alvarete.net

Nyle - Let The Beat Build

// May 28th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Check this out, Media

The Way of St. James

// May 24th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Personal

Until the cows came home.

Last month I celebrated my five-year anniversary of arriving in Spain, which would be cool if it hadn’t made me think how little of Spain I’ve experienced. The Way_of_St._James is something you keep hearing about from the locals, and it’s easy to see its appeal:

• You get to do some exercise,
• You’re off the grid for a week,
• You stress-test your relationship with your walking partners,
• You get to eat Galician home-cooked food (for the most part).

You also get the compostela, which is a cool diploma declaring you as a “Pilgrim”. We were told you only got it if you said you had walked for religious purposes, so that’s exactly what we said. I hope misrepresenting the nature of the trip doesn’t land me a spot in hell, should it exist.

Lost in contemplation, or unable to walk anymore?

Walking 200 Km. in 6 days carrying a 12 Kg. backpack isn’t as easy as we made it to be. It certainly didn’t sound like much after last year’s Caledonian Challenge. Then again, I should’ve remembered that you walk the Challenge without any weight on your back, that you get to rest for as long as you need after walking for 24 hours, and, most importantly, that after I finished the Challenge I had my left knee so worn down that the doctor forbade me from doing any exercise for 6 months. After your first 10 hour walking day, you wake up the next day to find aches in places you didn’t think could ache. You sort of rub your muscles into working order, and then go out and walk another 10 hours. And again, and again. It’s not as terrible as it sounds, though. After a couple days, you get used to the pain and, unless you hurt yourself in the process, you start having a good time walking. And then, just when you’re starting to really enjoy yourself, you arrive at Santiago and the walk ends.

I didn't bring any fancy clothes for the occasion.

The road itself is quite an experience. We didn’t plan our stops correctly and ended up walking over 30 Km. every day, and it still was incredibly fun, which speaks volumes about the trip itself. The food was uniformly excellent, and our walking group was great. We originally planned this as a six-person trip, but real life got in the way and it ended up being three of us. Being all guys had its advantages: bathroom breaks were quick, and the horror that was having unisex (open!) showers was somehow mitigated. I had a close encounter with a naked woman old enough to be my mother, and I’m sure it was a lot more uncomfortable for her than it was for me.

Somebody had to cook, somebody had to take the picture.

The one thing we kept hearing from all the other walkers (which were usually over 50, foreign, or both) that had already completed the walk previously was that this was the sort of thing you came back to. I can definitely see myself going back next year and trying a different route. The main problem will be having this year’s walking pace as precedent, which was insane. It’s certainly a unique experience, and one that heartily recommend.

State of the Art(s)

// May 3rd, 2009 // No Comments » // Media, Personal, Rants and Musings

During last year’s SAG strike, the major studios doom-and-gloomed about how the strike would hurt the 2009 summer movie release line-up. I’m sure it has nothing to do with the strike, but if the opening round for this summer season (Wolverine) is any indication, this summer movie slate might be dead on arrival. Looking at the releasse schedule, I find it hard to muster any excitement for any big-budget movies. Pretty much the only movie I’m genuinely excited to watch is Moon, and it’s in the hands of one of the most inept independent movie distributors in the planet.

Fortunately, it looks like an awesome year for concerts. I don’t think there’s been a better year than this. So far, I’m aiming for AC/DC, U2, Leonard Cohen, Joe Bonamassa, Chickenfoot, Ry Cooder and Gary Moore, on top of the Montreal Jazz Festival (fingers crossed). That, and the full line-up for Veranos de la Villa hasn’t been revealed yet (so far: Lou Reed, John Fogerty and Jeff Beck). The only thing that could make me happier is if Prince anounced he’s breaking his 12-year moratorium on Spain and promoting his new album(s) here, and John Mayer took a break from recording his new album to tour Europe, but that’s just being greedy.

Now, if you excuse me, I need to find people to trick into coming with me to these concerts…

Happy Birthday Pro-Tip

// April 29th, 2009 // No Comments » // Media, Personal, Rants and Musings

The best way to avoid the birthday blues:

• Purple Rain
• Sign O’ The Times
• Dirty Mind
• 1999

Because there truly is joy in repetition.

Midnight Phone Calls

// April 26th, 2009 // No Comments » // Personal, Rants and Musings

Nothing good ever comes when your phone rings at midnight. At best, it’s a friend that’s too drunk to work out whether +5 GMT works in his favor or yours. At worst, it’s bad news that couldn’t wait until tomorrow.

When my phone wakes me up and I hear a drunken slur on the end of the line, I’m usually too relieved to tell whoever it is to google  ”World Clock”. Sadly, this was not the case last week.

I hate midnight phone calls.

Learning to Write

// April 12th, 2009 // No Comments » // Personal, Rants and Musings

Back when I used to write with a certain degree of frequency, I had my creative process down to a science: I used to cook texts in my head for days at a time and, by the time I sat down to write them, I was done. I then forced myself to move on to something else before my endless revisionist urges took over.

One of the reasons I stopped writing was that this method wasn’t doing it for me anymore. I figured that my writing phase was over, inasmuch as the writing I did could be considered a phase. Lately, I’ve learned to live with the fact that I may not be overflowing with artistic talent, something that I have to face when I’m struggling against the guitar, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t wring out some semblance of meaning off myself. The question is, given that the old ways don’t work anymore, where does somebody who doesn’t know how to write start?

I figured the best way to start writing was to start writing. Even though I must admit I have warmed up to institutionalized education with the years (another sign of old age), I’m not enrolling myself in a writing course just because I’ve reopened my blog. So, what I did was dust off my old Moleskine, got a nice gel pen (Not a Japanese one, though. I don’t have the mental strength to research them.) and tried to jot down… Stuff.

Pros of analogue writing:

• Immediacy: Going from standing around in the subway to writing stuff down takes about 10 seconds.
• Purpose: Going into my “I’m writing something” state of mind helps me focus on the task at hand.
• Enjoyment: I’m not a pen freak, or a paper freak, but I must say that the Pilot G-2 is hot. The word lubricious comes to mind. I bought a bunch of different gel pens and stuck with the G-2, which is the one I started with because I had one laying around.

Cons:

• My hand writing is shit. Always has been, and not something that I place highly on my list of things to work on, so probably always will be. It’s legible to me, and that’s about it.
• Transcribing strikes me as terribly inefficient. I like the fact that it’s where I do most of the editing now, but it’s still time-consuming and prone to errors.
• The physicality of the notebook is not ideal. I’ve suffered hard drive losses in the past, and I didn’t carry them around with me. I can’t imagine what losing a loaded scratch-book must feel like.

I’m not convinced I will stick to this particular method of writing, but for now it’s what I have, and it seems to fit my current needs. I might decide to optimize it at some point down the road, but that will mean I’m still doing it, so all will be well.

Unforeseen circumstances

// April 5th, 2009 // No Comments » // Rants and Musings

We’ve all been there before: dressed up, ready to go, phone rings:

- Hey, something came up… I can’t make it.

As the saying goes, “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade”. Nobody has bothered rephrasing it to better reflect actual circumstances, that is, life doesn’t usually hand you lemons, it gives you shit. When it does, your prospects are quite limited and, often, not that appealing. In my particular case, the reasons behind bringing back alvarete.net are neither.

I’ll elaborate.

I’m sure you’ve all heard about this “financial crisis” we seem to be going through. It seems that if you’re currently working in the Financial sector, you fall into one of three groups:

• You’ve been fired (Sorry!),
• You just got paid an enormous bonus (Congratulations!),
• You still have to work, but don’t have enough work/are not getting paid enough to stay late, you get to go home a little bit earlier (Meh).

I fall in the third category, and, after the initial shock wears off, it’s nice to see how much you can accomplish with an extra hour or so of free time every day. I had this other writing project, but it’s moving slower than I thought (plus, I’m not a big fan of writing in spanish).

You can probably see where this is heading…

I’ve been going through my old site backups and different alvarete.net iterations, and my earliest posts date back to 2001. Reading the old stuff I wrote, I can see that I’ve come a long way from who I was. I would like to keep walking down that road, so here we go again.

This is my web page. There are many like it, but this one is mine.