It’s hotter than living hell out. It’s been an entire weekend of unrelenting weather, but this afternoon we got a wicked thunderstorm and some rain, so it felt good for a few hours. Now it’s getting hot again and the apartment is returning to swamp-like consistency. I should probably stop bitching about the weather, but the problem is that when the weather is like this, I have nothing else to write about, because my brain pretty much shuts down and all I can think about is moving to Antarctica, or how I can somehow take all of the computer parts in my house and build a bootleg air conditioner that will work better than the stupid portable one I have in my bedroom.

I finished reading this biography of Lester Bangs - I don’t remember the author [Jim DeRogatis], but the title is Let it Blurt and the author is/was this fat kid who went to visit Lester for his high school writing project, and met him at his apartment, and Lester was incredibly nice to him and talked to him for hours, and then like two weeks later he was dead. The book is the best one out there, but it was still a little weird or lacking, and I don’t know if it’s the writer (although he put a lot of effort into it) or just the arc of Bangs’ life. I mean, it seems like he was just gaining steam, and then BAM, and it wasn’t like Johnny Chapman jumped out with a revolver yelling “death to music critics” or something - he just died, and it’s still disputed if it was a drug overdose or a bad case of the flu or some mystery disease or what.

I think the thing with Lester Bangs is that describing him or what his deal was is a lot like trying to explain Devo to your mom, and you can’t really describe it, and it’s the kind of thing you just have to get right in the middle of and dive in without looking how deep the water is. And I’ve read a couple of the Lester Bangs books, and they kick total ass, and you realize how incredible this guy must have been. But all of his books were postmortem anthologies, and the little bits and pieces are good and bad and glued together at the whim of a third-person editor, and every time you read anything, you wish there was MORE somewhere. I mean, imagine Hendrix never released those first few albums while he was alive, and his entire discography was just these fucked-up, spliced together CDs that Steve Ballmer or whoever puts together. You’d get bits and pieces of the same riffs and jams, but would always walk away thinking “fuck, I wish he had some ALBUMS out!” And now, you put in Are You Experienced, and every song fits together perfectly, and every time you listen, you find some little sound that’s new, and I just wish Lester had put together some damn books in his lifetime so we all had that same experience.

The other thing about Lester Bangs is that in reading this biography, he really reminded me of my old roommate Simms, and I don’t know if Simms would take that as an insult or a compliment. I guess they, at least to me, have/had a similar persona, and Simms is totally this kind of guy that you could have a four-hour conversation about everything and nothing and that was a big Lester Bangs trademark, to the point that he had his phone cut off half the time because of huge bills to the phone co. And Lester Bangs sounds like the kind of guy who would go out and buy every Criterion Collection DVD and totally get on top of all of them as far as what was phenomenal and what was shit and somehow relate all of it to Frank Zappa. And I’m sitting here in iDVD, rendering an old video to disc, and the “burn” button is a spinning radiation-type symbol, like a six-piece circle with half yellow and half black, and it totally looks like this button Simms gave me of The Who that I still have in a box somewhere. So Lester Bangs reminded me of Simms, who I have not heard from in forever, but I just called his voice mail, so we’ll see.

It is POURING out. The top foot of my bed is drenched in water from the wind tearing the drops into my apartment. I hope that will dry off in the next hour or two. I also have about 20 CDs I bought in the last week, and I don’t want to listen to any of them. I am listening to Gordian Knot, this prog-rock project thing that is one of the guys from Cynic, along with a bunch of other prog-rock favorites like Bill Bruford and Steve Hackett, and it’s good. But I bought a bunch of stuff to fill holes in the collection, and I was bored of them before I got them out of the bag.

Okay, time to pay my bills and listen to the rain.

I’ve been sort of sick this weekend, although I think drinking my weight in grapefruit juice and sleeping 14 or 15 hours a day has mostly stemmed it off. It was that kind of sore throat, coated tongue, back of throat crap that is usually the first stage of something worse. What’s weird is that I have only had this sort of sickness all year, and not a full-blown cold. I hope I did not jinx things by saying that. Anyway, the three-day weekend plan has been to mostly sleep, and do some reading and other vagueness around the house.

The other day I read Apple Confidential 2.0 by Owen Linzmayer. It’s a very good history of Apple, from the birth of the two Steves up to the present. It was just published in 2004 by No Starch Press. I enjoyed reading this book a lot, because it reminded me so much of the “ancient” history of ten years ago when I supported the Mac at IU. I read through the various timelines and it made me think back to when we got our first PowerMac, when I first saw a Newton, when I first got to mess with a color Mac, and all of the other intersections with my computing past. Anyway, it’s an excellent book. I paypaled Owen twenty bucks and he sent me an autographed copy. You really should go to his site and do the same.

I had to get out of the house today, so I went to Union Square to shop for books. I went to The Strand, which for the first time ever was actually too cold instead of too hot, but didn’t buy anything. I also bought tickets to see that new hockey movie about the 1980 Olympic team, but I chickened out and decided I’d rather sit around the house for two hours instead. I know that sounds stupid, and even I can’t figure it out. Anyway, I hate sports, but I really like sports movies. I know that makes no sense, but it’s true. I have never sat through a college football game in my life, and I’d rather jam a pencil into my ear than do so, but I really loved the movie Rudy. Go figure.

I won’t go into the whole Valentine’s Day/anti-Valentine’s Day because things are just too far gone for me to deal with it, and I realize that it’s totally my fault. So I did not leave the house on the 14th, and then today I went to Duane Reade and bought about two pounds of candy for 50% off and ate them until I was sick, then I downloaded a lot of really sick pornography. That did not really solve any of my problems, but it took up as much time as the hockey movie would have.

It’s freezing outside, but it’s not bad in here, and it will be even better when I’m in bed reading and staying up late because I have the day off tomorrow. So here’s to that.

I’m getting so restless around the house, I actually cleaned. I really want to go out and do something, but it’s freezing again, and I don’t really want to blow any money, either. So I’m watching Die Hard with a Vengence on TV, although I missed the part where they digitally edited McClane’s sign that says “I hate n-words” to “I hate everyone”. I did just catch the part where the 7 train is at the fake 2-3 Wall Street station and blew up in a way that completely defies physics. Despite about 20,000 goofs, this is still a good movie. If I ever see it in the $7 bin, I’ll have to pick up the DVD.

One fun thing about watching the Sunday afternoon movie is you see the most pathetic, low-budget infomercials for junk As Seen on TV products. There was just one for the Eggstractor or something like that. It starts out with black and white footage of a woman with really crappy, frizzed out hair and no makeup, trying to peel eggs in the most pathetic way possible. Then they switch to full color and show the woman with totally Jenny Jones makeover hair, full makeup, and happily plugging eggs into this device that looks like a plastic squeze tube and another piece of plastic that extrudes off the egg shell. She’s happily de-shelling eggs like the thing’s giving her ten orgasms per egg. Then it shows the kids using it, and it’s the greatest thing since GI Joe with the Kung Fu grip. They also use the phrase “high protein” about 80 times in 30 seconds to placate the Atkins freaks. I never knew peeling eggs was such a god damned problem.

Anyway, I finished reading Snow Crash, and I was really happy with it. It’s probably one of the best books I’ve read in a while, and something so completely different. I’ve always wanted to like cyberpunk, but the Gibsonesque stuff wasn’t that great too me. It was good, passable, but too much like the crappy SciFi shows that they make to fill up time on the WB network on Saturday afternoons, and not enough like the very first time I saw Star Wars or something like that. But this book really blew me away, because it was like one part Mark Leyner’s humor with one part Kurt Vonnegut’s ability to take a couple of disparate stories and slowly weave them together by the end of the book. It’s also got all of this weird religious theory in it that almost threw me, but was still very interesting, and I wish I could learn more about that without tackling some giant, 1200-page theory/reference book I will never read.

Nothing else going on here…