I posted about death over on my MOG page, and then I thought I should link it here to keep all my death-related rambling in one place.
Tag: music
I should really go visit my old relatives
Last night Galen and I popped down to Pagliacci’s to pick up a pre-amp from Brooke, who was playing there. Pag’s jazz jam in full effect! It had been awhile since I’d been down for one of those nights. I think it was officially a Marc Atkinson show, but he was out of town, so the rest of the band asked Brooke to come play, and then various musicians came in off the street, and everyone on stage played several instruments so they all took turns switching. A pot pourri.
Of particular note, I finally got to hear Devon sing, and he is not kidding around about singing. I was having major grampa-convergence feelings watching him get settled on stage, though, because he was wearing the same kind of cuddly, old-man cardigan that my grampa always does, and this great plaid cap. Furthermore, Devon started out sitting in a chair on stage with no instrument and no microphone, no obvious reason for being there, just looking contented and watching the other guys play the intro.
My grampa does that kind of thing a lot, since his Alzheimer’s got noticeable. I’ve done a lot of sitting with the old guy, looking around and being contented. It made me think that my grampa should join a band. I think he’d be into it, as long as they played something old timey.
Things I did in 48 hours, while wearing fishnet stockings
- Rode a ferry to Vancouver and got my first slight sunburn of the year
- Used up a store credit at Diane’s Lingerie
- Visited two cousins and an aunt, and found out Galen is now considered an honorary cousin on account of my hanging around with him for so long
- Rocked out up front at Dungen, and felt very proud and happy for them even though I don’t know them
- Slept for 4 hours (ok, not in fishnets)
- Rode a ferry back to Victoria
- Arrived on time for a 10am business meeting
- Walked to grandmother’s house
- Battled sleep deprivation, caffeine shakes, and grandmother to produce mitered velvet corners
- Collected my mail from the postbox
- Stumbled home
- Wrote a training manual
- Collapsed
- Remembered the mail, and discovered our tickets to Pitchfork’s music festival had arrived. Os Mutantes!
- Collapsed, excitedly
Watching people sketch
We ran into Erik and Leni at the show last night and shared their table. I got distracted, watching Erik draw on the back of a poster he ripped down from the bar window. He’s fast, and starts right in on the details without blocking anything in. I took a dark picture of the poster after he taped it up backwards on the window again, but I forgot to look at it from outside when we left.
After that, and spending a lot of time scribbling on our bar table as a group, I was excited to see a little ““watch people sketch online”:http://www.boingboing.net/2006/04/12/watch_and_rate_peopl.html” game posted on BoingBoing this morning. But it turns out to not be that interesting. Maybe it has to do with texture? Maybe I only like watching people I know.
Galen is still considering starting some kind of one-thing-every-day blog. Maybe he should post a little video of himself drawing a picture. Like that landscape painter with the happy little trees, but not educational. Spectator art!
My desert island would probably be annoying
I’m with Mark Frauenfelder— a live ukelele weirdo beats the pants off any radio. Who watches that ad and wants to hang out with Mr. Grouchypants?
This reminds me of the Most Wanted/Unwanted Songs project, where researchers attempted to create the most agreeable and disagreeable songs in the history of the world. The disagreeable one was a 25-minute, bagpipe-Opera-rap with clip-clop noises and a chorus of children, and it was awesome. I’ll take that over a bland, romantic, R’n‘B duet any day. Marketing focus groups don’t see things that way, I guess.
I can’t stop watching the ukelele ad. The little white socks!
Meaningless words I would ban from music criticism
- ecclectic
- authenticity
- definitive
- distinctive
- experience
- universal
- 50-75% of all adjectives
Data slob
My friend and erstwhile coworker Justin just found 1.3GB of my old MP3s in the dark recesses of his work hard drive, from last December when I was briefly stationed on his machine. He was happy to have “Common People.” Thinking about it, I believe I deposited that song on at least 3 workstations on that campus, and possibly also on a network drive.
Fangirl/pirate/slob/nomad.
Leftovers (almost left behinds)
It is really easy to stop writing. I think of ideas or stories I want to write down every day, but if I don’t act on the seed within a certain window, the urge just sort of passes.
- My ideas are not worth writing down for posterity, or they’d be worth writing down the next day.
- I should write more often, if I’m going to write at all.
Urges that have passed in the last few days:
- Telling you about Antony and the Johnsons playing in a cathedral in Vancouver. Especially about how overwhelming and fantastic it was after about the fourth song, when the sound man finally turned up the volume just enough to resonate in the architecture. And about the comfort of seeing a genderqueer sensation sing in a church, along with a varied crowd of freaks and families and plainer sorts. I really like it when things don’t have to be burdened by being a radical act.
- Writing out the caffeinated explanation I came up with for why I laugh so much. I don’t think of myself as a giggly person, but somebody probably does. Once the caffeine wore off, this train of thought seemed highly drug-induced: self-absorbed and overly sincere. The jist of it was that I laugh at the paradox of everything being absurd, yet perfect. Am I in my ninth grade mystical phase all over again? I did not know caffeine held this potential for unselfconscious declaration. Maybe it’s a better vision quest drug than I initially thought.