Well, that was slightly less annoying than a trip to the dentist. I just mashed up the server AND reformatted/reinstalled my laptop system all in the same day. Fun.

But it feels like progress. The cruft is gradually falling away. Comments are a little wonky (ignore the "Garbage Errors") and some other things remain in flux, but the main juice is flowing again. Hurrah for that.

Some unequivocal comments on that last post. Thanks. As long as we've broken the seal inre: contemporary romance life, I might as well say that after a long and trying day of moving objects around three of the five boros, I had a lovely little evening of going to the Olive Vine and seeing the latest Harry Potter flick w/this belle du jour.

And now some notes on these things.

Moving: Sucks. When you've gone a while without really doing it in a big way, living out of a bag, the freedom of the nomad, it's a bit of a rude awakening to realize how cumbersome posessions are. On the plus side, the Craigslist experience of buying a bed was a good one, taking me up into Flushing (which is like another planet) where this nice young Korean(?) mother is apparently a bit of a pro at selling all the used furniture from her building. Little four-year-old boy running around with no pants, wants to help out moving the bed; outside (with pants now) wants to give me leaves he picks up off the ground while his mom and I wrangle the bed. It's unbelievably cute. There's nothing like the good spirit of a child.

Also cleared my locker at Manhattan Mini, which has been a long time coming. It's a strange little establishment, that place. They sell to upscale NYers (Jaguar being loaded up outside... you shouldn't be allowed to own one of those cars if you're fat and boring I think), but there are clearly also some dudes there who live in the box. That's New York.

The U-haul costs a little over $200 all told. Yeah, it's $19.95 to start, but at $2.50 a mile taking the wrong exit on the LIE and driving five miles out of the way will cost you 25 bucks. Adds up. Plus the GMC cargo vans they rent get (no kidding) 6 miles to the gallon. I drove the fucker 67 miles. But it's a worthy investment considering the storage space alone was costing me $60 a month; so this pays for itself by February.

And now I have all this crap. Some of it is Franko's, but mainly I need a couple shelves. The neighborhood can provide on that front I think. My room is mostly bed, but that's not really all that bad. I've done it before and always found that it works. Feels like I'm settling in a bit.

The Olive Vine is not to be confused with the Olive Garden. This is a whole different deal. They're in a couple spots on the Slope. In fact, the original that I remember from back when I was seeing Ya'el in college is gone now, but there's a new location a few blocks from my current pad, and the menu is largely unchanged, so I'm excited. I have two words for you: Lentil Soup. And I have two more: Fresh Pita, as in they pull it out of the oven and give it to you all puffed up full of steam.

That's fucking right. Fresh.

Along with Grey's Papaya, any good thin pizza, Mamouns, two eggs on a roll with cheese, PFC and General Tso's tofu, this is one of the culinary experiences I treasure in this here city. High-end food is high-end food the world o'er, but there's really something particular and regional about good, cheap, day-to-day eats. Pulled pork down South, Taqueria back on Mission, the legendary Cookie Run... these mean more to me than most of the four-star meals I've had. And now I have a fave around the corner. Lentil soup and Pita for four bucks; sounds like lunch to me.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is good like the last one! I'd only seen the last one because Dan put it together for opening night/midnight back in SF -- got high and biked the mission and got a little half-pint of whiskey for which with to spice up the cokes from the theater, kind of pushing it a little in contrast to the nice girls and guys from the Ivy League he tends to rope in to these occasions. Though this is in dispute (see comments). In any event, it was a good time then. This time I was straight, and I enjoyed it just as much.

Really, these are well-made films. These people are handing George Lucas a well-deserved pants-down spanking in the realm of cinematic myth-making.

Beyond all the enjoyable aspects of the drama, the great takeaway for me is how I long for an institution to which I can count myself a member. The presentation of Hogwarts and the wider "Magic Community" is really quite British, but it still tugs at my imagination. Oh, and by British, I don't mean the uniforms and accents. Rather I'm talking about the depth of history and formality involved in everything. Traditions. I don't really have many of those that I didn't make up on my own. This is a kind of freedom, yes, and I might go so far as to say a particularly American kind of freedom, but it clearly leaves something to be desired.

I could go on and on about this, and I will at some point, because it's not a new thought for me and I really find these kinds of questions interesting on both a philosophical and personal level.

But the point is that the Goblet of Fire is a worthly successor to the Prisoner of Wherever in that it's quite well made and has a lot for an adult audience to enjoy. I don't even really know the backstory, but I loved it. It's a movie for everyone, and huzzah for that.

Belle du Jour is the first shorthand that came to mind. I don't really mean to "du Jour" part literally. It's actually going pretty well there, especially as I relax. Thanks for participating in my Friday-night freakout. It helped Saturday go more smoothly.

I've got a ways to go getting myself together on that front. I'm not yet fully assembled or settled. But the only way to Be is to Be. So I will.

So this is the ethic: start something.

If you have an idea, put it out there. You don't have to make it on your own; start a damn project. Get your friends involed. See who else in the work is doing things that are similar or connected. Be the first node on your new network.

One thing I want the larger effort around The Book to be is a thing to hook into, a portal for networking, but in a smaller trusted way rather than the huge MySpace way. Fundimentally it's the internet's value at large, the global always-on citizen's band, but people need a little help making the most of it. So we're here to make it happen. We need to grow it, to push around the margins. Value exists at the edges. There are a lot of exciting projects online... and a lot of exciting projects in bringing more of the world on board.

It's imperative that we see the 1st amendment in 21st Century terms as the right to puublish online. A citizen's right. May take a while for us to get a supreme court ruling, but the truth is that we'll never get that if we don't create the facts on the ground.

This is the first step towards participatory media since they regulated Citizens Band and Shortwave radio into obscurity.

It's a big deal. Read this now.

The Go! Team, which I just discovered thx to SomaFM. It's getting me amped. A great mix of old-school R&B sounds, mixtape breaks and indy-noise pop. Oddly enough I'm not huge fans of any of those on their own, but together it just works.

Also, this is interesting:

Originally issued in the U.K. last year, "Thunder, Lightning, Strike" was recently released in a new edition in the U.S. through Columbia Records. Because of sample clearance issues, some of the songs needed to be reworked, but the band also had the opportunity to add two new tracks.

"There were three or four [sample] denials, but it wasn't too bad; there were a few melody changes, which I actually prefer in a way. A lot of the samples come from thrift-store, nothingy records that no one would think of looking at anyway. There's something about those Bollywood soundtracks that I've always loved: You have a 50-piece string section that is always out of tune with each other, and that's a sound you could never recreate."

Apparently their live show is a hoot too:

Lollapalooza may have had it all over the Intonation Music Festival in terms of sheer spectacle, but for me, the winning moment of the summer concert season came when the Go! Team took the stage at Union Park and a dozen preteen girls from the surrounding neighborhood, fresh out of the swimming pool, joined the absurdly energetic English dance-rockers onstage to gyrate, shimmy and frug.

It's definitely going into heavy rotation for the Bike Mix.