Friday, April 26
Well, it turns out that this weekend should be pretty easy to write about, because it was just a series of big long chunks of time, with no space between - which is also why I haven't had time to write. The idea, maybe, was to spend as much time as possible wearing earplugs. And the weekend effectively started Thursday night, which was the beginning of the turnaround from what had been my worst week in recent memory (I'll finish writing about that later too.) So, starting thursday night:
Earplugs In or close at hand (times approximate):
Superfurryanimals/Cex: 9:00-12:30 Thursday Night
Rehearsal 2:00-8:00 Friday (well, I didn't actually wear them, but I should have done)
Motion: 12:00-3:30am Friday night/Saturday Morning
Rehearsal 10:00-5:00 Saturday
Concert 10:00-2:00 Saturday night.
total: 24 hours out of 53, so definitely more than half of my waking hours.
oh yeah, sleep:
Thursday night: 2:00-11:00
Friday night: 4:00-9:00
Saturday night: 3:30-8:00, 8:00-10:00
so you can figure out the gaps for yourself, but there aren't very many. Good thing I don't have much schoolwork these days.
The crew for the Super Furries show was Kate Duffy, Benjamin, and myself, plus Amy Meek and her friend Eve, who luckily enough had been planning to drive anyway. Ben and I talked about Rolling Stone reviews on the way over (Elvis and Wilco both got four stars) and we also listened to Cex, the opening act. This record was pretty standard A-Twin-style IDM, and we compared it to the unusually engaging sitar music playing in Samosas, where we stopped for dinner. But his live set, which started not long after we got inside the TLA, after a run over to Tower to redeem my coupon for EC's "First LOUD album since 199?," was something completely else: smart, funky hip-hop beats programmed on his iBook to accompany spastic antics with a drill and whip-smart, punchy raps, about "real" subject - bikes ("thumbs shift - gears click…down hill - one wheel"), himself (the greatest entertainer in the world, a cocky 20-year-old kid with blond bangs over his headband?), and whatever topics the audience came up with: Nintendo, bloody kunts, and Mr. Peanut (enthusiastically supplied by Ben and Kate - he spun an incredible rhyme about monocles and capitalism and how the legume-about-town is a greedy CEO bent on domination.) Check out his website too. Two screens showed the same image, one a mirror reverse of the other - what turned out to be a live shot of the superfurryanimals turntables, spinning records between acts, and paperplates with writing on them during Cex's set. Then they switched to the blue/red "pornographic" outline cartoons of the video for "[A] Touch Sensitive" as the music came through the speakers and the lights dimmed. The Furries took the stage and banged out a live-rock version of it for a few minutes, and then crashed their way through a few short and noisy pop-rock bursts, including a stripped-down "Rings Around the World" and a song about a golden retriever (all with appropriate video footage, excerpts from the groundbreaking DVD - I have to say I wasn't terribly impressed by most of them - they're all animated, and most pretty cheap-looking.) For a minute I was confused that the whole show would be such straight, simple rock, but soon they broadened out into the eclectic, lush textures of the album, bringing in the electronics on "Sidewalk Serfer Girl," pedal steel and harmonica (truncated) on "Run Christian Run," vocoder/not-vocoder duet "Juxtapose." I didn't realize they had such a clearly defined frontman, who sang lead on all songs and did all the talking (not much of that, just thanks and we're Welsh), but they do and he's awfully cute and lanky. They're all pretty cute, except for the drummer. But he sang a lot of harmonies, which was cool. They played for a long time, and a lot of songs - everything from Disc 1 of Rings except the slower first and last tracks and "Shoot Doris Day," plus about as many or more that I didn't recognize - so maybe 25? One or two in Welsh, and their hit that sampled Steely Dan's "Show Biz Kids" and "Receptacle" ("this one has four or five sections and features a friend and some veg" - a guy in a John Lennon mask came and threw carrots and celery into the audience.) Fun fun fun. They didn't play an encore, which I liked (better to have a long set and no encore unless it's really appropriate), but instead yet another version of "Tomorrow Never Knows" came over the loudspeakers. Scattered comments over Cex on the ride home, and then Ben and I hung out in Amy's (spacious, stylishly messy Worth L) room, listening to Gorky's and Avalanches, and talking about music, academia, and dancing.
Friday My alarm didn't go off, that's what it was: for the second morning of at least four in a row now, I didn't get up on time, and missed bird walk for effectively the third week running. And French again. I don't care about caring about it. I had a banana or something (oh, cereal) before bird class, second to last week, last presentations, I haven't really got the ending thing in my head. And then to Olde Club for rehearsal, pausing to say hi to Claire and next-year-roomies on the beach; got a party invite from my mom for me and Alyssa. It was a useful rehearsal, once we got power for it. Corey says we use our rehearsal time more productively than any band he's worked with, and I think it's true. Rae and Rebecca had prepared a lovely meal of hummus and pasta and lemony lentils, that was good to eat. Joel and I talked about the band and then I played him some XTC - "Smarteft Monkeys," "Vgly Vnderneath," "1000 Umbrellas" - and tried to decide whether or not it made any sense to go out dancing. Ben was having second thoughts, but honors-paper-procastinating Amy was still down, so I showered and put in my contacts and on my blue rave shirt (where's the red one? Matt?) and headed over to Worth.
"It's good to be on the road back home again" was playing in Ben's room, Amy in a white muscle shirt, Ben convinced and changed into "cheer-up" tee and cargo pants. Radio on to SRN, where Murrik and Petar were playing "One More Time" and "Cassius 99" and a happy hardcore version of "Sunny," good pre-clubbing tunes, and we got reception all the way into the city, then flipped on the Handcream, as we discussed ways the Swat partyscene could be bettered and I struggled to get down a can of Jolt for energy. It turned out not to do a whole lot of good for me; by the end of the evening I was practically falling asleep on my feet. Motion, which is in a cleared-out building just south of Spring Garden, is a decent space, but not all that impressive, even compared to, say, Piranha/Water St. (which is where I went to my last rave probably three years ago now). One big room downstairs, where they were banging the hard house "Chicago-style," and a small drum+bass room upstairs, with little bar and lounge area. Cover turned out to be $25, a lot even for a fairly big-name headliner (and at least I'd heard of him), also because I always thought he was pretty inane. But we weren't going to turn back at that point. For the first hour or so the music was just ridiculously hard - no basslines, no melodies, pretty much no notes at all, just beats - which made it hard to dance to, but I tried to get into it anyway, and we had some fun, especially when we found a sweet spot under a high-powered fan. Later on there were two DJs switching off, and their stuff was more eclectic and interesting. We were mostly dancing in a loose group of three, unable to communicate because of the noise, just misinterpreting gestures, and Ben going off to refill his water bottle and offer it to us about every five minutes. He was pretty beat too, and at one point went and sat down for about half an hour; but then was revived enough to dance. I was on my feet the whole time (we were there for over three hours), and just got progressively more tired - by quarter of 3, when Bad Boy Bill came on and started flipping diva-disco, Fatboy vocal-samples, synth-bleeps and Danny Tenaglia's "cameras ready, prepare to flash," I would pretty much just stand there for about five minutes, and then have enough energy to jump around for thirty seconds. At one point I started doing the Kenanga arm series, which somehow gave me more energy for a while. Meanwhile Amy, who has a fantastically distinctive dancing style, dips and shifts and subtly grooves, flashes a great sweet, sympathetic smile and tilts her head to shrug. Yeah, maybe going dancing that night wasn't the best idea, but it was fun anyway, even as we drove him unable to hear the D-Plan on the freeway because of residual ear-mutedness, despite earplugs. Why does this stuff have to be so freaking loud? Crawled into bed exhausted once more. You have to live it up while you have the chance, right?
don't give a fuck about anybody else
you know they don't give a fuck about anybody else
you know they don't give a fuck about anybody else
you know they don't give a fuck about anybody else
you know they don't give a fuck about anybody else
you know they
Earplugs In or close at hand (times approximate):
Superfurryanimals/Cex: 9:00-12:30 Thursday Night
Rehearsal 2:00-8:00 Friday (well, I didn't actually wear them, but I should have done)
Motion: 12:00-3:30am Friday night/Saturday Morning
Rehearsal 10:00-5:00 Saturday
Concert 10:00-2:00 Saturday night.
total: 24 hours out of 53, so definitely more than half of my waking hours.
oh yeah, sleep:
Thursday night: 2:00-11:00
Friday night: 4:00-9:00
Saturday night: 3:30-8:00, 8:00-10:00
so you can figure out the gaps for yourself, but there aren't very many. Good thing I don't have much schoolwork these days.
The crew for the Super Furries show was Kate Duffy, Benjamin, and myself, plus Amy Meek and her friend Eve, who luckily enough had been planning to drive anyway. Ben and I talked about Rolling Stone reviews on the way over (Elvis and Wilco both got four stars) and we also listened to Cex, the opening act. This record was pretty standard A-Twin-style IDM, and we compared it to the unusually engaging sitar music playing in Samosas, where we stopped for dinner. But his live set, which started not long after we got inside the TLA, after a run over to Tower to redeem my coupon for EC's "First LOUD album since 199?," was something completely else: smart, funky hip-hop beats programmed on his iBook to accompany spastic antics with a drill and whip-smart, punchy raps, about "real" subject - bikes ("thumbs shift - gears click…down hill - one wheel"), himself (the greatest entertainer in the world, a cocky 20-year-old kid with blond bangs over his headband?), and whatever topics the audience came up with: Nintendo, bloody kunts, and Mr. Peanut (enthusiastically supplied by Ben and Kate - he spun an incredible rhyme about monocles and capitalism and how the legume-about-town is a greedy CEO bent on domination.) Check out his website too. Two screens showed the same image, one a mirror reverse of the other - what turned out to be a live shot of the superfurryanimals turntables, spinning records between acts, and paperplates with writing on them during Cex's set. Then they switched to the blue/red "pornographic" outline cartoons of the video for "[A] Touch Sensitive" as the music came through the speakers and the lights dimmed. The Furries took the stage and banged out a live-rock version of it for a few minutes, and then crashed their way through a few short and noisy pop-rock bursts, including a stripped-down "Rings Around the World" and a song about a golden retriever (all with appropriate video footage, excerpts from the groundbreaking DVD - I have to say I wasn't terribly impressed by most of them - they're all animated, and most pretty cheap-looking.) For a minute I was confused that the whole show would be such straight, simple rock, but soon they broadened out into the eclectic, lush textures of the album, bringing in the electronics on "Sidewalk Serfer Girl," pedal steel and harmonica (truncated) on "Run Christian Run," vocoder/not-vocoder duet "Juxtapose." I didn't realize they had such a clearly defined frontman, who sang lead on all songs and did all the talking (not much of that, just thanks and we're Welsh), but they do and he's awfully cute and lanky. They're all pretty cute, except for the drummer. But he sang a lot of harmonies, which was cool. They played for a long time, and a lot of songs - everything from Disc 1 of Rings except the slower first and last tracks and "Shoot Doris Day," plus about as many or more that I didn't recognize - so maybe 25? One or two in Welsh, and their hit that sampled Steely Dan's "Show Biz Kids" and "Receptacle" ("this one has four or five sections and features a friend and some veg" - a guy in a John Lennon mask came and threw carrots and celery into the audience.) Fun fun fun. They didn't play an encore, which I liked (better to have a long set and no encore unless it's really appropriate), but instead yet another version of "Tomorrow Never Knows" came over the loudspeakers. Scattered comments over Cex on the ride home, and then Ben and I hung out in Amy's (spacious, stylishly messy Worth L) room, listening to Gorky's and Avalanches, and talking about music, academia, and dancing.
Friday My alarm didn't go off, that's what it was: for the second morning of at least four in a row now, I didn't get up on time, and missed bird walk for effectively the third week running. And French again. I don't care about caring about it. I had a banana or something (oh, cereal) before bird class, second to last week, last presentations, I haven't really got the ending thing in my head. And then to Olde Club for rehearsal, pausing to say hi to Claire and next-year-roomies on the beach; got a party invite from my mom for me and Alyssa. It was a useful rehearsal, once we got power for it. Corey says we use our rehearsal time more productively than any band he's worked with, and I think it's true. Rae and Rebecca had prepared a lovely meal of hummus and pasta and lemony lentils, that was good to eat. Joel and I talked about the band and then I played him some XTC - "Smarteft Monkeys," "Vgly Vnderneath," "1000 Umbrellas" - and tried to decide whether or not it made any sense to go out dancing. Ben was having second thoughts, but honors-paper-procastinating Amy was still down, so I showered and put in my contacts and on my blue rave shirt (where's the red one? Matt?) and headed over to Worth.
"It's good to be on the road back home again" was playing in Ben's room, Amy in a white muscle shirt, Ben convinced and changed into "cheer-up" tee and cargo pants. Radio on to SRN, where Murrik and Petar were playing "One More Time" and "Cassius 99" and a happy hardcore version of "Sunny," good pre-clubbing tunes, and we got reception all the way into the city, then flipped on the Handcream, as we discussed ways the Swat partyscene could be bettered and I struggled to get down a can of Jolt for energy. It turned out not to do a whole lot of good for me; by the end of the evening I was practically falling asleep on my feet. Motion, which is in a cleared-out building just south of Spring Garden, is a decent space, but not all that impressive, even compared to, say, Piranha/Water St. (which is where I went to my last rave probably three years ago now). One big room downstairs, where they were banging the hard house "Chicago-style," and a small drum+bass room upstairs, with little bar and lounge area. Cover turned out to be $25, a lot even for a fairly big-name headliner (and at least I'd heard of him), also because I always thought he was pretty inane. But we weren't going to turn back at that point. For the first hour or so the music was just ridiculously hard - no basslines, no melodies, pretty much no notes at all, just beats - which made it hard to dance to, but I tried to get into it anyway, and we had some fun, especially when we found a sweet spot under a high-powered fan. Later on there were two DJs switching off, and their stuff was more eclectic and interesting. We were mostly dancing in a loose group of three, unable to communicate because of the noise, just misinterpreting gestures, and Ben going off to refill his water bottle and offer it to us about every five minutes. He was pretty beat too, and at one point went and sat down for about half an hour; but then was revived enough to dance. I was on my feet the whole time (we were there for over three hours), and just got progressively more tired - by quarter of 3, when Bad Boy Bill came on and started flipping diva-disco, Fatboy vocal-samples, synth-bleeps and Danny Tenaglia's "cameras ready, prepare to flash," I would pretty much just stand there for about five minutes, and then have enough energy to jump around for thirty seconds. At one point I started doing the Kenanga arm series, which somehow gave me more energy for a while. Meanwhile Amy, who has a fantastically distinctive dancing style, dips and shifts and subtly grooves, flashes a great sweet, sympathetic smile and tilts her head to shrug. Yeah, maybe going dancing that night wasn't the best idea, but it was fun anyway, even as we drove him unable to hear the D-Plan on the freeway because of residual ear-mutedness, despite earplugs. Why does this stuff have to be so freaking loud? Crawled into bed exhausted once more. You have to live it up while you have the chance, right?
don't give a fuck about anybody else
you know they don't give a fuck about anybody else
you know they don't give a fuck about anybody else
you know they don't give a fuck about anybody else
you know they don't give a fuck about anybody else
you know they
