No Star Wars, Thom

Saw Radiohead at the Shoreline Amphitheatre (aka the Shitline Assitheatre) on Tuesday night. Drove out there with Joey, hoping to get cheap tickets, but we both ended up getting in for around $40. Not much cheaper, but still cheaper than paying service charges. We also showed up a little late, after making a quickly corrected wrong turn in SF and then sitting in the parking-lot traffic from hell for about 45 minutes. But we made it in while they were playing My Iron Lung, about 5 or 6 songs in. I looked up the setlist later on, and we missed some great songs early in the set, but we got to see some excellent renditions of Wolf at the Door, Everything in it’s Right Place, Paranoid Android, No Surprises (the line “bring down the government/they don’t work for us” brought a HUGE cheer from the crowd!), Sail to the Moon, Idioteque, and a really great expanded version of the Gloaming, among many others. There were two encores, the sound was nice and clear (no walls to bounce all the muddy bass off of), but the view was terrible. I couldn’t see the stage at all, and had to rely on the big screens above stage to see what was happening. Good show, too bad it couldn’t have been a better venue.

I think we’re gonna watch Dead Man at home tonight. I’ve been meaning to see that movie forever. Jim Jarmusch film, starring Johnny Depp, with Neil Young doing the soundtrack entirely solo…very very promising.

More later…

Translated and Lost

I went to see Lost in Translation the other night, with Joey. Really, really enjoyed it. Scarlett Johansson was impressive…in Ghost World, she had this air of impatient frustration around her performance that really brought her character to life. Here, she’s playing a much more subtle, uncertain variation on similar ideas. And Bill Murray has become a really refined dramatic actor lately. The scenes between the two of them are understated and melancholy and tense and, above all, real. Oh, and the soundtrack is great (listening to it right now, actually).

I’ve heard some criticism of the film that focuses on what some people perceive as racist humor towards the Japanese, but i really have to disagree. The film is about people who are, if you couldn’t tell from the title, lost in a country they don’t belong in, in a culture they don’t understand, surrounded by a language they don’t know. If the Japan portrayed on screen strikes you as alienating, incomprehensible, silly, or exaggerated, it’s because we’re seeing it through the eyes of characters who are alienated, misunderstood, amused, and unsettled by their surroundings. The scene with Scarlett Johansson’s character sitting on the windowsill of her hotel room, as the camera pans around her, back and forth over the tiny Tokyo streets below, is the best and most visceral illustration of this in the movie.

Anyways.

I’m making it my new project to download all the Bends and OK Computer era Radiohead b-sides that I seem to have lost at some point. I still have somewhat low-quality versions on a burned CD, but I crave quality. Especially for songs like Talk Show Host.

I’ve also discovered the joys of .cbz and .cbr files for downloading comics. I’ve downloaded and read Grant Morrison’s entire run on New X-Men over the last few days, up to and including the big plot twist that has everyone abuzz. Fun stuff. Grant’s an interesting writer, and the only other thing I’ve read by him is the Filth (which just finished….see earlier postings about that title). This has made me actually engaged and interested in a superhero comic book again. Part of it is nostalgia triggered by the quality of the recent X-Men movies, of course.

More later…

The Party Don’t Stop…

Indeed, this weekend has been one long party. Joey came over on Friday night, and hung out with us all, and we drank Coronas and ate pizza and played Fluxx, second best card game ever, until the wee hours, at which point we proceeded to fall drunkenly to sleep on the living room floor. I woke about 4am to the sight of 3 other bodies sprawled out in the living room, but i was too tired to wake anyone else up, and just dragged myself upstairs and collapsed. Apparently, Michelle woke up next, did the same, then Emily did the same. Joey woke up at some point, and went home before we got up.

Then, on Saturday night, it was party time for Emily’s 21st. Phil and Holly made it up from Sacramento, and bunches of folks came and hung out and brought food, and all just generally sat around and mingles and snacked and drank some more. Reed showed up and made us bananas foster, which was awesome and incendiary. Truly yummy. Then we all cruised down to P-town to mingle at Steve-O’s birthday party, where the Righteous Fists of Harmony were playing. I had some Coke with Cafe de Santos liquer, which was awesome, along with some tequila. Then I got to play tambourine during the Righteous Fists’ set, which I bruised my hand and tired out my arm doing. But it was very fun, they played a lot of Velvet Underground covers, so I could actually follow the changes for 90% of the songs.

We cruised on back home and started up a game of Apples to Apples (the best card game ever!), with 8 players. There was some fierce competition between Michelle and I for a good stretch of the game, and there were some really great hands that had everybody clapping and laughing their asses off until 4 in the morning. I’m surprised the neighbors weren’t beating down our door….but after we exhausted the entire deck of green cards, and cycled through the red cards 2 and a half times, we called it quits, with me taking the win.

Then this afternoon was Nicole’s birthday, which was much more sedate, and not entirely sober, but certainly less sloshed than the previous two nights. We mostly sat around, played Star Wars trivial pursuit, and then watched Pump Up the Volume, which is a damn fine movie.

All in all, a pretty damn fun weekend, if somewhat exhausting.

More later…

Drama Beats

Continued working on Joey’s song last night. We got a lot done on the Buzz portion, and worked a bit on hammering out the arrangement. Once we get the lyrics and structure finalized, I can start working on some harmony vocals. Whooo! We’re both getting pretty excited about this song already….

I’ve been downloading lots of god stuff lately (yeah, yeah…so sue me). Some Original Hamster, Ryoji Ikeda, Fennesz, the new Shins Album, Prefuse 73′s Extinguished: Outtakes, some Farmer’s Manual….lot of good stuff.

Still no new EM411 releases, but I’m polishing polishing polishing. maybe this weekend. Speaking of this weekend, it’s Emily’s birthday on Saturday. We’re just having a few people over for a potluck that evening, and then moving on down to P-town to watch the Righteous Fists of Harmony. Should be fun.

More later…

Tinkering

Finally got together with Joey to work on music last night, and we’ve got one song that’s starting to go somewhere interesting. Hopefully, we’ll have a chance to work on some more stuff during the week, or on the weekend. It may be a while before we can actually perform anything though, since his rehearsals start this week.

I also, finally got MIDI input working in PureData. turns out I just needed to download the latest version. So I have now made a workable, monophonic FM synth with MIDI control. Whoo-hooo! Now I need to try making more complex synths, and learn some more sample-manipulation and sequencing techniques….

Picked up Bjork’s Live at the Royal Opera House DVD, and it was fantastic. It’s Bjork, Matmos, Zeena Parkins, and Inuit choir, and an orchestra performing mostly material from Vespertine, and re-worked material from her earlier albums. Matmos was doing some great stuff, like doing their live-sampling beat collage from sources like a deck of cards being shuffled. Really, really cool to watch. And Zeena Parkins had an electric harp. Distorted. With a whammy bar. That she played with an E-bow. Fucking rad. Highly recommended DVD, kids. Check it out.

More later…

Leashless!

Life with wireless DSL is fucking sweet. I downloaded all sorts of updates for software that i hadn’t been able to get on dial-up (newer version of Mozilla, ThUnderbird, Trillian, etc.; some new updates for Pure Data), and some music I’d been looking for (Bjork tracks and some old skool hip-hop bootleg mixes).

I’m planning on putting some more music on EM411.com this weekend, or maybe next week. I have 3 or 4 songs to post over the next little while, but I’ll be pacing myself. I’m still finalizing the mix on a lot of these tracks, but they should be ready soon. And Joey and I are planning on putting together a couple of guitar/laptop/vox songs to play at North Light’s open mic night, which should be cool. Maybe I’ll record those, and post them as well.

More later…

Ahh….Sweet Broadband

Whoooo! DSL!!!

Watching Evangelion: ReDeath right now….a “what’s up Tigerlily” style fansub of Evangelion: Death. Great, great stuff.

more later…

Kid 606

Caught the Kid606 show at Bottom of the Hill on Saturday night, and it was pretty awesome. For a fuller description, check my EM411.com page.

STILL no DSL at home…probably taking so long because of the long weekend. Sigh. But we did get a lot of work done in the kitchen this weekend, and a little tidying everywhere else. Somehow, my string of Christmas lights have disappeared in the shuffle. Odd.

Sojiro is a little terrorist. We’ve been using the old spray-bottle training technique to teach him things like “don’t chew on cords”, “don’t bite my hands”, “don’t harass the bird”, and so on. I think he has ADD though. He kept jumping up on the table to “play” with Jack Sparrow while I was watching Monty Python, and he ended up getting thoroughly soaked. He’s starting to recognize the “voice of god” that happens when he’s being bad though. Slow learner….

Speaking of Jack Sparrow, we’re pretty convinced that he’s actually a Jackie Sparrow. Oops. Hi/her markings are much more like the female house sparrow in Emily’s field guide. I hope s/he’s not too confused about his/her sexual identity now. Not that s/he’s going to mating with any wild house sparrows….

More later…