Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Brainscape

You know what has always fascinated me? Well, not always, because its the sort of thing you have to grow to be able to even really think about. Not grow like age but grow like start taking the steps toward the direction of even becoming self aware enough to ask this sort of question. And I know that sounds pompous, like, 'oh, I'm far more evolved in thought than others', but think about it. Look around next time you're in public and tell me most of those people you see have the presence of mind to think about anything other than their basic, animal functions. The people reading these words will see what I mean and feel a kindship in what I say because most of them I know and I know they have the mental facility/mapping for this. But look at the everyday people on the street. So many of them are open books: Eat, Fuck, Phone, Work, Shop, Sleep, or something such as this. "WELL WHAT THE FUCK FASCINATES YOU ALREADY???" I can hear You saying.

My head.

Seriously, sit back and think. Not about anything in particular, just let your mind wander around for a while. Daydream. Contemplate. Whatever. Now think about work (not for too long), think about your school days, the bar last weekend, your lover's face, or Parent's sitting at the dinner table, think about as much stuff as you can. Then pull yourself out of it and become lucid of the N.O.W. again, and think about all those thoughts, what are they? Electrical impulses triggered by inner neural activity yada yada - they're like files in a Mac right (sorry PC users)? Well, look at your hard drive right now, how many MB of your total MB does what's on it use? There's the photos (those images of Ma and Pa at dinner), the song caught in your head (MP3), the conversational points you took away from a political sparing match at the pub last evening (Word file). All of these different types of information flicker across your screen as electrical impulses too, but they are also stored and accessible again and again (except perhaps the finer points of that discussion at the pub, if you were drinking more than you should have been). Stored and accessible and thus they take up room on that hard drive. HOW MUCH ROOM DO OUR THOUGHTS TAKE UP? WHERE ARE THEY STORED?

That's my point in a nutshell. I remember the first time I thought of it like this, and I mean really THOUGHT about it was on a drive to Dayton several years ago with Sara. She had taken the wheel and I think I was still in a quasi hypnogogic state after zoing out behind the wheel for an hour or two in the flat NOTHINGNESS of the Midwest (I love You Midwest) and I sat there in the passenger seat staring out the window thinking and then all of a sudden I was thinking about the space inside my head. There are YEARS and a multitude of physical locations and music and images and people and words and all this other shit, all collapsed down enough to fit inside my head. And if you're like me, when you go wandering through that stuff an enormous, amorphous landscape opens up and to catch yourself lost in thought is like standing on a precipice at the edge of some vast adn epic Savage land, rolling hills of information and feeling stretching out as far as the eye can see.

So where does all of it go? To think of it in possibly more abstract terms, how does all of that fit in this little round box equipped with all these other funky gizmos whose purpose is collecting MORE information ALL the time? What extra-dimensional theory would explain or map how all of these things fold and collapse into our physical form, and then open up for our perusal at a mere thought? 11 dimensional Supergravity? Brane theory? Superstring? I don't know, but thinking about it really revvs that inner landscape...

Monday, January 28, 2008

Magick crowd control...

So I've done this before. Back at the bar. I used to HATE it when certain people came in. There were regulars that would suck up a bar seat for a whole night sometimes, leave next to no money, be abusive, irritating, annoying, demanding, whatever. Finally I got the idea to create a servitor, a tulpa, a Magickal (ie Will controlled) thought form that is programmed, much like a computer is, to do X when criteria Y is met. For the bar I named the servitor Karla, after Karla from the 80's television show Cheers, a no-nonsense bitch of a waitress that wouldn't take shit from anybody and would easily chase unwanted clientele from the establishment. I 'programmed' X = make undesireables leave the bar when Y = I drank tea. I don't know why I used that, but it worked. In fact, after I did that several of the unwanted regulars disappeared, hardly ever to come back.

Now at the bookstore we're worse than the fucking bar, especially of late. We have DROVES of high school kids who come in, take up all the seating, buy next to nothing, fuck things up, act like douche bags, are LOUD and all of this makes our (management) lives that much harder because not only do they annoy us, but they annoy our customers (many of whom are fucking annoying too) and then they complain to us. So guess what? Yep, I'm going to program a new servitor and attempt to attach it to the store. We'll see if it works.*

*some people would no doubt hear about the accomplishment at the bar and say, "oh, that's just a coincidence. you've convinced yourself that it worked, but it just happened to coincide," to which I would answer, "Who cares, as long as it works". That's the point of 'Magick' or whatever You want to call it.

Word

Monday, January 21, 2008

The Fixx...

I bought the vinyl of their 1983 2nd album REACH THE BEACH over the weekend for 50 cents at a thrift store and I cannot stop listening to it. I have always loved the tracks ONE THING LEADS TO ANOTHER and SAVED BY ZERO but know I love the entire album. And the weird, 80's art album cover is cool as hell. Thrift stores are so wicked for always finding these types of 80's niche records in.

Cloverfield

Where to begin? By hte time I finally saw this on the day it was released I had the definite feeling Cloverfield could NEVER live up to the expectations I had. If there was an award for the best marketing campaign, this should definitely get it. nd I'm not even talking about whatever the viral marketing campaign was, as I missed out on that completely. I don't watch tv or listen to the popular radio or really read much of the newspaper (preferring to get my news as an NPR junkie) so all I had to invest me in the film was the teaser before Transformers last July and the sudden proliferating billboards all over LA. Well, it was enough.

One thing that built suspense was my own approach, in that I refused to read anything that had to do with the flick. And then I planned to see it on opening day, something I normally would never do. IN this case though, I figured it may become damn well impossible to avoid the revelation of what it was that was that had torn the head of the statue of liberty off in the teaser. When you work at place with a lot of sci fi and horror movie buffs, avoiding something like that the next day is pretty hard if they've all already discovered the secret. It was hard enough avoiding it up until now, as many folks were scouring the net looking for clues to sate their anticipation. Myself however, I like to be surprised, really surprised, and I wanted to be sitting in that chair, baked, and have whatever it is scare the hell out of me the same way it would scare the hell out of the people on the streets of that fictional universe's Manhattan.


SPOILER>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>










Okay, well, there were two big rumors that had me concerned. The first was that this was a Godzilla remake. I may have mentioned here once before, I had effectively sworn an oath in front of many people that if in the big reveal it was in fact Godzilla I was going to stand up, shout Fuck You at the screen and leave. Of course, that would have made me quite the asshole, but it would have been well warranted, at least in my mind. Godzilla was cool in nineteen fifty. That 'Atomic Age' bullshit is dead and gone, we've been living with the repercussions for half a fucking decade, and so the concept of a giant atomic-irradiated lizard wreaking revenge on mankind is about as poignant as remaking a flick were characters flush aligators down the toilet and they grow super large via hazardous waste chemicals and attack.

The 2nd rumor that had reached me was that this was possibly a Cthulhu movie. Now, at first that seemed like an awful idea. But about a week before it opened I started dreaming about this flick, as though I was in it. I started to imagine that the monster was Cthulhu, only being that it was supposedly shot all on home video as though recorded by a person caught in the midst of it there would never be a place for the filmaker to actually get a 3rd person perspective and so, we would never know it was the big C unless they had designed the monster so that those Lovecraft nerds out there (myself most definitely included) would recognize him. This idea I liked. Imagine, a film based so much out of a love for that mythos that it was enacted so true to life that it had the perspective of one of Lovecraft's protagonists - they're recording what is happening to them, unaware at the street level that this is the awakening of the elder gods, yada yada yada. My inner fan boy is starting to need a mental book-checking, but you get the point.

It was, however, not Cthulhu. although, there is a way the nerd quarter fo my brain sees that the filmmakers could have intentionally left it open for those in the know to argue that it was. But I'll get to that later.

The only inkling of a let down was that the monster did not live up to the abstract horrors my imagination had half conjured in rampant expectation. The day before seeing it my friend Amy stirred this to a boil when she said she had read one review that had described the monster as being 'a thing of 17 nightmares' or something to that effect. Now, of course, when expectation adn the abstract inner realms of imagination get working together like this, their offspring could NEVER be realized outside of that abstract realm of imagination, let alone on a DV camera via special effects. But man, I'll tell you this, sitting there in that theatre, pulled so deep into the chaos of having that handheld home movie camera put me street level with all those screaming, dying, looting people, when I saw that motherfucker for the first time it was something akin, I think, in film comparison, to that scene in M. Knight Shamalamdingdong's SIGNS with the first footage of the 'Buenos Aires birthday party'. It scared the LIVING FUCK out of me. It was glimpse, glimpse, terror, expectancy pushed through the roof of your mouth like venomous barbs and then full on HOLY SHIT WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?!?

Now that, my friends, is a fucking monster movie. Mail your dime store giant lizard back to 1950 where someone might spill their pop at the sight of it. These days its gotta be the some-deep-sea-trench-just-vomited-this-abysmal-black-horror-into-the-lap-of-unsuspecting-mankind, and directly or indirectly, that IS H.P. Lovecraft.


Nerd addendum.

So, there is a scene, after we've seen the monster attacking, where the armed forces are attempting to evacuate what's left of the people of Manhattan across the Brooklyn Bridge and off the terrorized island when suddenly a giant tentacle-looking thing reels up out of the water and destroys the bridge. NOW, I know this is irrelevant to most folks lives, I know its nerdly obsessiveness the likes of which I make fun of others about, I know I should get a fucking life or find something worthwhile to do, but You know what? I will. I'm off work the next two days, just finished my third screenplay this year and am hard at work on my new one in another window, so writing this is my little tangent and I'll 'get a life' again when I damn well feel like it.

Anway, the point is, the monster we've seen thus far (and I do believe there may have been two even though here:

http://www.slashfilm.com/2008/01/09/cloverfield-building-a-better-monster/

the designers discuss its creation as if it is just one) wasn't the only one. Seems to me since we were only seeing it from one camera perspectives, there were glimpses of more than one thing that were unable to be confirmed or followed up on. Now, the biggest example of this is that tentacle in the water. The monster is on land in Manhattan, and has no tentacle, so what the hell was in the water and attacked the bridge? The argument could be made that the monster we've seen was the spawn or herald of something much bigger, and what is a much bigger horror and usually travels with a herald? Beside Galactus? CTHULHU. So, my hopes are Mr. Abrhams will put all his effort into the last few seasons of LOST, make a killer star trek movie, even though I HATE star trek, fo rthe most part, and then make a companion piece, NOT A SEQUEL to Cloverfield that will give us more angles, if you will, of what exactly is happening that night in Manhattan, Cthulhu or not.

Monday, January 14, 2008

WEEN...

Ween is an amazing band. I could do the whole 'drop to your knees and worship them' bit but Henry Rollins did it first and he did it better (cuz he's Rollins) and I'd rather recommend You hunt down that spoken word piece of his (or ask me for a copy) and listen to it.

It's not just Rollins' delivery this time though, he speaks the truth here. Ween is possibly the greatest living rock band in the world. Now I know that's a bold statement but let's look at it, shall we?

You get two fuck off stoner misfits who went from spending their ingenuity on rigging gas masks into scotch guard bongs and recording fuck off comedy music with a few heart-felt breakup songs scattered in for personal development issues to the fellows that hired a troup of living Nashville legends and wrote the best country album of the last decade (those who don't agree wither have not heard 12 Golden Country Greats or regard Deana Carter and keith Urban as country, which they ein't!!! From there the 'brothers' Ween gave the world The Mollusk, the perfect fusion of their old funny/catchy/quirky scotch guard era comedy music and a mature beyond imagining assortment of breath taking rock songs, from the title tracks Beatle-esque simplistic beauty to the magnum opus immortality of the faux 70's Brit rock of Buckingham Greene. I remember the day The Mollusk came out, I ran to the old record swap in beautiful downtown tinley park and traded in a NIN cd, along with some more forgettable titles because I knew the new Ween album was coming out and wanted to sit down with my friends Brown and Sonny to partake but I had no dough. After a quick record swap (perfect naem for the now defunct independent franchise, eh?) I headed over to Sonny's where the three of us smoked ourselves into a fucking coma and sat down to listen. NONE of us were prepared for what we heard, esp. Buckingham Greeene.

After that we learned not to expect anything from Dean and Gene because they were clearly able to do ANYTHING. So a few years later we get White Pepper and BAM! Wow, it was as if the bastard sons of ELO, ELP, XTC and a tour bus of Jimmy Buffet impersonators were squeezed into those scotch guard bongs now. I pictured Dean using a plunger to push Andy Partridge's arms and Keith Emerson's legs deep into the modified tubing of the apparatus while Gene flicks the lighter on em and takes a massive, lung-filling inhale.

Did I forge the live album, Paintin the Town Brown. No I didn't. Up there with The Who Live at Leeds and Slayer Decade of Aggression. I usually hate live albums. Not these, and definitely not ones that show case a band that can not only play any one of their songs a hundred different ways but has such a back catalogue of gems that ANY time you see them they are able to pummel you with something you've never heard before and make it sound like it was their number one hit accross the Universe. Such is PTTB and a priceless gem like COVER IT WITH GAS AND SET IT ON FIRE.

Another thing about Ween is they have SOO MUCH MATERIAL. I mean, I'm not about to go through their whole catalogue right now or I'll be running on at the mouth in front of you worse than on the Drum Off post. Suffice it to say up through the years (and now I'm getting kinda weirded out considering how many albums, and thus years, I've been with this band. Brown must be even more weirded out, as he's been into them since the first fucking album!) Ween has consistently defied all expectation, all convention, and still managed to put out the funniest, catchiest, most unique and memorable rock music I've heard. There are many other rock bands I love, but there is only one Ween.

Update 666

If You've put off taking my advice to go check out Technoccult.net, this is the kind of gem Your missing.

http://www.salon.com/wire/ap/archive.html?wire=D8U3916G0

Thanks to Tiamats Vision for posting a link to this there.

http://www.technoccult.net

Saturday, January 12, 2008

There Will Be Blood

SPOILERS CONTAINED WITHIN:

I have been looking forward to this movie for quite sometime. The trailer had me with its Penderecki-like violin scratchings ripping and clawing all over the images of the early days of the oil business imagery. It opened here in LA several weeks ago (Dec. 26th I think) but only played at the Arclight in Hollywood for most of that time. Now, the arclight is THE place to see I flick, judging from my only experience back in July when my friend Chris and his buddy Avner brought me to see Danny Boyle's Sunshine there. The sound was fantastic to the point of nearly being painful, which is exactly how I like the sound in a theatre to be. Twice this year we saw big blockbusters out in 'burb theatres and the sound literally seemed to be emanating only from the front of house. Fuck that, I want that shit to RIP my fucking face off! So the Arclight would have been the first choice, except the juxtaposition between Sara's schedule and my own has made it pretty much a massive inconvenience at best to get there. So anyway, P.T. Anderson's newest masterpiece (and probably the best film of his career thus far) opened wide this weekend and we made our way to the theatre in Rancho Palos Verdes, our local fav thus far, to finally see it.

We were not disappointed at all.

What with the three weeks or so of hoping to see it but being thwarted again and again I had begun to worry that my anticipation had been revved to the point of being unquenchable.

Nope.

From the very first note, the very first shot, all the way through to the end, There Will Be Blood is a breath-taking, dark, witty, funny, horrible, emotional piece of art that will stay with me for the rest of my days. I have a lot of favorite movies, but within that realm there are a certain few whose perverse mixture of the horror and the comedy of life, exemplified by stand out, iconic performances make them actual facets of my personality. Jack Nicholson in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining or Dennis Hopper in David Lynch's Blue Velvet spring immediately to mind. Their violence, sarcasm and beligerence is motivating in that it not only shows you how bad a person can be, but also motivates the impressive tales that contain them to leap off the screen and make you jump, flinch, laugh and hollor along - the inherent 'fun' in being able to be so unbelievably evil just by invoking the character through the quoting of iconic lines or acting along with the characters. Well, everything I'm trying to bestow to you above, Daniel Day-Lewis has it in this film. Hopper's role in BV is argueably a lesser part of the film in that he is not the main character (although I my self would argue he is the main character to some degree; he certainly drives lot of what transpires even if he does not have as much screen time as Kyle MacLachlan) but Day-Lewis' role as Daniel Plainview reminds me so much of Nicholson's Jack Torrance in that since seeing it I find myself wanting to run around holloring any number of memorable lines at the top of my lungs.

Now, TWBB also reminded me of another favorite from this past year, Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country For Old Men. So much quiet. So many big, open spaces where there was no movie on screen but a window into the characters' lives. Sara put it best, and I'll paraphrase her here, but after TWBB she said really like both these films for the fact that they were not so much conventional stories, with set-up, conflict introduced, exposition and finally climax and resolution, but more like recordings of real life. I liken them to using the camera not so much to tell a story the way most filmmakers or filmgoers think of a story, but more as an unnatural observer that watches a cadre of people's lives from point A to point B and then ends. TWBB is definitely that, and I would argue that the problem many people have with NCFOM is that it takes a tale that should have a resolution and everything else and twists and tweaks it so that it does not have them.

My picks for 2007:

Best Film: No Country For Old Men (TWBB a very close 2nd and the one I think will actually win the award)
Best Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis
Best Actress: Not sure.
Best Supporting Actor: Javier Bardem
Best Director: P.T. Anderson
Best Score: Johnny Greenwood for There Will Be Blood
Best 

Biggest piece of shit: Probably Transformers. I know there was tons worse (there's never any shortage of shit on the movie screen) but this, ah, even though I enjoyed myself profusely watching it, it was just bad. Not that it could have been anything else really, but my god, that scene with the autobots leaning backwards over neighboring houses trying to keep out of sight of the kid's parents? John Tuturro in this horrible role? NOOO!!! I'm going to rewatch Miller's Crossing soon to try and renew my faith in the guy.

I'll trail off here because I haven't given the rest that much thought.

Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Pink Floyd - The Wall

When was the last time you sat down and listened to this start to finish? It'd been YEARS for me, as I listened to it so much in high school that I kind of absorbed it and became jaded as I moved out into the world and saw how commonplace it was. Threw it on last night on a whim and you know what? It's FUCKING AMAZING!!!

There's this episode of six feet under, the first of the fourth season I believe, and in it there's a scene where David finds Claire in her room staring at a book of photographs by some famous photographer. She explains she is trying to see with different eyes, to leave all the tired associations the world grafts onto us behind and really see something in a different way. That's what I did to The Wall last night and I saw it for the monument it is. Haven't felt juiced by anything Pink floyd since high school.

Planet Earth...

I find it so amusing how popular the BBC television series Planet Earth is in box set form.

Wait a minute. Back up asshead.

Okay.

So I work retail right, and one of the most popular things nowadays, dvd wise, are box sets. You got box sets of television show seasons, ya got sets of movies in certain series or by certain directors or starring certain actors/actresses. THen you get the stuff thats documentary orientated, and the BBC's Planet Earth is one of those.

Many of you will know what this series is. If not for my job I would never haave heard of it. But I tell you, we sell these things like pot on a high school campass. Really, epecially everytime we do our big box set sale (couple times a year), then we literally have our inventory beefed up with them (last time I think with somewhere around 100 copies) and we sell them down to single digits, if not out entirely. I have actually seen people get FLAMING FUCKING ANGRY with me for having sold out and not had any. FURIOUS these people become (easy yoda) at the thought of not being able to spend $50-$80 (Depending on which sale) on a box of discs that contain images of animals and landscpes, phenomena and serenity from across the globe narrated by David Attenborough. Angry with us you say? Why?

We're standing in their way of treading up through the store in their Indonesian, child labor-made sneakers, paying at the front with a currency that, in most cases consists only of abstract 1's and 0's, having their their small, 2 lb package swaddled in a PLASTIC bag (at their request because the irony driver in me always has me ask a Planet Earth purchaser "do you need a bag with that') so they can transport it home in their hummers and SUV's, and throw on the 'spectacular images' (one customers words) of the Planet Earth and completely fucking IGNORE the real thing outside the walls to their own protective little existences.

Now, before I go any further let me just say that yes, I'm being somewhat of a hypocrite here. My shoes weren't made in China by World Industries. I don't know if they employ sweatshops or the like. They're a smaller company though, originally manufacturers of skateboards. The point is, Your going to have to wear some form of shoes, they should be something that is comfortable and something to some degree you do not find vomitous. WHY wear something like NIKE when they have had a past of child labor (for one example check out this old article

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/1020-01.htm).

Now, I'm not going to go on an all out rampage about shoes here, I'm just using a couple things to point out the ridiculous nature of people. We often joke at work about how many people probably leave with their Planet Earth DVD, unwrap it in the car and toss the plastic wrap out the window. This is so far out of my realm of existence but every once in a while I see someone do this while driving, often I think with cigarette celophane (based on the fact that yes, when I was a 15 year old douche bag punk with long ass hair, a chip on my shoulder about EVERYTHING for NO reason and too many Pantera albums (but then of course, 1 Pantera album is too many in my adult opinion) I also through cigarette celophanes out the car window. And I can remember exactly when I stopped, how I realized what I and so many people I knew were doing was completely thoughtless, without motive and downright terribly hateful. Indicitive of all the things older folks thought and said about us that we tried so hard to rebel against. And I THOUGHT and CHANGED my behavior and attitude. That's what I'm trying to say about... oh, wait, let me end these paranthesis and get back on point...)

Anyway, that's what I'm talking about in this meandering, soapbox post. Yeah, Nike may have changed their policies. From what little research I just did as writing this it looks like they have. ALOT of those sports shoes/clothing/products have. So no, its not fair for me to stand up and say I'VE CHANGED!!! TAKE ME SERIOUSLY AND FORGIVE ME AND LETS MOVE ON and not allow someone else to do the same thing. HOWEVER, the point isn't NIKE, or Hummer or whatever. Its the big joke that in the height of all the talk of 'GREENING' so much awe and respect, sacrifice and time is being poured into a marketable, consumer commodity PRODUCT instead of into the real, living and breathing thing that nurtures us. Text book IDOLATRY. Our real 'GOD[DESS]' is the marvelous machine that gave us life to begin with.

PLANET EARTH, the planet, not the DVD!!!

She is our mother and we forsake here. It's similar to everything else now, where our entire world and all of our intricacies as humans are being encoded into those wonderfully magick 1's and 0's, uploaded like characters in a William Gibson novel, while the flesh and blood bodies we all started with wither away from McDonald's-sized neglect (Billions and Billions served and I'm a fucking hypocrite ehre too because I ate there at some point in the last week).

Alright, I've left you circumnavigating the text here, my out of control ramblings weaving off and on topic, no doubt alienating many. That's the way I write because, honestly, thats the way information happens in my head, it all weaves in and out and that's how, I like to think, I make some of the connections and points (what points I hear you say, outraged) that I do. These are more an idea firing launchpaad than something that will sate those looking for classically trained 'articles'. Too bad, go to Wiki or an Encyclopedia if you want your theories 'opinion-free'.

Sunday, January 6, 2008

2007 Guitar Center Drum Off

so I come home from work yesterday afternoon and Sara wisks me away to downtown Lala land, specifically the Henry Fonda Theatre (aka the Musicbox) for the finals of the Guitar Center drum off.

'What the fuck's a drum off?" I ask, wanting only to consume copious amounts of beer and chicken after a hard day in retail hell.

"Thousands of try-out contestants from GC's all over the country have been widdled down to four finalists. They play tonight, amidst a bunch of bells and whistles, for the winning spot."

"What are the other bells and whistles?" I ask now imagining a mostly empty room, hardly filled by about one hundred geeky looking guys wearing Dream Theater t-shirts and gesticulating constantly with Trekky-like enthusiasm. Perfect for me to bring my paperback Terry Pratchett novel and a thirst for over-priced Irish whiskey from the upstairs bar at the Fonda, where a couple months previous we witnessed the Melvins play 'Houdini' start to finish followed by Mudhoney performing 'Superfuzzbigmuff'. Decent seats up on that balcony, maybe Sara can skim the nerds for her story and I can finish Wee Free Men and score a buzz.

"We're not staying for them, believe me. I want to get the story and get home in time to watch some more Lost."

Okay, I'd never let her down, so here we go.

I've been up since 6:30 in the A.M., so I'm tired. I sleep a little on the way down sitting cobain. I wake up just before we park, to the sound of Sara saying, 'Oh, they have spotlights.' Spotlights? I think, for a drum off? This confuses me. In my sleep-swaddled head I try to fit the images of a Hollywood funciton that warrants spotlights with the images of the nerd train I had in my head.

Try as I might the two would not reconcile, and then we were moving.

Sara, far more important in the musicians community than I often remember, is on her phone immediately with a gentleman named Robbie. He's a head rep something-or-other-big-shot for GC and she's giving him a step by step guide to our approach, as apparently he is coming out to usher us into the ...VIP? Wouldn't VIP at a drum off be the equivalent of VIP at an action figure collectors show?

Boy, am I wrong.

Robbie meets us on the corner and after a quick introduction he leads us back toward the entrance to the club.

THRONGS, yeah, that's the word alright, THRONGS of people are waiting in a line that wraps around the block and is flanked on either side by MASSIVE, Hollywood, MGM Grand style spotlights. The entire city block is alive with hipsters, metalheads, parents, kids, poseurs, minor celebs... I think I spot Wes Borland off to the side of the entrance arguing about his name's status on the list and I give him the finger as we're wisked past EVERYONE and installed in front of a kindly lad who plants a fourescent green wristband on each of us before we're allowed in.

Robbie gives us a brief tour of the facilities as they operate for the evening, ie - general admission, balcony, and thrid floor where the VIP seating is located within stones throw of the bar with the whiskey. He sees us seated and runs off, no doubt a list of a thousand people to greet and welcome similarly. We scope out our seats and then hit the bar. No reading here. This is set up as much a rock show as any rock show I've been to, and more so than some. It's packed, its noisy, its dark and its ALIVE WITH that expectation. Did I mention the name ANGELS and AIRWAVES on the marquee when we entered? No? Well, evidently they're the presiding rock icons to close the show after the competition (making me wonder how many of these people are here for them alone and if a version of this shindig without them would look quite abit more like the original image in my head) Shortly after we sit, the show begins.

Now, Stephen Perkins, drummer from the late Jane's Addiction is the host of the show. Interesting. Stephen holds the unique honor among his Jane's peers as being the only one of the three I do not find a contemptible douche bag. How could I, he's the only one that hsn't at some time in post-Jane's time tried to whore himself out for as much spotlight as possible. He comes out, harmless enough and says a few words, then introduces the opening act.

Opening the show was the Street Drum Core. Never heard of 'em? Neither had I. Here's what Amazon throws down as a description: "Street Drum Corps is a punk rock version of Stomp, a tightly choreographed mix of street drumming and pop-punk tunes..."

Now, go goggle them and look at some of their pictures on Myspace or wherever. The French have a word for folks like this, La Dil-Do. Seriously, a punk rock version of Stomp? Does anyone want to see this? ANYONE? Their performance was wretched. Granted, there were some interesting layers of rhythm and lights that made we wish for halucinogens (which would have been a mistake based on the shitty timbre of their music itself) but overall this was like fifth generation Slipknot knock-off run by high school theatre kids swept up by the 'all image, no substance' moniker often associated with Hollywood. TERRIBLE and they make Shawn's SIT THE FUCK DOWN list (to be addressed in a future post cuz its a looong list).

After the faux-punks (my how I wish we could eliminate that word from the popular lexicon) here's Mr. Perkins again. He comes out to introduce the two guys from GC who put the whole thing together and to introduce the living legends they are honoring this year. The more Perkins talks, the more I take a cynical view. He sounds exactly like my good friend Sonny impersonating 'whitey'. Seriously, this guy just sounds so white, there's no other way to say it. Of course I'm probably just looking for a reason to complete my disdain for the entire Jane's cast, and I try to keep this in mind and give him a fair shake. In the end I do, but still, he's getting made fun of after this. The word 'parradiddle', a drum training exercise, came out of his mouth SOO many fucking times I almost gained the ability to successfully anticipate its arrival.

'Wow, you guys, there are so many paradiddles going on backstage.'

'We got hits, grooves and more paradiddles coming at'cah in a few minutes.'

'Someone just jumped me backstage and force-fed me a piece of posterboard with the word paradiddle written on it in stinky permanent marker.'

The first two are half-remembered paraphrases and the third is a bit of a fantasy, but you get the drift. So out comes Alan White from YES, last years award winner, followed by Steve Smith from Journey and Dave Garibaldi from Tower of Power who won this years awards. Everyone on stage had a grand old time and I must say even though I'm not a drummer and really have no idea who these people are, really, its good to see great musicians get recognition. Okay then, that being said, the rest of the night went pretty well. HTe four finalists came out and played, we saw the winner coming a mile away I think, but still, it was actaully pretty cool. Then Robbie found us and wisked us away again so Sara could meet the CEO of GC, they brought us out to the VIP patio and after a few more minutes we left, wanting to get that early start before Angels and Airwaves showed their pointless tattooed asses.

All in all, one thing about this night was how indicitive it was of why I love Sara. I sometimes make up my mind about things based on nothing at all, and she often comes along and shows me differently, thus she adds layers to me that I do not add to myself. But I guess that's what's really meant by a 'soul mate'. The ying need the yang to make a complete circle.

Wednesday, January 2, 2008

The Trapezoid on Amduscias Comp...

I wanted to drop a line here talking about the Amduscias Winter 2007 Compilation my current music project, The Trapezoid is appearing on. Now, obviously I want You all to hear my track, but seriously, its 3 discs long and fell of great music. The artists are going to be unfamiliar to many of You, but that's even moree reason to go and download it here:

http://www.archive.org/details/AMR100

and help support independent music. It's all what many of my friends whould call 'weird' music; bizarre and often challenging tinctures fermented with Ambience, Noise, Avant Garde, Electronic, Dark Wave, No Wave, whatever fucking wave You want to call it. The point is it is original, imaginative and absolutely WONDERFUL!!!

My recommendation is download it, throw on Your best set of headphones, smoke out or pour yourself a drink, turn off the lights and immerse yourself in the sounds of the limitless dimensions of imagination.

its too bad...

I hate feeling as though I have friends out there who I can no longer talk to because of petty little squabbles. Seriously, I can't think of one example where this has happened where it has not been at least partially my fault, so I'm not pointing fingers at anybody and declaring my outrage or anger at them. No, its just that age old idea that time is the great destroyer - it literally pulls the fabric of our lives apart. Of course some of that is just the way we as people, with raging ids, egos, and libidos do things. We ATTACH to things, nostalgia for times and people that no longer orbit the same planets we do. How could they? It's like the ultimate proof of good ol' Aleister Crowley's Thelema, the basis of which is the idea that if everyone does what they are truly supposed to do, they would never cross another - our 'paths' take us to our ultimate selves, and on the path to our ultimate selves why would there be conflict with others? This then, what I'm talking about right now, shows how we form islands of alliance, friendship and comaraderie in our fledgling or formative years, tiny Pangias of meaning that eventually get pulled apart, scattering all the components into their own course, to become their own continents.

But this is one of those days where I'd like to call some people and chit chat, I won't name names, but suffice it to say that working on my screenplay about growing up in bands there's some pretty integral guys out there I cut my fucking teeth with in everything from bar fights to recording to throwing fucking potatoes at people. Some guys I'd like to call up and say 'What's up fucker," and drink a beer while on the phone and talk about what we're up to.

Fuck it, I don't dwell, I just wanted to catalogue this as a feeling, so next time it happens I can come here, glance at the words and dilute the nostalgia before it begins.