After all I’ve blathered about Ikea, I suppose I should go on as I’ve started. We did not make a pilgrimage to the opening yesterday (20,000 people expected; 1,200 parking spaces), and very well may not make it for the next couple of weeks. But here’s the roundup from the local newspapers.

• Phoenix: Don’t get the wrong IKEA
  “And when the first IKEA opened in Saudi Arabia last September, two men were trampled to death and 16 shoppers were injured when 8000 people surged forward to claim $150 vouchers.”
• Weekly Dig: Pax Ikea (also, another fabulous cover this week)
• Herald: Finding the Icky in Ikea
• Globe: Extremely tedious headline not worth repeating

Terri has a good summary of last evening’s rock show. As she points out, when I saw Gravenhurst’s gear, I did worry that I was in for 45 minutes of white indie-rock boys kneeling in front of their effects pedals. But they were pretty good. She thought the singer/guitarist looked like a young Andy Partridge; I didn’t see it, but I did think the bass player looked uncannily like Ray Davies. The only funny thing about them was that they seemed to need every single song to be both soft, and then LOUD; very slow and then FAST; all in one song.

Broadcast were good; I find their albums to be a bit overwrought, but they were a little more rockin’ live.

I hadn’t been to the Paradise in ages, and it wasn’t as bad a venue as I remembered. Only bad beer, though. We were standing right up by the stage (for the better pictures, of course). From there, we could see the sign taped to the pillar in front of the stage that said “Boston, Mass. ‘Paradise Rock Club’” to remind the band where they were.

Good night, Springtown!

Our pal Matt Shaw, man about town, hipster, quantum physicist, and all around renaissance man, was in town this weekend. While we were catching up last night, Colin pointed out that a talk Matt Shaw gave earlier this year had been mentioned on BoingBoing. If you actually want to hear his talk on quantum computing, you can follow the link and get an mp3. Fantastic Physics fun!

I’m finally trying to skim through the stack of 3 weeks worth of Wall Street Journals that have piled up by the door (there’s a reason that I don’t subscribe to daily newspapers unless they’re free), and there have only been a couple of articles that have caught my eye.

First, the Google founders are buying not just any jet, but a Boeing 767. That doesn’t bother me so much; I think it would be fun to have a 767. What kind of torques me off is this:

Larry Page, quoted in the article, said “part of the equation of this sort of machinery is to be able to take large numbers of people to places such as Africa. I think that can only be good for the world.”

Oh, come on, Larry. Just drive everybody to Africa in your damn Prius if you care about what’s good for the world. If you want to buy yourself a jumbo jet, just buy yourself a jumbo jet and say you’re buying yourself a jumbo jet. If you really want to ship people and gear to Africa, why are you renovating it to have two luxury staterooms and only hold 50 people?

Second, I actually found an article, yes, in the WSJ, stating that global warming is a fact. Not an unproven matter still disputed by scientists, but an observable demonstrable fact. In the science section? No. News? Nope. Editorial? <snort!>

No, it was in the travel section. “Climate Change Island Guide: As weather and geological disasters add new risks, we rank 40 destinations”. It even has an info graphic called the “Dow Jones Island Index” which goes through about 30 destinations and gives each a risk score and the change in degrees of in its average ocean temperature between 1974 and 2004.

While taking notice of environmental phenomena only as it impacts your vacation plans seems like an unbelievable cartoon of self-interest, I’m ultimately not going to knock it. Whatever makes people take notice and do the right thing. I think that business types are still basically rational humanists. I still just don’t understand their support for faith-based nut jobs.

In Slate:

Snobbery is as woven into the human fabric as the sexual and aggressive impulses it seeks to refine. It’s no accident, then, that Rock Snobbery emerged just as young people started dressing in blue jeans and pretending that social class didn’t matter. Adolescents simply found novel ways—ways more acceptable to their newly egalitarian pretenses—to marginally differentiate themselves from one another.

Ouch! But I basically agree.

The article also brilliantly rebuts another argument I’ve heard:

It’s even been argued recently that the advent of the iPod spells the death of the Rock Snob. True enough, thanks to the digital revolution, nonsnobs can now filch 20 years of compulsive squirreling with a single drag-and-drop.
… I think such fears are overblown, myself. I’d love to say it’s because genuine pleasure—that enemy of both snobs and satire alike—will always take precedence over the need to condescend. But the reality, alas, is otherwise. At some point, drag-and-drop deposits will overwhelm even the most cavernous hard drive; a person will have to choose, and then their true colors will out: The Killers? Lenny Kravitz? Dave Matthews??? Because let’s face it, only one thing is more incorrigible than my snobbery, people, and that’s your indefensibly crappy taste in music.

Yes. Beyond just filling up your hard drive, there’s the simple fact that life is still finite, and music still takes time. With my new laptop, I’ve started ripping my music collection from scratch. So far, I’m about 2% done, and I already have 2.2 days worth of music. And also, while difficulty of acquisition of rarities may be part of it, I think knowing more than the rabble was always more the point. And while the digital revolution might give the rabble more access to knowledge, its given the same to the Rock Snob, who still has the advantage of wanting to know more.

I’m such a bad fan. Such a bad fan. Not only did I not realize that Haruki Murakami was speaking at Tufts, I didn’t realize he had taught at Tufts. And more than that, he apparently wrote the last part of Wind Up Bird Chronicle while he was teaching there. Which means that part of one of my favorite novels was probably written within three blocks of where I currently am sitting.

In the late 90’s, Salon ran a regular feature called “Brilliant Careers” which had a great premise: why wait until someone remarkable dies to give them a tribute? The idea had promise, but the actual execution ended up featuring a lot of people who are well-profiled elsewhere. And it was long enough ago that you’ll notice some of their subjects have since gotten their tributes in real obituaries (Fred Rogers) or in the tabloids (Phil Specter).

Anyway… I wish I had gotten to read this Providence Phoenix tribute to Charles Rocket before he committed suicide.

To his thousands of friends and fans here in Rhode Island, Charlie was the kindest and most generous type of person. We loved him without reservation, and he gave us that love back. He was a towering figure in the underground arts scene in the Providence of the 1970s. He heavily influenced Talking Heads, the Young Adults, and dozens of other bands. Those who were active then will tell you that Charles Rocket, in many ways, helped create the template for the underground/hipster/bohemian art scene here and elsewhere.

You may know him from his memorable stint as David Addison’s brother in several episodes of Moonlighting, as noted here. He was sort of a huckster selling “Rich & Thin” pills, and Terri can probably recite you most of his “rap”.