chest bumps, for real…

in a different post i said musicals couldn’t be all bad. i was wrong.

jane a theater company put on a production of sondheim’s company. it was terrible, just terrible. they were all oversinging when not being drowned out by the orchestra. they were all overacting on a terribly designed stage with horrible lighting. we walked out at intermission. that is all.

one night i saw boobs.

still playing catch up, i can’t believe it’s been three weeks since i went to see erase errata and the again reformed team dresch. i was really excited for this show i just knew it was going to a lot of fun. erase errata i’ve seen four or five times and always had a great time. years ago i saw team dresch and remember them being awesome. i had faith that even though neither of them have been particularly active for the last couple of years, they would be in solid form.

i like rotture as a venue. it’s a good size and has a good outside balcony (usually full of smokers). i was glad to see that they raised the stage, seeing was a problem sometimes. the crowd was elated and possibly one of the friendliest crowds i’ve experienced since moving to portland. the first two bands were good and well received, but i can’t remember a thing about them.

when erase errata came on it was just like old times again. the reason i love erase errata is because they have a sound and spirit that is akin to the great post punk/no wave bands; the pop group, the slits, the index (who are really proto and way ahead of their time), come on, devo, the raincoats. it’s a sound i’ve always connected to. erase errata played kind of a greatest hits show, energy was high, and they sounded as tight as ever. it was one their best shows i’ve seen. i really got my twitch on, and so did beth ditto, who was standing next to me. sadly there were no new songs or promise of a new album.

team dresch had been in the crowd all night so it wasn’t a big deal when they took the stage no one paid attention until they started playing. they also stuck to the greatest hits format, and the crowd knew every word.  my favorite songs were alway the kaia ones, so i was glad that i was standing next to her. they rocked it like it was still 1997. some of the women in the crowd were so excited they took there shirts off and i got to see boobies for the first time in a while. including those of jenny hoyston, the lead singer of erase errrata, she had replaced beth ditto next to me.

when the show ended, sometime after one a.m., i was in such a great mood that i had a very enjoyable bike ride home.

i’d be on hands and knees.

mama i’m swollen, curisve’s first album in a couple of years, suffers from the same problem that its predecessor (happy hollow) had. it’s just not that original or memorable. in the early 2000’s they released a string of fantastic albums, domestica, burst and bloom and the ugly organ. each album was different, building off each other, they defined a cursive sound (loud, angular, post punk). they weren’t afraid to experiment and expand their sound. this album seems to revert back to a sound they had in the pre-domestica days. i fear that cursive is in a rut, and doesn’t know where to go.

part of me wants to blame the good life, tim kasher’s more indie rock side project. i never got into any of the good life’s albums, despite kasher’s brilliant songwriting. i found them not at all interesting, too strait forward.for a while he bounced between the two groups,  he gave up the good life shortly after cursive released happy hollow, but the damage was done.

mama i’m swollen is not a bad album, on shuffle it fits nicely in the the cursive catalogue. kasher’s songwriting is still excellent, the personal is still his strong point. he even touches on how he is at a good point in life and has nothing to write about. the musicianship is solid even with the muddy production and levels that seem wrong to me. still, several of the songs, “i couldn’t love you anymore”, “let me up” and “we’re going to hell”, give me hope that they can get it together and still produce another great album.

orange felt square.

the second edition of jamie stewart’s monthly series arrived a couple of weeks ago, i needed a good amount of time to digest this one. this is a different experience than the previous one, which seemed to be mostly comprised of acoustic samples. this disc seems to be more like vinyl collage work, in the vein of christian marclay, with a large portion of the material coming from recordings of organs and sound effects. i thought that his last edition was about the silence, this one is more about the size of the sound. the last track is a sixteen minute battle between silence and organ blasts. it would be a great installation piece, it calls for loud amplification and good acoustics.

a needle pulling thread.

this occured in antwerp’s central station. i know it’s not the first time a spontaneous music number surprised the public, companies have started staging them  for advertising, i still love seeing it. this gives me hope that we are all living in a musical waiting for our cue. i hope i don’t have to sing, i can probably pull of the dancing alright.

cable’s lament.

our cable was finally shut off today and here are a couple of things that we’ll miss. some of them we are definably better off without.

pop culture clip shows - the soup, the dish, best week ever

chelsea lately

msnbc – rachel maddow, keith olbermann

the daily show and colbert report-

most bravo shows- project runway, top chef, real housewives of atlanta, etc

mad men

torchwood

and of course the countless other crappy shows we get sucked into, which is the main reason we got rid of cable.

trying hard not to mention the blue penis.

i finally broke down and read watchmen. i figured i should read it before i saw the movie, which i saw last night. i found the book to be a good read offering a well written multi-layered story about the state of the human condition, albeit in an alternate reality where super heroes exist and nixon has been president for almost twenty years. i liked the book but i fail to see why it gets all the critical acclaim. i wasn’t in awe of it, and while the story was dense it still felt a bit shallow to me. it may have been another example of setting my expectations too high.

my opinion of the movie version is a bit different. i liked the movie quite a bit, although it was far from perfect. they cut a lot of the content of the book, and changed a little of the story. i agreed with all the alterations, the book has quite a bit of chaff that could be cut. the film was well cast and everyone gave a good performances. the style and design was lifted right out of the comic with only subtle changes to make it workable in “reality”, the look of the movie was one of my favorite parts. the downfall of the movie was in its pacing and length. watchmen, much like the dark knight, should have been made into two movies. they could of given us a little more of the depth and connect us to the characters more. i don’t know if i would recommend watchmen to anyone beside comic book nerds.

among other things.

michael gira played to a comfortably full room at the doug fir on tuesday. the crowd was a mix of metal heads and goths (fans of swans), psych-folk hipsters (angels of light fans), and music/record nerds (probably where i fit). the opener was larkin grimm, m. gira’s latest protege (you may have heard of his last one; devendra banhart). pretty folk singer, not anything special to me, but i could see her finding a niche. she had great stage presence and the crowd warmed up to her nicely.

m. gira was in the crowd all night, so it wasn’t a big deal when he came on stage to set up his equipment. once he set up his amp balanced on two cinder blocks and his music stand with laminated lyric sheets,  he wandered off stage. he returned ten seconds later and started the show. the set consisted of a lot of new material, angels of light and swans songs. gira was in a fantastic mood joking with the crowd, a much different persona than last time i saw him. gira’s power in his voice is what makes him special, hearing him live is something you won’t forget. like jamie stewart he has a talent for reaching that painful-beautiful space. also as a songwriter he is masterly poetic with dark, sometimes brutal, imagery and subjects. lots of blood has been spilled in his music.

something to smile about.

when i got this plant i was told that it would never flower, but it would be a great foliage plant. well seven years later, the plant defied the odds and flowered.

ripples on a blank shore.

this has been a good couple of weeks for videos. now we get the new radiohead video for “reckoner”. here’s thom’s post from dead air space.

hello
my mind is not functioning at the correct speed at the moment thanks to being in Tokyo
but however and here
is one of my favourite video things that has ever happened
for Reckoner it is, the result of somebody entering a competition to make an animation to one of the tunes on IN RAINbows.
on aniboom. you can scroll down dead air space and find all about it.. but anyway

so we asked them whether it was ok to make it the official one we use as it goes with the song so well. they said yes.

and if you’re like me and find it hard to find videos on televsion any more, or even turn on the television you can watch right here.

ok now im going to fold some clothes.

this video is pretty great, and it suits the song. clement picon did a fantastic job.

i am kind of partial to this version of the song though, it captures a bit of the live radiohead experience. it’s from radiohead’s thumbs down webcast they did last year.