I did a little updating to my Links page just now, adding a few sites that I’ve been reading, some bands I’ve been listening to, artists I’ve been enthralled by, etc. Nothing too exciting,
I also released what I’d probably consider an Airliner B-side, entitled Assassin, over at EM411.com. An old song that doesn’t really fit into my usual style, but I like nonetheless.
More later. Oh, so much more. You wouldn’t believe.
I can’t remember the last time I was this full. I think this feeling is going to last for a few days, from the looks of it. Well, I’ll just have to make some room for veggie thanksgiving tomorrow night though….eh, holiday blogging is boring, so I’ll spare you.
Open Mic was fun the other night. I did Wilco’s “Pot Kettle Black” (which I’ve been listening to a lot lately) and re-attempted Elliott Smith’s “Happiness”, which I drunkenly butchered the week before (I already blogged about that elsewhere). But this week made up for that disaster, I think. It was kind of slow, due to the holidays, but it was a nice crowd nonetheless.
I finished re-reading The Crying of Lot 49 recently also. I enjoyed it immensely the first time, but I feel like I sppreciated it more the second, especially having more familiarity with Pynchon’s other works. It’s interesting to see some of his obsessions carry over to other books. I’m planning on re-reading Gravity’s Rainbow again sometime too, but that’s a pretty hefty time investment, I don’t get to read much anymore these days.
Oh! Almost forgot. I won Green Day tickets and Meet and Greet passes last weekend, which is funny because I don’t like Green Day. I owned a copy of Dookie for about a month when it came out, but it wore off on me pretty quickly. Anyways, I only won the tickets because Emily took me along when she was trying to win them, so the tickets found a good home with Green Day uber-fans Emily and Marisa. Unfortunately, the Meet and Greet passes were not transferable for contractual reasons. We were thinking of giving Emily my old ID (in which I have long hair and look rather less masculine than currently) and trying to pass her off as a transsexual, but decided it wasn’t worth the hassle.
Made a stop at Amoeba Records while in the city also, and got a pretty good haul for right around $50. I got Hood’s Singles Compiled and Compilations 1995-2002 pretty cheap, Fog’s self-titled (which I haven’t been able to rip…grrr!), M?m’s Summer Make Good, Son Volt’s Straightaways, the Freakbitchlickfly compilation on Violent Turd (featuring copyright abusing remixes and mashups by Kid 606 and friends), and Mates of State’s All Day EP. Good times.
Not a lot of music happening. “Sweater” is kind of stalled, due to my being somewhat disenchanted with it at the moment. It may be abandoned. I’ll listen to it again in a week or two and see how I feel about it. I’m trying to work on a collaboration track with Celibacy Club, but I need to give myself a crash course in Fruity Loops again to make that happen. That’s the problem with electronic music….there can be more barriers to collaboration due to software/hardware issues. Of course, in acoustic-based music, you can’t really collaborate with someone 2 states away anyways, so that’s a moot point. I did find some people locally who are looking to get a music project going, so that might open up some new musical vistas for the moment…
More Later….
Halloween was more sedate than I expected. I think it being on a Sunday had a lot to do with that. Everybody must have got the partying out of their systems on Friday and Saturday. But it was a fun Halloween nonetheless. Early in the day, I went to see Primer with Joey and Reed and Nicole (more on that later…go see it for yourself now!). Then I went back home to suit up in my cowboy gear (leather chaps, leather jacket with fringe, etc), picked up Michelle in her lovely geisha outfit, and we headed back up to Reed’s place, where we all hung out for a while. Reed and Joey and Nicole were playing this pirate themed card game that looked pretty interesting, while Michelle, Kelly, and I decorated Nicole’s sugar-skulls with icing.
Michelle and I headed out to Guerneville for a cool benefit Haunted House, We were originally planning on hitting the Guerneville downtown (Reed advised me to not get raped…so helpful), but things were pretty dead down there, so we headed back into civilization, and ended up at the Tradewinds due to lack of better options. There were some great costumes there, and a pretty tight little funk band was playing, so it was an alright time. I haven’t actually dressed up for Halloween in a while, so that was cool, but I don’t know what I’m going to do with these chaps now….
Well, the subject of cowboys has been raised, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to make an election segue (or does it?). Better, more thoughtful writers have expressed anything I would want to say elsewhere anyways. So I’ll just say this:
FUCK.
Right. So then. I traded Emily my extra wireless card for a home cooked meal the other night (and another meal again this evening), which is a pretty good deal for me. Most of the home cooking I consume involves the microwave or comes out of boxes in foil packets. I have no patience for prearing food. I demand instant gratification. But I’ve certainly got nothing against letting other people make me food. And Emily’s generally good to hang out with anyways.
What else is happening in my life? Not a lot. I’ve got two Airliner tracks in progress that are pretty far along, but I’m feeling somewhat stalled on them. It doesn’t help that I still don’t have Buzz up and running perfectly on my new laptop. Such a fickle little program…it has so many quirks and workarounds. It’s the program I dread installing most on new computers, because there are so many little details that can cause it to crash. I think I’ve got it figured out now though. Which means as soon as I find my inspiration again, I can finish up “Sweater” and “Skirt”. I think that’ll be it for my clothing EP, except that I’m toying with the idea of a remix or two also. Either by me, or others. I guess that’ll depend on if anyone else is interested in remixing one of my songs. I’d like to do a really hip-hop remix of “Panties”, but I haven’t actually started working on that yet.
I’m also re-reading The Crying of Lot 49. I’d like to re-read Gravity’s Rainbow at some point also, but that’s such a time and energy investment. Worthwhile, though. I’m on such a Pynchon kick lately….I’ve been reading what little biographical and critical information I’ve come across on the web, and becoming further and further fascinated by him.
Blah blah. More later, kids….
Sweet Jeezy Chreezy, it’s back in the Hizzy, yo! Broadband in the Hizzouse, G!
Ahem.
So yes, I’m back from dial-up purgatory, and once again basking in the sweet nurturing nectar-y goodness of broadband. Which means that now I can blame my sad state of internet addiction for my lack of any productive activities, and not just my own lack of motivation. See, I’m a victim! It’s not my fault now!
So yeah. I did roughly jack shit for the past couple weeks. Sue me. I tinkered away with Buzz, but didn’t really get anything going to far. I read some comics. I read more of Libra. I played some music. I started learning how to do the ultra math-rockin’ two-handed tapping stuff that I like so much (except when done by wanky hair-metal guitarists).
But yeah, other than that, noting. I read Eightball #23 a few times, and feel like I should read it a few more. Next time I’m in Berkeley, I’m going to make sure to pick up as much Dan Clowes as I can carry. I already had Ghost World and David Boring, and already loved both of them, but this cements my love for him. If I feel real ambitious I’ll post some thoughts. I’ve been entertaining the notion of returning to some sort of regular review format here, but we’ll see how I do with that. There are impending and continuing distractions that will probably kick that idea to the curb.
More later, suckas.
New music up at Em411.com. Another song in the clothing series, “Sneakers & Socks”. Check it out.
Last night was the Velvet Teen show, the release party for their new album, Elysium. I showed up midway through the set of the opening band, the Americas, and wished that I had shown up early. They were awesome…just a guitarist and a drummer, and they did these incredibly dynamic build-ups, from almost nothing to Lightning-Bolt-esque explosions. Their Statuette EP is pretty damn good too.
Then, Little Cat took over the lobby for a rare-in-these-parts live electronic music set. He had a few racks of gear (all hardware) stacked up behind two stacks of speakers, and was blasting out some great blippy IDM/drill n bass type sounds, and he even had a few kids dancing. He played several sets, between each of the main stage acts, and packed the lobby area for each of them.
I skipped over to Volpi’s for a couple of drinks during Inventing Edward’s set. And I also stayed outside talking to Fonda and Laura during most of the Desert City Soundtrack. But then the Velvet Teen took the stage, and of course everyone had to crowd right in. They played a lot of new material, including a song that seemed to go on forever, or at least 15 minutes. They had a lot of pre-recorded string and synth parts that they played along with, and new drummer Casey Dietz (also from the Americas) played along with headphones on for about half the songs. The set was dedicated to former drummer Logan Whitehurst, which drew an incredible amount of applause from the audience.
The set was OK…it was impossible to hear the actual lyrics because of how loud and overbearing the house mix was though. Of course, “Naked Girl” and “Counting Backwards” were played as encores. Not to be too obvious or anything…The new songs, while impressive, didn’t exactly grab me the way the best of their earlier stuff did. Maybe it’ll grow on me? I didn’t pick up a copy of the album though, so who knows.
More later….
So I did the whole open mic thing last night. Schlepped my guitar on down to North Light, tuned down a whole step, and signed up to subject an audience to my renditions of “All My Little Words” by the Magnetic Fields and “Say Yes” by Elliott Smith. It was a crowded house, with about 30-some odd people signing up to perform, and the longest waiting list they’ve ever had there. I managed to slip into an early slot, around 8:30, and I think I did pretty well. I’ll have to do that again.
I’ve been packing up for my impending move (another 5 block move to yet another section of RoPo), and I keep getting distracted by old notebooks full of old lyrics/sketches/etc/, and boxes full of old photos. Packing is a slow process for me because of all this junk that I collect and hang on to indefinitely. But it does make the moving process somewhat interesting.
Ah, but Daily Show reruns beckon. More Later….
I’m quickly drawing near the end of Love in the Time of Cholera, which I’ve been making slow, somewhat steady progress in for the last few months. It’s a great book, but it’s not a book you can just pick up and read in bits and pieces. There are very few easy break points to set it down, and every event and thought in the story flows easily into the next, implications and emotions unfolding in slow arcs across large chunks of pages. You can’t just read a little bit, because a little bit isn’t enough.
And of course, I’ve had a shitload of comics to read lately. I even went so far as to avoid picking up this week’s batch (100 Bullets #51 and Love Fights #11, a good haul, quality wise). But, I finally finished reading the Maxx, which i thought ended really appropriately. It’s a shame that Kieth’s Friends of the Maxx series didnt’ stick around as long as it could have. But really, Zero Girl and it’s sequel fit so well in that vein that it might as well have been part of that series. Different characters, similar themes (especially the bit about shame), and since the Maxx ended with one of many possible universes ending and splitting off into variations, then it could be seen as a new “bubble-universe”. Hmmm.
So Transmetropolitan was pretty disappointing. I like the idea of a comic series centered around a journalist, as it gives the series a real freedom to find different milieu in which to explore, but so much about this book was really uninteresting. The suppporting characters are all pretty wooden, and there’s no insight into anyone’s motivation, except for the occaisional superficial plot device (Spider’s editor likes money! Deep!). The plot had very little tension. I really couldn’t bring myself to care what was going to happen, and didn’t feel like the level of conflict built very convincingly. And the setting was pretty cliche Blade Runner/Neuromancer sci-fi drek. I don’t think I’ll be looking much further into this series.
Played some music with Josh tonight. We kicked around some funk, played a little Radiohead, and chatted about 4-tracking for a while. I haven’t been making music outside of my laptop much lately, so it’s nice to play with someone else every once in a while.
A Ghost is Born is really growing on me. I thought there were a few good tracks at first, and the rest of it didn’t grab me right off the bat, but the more I listen to it, the more I like it. “I’m a Wheel” is the only song I don’t think is absolutely great at this point. The dynamics on this album are really wide, which is great i this age of overcompressed LOUD ROCK ALBUMS. Makes it hard to listen to in the car, but my car speakers are blown anyways. I hope they plan a US tour soon, because I’d love a chance to see them live.
I’ll be off to see the New Trust and the Polar Bears at the Phoenix tomorrow night. Haven’t been there in a while. Should be interesting….
More later….
I just posted the debut Superficial Hero full length album, Life Under Glass, to the Music page here. All files are 192kbps stereo Mp3′s, except for the last bonus track, which is only available at 128kbps for now. I’ll try to fix that at some point. More music coming along at some point…