Today I got to see ex-Beatle Paul McCartney live in concert. Of course, to be technical I was not attending the concert. Marq and I were among a throng of people outside the fenced-off perimeter of the proper concert who were listening anyway. Take that box offices.

All in all, I would say that was an excellent several hours of music listening. We found a nice place where I wasn’t too surrounded by people and we could kinda see over the fence. McCartney puts on a good show. And the thing I enjoyed most was the big bald drummer who would not look out of place on a metal band.

Marq had to leave early, so I’ll just tell him some stuff he missed:

• Songs Marq missed include (but are not limited to): Yesterday, Hey Jude, Day Tripper and Helter Skelter. And Live and Let Die had fireworks.
• Four people jumped over the fence by the road. They pretty peaked at the second attempt and got progressively worse at getting past security. The first guy just jumped and made a break for it with a security guy coming after him. The next guy used that distraction as chance to make a break for it. By the time I lost sight of him he hadn’t been spotted. I doubt he got anywhere really, but who knows? The third guy jumped over and hid behind a bush for a while until the crowd egged him on to try his luck, which caught the attention of security. He then fell into the bush because he was apparently too drunk to run for it. The last guy, apparently even drunker, would have done just as well if he’d jumped right into security’s arms.
• Someone cut the cord of that balloon and it floated away never to be heard from again.

That’s about all I can think of for now. For the most part it was just me, standing by a fence and enjoying music.

Previously on Book of PDR:

I had a computer virus which was quite mean and tenacious. My inability to get rid of it annoyed me, but having cleaned as much as I knew how to and enough to continue doing most of what I needed to do, I was content to let it be.

Last week my computer seemed to magically clear itself of the virus. Scans turned up some corrupted files that had been missing not been detected before and it cleared them up. Then I could do the two things the virus remnants had not been letting me do: I could defragment the drive and I could update my anti-virus software. But then it all went bad. Suddenly my computer was saying that I had 98% free space or something like that. I figured that was not good. Then the computer shut down. Also not good. The computer can no longer start up because it says it lacks an operating system. That, I can can only assume, is the final straw of not good. It looks very likely as though my computer died and lost everything saved on it. Music, photos and most devastatingly everything I’d written within the last six months or so is apparently gone. Skynet won that computer.

Now, obviously I am using a computer to write this. What I did was go out and got myself a laptop and now I am using this for my computing needs. I have a tradition as far as naming my computers. The first was Computron. The second was Computron V. The third was Computron X. This new laptop is Computron Rex. Welcome to the family Computron Rex, we all hope you’ll enjoy your time as PDR’s machine.

On top of that when I got the Laptop and got back on the Internet, my little site here was gone. Server maintenance it seems. A week I was without the writing stored here and most of my other writing gone, I was mad with insanity from that I was gone. But now it is back and I have learned a lesson about backing stuff up. Everything.

I’ve complained about linear time being too fast for my liking and I’ve complained about not having anything interesting to write about. Those are my standard things I blame not writing here more on. Today I’m gonna blame something else: I was abducted by aliens. It isn’t necessarily true, but it’s good to have some variety in my excuses.

There were a couple questionnaires in the newspaper today. One for how depressed you are, one for how stressed out you are. According to the stress one, I’m living a good life. According to the depression one, I should be seeking medical help. Sounds about like I suspected.

Haiku!

Aboard the spaceship.
All the aliens were sad.
They had no robots.

The Sound of Silence by Simon and Garfunkel. That’s what I’m listening to right now. Good song. One of my favorites probably. I remember I looked it up on the Wikipedia once and it said it was supposed to be about the way the nation felt after JFK was shot, but it doesn’t sound right to me. If I were to pick my meaning, I would say it sounds more like a warning against people letting their interactions become hollow and meaningless.

But all of that and I still get the words mixed up in my head and replace them with “‘Your exploits have been sad and boring. They tell a tale that’s worth ignoring. When you’re alone, the words of your story will echo down the resthome hall” from the Simpsons. Ah the Simpsons. Good stuff.

I’ve been putting off for no good reason, but I remembered a few more things about the trip to China that might be worth mentioning (at least because it’ll get me something to write about).

The first night we stayed in Kashgar there was a concert going on about a block from the hotel we were in. It was in front of a statue of Mao. Fireworks were going off, but there was apparently no attempt to time them to the music or anything.

The next day we were walking around and we saw a big jumbotron thing showing footage from the concert. The audience was not at all rapt. They sat their in matching businessperson shirts and watched with the same level of excitement I give the average episode of one of those home remodeling shows. With all those blank faces I can’t imagine why the cameras ever bothered turning away from the performers, who did seem to be giving it their all. I’m left assuming that attendance of the event was mandatory for those chumps.

Also, though it has come up in my Facebook comments, I have to comment that Neon Lights are apparently the future over there. If someone were to visit China two years from now and tell me that the government had begun installing neon lights on the trees, I would believe it, because they’re running out of space for them on the buildings.

And finally I will mention that on my second night in Shanghai, the night it poured rain and ruined my shoes, I also got a haircut. First they rinsed the hair in one chair, then washed it in a sink in the back, then cut it in a third chair, then rinsed it again in the sink again and then I got confused. They wanted to take me to the third chair again to blow-dry my hair. I don’t dry my hair usually. I let it dry itself in the air, so I felt like I was done after the second rinsing. We did not speak the same language and it took like two minutes for me to know what was going on. At one point the guy tried just using a towel on my head as I stood. It was awkward.

That’s it for now. I might put up another Facebook album like tomorrow or something. I’ll see.

Hello. It is me again. Getting sick of me yet? Yeah, me too.

So, I don’t know how late I am to this party (note: not very, it seems), but there’s this guy who goes by the name Girl Talk, and he put out this album that is almost entirely samples, just bits and pieces of all kinds of different music. It’s called Feed The Animals and it sounds amazing. I mean, Jay Z rapping over Radiohead? That blew my mind, maan! And, I mean, even if it’s not your kind of thing, you really can’t deny the amount of work that went into something like this. In one interview I read, he said it took the better part of two years, mostly trial and error to get things right. That’s a long time for a project like this.

There are also some naysayers out there who, even if they do acknowledge the work involved, say that music like this is on the wane, but I’d beg to differ. Last summer, Daft Punk put out a live album that pretty much took everything they created up to that point, and mixed it all together into one sweet cacophony of house, synthpop, and rock. It’s like they really are robots, and they didn’t need to spend ten years to make three albums, but chose to in order to build up our tolerance slowly, so that our brains wouldn’t fry and we would be unable to see them taking over the world. Robots are totally awesome like that, you know.

The year before that, Cirque du Soleil put together a show based on Beatles tunes, and brought in their original producer, George Martin, and his son to mix and remaster all their old tunes into this album called “LOVE”. It was something to the extent of 130 individual songs were used to create this bed of sound, and it’s nothing short of amazing. The story they get into in the booklet makes this big deal about combining the singing of “Within You Without You” to the rhythm tracks of “Tomorrow Never Knows”, which is great and all, but I personally love the way they put in “What You’re Doing” and “The Word” to the song “Drive My Car”. I can’t sing it any other way now.

So maybe the point of it all is that because it’s becoming more mainstream these days that we’re going to lose out all the underground creators, the inspiring innovators, but more and more people are accepting this kind of music and enough “regular” producers are going to push a little bit more into this territory. Which doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good thing, or that everything like this is going to sound good, but I can’t see it dying off at this point. I just can’t.

Thanks for watching!
–me.