Heads-Up Display
Sorry for the distinct lack of updates here on ByM over the last three months.
In the meantime, I’ve been keeping a very minimalist “daily dashboard” blog over on Dreamwidth. It’s called “Heads-Up Display”. You may want to have a look:
http://mwkelley.dreamwidth.org
( or plug this link into your RSS reader of choice:
http://mwkelley.dreamwidth.org/data/rss )
Waiting for a normal day
So I’ve been waiting for a normal day to catch my breath and write a comprehensive update, but I guess normal has been in short supply lately.
For the curious: I’m now fully moved into my new place on the other side of town– a house we’ve decided to name “the Satellite of Love” (an Mystery Science Theater reference, if you’re a total nerd)(or a Lou Reed reference, if you’re not). I turned in the keys to my old studio downtown on the 31st. Took my car key off the keyring this week too, since the house is right on a main busline, and it’s getting warm enough to bike around. Feels nice to be down to just two keys now. In my experience, “Number of keys” tends to correlate directly with “Level of stress”.
Things are in full swing at the greenhouse now– it’s been cold and miserable on the last couple of weekends, but plants are popping up everywhere. Business at the mill is still humming along– though it’s showing signs that the orders may soon be sloping off for the summer. Plus, the City is tearing up the pavement right in front of our front doors to bury power lines, so it’s going to be a scene of mass havoc for awhile.
I’m happy as ever. Enjoying sharing a roof with my new housemates just like I thought I would. Still working out a new daily routine. I’ll try to bash out some more details soon. Here’s the new mailing address, if yr interested:
Mike Kelley
c/o the Satellite of Love
1540 E Maryland St
Bellingham, WA 98226
Taking stock, pt 2: Home and refocused
So, I returned home yesterday from a trip w/ my sister to Central Florida. We were visiting our parents, who I hadn’t seen in more than a year.
It was quite lovely. On the same day that I stepped off the plane I was photographing manatees in Blue Springs with my new camera. I got to see a pre-dawn Space Shuttle launch (sadly, the last). I got to watch the Superbowl with my dad. My mom gave me a sewing lesson and I stitched a hole in my favorite sweater; it’s good as new. I paddled a kayak through a mangrove swamp with my sis, mom & aunts. I won four games of ping-pong, three games of Scrabble. Climbed an orange tree, and scrapped-up my hands leaping out of it. (plus, the oranges I picked were under-ripe and mercilessly bitter. oh well, it was fun anyway.) I saw hawks, herons, huge pelicans, ibises, ospreys… birds of all shapes and descriptions, everywhere. Watched some charming films: Up in the Air, Pixar’s Up, The Hangover (also, an old favorite: Jean Reno & the 13-y.o. Natalie Portman in The Professional). Just a fun week all around.
Last year my family went through some serious upheavals, so– most of all– it was good to get back together with my sister & parents and see that each of us is falling into our new routines pretty well.
Now I’m back in B’ham. Mostly ignoring the big Winter Olympics hubbub going on 50 miles to the north of me. I may wander over to the brewery later this week and do some spectating, but right now I have other things on my mind.
Since it’s been such a warm winter here in Whatcom County, folks at the greenhouse are talking about planting even earlier this year. I could be starting my “summer” weekend job this month(!), maybe even this weekend. That means going back to a no-days-off schedule again– kind of a bummer– but I’m excited by the prospect of two more paychecks each month. If my budget stays on track, I could have more than 50%(!) of my remaining debts paid off by October.
In the off-hours, I have my usual spread of pursuits and hobbies. Getting more serious about practicing on my guitar and piano again. My friends & I are still playing a lot of MtG, and I’ve also started playing Pauper Magic on MTG Online, which is a surprising amount of fun. I bought a new-used camera (a Canon G10) with the intention of improving my photography and getting back into Flickr. I’ll be restarting Nodeslam.com this week, finally. I’ve also been recording myself reading The Silmarillion outloud, purely for my own amusement. (I may upload the recordings at some point, but in a more out-of-the-way location. I don’t want to run afoul of the Tolkien estate. I’ll let you know.)
My 20 favorite albums of the 2000s
(Happy Decemberween, kiddos: I tossed together a Whitman’s Sampler of 20 songs plucked from the albums mentioned below, and you can [download it right here]. Share & enjoy.)
One of the things my dad sent me for my birthday last week was a double-CD of two Dave Mason LPs: It’s Like You Never Left from ‘74 and his self-titled follow-up album, Dave Mason. These were a couple of my father’s top-ten albums from that era, back when his life mirrored mine in a lot of ways. (Like me, my mom & dad left Michigan in their mid-twenties and moved to a laidback Cascadian college town– Corvallis OR, in their case– to go back to basics and enjoy a hippie lifestyle. Yes, this is basically where I got the idea.)
It got me thinking about what I’d choose as my top albums of this decade, the 2000s.
Furthermore, if you still haven’t heard: I broke up with my girlfriend Jet last Saturday and– although I’m still content with the decision and hope that Jet & I can still salvage a friendship– it’s thrown a ratchet into my brainpan that’s been rattling around all week. For any serious topic, it has made it hard to introspect farther back in time than the last few weeks and months, what I should have said and done differently, etc. So– in true [Rob Fleming] fashion– talking about music seems like a nice diversion.
And thirdly, I enjoy making lists. A lot. To an embarrassing extent.
10 years, 20 albums. Make it so.
2009
* Far, by Regina Spektor
I’d been predicting since mid-June that this would be my top album of 2009, and sure enough.
2008
* 3-WAY TIE: albums by local Bellingham bands that you’ve never heard of, but yet are better than most anything released on a major label that year =
All of My Friends Are Good People, by Go Slowpoke
Take This and Go, by Jenni Potts
New Ocean Waves, by Your Heart Breaks
These three, plus I Love You Avalanche– aka Anna Arvan, another B’hamster who plays in a half-dozen groups (including Go Slowpoke) yet shockingly has never released an album– really grabbed my attention in the summer of 2008 and made me realize that Bellingham has a local music scene worth listening to… and more generally, made me realize that most of the truly good music in the world is made in bars and basements, not music studios.
* 3-WAY TIE: some particularly awesome mix CDs =
Horace Phair 6 by fweez, icicle & ouroboros
Audiovisceral Club 1&2 by danndalf and indigoe
Indieboy Heartbreaker by chaotic_poet
I debated whether to include mix CDs on this list, but truth is I love love love mixes and I tend to reach for them a lot. So if you mailed or handed me a mix at some point this decade, it’s a safe bet that I’ve listened to it at least as many times as each of the other albums on here.
Special mention needed to go out to three, though, for containing a dangerously pressurized quantity of awesome-sauce and being my first intro to several excellent acts.
(technically Robbie gave me Indieboy Heartbreaker in 2007 but whatev, it fits here better.)
2007
* Faces in the Rocks, by Mariee Sioux
* Romance Conflict Adventure, by Best Friends Forever
2007 was the year I moved from my ski lodge in the Cascades back to Metamora for the summer, then I moved (to stay) in Bellingham that fall. Mariee Sioux is beautiful, mysterious, sublime Native-American-inflected folk music from the Pacific Northwest. Best Friends Forever is happy, happy, happy two-girls-and-some-drums pop music from Minnesota. I’d be hard-pressed to locate a better soundtrack for summer in the Midwest and winter in Cascadia.
The rest of these records are (slightly) less obscure, so I’ll slim down the commentary.
2006
* The Body, The Blood, The Machine by The Thermals
* Gulag Orkestar, by Beirut
2005
* The Woman King EP, by Iron & Wine
The only EP on the list, but I’d pick these 6 songs over anything else in the Sam Beam songbook.
* Illinois, by Sufjan Stevens
* Picaresque, by The Decemberists
2004
* Sanctuary, by Charlie Musselwhite
Given to me by an old co-worker of mine, “Barnacle” Bob Baker, an Alaskan deep-sea fisherman turned I.T. guy that I used to work with at the college. He knew I liked Jack White and Kurt Cobain, so one day he dropped some real blues on me. 2004 was the year I moved into my first apartment, and songs like “Homeless Child” and “Let’s Burn Down the Cornfield” packed (and still pack) a lot of wallop.
2003
* Her Majesty, The Decemberists
2002
* (), by Sigur Rós
2001
* White Blood Cells, by The White Stripes
* Space Lullabies and Other Fantasmagore, by Ekova
Ekova is Afro-Parisienne electronic/worldbeat something something something fusion… Probably the first truly strange album I’d ever sought out and purchased (at age 19) and it’s left a big impression. This album and another, similar disc (Bothy Culture by Irish musician Martyn Bennett, which I’d discovered via dad) opened up a massive new sonic landscape for me.
2000
* De Stijl, The White Stripes
This album came out literally a week after I graduated high school, although I wasn’t cool enough to know it at the time. (Like most everyone else, I’d only found out about the Stripes after White Blood Cells hit Top 40 and Jack & Meg became kind of a big deal.) Of all the albums on this list, De Stijl is the one that I can see myself still raving about 30 years hence. It deserves a spot in the rock-gods’ canon, somewhere between Led Zeppelin IV and Electric Ladyland.
Hell, De Stijl would also make my desert island top-five, next to The White Album and Tigermilk, but that list would be another long excursion all together.
Taking stock, part 1: a miller’s tale
It’s pretty warm in my apartment right now. It’s a 3rd story loft– a big open space– so it’s hard to keep the temperature consistent. When I turn the heat off, all the warm air tends to drift to the top. A fan would probably do the trick, but I haven’t figured out how to rig one up. Haven’t given it much thought really, to be honest. It rarely gets this cold in Bellingham. It’s been below freezing now for nearly a week. Jet predicts that it’ll snow soon. But anyway, I’m comfortable.
We’ve been busy at the mill. A lot of people dust off their cookbooks around this time of year, and that means a lot of extra demand for good flour. I’m happy to provide.
I’ve had two jobs in my life that I’ve really enjoyed. The first was my I.T. internship at Oakland CC in Auburn Hills, but that was mostly due to the laidback work environment; I loved the comraderie of hanging out in nerd central with the other I.T. guys, playing Unreal Tournament on the college LAN and waiting around for trouble tickets to roll into the queue so that we could swoop in and save the day. When it came to the actual job though– fixing finicky PCs & printers– meh, it was fun but it got boring after awhile. I didn’t feel like I was really doing anything, just maintaining other people’s tools so that they could carry on with their day.
I never get bored of making flour, though. Mostly because my job is so easy. I feel as if Kevin– the miller, or in other words, the mill’s owner, my boss (I find it an interesting statement about 21st century life that all of my friends know what an I.T. guy’s job is, but I have to explain every facet of what a miller does for a living)– I feel as if Kevin has the hard job, talking with customers & suppliers, making business decisions on what grain to buy & what prices to charge for our flour. Making the flour (my job) is the easy part. It’s so simple that there’s nothing to get bored *of*. Hell, making flour is something that hunter-gatherer societies had figured out. Using electricity to do it makes the machines more complicated, but it tends to save on labor. And since we only use organic grain purchased from trusted sources in WA, the nearby states, & Canada, I have complete confidence that the flour I make every day is at least as good or better than the flour made by every other miller’s assistant in the entire history of humanity.
So, in other words, I like my job. It doesn’t pay a lot but it pays the bills, and it helps pay my debts, and gives me a little left over on the side to have some fun and a lot of extra free-time to enjoy it. Sometimes, in moodier moments, I come down a little hard on myself for living as a modern-day peasant in a world where wealthier people have access to such incredible things– books with electronic ink, cars that run on cooking oil or get 200mpg, hiking gear made out of space-age materials, routine travel on intercontinental airliners, …. But then, I look around even within my own circle of friends and also see a lot of people who are currently looking for work & having a stressful time of it– most of them better educated & more hard-working than I am– and I feel supremely fortunate that I’ve lucked my way into such a lovely lot in life.
Though that doesn’t mean that I expect to be a miller for the next 40 years. I’d be content to do that, sure, but I have other things in mind.
More on that next time.
