Randomly Assembled Mix, ides of July...

1. Sunset Rubdown - Us Ones in Between
2. Tortoise - Prepare Your Coffin
3. Tortoise - Tin Cans & Twine
4. Wilderness - Beautiful Alarms
5. The American Analog Set - Come Home Baby Julie Come Home
6. Andrew Bird - Fake Palindromes
7. Bon Iver - Skinny Love
8. Bottomless Pit - Dead Man's Blues
9. Buring Airlines - Song with No Words
10. Calexico - All Systems Red
11. Caribou - Niobe
12. Elbow - Mexican Standoff
13. Faraquet - Conceptual Separation of Self
14. From Monument to Masses - Deafening
15. The Poison Arrows - Future Wine

For July, a new Top Ten....

Bands I've been listening to a lot/shall be listening to a lot:
(in no particular order)

1. Obits
2. Bottomless Pit (slightly disappointing show on Sunday though)
3. Disappears
4. Cave
5. The Poison Arrows
6. Tortoise - just got Beacons of Ancestorship
7. Elbow
8. Channels
9. Constantines
10.Grizzly Bear

Commuting through Architecture...

My tuesday routine requires me to drive in to work, find the best (read "cheap") parking available, and then resume my regular work day when I walk out of the parking garage. The Tuesday commute has become a guilty pleasure for me, especially when Chicago's various weather gods call a ceasefire in their war against nice days and let it actually be 65 and sunny at 7:30am.

I love walking out of my three flat and into nice weather, on a residential street. A great change of pace from three apartments in a row that never had the residential street feel because they were either right next to the neighborhood's main drag, or right on it. The first part of the drive is about the music and the rush of zigzagging around bored drivers. They must hate their commute because they do it everyday, or hate their jobs so much they drive slow just to delay the inevitable. The skyline is just visible east of all the West Town neighborhoods, kind of hovers there like the Emerald City or some other majestic destination.

The real fun of the commute begins downtown though - by then I've settled into the music, the windows are down, today even the sunroof was open, sleeves rolled up, and as the car makes the last left turn of the morning, I'm facing east and its all skyscrapers and train stations and at the very end of the route, before the last right turn...the Frank Gehry designed Pritzker Pavilion sits there, like a transformer in between forms, or Robo-Crab.

A Note to Self...

This WSJ article on the Muses totally misses the way in which the muses and ancient philosophers in general, thought about art, the artistic/creative process, etc. Memory and imitation were part of that process...its the recombining of existing forms that the ancient Greeks admired.

Califone - Bottles and Bones (Shade and Sympathy)

Nervous john
Rescues all the whores
Bleeding nose and all
Taste
of metal
When you’re hit straight on
Frozen dimes and
throwing flashes
Clouds of angels liquored pink and
underage
Steal your sweet decline
This is the longest
goodbye
Loose breaks on
A one eyed continental
Engine willing
Interior stained
China rattles
wish
The cold pacific shallows
Spells and fits
resurrected
Calls you in
Forget your sweet decline
This is the longest goodbye
Aching to get your pocket
picked
Bottles and bones shade and sympathy
Kick the
glass out of your path
Calls you in
Traps for your
fingers
Fire for your mouth
Stones for your passage
Brass for your jaded
Underneath the baking clouds and
hardening starless skies
Lick your collarbone clean
And repeat.

The New Commute

There's always two ways to do the commute to work, given where I work and the fact that both the Red and Blue lines go downtown into the loop. First, get on a bus. Thank you ctabustracker.com. Right now, the 66 bus down Chicago Ave makes the most sense because its a shorter walk than the 65 Grand bus, and its next to a coffee shop. Logically, the faster I get on a train line, the faster I'll get to work, but logic doesn't work well with the CTA. In fact, it generally fails. So I decided to snub logic and just stay on the 66 bus all the way to the red line. Took me basically 40 minutes, which isn't awful, but could be better. Wednesday I can test out of the 66 bus to the blue line and see if its actually faster.

In other news, I've had no hot water or gas at the new apartment, not until Tuesday morning. Nothing like going to the gym to shower.

A Top Ten...

Ten Bands I'm Listening to A Lot...

1. Maserati
2. Wilderness
3. Red Sparowes
4. Bottomless Pit
5. Obits
6. Constantines (especially the cover of "Islands in the Stream" with Feist)
7. The National
8. Elbow
9. Miles Davis (think Bitches' Brew)
10.Beulah

It's Alive...

This seems as good a place as any to start spewing forth random observations, thoughts, comments, etc.

My new apartment, i.e. the new Headquarters of SethCo Worldwide, is starting to take shape a little. Tonight, I paint. Post-move organization is going to be a bitch, I'm sure. Not exactly one of my strengths.

Very interested in watching the Cats adapt to the apartment (if you're just stumbling upon this and don't know, their names are Grendel and Tweez) .

A Funny Thing Happened...

while reading Alastair Reynolds' Chasm City. After about 200 or so pages of being pretty engrossed in the book and enjoying the two stories centered around the main character, I realized that there's very much a greek tragedy feel to it so far. But also, there's a moral theme playing out, with so many of the characters being immoral or having very ambiguous ethical systems, and yet noticing the "goodness" or lack thereof, in others. Makes me want to write an essay on the novel.

Small Batch #1/#14 A Hoppy Red Ale...

Not really sure on the name of this one yet, might have to taste it first...
I'm leaning toward calling it "American Red Ale for Blue States."

There were a lot of things not quite right about the process for this beer. Its my first half-batch/small-batch. In some ways, that makes it a test batch for halving recipes, using my new 3 gallon carboy, and brewing more/more efficiently.

I did a small mash of grains with 1lb of American 2-row barley, .25lb Victory, .25lb Aromatic, .25lb of Caramunich, 1lb of Red Wheat (which should help with a great foamy head), and .5lb of British Cara Malt. I mashed all of that at about 152, with a few temperature spikes (160) and drops (148) as I tried to keep things warm for about 90 minutes. The mash was a total of 3.25lbs of grains to 4.75 quarts of water. I washed the grains some with 150 degree water to get as much flavor out of them as possible, and this brought the volume I planned to boil up to about 3 gallons or so.

I added a 1/2 ounce of Columbus hops, 12.2 AA% and 3 lbs of John Bull Maris Otter liquid extract, which is basically a British pale ale extract. I also added 1 lb of Dry Malt Extract, which I had from one of the homebrewing supply websites. I thought I took better notes than I did, so it could have been 2lbs actually, but well, we'll find out the hard way.

Whatever I did, I hit the expected starting gravity of 1.056. However, there was one hiccup in the whole equation. I used a Wyeast Smack Pack of London ESB yeast. The way these things work is, you place it on the counter, locate the nutrient pack that is inside, smack the shit out of it, then the yeast have something to snack on, which wakes them up, gets them multiplying a little, and well, the still sealed outer pack starts to inflate from the gases emitted by the yeast. There was very little inflation, so I actually prepared a package of dry beer yeast, from a brand called Nottingham, that I've never used before, but have had around the house for awhile from previously purchased kits.

Fermentation went off without a hitch, I guess a little over 2 weeks ago. This week I'm going to rack the beer to the secondary carboy, bottle the Belgian Saison I made before this, and test the gravity of the Red Ale.

About Me...

I'll keep adding to this post with random shit about me. Yep, I'm that arrogant. Also, please feel free to point out spelling errors, grammatical errors, or nonfactual statements. I'll probably even correct them.

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11/11/2008:
So, a few things. One, here are things I am guaranteed to talk about: beer, homebrewing, scotch, politics, music, art, food, maybe philosophy, law, and did I say beer?

A New Blog is Born...

...probably every minute. But, here's another one. No mission statement yet, no plan, no agenda even. Just the thoughts of one guy named Seth R. Feldman...

Things to see in the future of this blog: lots of beer commentary, recipes, random political commentary, the occasional cute picture of a cat or two, philosophical ramblings, etc, etc.