The last time I had gone off caffeine was nine years ago. I was living in a tiny studio in Venice Beach and working in the west valley. My commute was the PCH. Withdrawal was brutal, but after a week or so of foggy ten-hour full-day headaches, I had weaned myself off the caffeine, reducing my daily intake from roughly 800mg down to about 30-50mg per day. I was proud of myself, feeling healthy, sleeping deeply, dreaming vividly and waking up thirty minutes before the alarm, every morning. But the following winter while visiting my folks, I went back on caffeine during a snowstorm, largely out of boredom – and I’d never looked back.

Last Monday I was late for work. I was in a real rush. I didn’t have time to get my fix. “I don’t need coffee today. In fact, let’s kick it to the curb and see what happens. I drank enough Joe in San Francisco yesterday to give me a heart attack. No coffee; I’m going to eat right this week, too.”

And so this past week I subsided on placebo decafs and the occasional green tea, and subsequently dropped my daily caffeine intake from the 800-1000mg range down to about 35-40mg, again, by my calculations.

I also bitched out my boss on three separate occasions (going so far as to assign her a few action items), berated a consultant, dicked over my downstairs neighbor by poaching the dryer while his duvet was clearly still wet (and played innocent), bitched out my girl for playing Jewel on her iPad, gave various parties the silent treatment, warned Robin that her plane might crash if the jet fuel wasn’t properly blended, berated a pigeon, considered kicking a dog in the jaw, called a tiny black ant on my workstation a “fucker” before squashing him with my thumb, unnecessarily humiliated my vanpool-mates, muttered to myself incessantly, appeared grouchy, scowled, frowned, postulated in a foggy haze, dozed (fell fast asleep on a park bench during lunch break), drooled, bolted out of a St Vincent show without saying hello to a soul, felt miserable, and generally acted in a menacing fashion, for four days straight. All true. I dreamt vividly, and woke scowling.

»continue reading iPhotograph My Life: Ep 2: Off Coffee Twice

Tacos de camaron! That’s deep-fried, right?

“Yah.”

OK, add one of those as well.

Here I am rolling the dice at an incredibly goofy-looking truck just off Sixth street. Let’s do this and get it over with…

TRUCK NAME
The Surfer Taco

LOCATION
Sixth @ Witmer (a few electrifying blocks west of the 110) (Pacific Dining Car-adjacent)

DID THEY TWEET YOU THE LOCATION? LIKE THE KOGI?
…

TODAY’S ORDER
1 de chorizo
1 de asada
1 de camaron
1 Jarritos Refresco de Mandarina

QUANDARIES AND HUNGER-WROUGHT POSTULATIONS WHILE MARVELLING AT TRUCK
»continue reading Under $10: The Surfer Taco

A brief look at the current prices of some of the longest DRM-free music mp3s on the marketplace at two major vendors, and why you should or should not buy them from either vendor based strictly on price.

Today we compare some of the longest DRM-free offerings of Amazon and ShockHound, in an attempt to completely fill an iPod nano with as few songs as possible. (You guys remember ShockHound, right? Hot Topic Inc’s scrappy DRM-free MP3 site that launched last fall, we hosted that party at the Troubadour with Titus Andronicus and No Age, yours truly was mumbling belligerently onstage briefly…ringing any bells? No?) Time will tell if I should have added a “paid content” clause and a few $s to that good ol’ ShockHound ad contract, for I’m giving them mad publicity today.

Background
I was shopping around for Miles Davis mp3s out of curiosity yesterday morning, and I discovered that one can in essence buy a $20 album for less than two bucks, once you figure out who’s got what tagged “Album Only”. (N/B: You are an absolute fool not to download both tracks off Pangaea below for a whopping $1.98, but I’ll save the speech as tastes differ in these waters.) Many commercial digital offerings on the market will throw one or two songs into the dreaded “Album Only” category, rendering your digi-album or playlist incomplete unless you kowtow to the ugly ploy which forces you to buy a full album at a higher price just for one song (how very 20th century). Well, fuck that. As you’ll soon see, the labels don’t even properly manage “Album Only” tracks on a vendor-by-vendor basis.

Why the long songs?
After I’d finished with Miles, I stuck with very lengthy selections for this exercise in order to see who was pricing on a weighted scale based on song length (Amazon, albeit sporadically), and who was foolishly giving away 45-minute 80mb files for 99cents (both, to my surprise). Unfortunately you still can’t buy something like the hour-long opus Sex by The Necks anywhere digitally (and jesus! I’m holding onto that CD, because the fucker is apparently selling for $36 retail, go figure); nonetheless, I feel I’ve managed to amass a somewhat well-rounded cross-section of ridiculously long mp3s below. Note that every so often I threw a curve ball just to gauge the libraries of both vendors. (To further complicate the price-by-length irregularities, a friend has pointed out that a 15-second track by Melt Banana is going for $0.99 on both sites, but that’s a separate chart for a separate day. Takers?)

Regarding MP3 Quality
Amazon claims to have 256kbps mp3s; Shockhound claims 192kbps minimum. So both of these options already beat the pants off of iTunes (128kb with DRM) and iTunes Plus (256kb DRM-free – but AAC, not mp3, not exactly universal out of the box and often pricier to boot).

WITHOUT FURTHER ADO…
»continue reading Amazon vs. ShockHound: Where to Buy Your Long-Playing DRM-Free MP3s And Why