year is here and I’m in full gear.

Busy week and I’m looking forward to all its parts and hope you guys are too. Happy Monday.

People finished all the cookies.

That is all for now.