I’m not feelin’ it today, I gots to admit.

Need to move a bunch of crap around in my office, but I also have a raft of server upgrades due – I started to work on it at noon, but the software kept getting checksum errors when I’d download it. So finally, by the time I had what I needed, there was not gonna be enough time to wrap the upgrades before dinner.

The major piece is a system upgrade to bellerophon, which, according to MacinTouch is likely to break PHP and sendmail at least, and possibly more – some of the problems seen outside these kinds of apps are a bit unsettling as well, involving inabilities to go online – although via modem primarily.

Therefore, I REALLY want a clean 8-hour block ready to fix things.

I wonder, should I dry-run on my desktop box first? Mebbe.

…

I am kinda putting off a review of Coloring Outside the Lines, by Aimee Cooper. It’s a memoir of time spent in the nascent streetpunk scene in L. A. around 1980, and I really enjoyed the book.

A full review is forthcoming, but I’m also looking to try to place a piece so I’m sort of dawdling in this venue.

Lowdown: if you’re an ex-punk or currently are, or if you have an abiding interest in subcultural histories, go pick it up. It’s pretty good. Kinda raw, but enjoyable. I have no actual idea how it might play to someone who wasn’t on the inside.

Good points: namedropping is strictly limited, and focuses on the stupidity of namedropping, or at least the futility of celebrity. In fact, music is not at all what the book is about. It’s about one of the ways that young people come together to define themselves when the traditional structures made available by society don’t operate as intended.

At least one other reader of the book complains that the narrative is about no-one famous, and that these people apparently interact with the music scene in a peripheral way. Well, yeah, but that’s why I thought it was interesting. I mean, somone else already wrote those books, and I’m not interested.

Would I enjoy memoir of a hippy house on Polk Street in 1968? Maybe. On the other hand, it might really irritate me.