More Eric Johnson

Yeah, OK, so I'm obsessed at the moment. But I did find that Eric was on NPR's Weekend Edition in August. There's also a few RealPlayer files of his performance, as well as three files from his most recent album, Bloom.

Johnson is God

In almost every successful musician's career, there is one legendary show that puts them on the map and gives them the necessary buzz for their breakthrough. For Eric Johnson, that show happened to be televised. In 1988, Johnson appeared on Austin City Limits and proceeded to tear the roof off, blowing away the audience and taking up the sceptre as his generation's greatest guitarist. Tapes of that show are much-coveted and hard to come by, so thankfully, ACL has released it as part of their recent series of CDs and DVDs. I've been a fan of Johnson's since 1990, when I first heard his song Cliffs of Dover on the radio. At the time, I was just starting to play guitar, and I bought a book of songs from Johnson's first two albums, hoping to teach myself to play like him. I remember the guy behind the counter at the guitar store wishing me good luck at figuring anything out, saying he had been playing for 20 years and couldn't make heads or tails of a lot of the songs. 15 years later, I understand why: human beings aren't supposed to be able to play the guitar like this. That is just sick fretwork. But until today, when I bought Live from Austin, TX, I assumed that much of Johnson's incredible sound could be attributed to studio trickery and overdubbing. Despite having seen him live way back in November 1991, I was still unprepared for this recording. Onstage, he is constantly dancing on his effect pedals to switch them on and off, but effects can only do so much. A lot of what he does with the instrument can only be appreciated by someone who plays, but even non-guitarists have to be blown away by this disc. This is the result of sheer, unadulterated talent. The speed, fluidity and tone that he's able to get playing by himself is unbelieveable, and it's made even more so by the fact that he doesn't limit himself to one genre, blowing through rock, blues, jazz and country styles, often in one song. Aside from cementing my belief that Johnson is from another planet, listening to this CD has managed to both make me feel incredibly untalented and also convinced me that it's time to buy an electric guitar. Hope my neighbors are tolerant...

London Day by Day

First off, my photos are posted at Shutterfly. I apologize if anyone tried to get in and ran up against pasword protection. That should be disabled now. Email me if you're having any problems. Now on to the travelogue.

This trip came about because Todd works for a major airline and is able to fly anywhere they go as long as there are empty seats on the flight. So he suggested we try to go to England for a soccer game, and I, never having been out of North America, thought this was a fantastic idea, since he can also bring friends for a very cheap price. So we decided to try for last weekend so that we could see the Fulham-Blackburn match and get to see several American players plus Ryan Nelsen, a Kiwi who used to play for DC United. My trip began on Thursday night:

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Thursday
Drive to Chicago. Arrive around 8:30 Central Time. Look at flights with Todd. There are 5 possible flights, 3 from O'Hare and 2 from Washington-Dulles. Based on flight loads, we decide to try for the Dulles flights. Am a little apprehensive, because we could potentially sit in Dulles for 10 hours and not make it to London. Sleep very fitfully. Toss and turn while imagining all the things that could go wrong. I hate being a Type-A.

Friday
Up at 5:00 CT. Leave for Midway at 5:50. The El station is freezing. Begin the "Day of Airports". Check in for flight to Dulles, which is a fairly easy process. Get on the flight, departing at 8:30 CT. Arrive at Dulles at 11:45 Eastern. Go to gate for first flight to London, which doesn't leave for over 6 hours. Terminal is dark, crowded, and under construction, so we take a tram to a different terminal. Eat lunch, play cards, read the manual for my new camera, and do sudoku puzzles until 5:00 when we head back to gate and register for the flight. Lots of nervous nail-biting ensues. Todd checks at desk several times. Things seem to be looking good, but when all the passengers have boarded and it's only us and 8 other standby passengers left, the woman at the desk says she won't be able to add us to the flight due to weight restrictions. Crap. This means another 3 hours of killing time in the hot crowded international terminal. After dinner, we head back to the gate and begin talking to a couple who had also tried to get on the first flight. The man is a pilot for Todd's airline and tells us that the weight restriction is due to a fire at a fuel depot in London which has raised fuel prices and caused the airlines to want to conserve as much as fuel as possible on flights to London. He tells us that the flight we couldn't get on went out with 30 empty seats. We begin to feel very negative about our chances for the second flight, which is a smaller plane. This leads to more nail-biting, stress, and adrenaline rushes, but when the plane is only halfway boarded, the woman at the desk calls our names. We're on! We're seated in business class. I sit next to a Simon Cowell look-alike who's apparently on the Atkins diet, since he refuses to touch anything containing carbs. I attempt to sleep for most of the flight, but again sleep fitfully, waking at every small bump of turbulence and imagining the plane falling 30,000 feet into the icy cold North Atlantic. I hate being a Type-A.

Saturday
Arrive in London at 9:50 Greenwich Mean Time and are whisked through Customs. Stop to withdraw pounds at an ATM and purchase a 3-day Tube card, and then we're off to Covent Garden and our hotel. As the announcements say, we "mind the gap" as we "alight" at Covent Garden station, where it's only a short walk to Seven Dials and our hotel, the Radisson Edwardian. Check in, dump our stuff, wash up, and then head out again. Lunch at the White Lion pub. I have sausage and mash and drink London Pride. Yum. Then back on the Tube for the 20-minute ride out to Fulham, followed by a 10-minute walk along the river to Craven Cottage, home of Fulham FC. We take in the atmosphere and squeeze our way into the club shop, then enter the stadium, drink a quick pint, and take our seats. The stands quickly fill in. Only two Americans are playing, Brian McBride for Fulham and Brad Friedel for Blackburn. No sign of Carlos Bocanegra or Ryan Nelsen. After a quiet first half, Fulham scores just before halftime, soon after halftime, and gives up a late goal. According the diehards next to us, this is typical of the season, as is the referee's horrific mistreatment of Fulham (which neither Todd or I have noticed). These same guys also teach us several colorful new phrases. After the game, we go down to field level to take some pictures and notice a group of kids and parents being escorted onto the field. We surreptitiously attach ourselves to the group and soon learn that the pitch is laid down on a base of sand which allows them to control blah blah blah. In between yawns, we notice the players jogging on the field for their post-game cooldown, and at that moment, Brian McBride passes by. Todd flags him down and we go over to chat. This is the second time we've met (not surprisingly, Brian doesn't remember), and he is just as classy this time. In fact, we think he was inviting us to Fulham's Wednesday match if we were still going to be in town. We talk a bit, snap a photo with him, and then let him finish his cooldown. Todd and I leave the stadium, stopping at another Fulham store before taking the Tube back to the hotel. We set out in search of a pub where we can see highlights from all the other matches of the day, but after a long search through Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square, we end up at an American-style sports bar, where we're able to see the last 15 minutes of Manchester City-Birmingham City as well as the New England-Tampa Bay football game. We eat dinner, but the food and beer are somewhat disappointing, so we head back to the pub across the street from our hotel, The Crown. I drink something on tap called Bombardier. Not bad. After drinking, we go to the hotel and crash. My Type-A neuroses take the night off, and I fall asleep within moments of lying down.

Sunday
Have croissants and coffee at a French bakery on the circle. Best latte I've ever had, hands down. We set off for a day of sightseeing. Weather is cold, but bright sunshine. So much for London's famous rain and fog. Start by taking the Tube to St. Paul's where I try to get in touch with my mate Neil. Can't figure out the stupid English phone numbers. A recorded woman keeps telling me the number can't be recognized. Sorry, Jamo. Take pictures of St. Paul's. My new camera rocks. Walk down to the Thames and cross the Millennium Bridge. See Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, the house from Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels, and the site of the Clink Prison. Cross back over the river on London Bridge and walk along the river side to the Tower of London. Take a walking tour guided by one of the Royal Yeomen. Take lots more pictures. Finish our tour around 2:00 and decide we're hungry. Take the Tube to The Blackfriar Pub. I have fish & chips and mushy peas and drink some kind of bitter whose name I forget. Am surprised at how much I like mushy peas. Interior decorations are terrific in this place. While we're inside, clouds roll in and the weather becomes more what you would expect from mid-December London. After eating, we head to Big Ben and Parliment. Take more pictures. Am really loving my camera now. Walk past Westminster Abbey, but it's not open on Sunday. Head back to hotel, pausing on the way to do a little shopping around Covent Garden. Then back on the Tube to the Tower of London again where we meet Leslie, our guide for London Walks' Jack the Ripper tour. She's cute and has a great Irish accent. Grrr. She takes us (and 30 other people) through the East End, stopping at several murder sites and giving us an insane amount of detail about the murders and the case. Very enjoyable. I'm surprised again by how many buildings from the time of the murders are still there, in basically their same form. The tour ends at the Ten Bells Pub, where apparently the Ripper stalked several of his victims. It's too crowded, so we set off in search of dinner. End up in the Spitalfields Market at a place called Giraffe. It's a cafe offering fairly healthy food and is apparently partnered with the Putumayo music label, so we had our first healthy meal of the weekend accompanied by a great soundtrack. I order a Coke, which comes in a bottle and somehow tastes different, which puzzles me until I look at the ingredients. Aha. No high fructose corn syrup in English Coke, only pure sugar. After dinner, we're wiped, so we head back to the hotel. Watch highlights of the Tottenham-Middlesbrough and Arsenal-Chelsea matches from that afternoon and some kind of crazy English talk/game-show with a surprisingly funny Robbie Williams as the guest. Type-A is still on vacation, and I crash again.

Monday
Back to the French bakery for breakfast. Second latte is just as good. Spend some more time in the shops around our hotel. Pick up some gifts and find lots of shoes and clothes I'd like, but stop myself from buying anything by mentally calculating the prices in US dollars. Nearly give myself a heart attack on several items. Check out of the hotel at 12:00 GMT and head to the Tube for our last ride to Heathrow. No problems with the flight this time, as we only wait five minutes for our boarding passes. We're in first class for this trip. Beginning to get spoiled. We take off about 4:00 GMT. Spread out in my spacious chair and watch Crash (excellent) and Bewitched (utter crap) on my personal movie system. Eat the delicious 5-course meal, then play rummy with Todd for most of the rest of the trip while watching the progress of the flight on the map available on our video screens. Land at O'Hare at 6:10 Central. Slowly make our way through Customs, hop on the El and meet Cynthia at the other end. Show her my pictures from the trip, then load up the car and head back to Indy. Arrive home at 12:30 Eastern. Have been gone exactly 4 days, 6 hours. Feels like a month. Wish I could go back (although maybe minus the day of sitting in the airport). I may be wiped, but it was totally worth it.
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So that's the trip. I should pause here to say Todd is The Man. I would never have been able to take this trip without him, and I owe him big time. I loved London, and despite what several people told me to expect, I didn't find it dirty at all. Certainly the Tube stations were much cleaner than the New York subway. All the English we interacted with were very polite and helpful, even the ones who weren't in the service industry. I loved that London has so much history and yet feels very young. I can't wait to go back sometime.

The 77-hour tour of London

I'm still recovering and will have more details tomorrow when I'm not so groggy, but suffice it to say that in just over three days, Todd and I managed to see one Premier League match, Big Ben, Parliament, the Tower of London, a bunch of famous bridges, St. Paul's Cathedral, Piccadilly Circus, the site of three Jack the Ripper murders, the house from Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels, and the inside of several pubs.

I also got to try out my new camera with great results, and hopefully will be able to post a link to a Shutterfly album tomorrow. For now, enjoy my Clark Griswold shot.

Killing time

Well, I resisted it for a long time, but I've finally been seduced by Sudoku's wily ways. If there's still anybody out there who's been living under a rock, Sudoku is a Japanese number puzzle somewhat like a crossword. As you can see in the image, it's a 9 x 9 square, divided into nine 3 x 3 squares. The object is to get each 3x3 square, each vertical column and each horizontal row to contain the numbers 1-9, used only once in each sequence. I know a lot of people who have doing these puzzles for a while, and I wasn't sure if I wanted to try it. I've never been much of a puzzle guy. But I went to Borders today looking for something to read on my upcoming flight to London, and the first thing inside the door was a display of various sudoku books, all on sale at 3 for the price of 2. So after playing around with a sample puzzle, I ended up leaving with three books. So far, I've done five puzzles today, and I've already bookmarked WebSudoku.com. I forsee a lot of my time getting eaten up by this game, but I don't mind it as much as say, playing XBox. At least this way I'm using my brain cells instead of killing them.

Joy and pain

The stars aligned in my favor today when I went by the library to return a book. I decided to take a pass through the CD section, and it was a massive success. Lots of stuff I've wanted to hear for a while, coupled with stuff I'd forgotten I wanted to listen to. Here's what I found:

Sufjan Stevens, Seven Swans
Maxïmo Park, A Certain Trigger
Pedro the Lion, Achilles Heel
Madvillain, Madvillainy
Paul McCartney, Chaos and Creation in the Backyard
Matt Pond PA, Emblems
Aimee Mann, Lost in Space
Johnny Cash, Unchained
Various Artists, Dressed in Black: A Tribute to Johnny Cash
Neko Case & Her Boyfriends, Furnace Room Lullaby
Danny Gatton, Hot Rod Guitar

As I've been ripping, I mean, uh... listening to these CDs, I've been watching more of Arrested Development: Season One. What an utterly criminal waste to cancel this show. I guess because it's not dumbed down to the level of Two and a Half Men or Joey, the Average American doesn't get it. Hopefully HBO picks Development up and it takes its proper place in the best lineup of shows on television. Imagine a night of back to back eps of Arrested Development and Curb Your Enthusiasm...

Sigh. My dream world is a nice place.

My new toy

Christmas came a little early this year. Yesterday I bought a new digital camera (a present from Mom and Dad—thanks, you guys), the Canon Powershot S2 IS. It's a little fancier than your standard point and shoot, with a 12x optical zoom, image stabilization, and a variety of shooting modes, but not quite at the level (or price) of an SLR model like the EOS Rebel. I have yet to read the manual, but I was still able to take the picture you see below (Indy's War Memorial, covered in today's still-falling snow) and get it to the point where I can upload it to my blog, thereby proving I am at least as smart as a chimpanzee. Pretty, shiny, silver thingy make picture. Once I actually do open the manual, imagine the fun I'll have! Look for more original photos in this space soon as I continue to experiment.

I think we got 8 inches of snow over 3 or 4 hours, and of course the usual Midwestern chaos ensued. Everyone rushed to leave work "before the roads got bad," thereby jamming every road in town and causing thousands of commuters to be on the snowy roads much longer than they normally would. A typical 30 minute commute to the northern suburbs seemed to be taking about 2 hours. It's days like this that make me appreciate walking to work even more than usual. I didn't even mess with the grocery stores, but I assume they're running rather low in the bread and milk sections. Luckily, most of this mess will be gone tomorrow, and then everyone can stop complaining about the snow and go back to complaining about how cold it is.

It's OK. Judge a book by its cover. It keeps Chip Kidd in business.

I had a pleasant surprise today when someone at work told me that Chip Kidd would be speaking at the Herron School of Design tonight. Kidd is the name in book cover design, and as close as it gets to a professional "hero" for me. He has worked for Alfred A. Knopf Publishing for 20 years, and after designing for such diverse authors as David Sedaris, James Ellroy, Augusten Burroghs and Cormac McCarthy, you probably have at least one of his covers on your bookshelf. Being a bit of a superhero/comic freak, Kidd has also designed hardcover collections of Charles Schultz's Peanuts and DC Comics's icons, and as I learned tonight, revamped the Superman and Batman logos for DC's new line of All-Star comics. And finally, Kidd is also the author of a novel, The Cheese Monkeys, a vaguely autobiographical account of his experience in design classes at Penn State and one of the only books I've ever read where the design takes an active role in how you read the book.

Kidd's talk tonight was pretty enjoyable, especially since Indy is pretty starved for appearances by designers (or important artists of any sort). My friend Michael (who's also my boss) and I grabbed this rare chance to get our collective design nerd on, and it gave me my first chance to see the inside of Herron's new digs on IUPUI's campus. Pretty sweet, and a far cry from the old Army barracks where I began my collegiate art classes. As a speaker, Kidd was everything I expected from a well-known art director: he was witty, self-deprecating, a little nerdy, and an arrogant bastard who managed to offend most of the audience at one point or another, but still had us all laughing most of the time. He was alternately instructive and dishy about subjects like the diva-ness of certain authors (I won't name names, but she recently switched topics from vampires to Jesus), and I was happy to hear that book publishing is not all that different from magazine publishing in terms of the cause of their headaches. Despite his rock star status, Kidd is the #2 art director at Knopf and has no desire to be #1 and take on all the administrative duties and direct flak involved. It's nice to know that I'm not the only one who feels that way. But most of all, I enjoyed seeing some of his current work, and I came away feeling refreshed and wanting to try new things at work. Not a bad evening.

If you'd like to learn more about Chip Kidd, Jason Santa Maria has a similar post. Only with less rambling and more information. And nicer design.

Breathtaking

My friends Nikki and Tom, being the adventuresome couple that they are (you may remember them as my hosts on our Alaskan Adventure back in August and September of '04), recently took a trip to Churchill, Canada to see polar bears in their natural habitat.

It sounds like an incredibly interesting trip, involving several days on a tundra buggy that sounds like it was like a moving camp bunk, but it led to some amazing photos by Tom. As I've mentioned before (and as anyone who's checked out the links on the right side of the page will know), Tom has his own website and is a rather accomplished nature and aerial photographer, but these polar bear photos are some of the most spectacular I've seen from him. But don't take my word for it. Take a look for yourself. A picture, as they say, is worth a thousand words. I'm particularly in love with "Peace on Earth Vertical". While you're there, please take the time to check out some of his other albums as well.

Grab bag

Miscellany time again:

I'm trying a new downloading service: eMusic.com. To start, you get 50 free downloads, and after that, you pay a monthly fee for a certain number of downloads (for instance, $9.99 for 40 downloads per month). I've had no trouble finding things to download. So far, I've gotten a Johnny Cash track, Coldplay's first EP they ever released, the latest New Pornographers disc, and several tracks from a Daniel Johnston tribute disc by artists like Beck, Death Cab, and Bright Eyes. So far, not a bad deal, but I'm curious to see if it will be worth continuing. So far, the searching I've done turns up a lot of current music and popular albums, but not much in the way of back catalog for more established artists.

My dad turned me on to Pandora.com, a site that creates a radio station for you based on music you already like. You type in the name of an artist or song and Pandora creates a playlist of similar music and explains each selection, going so far as to break it down by tonality, beat, instrumentation, and overall feeling of the lyrics. It requires a free registration after the first 7 songs, but it seems like a pretty good system. I tried Andrew Bird, a fairly obscure violinist influenced by Radiohead that my brother Jeff got me into, and Pandora did a decent job of coming up with a playlist I really enjoyed:

"Action/Adventure," Andrew Bird
"For the Moments I Feel Faint," Relient K
"Cayman Islands," Kings of Convenience
"Road Trippin'," Red Hot Chili Peppers
"The Happy Birthday Song," Andrew Bird
"Who Will Walk in the Darkness with You," The Black Swans

I own music by all of these bands except The Black Swans, so Pandora read my tastes pretty well. But I'm curious as to why I got two Andrew Bird songs when I already told Pandora I like him. Also, this seems a little similar to the way the streaming radio on my Last.fm account works (it chooses music based on what I listen to), and I'm already pretty invested in that. But Pandora might be good if I'm traveling somewhere without my music collection or in the mood for a specific type of music.

I just finished reading Carter Beats the Devil, by Glen David Gold. It was on everybody's best-of lists back in 2001, so I'm a little behind, but that didn't stop me from enjoying the book immensely. The story follows Charles Carter (a real magician in turn-of-the-20th-century San Francisco) through a series of fictional adventures, during which he encounters many other real-life people including Harry Houdini, the Marx Brothers, and President Warren G. Harding. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it.

And finally, I think this was on the Today Show this morning, but this has got to be the pinnacle of garish Christmas decorations. Can you imagine living next door to this? Honestly, I don't think any jury in the world would convict a neighbor who burned this house down. (And of course it's in a suburb of Cincinnati.)