OK, folks. I have pretty much put together the new blog, and you can find it here. It's still a work in progress, but it's presentable enough to begin using it as the main blog site. Please update all links, RSS feeds, etc.

OK, folks, here's a (probably) futile effort to find a band that, as far as I can tell, has never actually released a single track. But I'll ask anyway. If my two decades of Young Marble Giants scholardom have taught me anything, it's that being a pest pays off. Sometimes.

I have an old fanzine in my possession entitled Rorschach Testing. It's a slick publication that seems to have been based out of Bedford, England. Mind you, I'm only guessing, as there is no editorial masthead, no issue number, no contact address, and there are no writer credits - but the back-cover ad is for one Winkles Club in Bedford. I think I bought it in college, primarily because it had interviews with Eyeless In Gaza and Everything But the Girl. However, it's a quality magazine all the way through with lots of interesting bits, including a very early Smiths interview, a typically candid John Peel conversation, and an atypically candid New Order interview.

Hidden among these indie-chart stalwarts is a one-page feature on a band called Charcoal Chase. Based on a demo tape, Rorschach Testing describes the band as having "the strains of the more relaxed side of Weekend with haunting vocals in the mould of Nico," and working in the tradition of "the Everything But the Girl/Marine Girls vein of song." Might as well have my name written all over it, right?

The only problem: no contact information. There was a UK phone number listed, but I was a poor college student, and these were the days before frequent-calling plans and guaranteed weekend minutes. Over the years I've kept an eye out for the name, and when the Internet emerged, I'd do occasional searches under that name. They haven't even crawled onto MySpace, despite the plethora of forgotten bands that have uploaded profiles.

So in the absence of contact info or an Internet presence, let's look for clues within the article. It says here that Charcoal Chase began life as a band called Three Children, originally from Sunderland. I Googled "three children" and "sunderland" and got back links to social service agencies. At the time this article was written, they had just compiled enough songs to fill a live set, and had plans to play Bedford. However, it doesn't look like they ever played live, although Three Children did. It doesn't look like they ever did a Peel session or released a compilation track, let alone their own 7" or album. I suspect that they never released anything besides the one demo tape referenced in the article.

What about finding ex-members? The vocalist was named "Yvonne," and the bass player was "Liane." The guitarist is named Jerry Mussa; no such person emerges from England. Other members of the band are named "John Wood" and "Ian Taylor," which are on a John Smith level of being unGooglable. Thinking that perhaps they registered their songs with MCPS, I checked the PRS/MCPS website, but it doesn't have the kind of online repertoire search that ASCAP and BMI do.

So I'm out of options. If you were in Charcoal Chase, know someone who was, wrote for Rorschach Testing, or have the Charcoal Chase demo tape and would be willing to send me a copy, would you please contact me? I suspect we're missing out on an undiscovered gem, and I'd like to hear the recorded evidence.

On my way home from work today, I was listening Kumari's How To Pop, How To Punk cassette and reminiscing about the late-1990s Japanese indiepop scene. I miss it. I miss Beikoku-Ongaku, which in its prime was the world's best music magazine. I miss Catch That Beat! I miss Nobi and Tomomi playing shows in my cramped Hoboken apartment. Most of all, I miss the mail: elaborate handmade letters and packages from Japanese CIF readers, complete with enthusiastic broken English. I wonder whether Stephen Pastel, Roddy Frame and Edwyn Collins are still revered there. Someday I hope to visit and find out for myself.

Thanks for your advice, everyone. WordPress appears to be the unanimous favorite, so I checked my SiteAdmin and saw that my web host now offers WordPress 2.6 for automatic download. (Last I checked they had an old, obsolete version. Thankfully they've upgraded.) I have installed it and am hoping to set up a blog as soon as I can. Right now the plan is to make the front page of appelstein.com into a blog, with links to the various sites I host, etc. It's all about time, which is in short supply lately. Maybe I can eke out time to work on it this weekend. I'll let everyone know when it goes live, of course.

* Congrats to Chris and Arianne of Indiepages on the arrival of their son, Calvin Edward McFarlane. I had no idea they were even expecting until today! Best wishes to the proud parents. Some hard-won advice: get a lock for your CD room. Otherwise, wee Calvin is going to be pulling CDs off the shelves, breaking the jewelboxes and throwing the discs around the room like frisbees. (Or was that just Abby being Abby?)

* I got a job! Well, a short-term document review project, but a job all the same. The employment agent warned me in advance how "dry" and "boring" the work is, but I've worked on electronic discovery for multiple class actions, so I know what to expect and how to manage the work. If working at a huge downtown law firm taught me anything, it's that the practice of law is quite often tedious and unglamorous. Which, strangely enough, is one reason I've felt like I could do it.

* Those of you who have blogs that you run off your own server, rather than Blogspot or Typepad: what software do you use? I've just spent my entire evening in a fruitless attempt to install and run Movable Type on appelstein.com, and was not able to establish a connection between the server and my computer. Should I use something else? Forget about it entirely and just forward my Blogspot URL to my web domain? The easier the option, the better. Just as I can drive a car but can't rebuild a transmission, I can handle basic software installation and customization but can't troubleshoot complex technical problems. Any advice welcome.

* Even if I can't figure out how to do the above, I'm probably going to kill this blog soon and start afresh. I'll be writing about the exact same things, but this particular blog feels old and dated. The whole "DJ Early Bird" nom de plume made sense five years ago, when I actually was DJing semi-regularly, but not so much now. Similarly, the blog's title is barely a cultural reference anymore; when did Nelly release that song, 2000 or 2001? Now Nelly's giving interviews to St. Louis Magazine complaining about his local haters.

* With the bar exam done, I literally don't know what to do with myself.

"So, Mike, how did it go?"

I went to the testing site the night before. I'd driven two hours to Jefferson City, stopping on the way at the roadside nostalgia shop with the corny signs. (It was every bit as tacky as I expected, and not in a cool way.) I pulled into town, threw my luggage into the hotel room, and drove over to the testing site.

There were two testing sites for the Missouri Bar Exam. Mine was in the Truman Hotel, a rather shabby establishment just about a mile down the road from my hotel. I checked out the conference room where I'd be taking the exam the next day. It felt surprisingly benign: long rows of tables, with a large digital clock in front. It looked almost like a Bingo game, rather than the place that, in 12 hours, would make or break legal careers.

Back at the hotel, I did some last-minute studying, and could not sleep due to the endless loop of legal rules playing in my head. "Holder in due course: a holder...who takes for value...in good faith...without notice..." "Personal jurisdiction...must satisfy...both the Missouri and federal long arm statutes..." I ended up watching some terrible reality show for awhile, and finally passed out for a few hours.

Tuesday morning I drove back to the testing site. I found my way back to the conference room and waited in line with about a hundred other people, all of whom were clutching laptops and holding their personal items in clear plastic bags. (The bar association makes you empty your pockets - not that they frisk you at the door, but you're expected to carry your wallet, keys and other essentials in a place where they can be seen.) I showed my ID and was given two things: 1) a sticker with my seat number on it, and 2) a clear hangtag for my ID, which I was expected to wear around my neck both days.

I took my seat. In front of me, I noticed one of my classmates from SLU. She and her husband were adopting a child, and had to fly to Nicaragua literally the day after the bar to pick up their child. She may have been the only person in the room for whom the bar exam was not the biggest event of the week.

At 8:00, the test proctors handed out bright orange envelopes containing the first part of the essay test. We were given our instructions, logged on to the special ExamSoft program, and got to work. The digital clock started at 1:59 and began counting down to zero. I opened the booklet and read the first of the four essays. It was an equity question. I froze. Not to worry; I expected to freeze. I took a deep breath, read the question a few times, and got to work writing. Of the four questions, there were I'm reasonably sure I did OK on the Family Law and Civil Procedure ones, may or may not have done well on Equity, and basically made it up for Trusts. When time was called, I felt exhilarated - the first part was done, and I'd survived!

The Multistate Performance Exam was next. Another round of brightly-colored envelopes, another set of instructions, another digital countdown. The MPT is considered the easiest part of the essay section: you're given a fact pattern and a "library" of cases, and are expected to pull together the facts and write a memo or brief based on the fact pattern. Without having to actually remember rules, I was able to write a coherent and well-reasoned memo. If only the MPT was the whole bar exam, I'd be fending off multiple offers right now.

Lunch. I drove back to my hotel room, made myself a PBJ, called Callie and relaxed a bit. Then back to the testing site for part two of the essay section. This one featured six questions in three hours. It's amazing how fast three hours can fly when you have half an hour, and no more than half an hour, to formulate a coherent response to a complicated legal question. I'll be honest: I choked on a couple of them. I kept asking myself, "What the hell are they asking here??" I managed to eke out answers, but I don't delude myself into thinking they were 12-pointers*. The other four were OK, but in general, it was frustrating in general that the facts and rules weren't coming to me as easily as I'd have liked after all those 12-hour study days. That was what I was afraid would happen. My only hope is that I remembered as much as everyone else.

Time. Day 1 was over. You could feel a wave of relief through the entire room. I packed up my computer, put my ID back in my wallet, and walked upstairs. I saw a few friends in the hotel lobby, but deliberately did not talk to them. I'd made a decision to essentially sequester myself for the whole two days. I was basically willing myself to be self-confident even though I was feeling exactly the opposite - and the last thing I needed was to hear, "So, what did you think of those afternoon questions? Pretty easy, huh?"

I hopped in my car and went on a fruitless search for something besides McDonald's or pizza. I at least got to see some of Jefferson City. Even happened upon a used record store, which seemed to specialize in dollar-bin cutouts. No unexpected treasures or anything. I ended up getting some Wendy's chili on Missouri Road and eating it back at the hotel room.

I was fast asleep by 9:00. I had a dream that Amy Winehouse was at our supermarket. Esther made some insensitive comment, and we made her go and apologize. Hey, Esther needs to learn manners, but don't ask me where in my subconscious that came from.

Back to the testing site the next day for the MBE. Two three-hour sessions, 100 multiple-choice questions apiece. The MBE is inherently less stressful than the essays, for no other reason than only having to remember six subjects - but they require exactly the same amount of stored legal knowledge. It's easy to pick wrong answers if you don't read very, very carefully. Even then, you may be confronted with three out of four answers that all seem equally plausible. The right answer often depends on your ability to catch a term or art or an exception to a rule. For instance, a Constitutional Law question might ask you whether a proposed rule needs to be "narrowly tailored to a compelling state interest" or "rationally related to a legitimate government interest." Unless you know the difference between the strict scrutiny and rational basis tests - and unless you know which classes of people are covered under each standard - you will only be able to guess. Likewise, when presented with an Evidence question, you need to know when and how hearsay may be introduced at trial, and what the various exceptions are. This means that it's important not to let the multiple-choice format throw you; if anything, you need to read more closely and be more precise for the MBE than for the essays.

I think I did OK. I hope so, at least. I scored rather poorly on the practice MBE we did in BAR/BRI class last month, and have been studying and doing lots of practice questions to make up for it. I definitely caught more this time. Again, though, it's impossible to know how well you did. Everyone leaves thinking they failed.

After the MBE, SLU was giving a post-bar dinner party at a local restaurant. At first I was anxious to just get home, but after driving a few miles in the pouring rain, I decided to stop in for awhile. I had some dinner, talked with a friend of mine from first year, and hit the highway. And that was it. Hopefully I hit the magic 1300 number.

"When do you find out your grade?"

September 17. And please don't ask me about it until then, as it will only stress me out.

* the highest score you can get on a Missouri essay, pre-curve

The studying is almost done. On Tuesday morning, I open up my test booklet for the first day of the Missouri Bar Exam and see how well I've prepared. I sure can't figure it out for myself. Depending on what time of the day it is, I'm either confident about my ability to pass, or I'm feeling overwhelmed and mired in hopelessness. Almost every person enrolled for this test will tell you the same thing. The ones who say otherwise are liars.

I think I can do OK on the MBE. I've done literally a couple thousand practice questions, which actually is about average. It's taken me all summer, but I have begun to crack the test. As long as I read carefully, I should be able to finesse it. The essay portion is a fairly straightforward of keeping all the facts in my head. This is proving infuriatingly difficult. I have Rain Man-like total recall for all kinds of trivia, but that trait is failing me with regards to the various rules of contract formation, secured transactions, and all the other thousands of details I need at my fingertips come test time.

Again, the good news is that no one else is that no one else has memorized all of it either. The challenge is going to be how well I can bluff on those questions where I haven't a clue.Y ou can come to a completely erroneous conclusion but still get most of your points if you've applied the proper standard of review.

All I need to do is get a 1300 out of a possible 2000 points. I keep telling myself that. I don't need to answer every question correctly; I just need to hit enough of the major points to barely pass. I won't find out how I did until mid-September. It could be worse. The California bar exam is three days long with a 1440 minimum score and a four-month wait for results.

I briefly joined a Livejournal group of bar-takers. I had to leave after two days. The other group members were depressing me with their toxic attitudes. The basic tenor was "This is hard. I can't do this. Why am I even bothering to put myself through it when I know I'll only fail yet again?" You know, I have enough problems keeping up my self-confidence and self-esteem on my own. I'm naturally pessimistic, which causes enough problems in my life without strangers on the Internet reinforcing it.

I'll need a job after the exam is done. I'm actually looking forward to just working. As long as a lawyer's hours can be, they surely can't be longer than the 12+ hour days of studying I've put in since late May.

Wish me luck, tell me to break a leg, etc. I'll report back after it's all done. And after I get some sleep.

* from the Loud Family's "Top-Dollar Survivalist Hardware." Appears on Interbabe Concern, surely one of the 1990s' lost treasures.

Apples in Stereo preview, this week's RFT. I must also acknowledge music editor Annie for sending me an advance copy of Jennifer O'Connor's much-awaited Here With Me CD, knowing how much I'm struggling with bar prep. Have I mentioned that Annie is the best music editor ever? It's nice to be thought of, especially when under this kind of extreme stress.

13 days and counting. Studying at least one essay subject every day and working on MBE subjects at night. Starting to make some breakthroughs in Constitutional Law and Real Property. Subsisting on Wild Cherry Pepsi, granola bars and coffee. Tired.

Labels: rft

State of bar prep, 23 days and counting:

I admit it: I was spinning my wheels a little last weekend. I'd outlined all the subjects, done the first three sets of MBE practice questions, and done at least the first few of each set of essays. I was keeping up with the BAR/BRI paced program, but I was having a hard time memorizing the law. It was beginning to get me down.

Then I took the all-day practice MBE last Monday - and didn't do nearly as well as I'd liked. This shocked me back into motivation, which is apparently the point. BAR/BRI deliberately makes the practice MBE hard to beat. We spent the next two days reviewing every single question of the 200 we'd answered.

On the first day of MBE review, I finally tired of the loudmouthed neighbors behind me, who'd annoyed me all summer with their incessant chatter and inability to conversationally self-edit. I moved to another row, next to another SLU evening student I knew. As we started Tuesday's class, I noticed that she was taking notes on flashcards as the instructor went through his review. As this review consisted largely of mnemonic devices (that favorite trick of bar instructors everywhere), and as we had almost no room to write everything down on the sample MBE, I decided to give flashcarding a try.

So when the first break arrived, I bought a pack of 100 cards at the Wash U. bookstore, and got to writing. MBE review is a super-concentrated course; you're going through all six multistate subjects in just a couple of six-hour sessions. Through the combination of total immersion and the flashcard technique, I retained more in those two days than I have all summer.

I realized that I was going to have to go back and turn every single outline I'd done into flashcards. I've now done all but four subjects, and I hope to have those done by Tuesday. Flashcarding is incredibly tedious, not to mention physically exhausting when you're doing it remedially, but it seems to be paying off. I'm beginning to remember things. Slowly, gradually, a bigger picture is starting to emerge. Up until last Tuesday, I felt certain that I would fail the bar exam. Now I think I have a fighting chance.

Wednesday is our last day of new material. After that, it's time for what I've nicknamed The Three Weeks - the final crunch time when we bar-takers spend up to 18 hours a day cramming what we need to cram. It coincides almost exactly with the Three Weeks leading up to the Jewish holiday of Tisha B'Av. That's the saddest day on the Hebrew calendar - the date the Second Temple was destroyed - and observant Jews spend the three weeks beforehand in open mourning. Hopefully the Missouri Bar Exam will not be an occasion for such mourning. But the preparation will certainly be unpleasant.

(mostly property law terms because that's what I'm studying tonight)

1) Attractive Nuisance *
2) Natural Flow Theory
3) Fertile Octogenarian
4) The Four Unities
5) Inter Vivos
6) Mutual Mistake
7) Next Friends
8) Pur Autre Vie
9) Unborn Widow
10) Ultra Vires

* already an album title thanks to the Loud Family