![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/files\/2010\/09\/american_splendor-win_a_few_skirmishes.jpg\" "\\"Diversion")
<\/a>I went to see Paul Baribeau<\/a> this week.\u00a0 It was one of the more crowded house shows I’ve been to in Chicago.\u00a0 The feeling between Baribeau and the audience as pretty strange.\u00a0 He writes songs that are explicitly personal, so it’s strange to hear a whole room singing along (not to mention singing along slightly off-time and off-key).\u00a0 Maybe it speaks to the real need that people have to understand or process the kind of things Baribeau writes about: relationships and growing into adulthood.\u00a0 There was this one guy in front who kept demanding certain songs and he and Baribeau got into this kind of weird, mostly-joking but strangely confrontational back-and-forth.\u00a0 Though I love the participatory aspect of DIY punk, it’s frustrating when it seems like the show means more about you singing along to a song you love than listening to what someone else has to say or how he says it.\u00a0 At best, I think it’s a compromise between these things, a perfect balance arrived upon organically by the performer and the crowd.\u00a0 But, there’s a distinct difference between having a collective experience with music and a room full of individual experiences.\u00a0 Maybe the show felt like more of the latter because people didn’t really know each other. It seemed like the crowd was a mixture of people from Chicago, the suburbs and folks from out of town and people from the suburbs.\u00a0 Everyone seemed pretty young which might have contributed to the dynamic as well.\u00a0 Chiara referenced research about “millenials” being more selfish than past generations.<\/p>\n Pekar is also pretty unapologetic about his mercenary intentions with his art, which is also refreshing.\u00a0 DIY punk spends so much time demonizing making money, or rationalizing it, but doesn’t provide a lot of examples of working-class people finding complex, sustainable lives while still basing what they do on some core values.\u00a0 A few weeks ago I read an interview I liked with the hip hop group Das Racist<\/a> that touched on authenticity, punk and class:<\/p>\n Suri: That’s the whole thing. Punk bands have never had the question of authenticity because authenticity was about how broke you were. The whole break between punk and hip-hop in the 80s was because hip-hop kids were like, I will rap about having money because I grew up with none of it. White kids were like, I will not sing songs about having money.<\/p>\n Vazquez: I think it’s complicated in both circles. There was like broke punk kids and rich kids and broke rappers and rich rappers.<\/p>\n Suri: But a lot of punk kids choose to be broke and rap kids, we don’t choose to be broke. I grew up wanting to make money at every opportunity to. I wouldn’t shun my money. I’d buy a $200 pair of sneakers.<\/p>\n Kondabolu: And my mom wouldn’t let me go to vintage clothing stores. She’d be like, “Why are you going to buy someone’s old clothes?”<\/p>\n Vazquez: It’s also easier\u2014you know, the idea of rejecting privilege comes with the fact that you have it in the first place.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I also went to Quimby’s<\/a>, the first time I made it there since I’ve been a Chicago resident, and in a total impulse buy, I picked up Please Don’t Bomb the Suburbs: A Midterm Report on My Generation and the Future of Our Super Movement<\/a> Again, as I get older, I’m interested in how people iterate their ideas and reconcile them with new experiences.<\/p>\n Pekar and Joe Sacco also have a nice comic about gentrification in the American Splendor compilation. I like how, in just a few frames it captures the ambivalence around neighborhood change. There’s the fear of people getting pushed out, some hope for seeing resources come into a neglected neighborhood and folks just having other concerns.<\/p>\n I went to dinner one night this week at a good, but slightly fancy place in Logan Square<\/a>. Driving north on Kedzie from Humboldt Park, you could see a demarcation between different neighborhood residents as we got closer to the square.\u00a0 Teenage Latino girls with these fabulous neon hoop earrings gave way to 20-30-year-old white people walking their dogs.\u00a0 The restaurant was pretty terrific, but the patrons didn’t look like the neighborhood as a whole, which is always a little disarming.\u00a0 It’s a good reality check though, to recognize where I stand, despite a consciousness of issues that affect communities in Chicago.<\/p>\n The “Restoring Honor” Rally was big news and a big site for meta-analysis this week.\u00a0 I heard this segment on WBEZ’s Worldview<\/a> and thought commentator Frank Schaeffer did a pretty good job of pinpointing the way that some Americans responded in the wake of Obama’s election.\u00a0 They looked around and realized the country they lived in and realized it wasn’t the country they thought it was and freaked out.\u00a0 But Schaeffer also articulates a certain contempt for people who react fearfully to a changing country and to feelings of using power in the culture.\u00a0 I’d like to see someone speak frankly about this fear and across the divide of those who feel more comfortable in a country perceived as less homogeneous and those who fear it.\u00a0 I felt like some of this was going on during Obama’s campaign, but once he was elected it sort of dropped off and we’re all left with crazy polarization and taking potshots across the divide.\u00a0 I don’t agree with the rhetoric or the values of those like Glenn Beck but I think the fear they exploit is a pretty human response that has to be taken seriously and acknowledged, even while trying to move away from that fear.<\/p>\n I’ve been working on a cleaner version of The Max Levine Ensemble website<\/a> and a basic theme for Toby Foster’s website<\/a>.\u00a0 Because of the artwork that David and Nick gave me, I have to use a fixed-width design.\u00a0 I was curious what a good width for modern browsers\/users should be, and the best example I found was in this\u00a0 2-Column, Center-aligned Fixed Width Layout with CSS tutorial<\/a>.\u00a0 The tutorial author says:<\/p>\n I\u2019m adding a wrapper division around the entire body html we have so far, and in the CSS, I\u2019m giving this wrapper division a background color just for demonstration purposes \u2013 and a width. The width is based on current trends per W3Schools Browser Trends<\/a>. According to this information, the vast majority of all surfers views at resolutions of 1280 or higher, so I\u2019ll shoot for 1280px. To allow room for the scroll bar and a bit of the (white) body background to show, I\u2019ll set the width of my wrapper at 1200px.<\/p>\n Mike Gibson of Love Has No Logic<\/a> had this to say:<\/p>\n I’ve been listening to a lot of the bands we’ll be playing with on the upcoming Defiance, Ohio tour<\/a>.\u00a0 In particular, I’ve been into The Sidekicks<\/a> from Cleveland who play melodic punk in the vein of Built to Spill.\u00a0 I also gave Shellshag<\/a> a good listen for the first time and I love how they’re poppy but also noisy and weird.<\/p>\n I feel like as I have less time to practice with Defiance, Ohio, I’m more self-conscious about how well we play.\u00a0 I feel like how comfortable we are playing really effects the quality of the performance, so I decided to get my guitar set up.\u00a0 I’ve always played acoustic guitars with pretty high action, but after playing Theo’s hollow-body electric guitar and realizing how much more easy and fun it is to play an instrument with lower action, I took it to a guitar tech.\u00a0 He told me something interesting about acoustic guitars and action:\u00a0 instrument makers usually leave the action high from the factory because they’re worried about the neck shifting, creating fret buzz in the showroom.<\/p>\n I was setting up a new WordPress instance for Ryan Woods’ painting website, ryanwoods.org and he was having problems uploading files, getting a cryptic error message.\u00a0 It turns out that the Network upload size limits were set to only 300 KB.\u00a0 It took a while to find this limit, but it’s at Super Admin > Options<\/em> in the left hand menus in the administration pages.\u00a0 Then scroll all the way down and look for the Upload Settings<\/em> section.<\/p>\n I’ve spent this week hanging out with Florence and Oona since Chiara had school and work all week and they don’t start school until next week.\u00a0 One of the hardest things has been building consensus about how we’re going to spend our day.\u00a0 Oona’s down to play music, but Florence doesn’t want to.\u00a0 Florence likes the idea of riding bikes to the zoo, but Oona neither wants to ride bikes or go to the zoo.\u00a0 Flash games on the internet seem mutually captivating, but the end-of-the-summer weather is too nice to spend completely indoors.\u00a0 The consensus activity today was to think of something we want to eat, walk to the store to get the ingredients and make it.\u00a0 We ended up making sushi and Dora-yaki<\/a> (red bean pancakes), though the pancakes came out a little weird.<\/p>\n GAMBIT Summer 2010 Prototype Games<\/a> – I’ve disliked video games since I was young and didn’t have a console and had to spend hours watching other people play after I died quickly.\u00a0 But some people are really doing some interesting things with games right now.\u00a0 I was out of town playing a show when the 3G Summit<\/a> went down, but from what I learned about it when I wrote a preview piece<\/a> in the spring, it seemed pretty awesome.\u00a0 These game prototypes from the Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab are all pretty interesting and have some interesting mechanics, visuals or ways of conveying information about the real world.<\/p>\n The Tummy Project<\/a> – I only met Jamie recently when she offered to give me a ride back from Milwaukee that I ended up not needing, but I found out she has a blog that uses reader-contributed photos of tummies to think about body image.<\/p>\n 2009 Illinois School Report Cards<\/a> – The Tribune Apps Team made this useful news app to navigate Chicago schools and compare them by features like class size, ISAT scores and percent of students who receive free or reduced lunch.<\/p>\n How to Solder<\/a> – If tour is a good way to lose equipment, playing individual shows is an even better way for me to lose stuff.\u00a0 At least it gave me the impetus to fix a bunch of old instrument cables I had lying around.\u00a0 I solder so infrequently that I didn’t realize I wasn’t tinning my wires properly.\u00a0 This video helped.\u00a0 Also, the number one tip I have for soldering things is to make a jig.\u00a0 This video<\/a> has one simple example, but I often just tape the wires to my desk so everything gets held where I need it.<\/p>\n Acoustic Guitar Amplification<\/a> – This is the guide I’ve always been looking for.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What I’ve been doing this week – on and offline. Getting older I went to see Paul Baribeau this week.\u00a0 It was one of the more crowded house shows I’ve been to in Chicago.\u00a0 The feeling between Baribeau and the audience as pretty strange.\u00a0 He writes songs that are explicitly personal, so it’s strange to… Continue reading Week in review<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[20545,54,20548,525,20546,20540,20541,39,101,20547,20539],"class_list":["post-2110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-aging","tag-america","tag-body-image","tag-games","tag-glennbeck","tag-grid","tag-layout","tag-music","tag-punk","tag-soldering","tag-web-design","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4wnIz-y2","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2110"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2110\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2134,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2110\/revisions\/2134"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a>Being off of school (mostly, I’ve still got some loose ends to tie up with my independent study) is great.\u00a0 For one, I finally had time to go to the library.\u00a0 I picked up Harvey Pekar’s Best of American Splendor<\/a> and I feel like I have a different reading of it a few years after the last time I read some of Pekar’s comics.\u00a0 Pekar writes about his life making underground media in a really unglamorous way, which is refreshing.\u00a0 You can’t dispute that he loves what he does or makes compelling and at times really beautiful work, but there’s nothing glamorous about working for decades as a file clerk or the anxiety of failing health or trying to figure out how to make ends meet.\u00a0 As I get older, I’m less interested in finding optimistic ideas to buoy me through tough times and more interested in how people persist, even through tough questions or challenges.<\/p>\nGentrification<\/h3>\n
<\/a><\/p>\nRestoring dialog<\/h3>\n
Fixed width layout widths<\/h3>\n
Music<\/h3>\n
WordPress file uploads<\/h3>\n
Cooking as consensus<\/h3>\n
<\/a><\/p>\nLink Roundup<\/h3>\n