Breaking News: Nothing Happening!

Oh, it’s been so long, where to begin…

I watched the Wilco documentary, I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, last night. It was pretty cool, but didn’t really tell me a lot I didn’t already know from reading articles about the whole Yankee Hotel Foxtrot debacle. I guess I was hoping for more behind the scenes looks at the actual sessions, and more of an opportunity to see how big an effect Jim O’Rourke and Glen Kotche had on the sessions. There were plenty of alternate and early takes, but I didn’t get as much a feel for the evolution of the songs as I’d hoped. The live performances and studio shots were pretty great though, and it’s nice to have a clearer picture of the other members of the band, aside from Tweedy. And there was even a cameo by some locals (props to the Last Record Store!)

The whole Tweedy-Bennett meltdown scene, during the mixing of “Heavy Metal Drummer” was fascinating, and unnerving, especially when the cameraman followed Tweedy into the bathroom, and slung the camera over the stall as he was throwing up. Pretty intense moment….

I rented Coffee & Cigarettes also, but I haven’t watched that yet. It’s due tomorrow, so I better get on that tonight.

Anyhow. My downloading spree has pretty much become a way of life, although I have, of course, been supplementing it with actual CD purchases. I got the new Archeopteryx CD-R, and M83′s album on Friday. The Archeopteryx was exactly what I’d expect. The M83 is interesting…when it’s good, it’s very, very good, but some tracks are a little weak. Still a good buy. I’m planning on picking up Battles’ EP B, after seeing it at the Last Record Store and downloading EP C. Or vice versa…can’t remember. But they’re a cool band, with members of Don Caballero and Helmet, and they’re on a cool label, Dim Mak. Speaking of Don Cab, and post-Don Cab bands, I can’t find the self-titled Storm and Stress album anywhere. Usually, slsk serves me well, but the only copy of this album I can find is at 128kbps, and that’s just unacceptable.

I went to Rock and Roll Sunday School at Anthony’s for the first time last Sunday ( a week ago yesterday), and got thoroughly schooled by a couple of White Russians, some scotch, and a screwdriver. There are rumors some dancing occurred, but I don’t know about that. sure doesn’t sound like me. Nope. Especially not on a work night. At 2am. I’d love to DJ there sometime though, slip in some danceable glitch music or something…it’d be interesting to see how far I could take that.

Started working on a new clothing song, but I’m not sure how far that’ll go. I’ve got another few songs in various states of completion, as usual. I hope to finish this new one (tentative title: “Sweater”) pretty quickly, but the best laid plans….

Well well. More later.

Minus the Planning

Minus the Bear played at the Bottom of the Hill last night, and I jetted on down there with Joey at around 8:30-ish to check it out. We got there after 9 sometime, only to find out it was sold out. So there we are, standing in front of the club with our $8 in hand, looking at each other like “oh. well…what do you want to do now?” We ended up thumbing through the Guardian and heading over to Cafe du Nord for indie folk night. Except that I forgot which block of Market Street Cafe du Nord was on, and we walked 6 blocks in the wrong direction before we relaized it. So then we walked 8 blocks back (back down the 6 blocks we’d walked in the wrong direction, plus the 2 blocks in the right direction!) and got there at 11, just in time for a quick gin and tonic before the last act.

Dave Dondero was good, wholesome folky fun, with songs about burning his body and scattering the ashes on the highway, and losing $500 to a Vegas hooker. He was damn entertaining, and a damn fine guitar player as well, playing some down home country folk licks through an acoustic guitar fitted with a humbucker pickup. Lots of straightforward but slightly leftfield song arrangements and clever, often hilarious, sometimes poignant lyrics.

All in all, not too shabby an evening. We capped things off with a quick trip to Safeway, an impromptu Britney Spears singalong in the candy aisle, and a drive back home with the company of the Gene Burns program on Newstalk 810. Good times, except for wanting to fall asleep at work the next day (today).

I watched Gus Van Sant’s Elephant with Michelle, and was thoroughly creeped out. A really well made film about very uncomfortable subject matter. Some really interesting techniques that put you inside the situation in a very “fly-on-the-wall” sort of way; excellent and sparse use of music and sound effects as well.

In other news….I’m fighting a losing battle against comment spam. I’ve been deleting a handful of comments advertising the usual internet scams per day lately. Grr. I’ll have to do something about that.

More later.

A Severed Lifeline

Our DSL connection at the new place is going to be going off on Monday, and won’t be back up until about the 23rd. I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself! maybe this’ll give me more of an excuse to work on music. Hopefully I’ll be roarin’ back onto the internet on the 23rd with a completed release for Em411. We’ll see. Our phone line will also be down for a few days, but that’s a little less of an inconvenience right now…at least for me.

I will still have DSL at work of course, so I’ll be checking my e-mail and such regularly, but I won’t be on any IM services or anything for a while. And no music downloading! Grrr!

Last week was a great week for comics. Lots of good, arts-y trades and graphic novels out, including Craig Thompson’s illustrated travel diary, Carnet de Voyage. I can’t believe this guy can draw that much and that well while travelling. It’s incredible. Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Datebook also came out in hardcover, which I might get next week. It’s a beautiful looking sketchbook, with his trademark busy cover style going on.

Speaking of comics, I watched American Splendor, the adaptation of Harvey Pekar’s autobiographical comic series of the same name, with Joey last night. Damn funny, very odd little film, and the integration of the real Harvey Pekar and his real friends and family in the narration and “interview” scenes was really well done, and really unique.

More later, and this time, when I say later, I mean way later, most likely.

No Escaping the Scene

I actually went to a show last night, for the first time in quite a while. There’s either been a dearth of good shows and venues in the area lately, or I’ve just been completely out of the loop. Probably a little bit of both. But I saw a lot of people I hadn’t seen in a while.

The show was at Michele’s, in Santa Rosa. I’m gonna have to pay more attention to what’s going on there, if there are good shows like this more often. Ashtray was up first, a boy/girl fronted punk rock band, really energetic with a lot of trade-off vocals and stage presence. Not really my sort of thing, but they’re pretty good at what they do. Next up was old favorites The Rum Diary, who I hadn’t seen in quite a while, and who were still rocking as always. Then came The New Trust, Josh Staples’ newer project. They’re a harder-edged sort of indie rock, very melodic, with lots of short songs and some really cool rhythmic interplay. I’m glad I finally got around to checking them out. But during their set, they took a two-song break and loaned their instruments to The Polar Bears, who tore shit up and left Josh’s bass bloodied and seriously detuned.

I need to find more local shows again. And get working on a band project of some sort. I’ve been neglecting the rock and roll for too long, it seems. I’ll have to do something about that.

Anyways, I saw Fahrenheit 9/11 earlier in the day, with Joey, but I think I’ll write more about that later on. I’ve gotta head out to Reed and Nicole’s slide show in a little while here, and I haven’t even showered yet. Bleh….

The Terminal

Saw the Terminal yesterday with Reed, Nicole, and Joey. I really enjoyed it, and it was nice to see Kumar Pallana in something that wasn’t directed by Wes Anderson. The movie starts off like the Monty Python “Hungarian Phrasebook” sketch, becomes more like Kafka’s “the Trial” for a time, and then becomes straight-up heart-warming Spielberg for the remainder. Not a bad time, all in all.

Changes are in the works…

I’ve finally got Movable Type up and running, but only on a test blog. I haven’t set up any templates or anything yet, but once I get my old posts imported and a new layout finalized, I’ll be moving completely off Blogger and onto a Movable Type blog. Blogger is great, but I feel like I’ve sort of outgrown it, and feel like I want some of the features that Movable Type offers.

APE is tomorrow, and my main goal is to get a sketch of Hopey from Jaime Hernandez in my copy of Locas in Love. We shall see…. I also want to see Farel Dalrymple, Jim Mahfood, Brian Wood, and a bunch of others.

But now, Joey and I are off to see Monster with Aaron and James. There are quite a few good movies out lately, so maybe it’s time I stopped my lackadaisical schedule of filmgoing. Especially since the Rialto has a good selection at the moment….

More later….

First Quarter Productivity is Up

Yeah, I actually feel like I got some things accomplished this weekend. First, I gave myself a deadline project to complete, and ended up with a new song. Not bad for 8 hours of work, including a dinner break.

Joey and I did some practicing on Sunday, and got some nice guitar/vocal stuff happening on Josephine, but we were distracted by Glengarry Glen Ross on IFC, and Our Fearless Leader on Meet the Press, and didn’t get as much sequencing done as we’d hoped. But we have a decent outline to start from at least. Rawk.

Oh, and a bunch of us hit Japantown on Saturday, and had Japanese food and Gelato crepes. Aww yeah. We were thinking of maybe hitting up Amoeba afterwards, but nobody was really feeling it, and my wallet didn’t need that kind of abuse at the moment, so it’s all for the better.

Goal for this week: finish sequencing Josephine by Sunday. Write my Comics: Week in Review “column” tonight. Make a bazillion dollars. I’ll give myself until next week on that one, just in case.

More later….

Success Status: Ambiguous

Weeeeelllll…..the show went OK. We were called dead last to choose a time slot, and ended up #6 on the waiting list. But Eli squeezed us in sometime after 9:00, and we did one of the two songs we planned to play, “Beautiful Eyes.” Unfortunately, there is NO monitor setup at that place, so we couldn’t hear anything but muffled bass. No guitars, no vocals, hardly any beats. We pulled it off, though. Joey had a harder time than I did, it seems, but I think we did OK, especially considering what we had to work with. Ah well, we’ll figure something out for next week.

I got the laptop back! I’m still getting it all set up and back to an improved version of it’s previous state though. The thing I’m dreading most is making sure that Buzz is working and stable and usable still. Everything else is easy, comparatively. I’m also searching for a new Cd ripping program. I’ve been using Sonic Foundry Siren for a while, which is OK, but the cddb support is screwed up, and it uses Sonic Foundry’s inferior MP3 codec. I Like Audiograbber, but I’m having some minor problems with my registration. All the features are great, and it does exactly what I need, quickly and efficiently. Hopefully I can get that figured out right quick.

I picked up the Director’s Label DVD for Michel Gondry the other day. I knew he did some amazing videos, especially for Bjork, but I had no idea how fucking cool some of his work was. especially the videos for the Chemical Brothers’ “Let Forever Be” and “Star Guitar,” and my new all-time favorite video, Cibo Matto’s “”Sugar Water.” If M.C. Escher made videos, this is what they’d look like. I really want to check out the Spike Jonze and Chris Cunningham disc now too. Although I hear the Chris Cunningham disc is missing a lot of videos. He’s supposedly working on a compilation with Warp that should fill in the gaps though.

More later….

Cactuses (Cacti!)

Cactuses was fucking rad. I was expecting something good, I was expecting to enjoy it, but I didn’t realize quite how well-crafted and involving the story would be. There’s really a lot of aspects to the success of this project. It was ambitious from the start, and the fact that it’s been pulled of at all is amazing, but the fact that the end result is so damn good, regardless of any of the circumstances of it’s production, has to be the most fulfilling to it’s creators. This isn’t a good first movie, it isn’t a good independent movie, it isn’t a good student-produced movie, whatever qualifier you want to throw ont here…it’s just a good movie. Period, absent all other considerations. That it was student-produced, that it was low-budget, all-digital, all-local, whatever….that’s all just icing on the cake. Important, yeah, but none of that would matter if the heart of the project, the story and the characters, didn’t connect with the audience.

I had fun driving out there and back with Michelle, although we hit some ugly weather on the way there. We could be driving on dry highway one minute, and then hit sheets of rain the next. We passed a few accidents, and even did a brief bit of hydro-planing (eek!) but we got there OK, and the ride back was clear all the way.

I’m close to making my big laptop decision. Not that it’s really a decision….I’m almost ready to bust up the screen and bring it back. Probably this week sometime….wish me luck.

More later….

Kill Bubba

Ok, so it’s been a while….what’s up? Not too terribly much. Still looking for a band name, but slowly completing more songs. Finally got the harmony vocals worked out for “Blank Canvas.” Now we just need to polish up our performance for that one. We’ve got one and a half complete songs now…performance at open mic night soon? One can only hope….

I saw Kill Bill a while ago, which I loved, and Bubba Ho-Tep, which was completely different then I expected. I knew Bubba Ho-Tep was about an elderly Elvis and a black JFK fighting off a mummy, and starred Bruce Campbell, so I was expecting something much closer to Evil Dead/Army of Darkness, etc….lots of fake blood, over-the-top cartoon violence, and such. Instead the movie was more understated, melancholy, and somewhat character driven. The plot was mostly just a backbone to support Bruce Campbell’s take on the King, which was surprising. I didn’t even recognize him at first. The make-up was so well done, that I thought it was some older actor portraying the King at first, and that the movie was going to slip into flashback mode and switch over to Bruce. And Ossie Davis as JFK was brilliant. Kill Bill, on the other hand, was everything I expected, and a little bit more. Non-stop fast-paced action-packed bloodspray and mayhem. A ballet of murder and revenge. Where Bubba Ho-Tep uses the conflicts to outline the personality of the main character, Kill Bill skirts completely around the edges of Uma Thurman’s character’s psychology. All we know about her is that she’s disciplined, brutal, determined, and pissed. And we don’t need to know anything else, because the movie doesn’t work on any deeper level. It has no insights into the motivations and machinations of the characters, beyond what is actually seen on screen. Even the most moving scene in the movie, where the sword-maker Hattori Hanzo breaks a 28-year vow to God to never make an instrument of death in order to give the Bride her weapon to defeat his former student Bill, all the revelations of his emotions are direct and unambiguous. He is saddened and relieved of his obligation because he says he is. Everything we need to know is made clear on screen, and everyhting that is kept ambiguous is not. Simplistic, and yet complex techniques are at work here….

Picked myself up another Love & Rockets collection, “Wigwam Bam”. I’ve decided to slowly but surely build myself up a complete collection. I’m also waiting for some other comics to arrive, namely Bone #50 (I already have #51 and #52, but haven’t read them, since I missed #50), X-Statix Vol. 2 TPB, X-Force Vol. TPB 2 (the pre-cursor to X-Statix), and a Sin City collection. It’s been a while since I ordered them, but they should be here this week sometime. Can’t wait to read them. Iw as also thinking of picking up Azarello and Risso’s take on Batman, but it didn’t look all that great when i thumbed through it on the shelf, so I guess I’ll pass, for now at least.

Still working on a design for successless.org. There’s a new placeholder design up right now, but I’m still working on the final layout. Hopefully soon. I might do some of that today.

More later….