Ethan Rand

Tina singing in the country

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan Rand) — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 23:13:00 +0000

On vacation in the Catskills with Sarah -- Tina and Claire came up for the past few days and we've some of the best times ever. Good food, good friends, good fun. Kayaking in the river, hiking around, playing badminton in the backyard...And here's a video of Tina singing at the dining room table.

School soon come

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan Rand) — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 20:00:00 +0000

Ah, you are probably not wondering what class I'm taking in the autumn, but in case you are...this is it: http://www.newschool.edu/nssr/courses.aspx?id=17190

Viral or just yucky?

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan Rand) — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 16:57:00 +0000

My songwriting partner made yet another super sweet Indelible Beancurd video. They just keep getting better. This one features footage of two moths having sex.

Front porch and the rain

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan Rand) — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 19:31:00 +0000

I'm sitting on my front porch and it's raining. Absolutely perfect. The morning was all sunshine and light breezes. Now I'm just out here with my computer transcribing some song lyrics. Going to grab my guitar in a bit too. Alas, my camera isn't working so no pics....oh well.

My brother in law: superstar

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan Rand) — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 01:02:00 +0000

Just got home from a grueling day of corporate stuff and to unwind from it spent the past few minutes looking at (watching/reading) my brother in law, Robert Guererro's blog, Controlled Accidents. He and I went out for dinner (at a yummy Indian place) last night and had a wonderful, wandering conversation about life, the universe and all that other stuff. I'd be lying if I said I don't envy him a bit -- he is about as free as they come. Now granted, he's six or seven years younger than I am, but still. I just love the way he's drifting around following his passion and his star. He's a professional in-line skater on Rollerblade's pro-team. Whenever he's on the East Coast he and I get together, sometimes he stays with me. Last time he was in town he was doing a stunt for some tv show that required him to skate backwards at high speed down the steps inside the NY Public Library. He's just an incredible athlete and a warm, thoughtful person...those attributes aren't so often combined, which makes him a pretty unique guy. Anyway, check out this video he just put together a few days ago.

Wordle

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan Rand) — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 20:56:00 +0000

I just plopped the text from my last term paper into an online tool called "Wordle" that allows you to create a word cloud from any chunk of text. Here's mine. So cool!

Check it out and create your own.

Hottttttt

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan Rand) — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 20:40:00 +0000

Returned from London late Friday night and found myself at the front end of a NY city heat wave in an unairconditioned apartment with a whole lotta packing to do. No worries, Sarah and I spent Saturday sweating and packing boxes for the big move next week. We got 85% of it done, which is no wonder because we started early, taking lots of stuff up to the house. Tonight: more sweating and packing.

Saturday night I went out with Brent for a real East Village evening. We had drinks at the newly re-opened International Bar...my old favorite bar revamped and reopened after more than two years shuttered. They still sell cheap Rolling Rocks, so I'm a happy customer. Then we had aaaammmmmaaaazzzziiiinnnnnggggg burgers at a new place called Seymour Burton. The joint needs to finish some of the decor (noticeable issues with the ceiling, air conditioning was broken etc) but the food was incredible. I think they sautéed the burgers in butter o something. Incredible. Then off to the Music Box -- a bar I haven't been in for a few years. We met up with some of Brent's film industry friends...luckily people in production rather than actors :-)

On Sunday Sarah and I went to see Ironman, which we both loved -- especially escaping the mid-day heat. (And have I mentioned air conditioning enough?) Sunday night we celebrated Josh's birthday at Nurse Bettie's on the Lower East Side -- great birthday bar. Oh, and to redeem myself for the snarky anti-actor comment above, I should mention that we hung out with some of his thespian pals and they were delightful.

Zombies

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan Rand) — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 14:20:00 +0000

Watched "I am legend" last night and loved it. Nothing like a good zombie flick to cap off a sunny, spring weekend in New York City -- especially a zombie flick that features images of a deserted, desolate alternate-reality New York City.

Burping, farting, mouth-breathing miscreants..and a lush sunset

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan Rand) — Fri, 30 May 2008 01:38:00 +0000

I worked from my country house today. I sort of love/hate saying that. Love because it's something I dreamed of and worked for, hate because it sounds incredibly overstated and bourgeois -- especially considering the modesty of the property itself.

Anyway, I came up here because a few weeks ago I got busted speeding. In all fairness, I was speeding. But I should say that it was in a bit of speed trap -- a few hundred yards from where a 30mph zone turns into a 55 mph zone -- I was accelerating into the new zone and bang! So I decided to appear in court to see if I could at least bargain them down -- I looked into hiring a lawyer -- $300 - $500 for them to show up on my behalf and then usually a fine on top of it anyway! So I represented myself.

Weeeeellll...all I can say is that going to night court in a small Catskills town is like living a page out of a Mark Twain piece. The quality of the characters accompanying me within Walton, NY's faux-wood paneled hall of justice almost defies description. The first up was a nineteen year old kid there with his mom; he'd been arrested for waving a knife at some other kids and threatening them -- a class A misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in prison! He was dressed in a muscle T-shirt and wore a camouflage baseball cap. Then came the family of oxygen-deprived telephone-harassers. The defendant, an overweight nearly translucently pale woman kept trying to explain her case to me and show me the two telephones she had in her hands as evidence that the prank calls she was accused of making were actually initiated by the complainant. She promptly dropped one on the floor and it shattered into pieces. I suppressed a laugh and tried to stare nonchalantly at the judge. Her family (there as character witnesses, I suppose?) burped and farted loudly throughout. Her sister (mother? daughter?) had easily 35 hickies on each of her arms and carried a babydoll. She was either 14 or 47 years old.

And that was just the start of the parade of shorts-wearing, tattooed, myopically-haircut, lawbreakers in attendance tonight.

As for me, I looked as idiotic as the rest of them -- all Banana Republican and coordinated, Blackberry buzzing semi-silently, expensive teeth etc. But I got off with a plea bargain and everyone else has a date in a few weeks with the District Attorney. And that's what being rich (well, relatively) does for you in America.

After court I drove home (minding my speed, naturally) over Bear Spring Mountain through such intensely green greenery that, well, it took my words away. When I got home I made some Mandarin orange herbal tea and walked to the bridge to hear the river where I saw an enormous trout jump out of the water. Following dinner on the porch with the paper and the sound of chirpy birds, I went into my backyard and lay myself on the grass as the sunset faded into periwinkle. I turned my head east because I figured the sky would be darker that way. I watched a couple stars twinkle their way into existence, just like the song. It's like they pushed their way out of the invisibility of daylight into glorious night time shimmering. The birds faded into bugs and swooping bats that I could hear before I could see. And then the river in the distance emerged as night fell.

Sunny day in NYC with Shaydrian

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan Rand) — Sat, 17 May 2008 20:58:00 +0000

After doing some IBM stuff, going to the gym and lounging a bit, Sarah and I spent the day walking around Manhattan with Shayna and Adrian, whom we've dubbed "Shaydrian" as their celebrity couple nick name. We passed this ad for the new Grand Theft Auto posted above a mega Keith Haring poster. Kind of an interesting juxtaposition, eh?

Infinite work, infinite entertainment

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan Rand) — Thu, 15 May 2008 00:48:00 +0000

A friend of mine at IBM was just telling me how much she loves her ipod
touch. She watches movies while she does chores. She's also a blackberry
addict (full disclosure, so am I. In fact I'm writing this on my bb). It
occurs to me that both devices are embodiments of our corporate world
system in that the one promises infinite productivity and the other
infinite consumption. Someone should duct tape the two together.
-----------------
Sent from my BlackBerry Handheld.

Fountain

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan Rand) — Tue, 06 May 2008 15:11:00 +0000

I passed this on the street this morning and snapped a shot with my cellphone...precious ad hoc re-interpretation of Duchamp's 'Fountain."

Trying out Scribefire

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan Rand) — Mon, 05 May 2008 14:27:00 +0000

I'm trying a new tool to update my blog...let's see if it works. It's called Scribefire.

Short sighted idea: cut the gas tax

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan Rand) — Thu, 01 May 2008 13:52:00 +0000

Here's an idea, cut the gas tax to help out consumers. Just what we need to do...stimulate demand for a commodity in short supply (that happens to e incredibly poisonous to the Earth.) Oh, and simultaneously deprive the agencies that build our roads and upkeep our infrastructure of much-needed funding (anyone remember a few recent bridge-collapses? Hmmm.) How about we time it when the fattest, meanest, dirtiest companies in that industry are also among the most profitable in the world?

Great idea!

Sleep and gym and yard

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan Rand) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 17:23:00 +0000

I feel so much better on 8 hours of sleep...and amazingly better when I make it to the gym in the morning. Both can be said of today. I got a lot done this morning too. It's obvious, I know, but I just feel better and get more done when I'm well rested and exercised. Thi9s weekend I was up at the house on my own, enjoyed the clean air and, at last, clean water. I spent a lot of time in the yard repairing the enormous crater left behind by the crew that dug my new well. I moved a lot of rocks, raked, planted seeds and fertilized. I'm hoping it will rain a lot this week up there so the grass grows in...it's a pretty big scar on the lawn. Other than that I got a jump start on the paper I have due in a couple weeks. I really shoulda done more, but I got the 1st three pages done. On Sunday I just wanted to be outside in the yard and then relax in the afternoon. I even played some video games. On an annoying note, I got nailed with a speeding ticket....first in well over a decade. Forty-eight miles per hour in a 30 mph zone. Dang. Well, I'll see if I can at least get the points reduced....blargh!

Generals in your pocket

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan Rand) — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 02:43:00 +0000

Really, a frighteningly good piece of multimedia reporting here by the NY Times showing just how deeply the Pentagon's tentacles run into the media.

World-systems analysis

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan Rand) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 21:03:00 +0000

I meant to post this paper a while ago -- basically a book report I did on Immanuel Wallerstein's introduction to world-systems analysis. It's only five pages, so not a long read...but he's got some interesting points in his critique of capitalism.

Remember forever

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan Rand) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 13:57:00 +0000

Just read an interesting article by one of my favorite tech writers, Farhad Manjoo about software that allows you to digitally capture your whole life. Well, a lot of it anyway. It's a sort of "extreme blogging" in a way and, I think, the beginning of something that is inevitable and likely to change society in profound ways. It's already apparent that we're headed towards the end of forgetting and probably the end of privacy...and we are not culturally, legally, politically or spiritually ready for this 'panopticon.'

water, water everywhere

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan Rand) — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 03:29:00 +0000

I'm up here in my country pad alone right now -- it's wonderfully quiet. Just the sound of the cast iron pellet stove burning away and keeping me cozy.

I had a new well drilled, which is great because now I'll have clean water and good pressure...but the yard looks like a missile hit it, so I'll probably do a little work out there this wknd. Don't laugh, I bought a rake.

In other news, I listen to meditations occasionally from this Buddhist guru who sometimes really fucks with my head. Funny how, for the most part, intellectual and spiritual explorations often make me feel pretty bad. The same thing goes for the world-systems analysis stuff I've undertaken with my masters degree. It doesn't take much introspection to discover your own complicity in a bunch of shit that you find pretty toxic. Oh well.

That's why God invented beer!

Nostalgia

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan Rand) — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 14:03:00 +0000

These past couple days I have been making myself go to bed at around 10:30pm (very early for me) and sleep until at least 8am. Nothing beats Ambian with a glass of wine. I was really out of it last week. Kind of feeling beat-down and tired.

I'm rebounding now. I went to the gym last night and then stayed up late reading World Systems Analysis for school. I have a paper due next week, so I am very focused on that right now.

I listened to a radio show the other day about nostalgia -- you, know the emotion of romanticizing the past. It was really beautiful. The narrator of the program had looked up his babysitter form 20 years ago. He had to hire a detective to find her, but when he finally found her they had this wonderful, truthful conversation where they compared notes about their memories. It was an interesting analysis of memory too.

I hardly remember my old babysitters...but I do have intense feelings of nostalgia for various episodes in my childhood. Like going hiking in the public park with my dad and my sister. Or hanging out at "Arabica," the local coffee shop. Or riding my bike to the comic shops all the way across town.

It's funny what triggers nostalgia. Could be any sense, and yet no sense to it all.

Kitchen before and after

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan Rand) — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 14:49:00 +0000

Ok, so here are the before and after photos following an intense weekend of cleaning, priming and painting.

Brains and brawn, not necessarily in that order

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan Rand) — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 22:41:00 +0000

I'm making good progress up here. I cleaned the cabinets and taped up the walls around them last night and figured I would stop at that point. But then I go motivated and removed the doors and, well, I got really motivated and started to put on the primer. Yes, I got all the priming done last night by about 2 a.m. !

This morning I painted the first coat -- it's a semi-gloss white -- and in an hour or so I am going to do the second coat. It may only need two, in which case I'm done painting and will put the doors back on tomorrow before I leave here. Or maybe it will need a third coat, we'll see.

My next project will be to replace the counter tops and sink in the kitchen. That's actual hard work, so I might have to hire some help or twist a friend's arm into it. Counter tops weigh about 500 pounds, so it's not something I can do alone.

And yeah. Painting is real work. My right arm feels like it's going to fall off.

So now as I wait for the paint to dry I am doing my school reading (Eli Zaretsky, Marie Mies) and sitting by the fire. Not so bad for a weekend. I like the mix of physical and mental work.

This morning the crew from the well-drilling company came. They had to survey the land to make sure they can get their 33 ton truck in here. I filled out all the paperwork and paid a deposit...a few more weeks and I'll finally have good water up here. At last :-)

Here!

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan Rand) — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 04:35:00 +0000

I just arrived at my house, a long drive alone, but peaceful and actually good weather for driving. After listening to the news on my iPod, I listened to an album I recorded with Carbon Based Souls back in the mid 1990s. It's a pretty rocking album, too bad we never released it -- that was when my aspirations for a full time career as a musician ended, actually. It always makes me feel a little nostalgic, but I still enjoy hearing the music every once in a while.

As previously reported, I had to get my car fixed this past week -- so after the tune up, the drive up here was even better since I wasn't worrying the whole time that he engine was about to blow up. Turns out the car needed a new knock filter (which I had read about on line as a somewhat common problem for this car) and I also got the power steering fixed so it no longer whines at me when I parallel-park. New spark plugs, a tune up etc too. All in all, not so bad -- but none of it was covered by the bogus warranty. I didn't really expect it would be, but nonetheless felt a little disappointed. Anyway!

On my way up here I bought painting supplies -- including a ladder! I am going to clean and repaint the cabinets in my kitchen this wknd. I am a little nervous about doing it right...I don't want to fuck it up! But I suppose the worst that could happen is that I'd have to re-do the work. So I'll just relax and enjoy the process of doing work with my hands. I have a stereo and some beer too. Maybe I'll get some pizza to complete the scene :-)

I'm going to start by cleaning the surfaces and then priming them with BIN. Next, I'll slather on some white paint. After the paint job, I'm going to get some new hardware and start trying to figure out how to get a new counter top and sink in there too. It's going to look great and I am hoping to do almost all the work myself. I'm also going to rip out that ugly drop-in ceiling from the 1970s. Bleh. Maybe I'll get really motivated and post some photos on here.

Car repair; wish me luck

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan Rand) — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 15:54:00 +0000

I just dropped off the car to get it fixed -- the engine light is on. What a bummer, eh? I went ten years without being owned by a car, er, owning a car. It was dreamy. Blissful. Trouble free! But now I have the car and that means maintaining and parking it -- which is all the more hassley in New York City. So....fingers crossed, the boys at the shop in Brooklyn will be able to get me and my little Subaru back on the road.

Walk in the rain

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan Rand) — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 15:02:00 +0000

I didn't have an umbrella with me this morning as I walked to the subway. So I walked as much as I could under the awnings of the stores on First Avenue. I was listening to an interview with Lama Marut, a Buddhist who looks a bit like Joe Pesci and sounds like Spiccoli from Fast Times at Ridgemont High. And yet the interview with him was just great. I didn't even mind the rain. It meshed quite well with the book I'm reading now by Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.