no icefest

so it's saturday night & i'm getting ready for the south bend noise fest, scheduled for the following day. i get an email from bobby vomit mentioning that amy from the people bomb is supposed to be spinning at some house party that night (sat), & that the bt crew is also invited to play some records. so i get my shit together & head up to muncie, though by the time unszene, vomit, & i show up, amy has long since stopped alientaing indie rockers with her records. we hang around in the front yard drinking for awhile until bobby vomit decides that he wants to play. so he played for awhile, then i played for a bit until it's 3am, most the party has left, & the people bomb want to pack up their turntables. we return to la casa de vomit & eventually go to bed.

the noisefest was scheduled to start at 5 & we estimated it as being a 3-hour drive, so we left pretty early. the path to south bend from muncie is convoluted: it involves several state roads, us highways (virtually no interstate), & driving through a bunch of small towns.

getting to south bend proves easy. we approach the town with plenty time to spare, yet somehow overlook our exit. the next thing i know, we have arrived at the michigan border. we turn around and head back toward indiana, but by now it's after 5pm and we know that the show has probably started.

we get back to south bend and this time, manage to take the wrong exit. we don't have a proper map, just directions vommy printed off from randmcnally.com. the directions say we want Business US-31 (Michigan St), but don't state a direction, so the first time i see a sign for biznatch 31, i take it... but there is no michigan st to be found. this sets us back 10-15 minutes before we stop at a gas station & bobby v goes inside and checks a map (but doesn't buy one). he determines that we are at the complete wrong side of town, but suggests (among other things) that we should be able to just take bidness 31 south to the south side & find our exit.

it turns out that the two ends of business 31 don't seem to meet each other, at least not that we can find. we manage to get lost, but eventually see main st. because there's a main st on our micro-map, we turn. main st ends and branches off in a different direction. then that main st abruptly ends and we are almost totally lost. by this point mr v is rather upset: by this point we have clearly missed emil beaulieu, who was supposed to play at 5pm sharp.

eventually at about 6 we see us20 & jump on that, which takes us back to where we had first gotten lost 80 minutes earlier. this time we find the michigan st exit (whose signs do not say business us-31, although it clearly is bus us-31 once we get on it). we are home free; the directions from here are clear.

at about 6:20 we roll up on the venue, after more than 4 1/2 hours in the car.



above pic is bobby vomit standing by the door to the venue. the sign says it is temporarily closed by city of south bend, & although it's hard to make out, underneath that it says that the noise festival has been cancelled.

we just kind of laugh at the situation (bobby v is at least relieved that he didn't actually miss emil beaulieau), take a couple pics to prove that we were there, & get back in the car to look for somewhere to eat. we end up going to burger king, then driving back 3 hours to muncie. back at the casa de vomit, we watch belly on vhs and listen to the sound experiment on the radio, then i drive back to indy.

i had asked for today off work, with the option of going in to work in the afternoon if i got back early enough. clearly i was home in time, but when i got up today at 11:30 i wasn't quite motivated enough to get ready in time. maybe i'll go run some errands in a couple hours so my day off isn't wasted.

sf part III: i left my hard-on in san francisco

damn... by now it's been close to two weeks since i left san francisco, so i should try to finish this shit up...

warning redux: all photos are 1280x960 & range ~200-300kb

on friday afternoon we went to see spider-man 2. i had some free passes to amc, connie wanted to see it, & nothing else showing (that they would accept passes for) looked that good, so that's what we went to see (i'd seen it once; connie had not). i enjoyed it, again. after the movie, some kid in the bathroom was asking people what movie they had seen & even asked me to give him my ticket stub, i guess so he could sneak in to see spider-man 2, but he had obviously already made it past the ticket-takers, so he didn't actually need my stub to get in... i didn't bother to explain any of this; i just lied & said i had lost my stub.

after the movie we began our trek toward the somarts gallery for sfemf night 2. connie was pretty hungry so we stopped at a chinese restaurant in the market district. i just ordered some hot & sour soup: even after the waitress warned us it was "a big bowl" i still figured it would only be a serving or two's worth. i was wrong: this bowl was a good 4-6 servings, & on top of that we ordered pot stickers & chow fun. way, way too much food. but it was fairly tasty. we decided we would offer our leftover soup to a homeless person during our walk to the show, but we weren't outgoing enoug, so that didn't happen (i guess i was waiting for someone to ask me for spare change or something).

so we made it to the show only a little late. CMAU was playing. they had several members strewn across the stage, some using electronic instruments, some apparently playing with found objects, & one holding a videocamera: the footage was projected onto a big screen at the back of the stage. their sound kept morphing nicely, & occasionally got fairly dissonant (although later on wobbly complained that he would've liked them to've been more dissonant, that he'd seen them "rock out" more during other performances). here's another blurry no-flash photo.

then came christopher willits. he played using a guitar run through a laptop. the laptop would process the sounds somehow (custom software, according to the program) so it all came out as odd tones and clicks. it was sorta amusing to watch him standing there, guitar in hand, jamming to his music like he was in a club-rock band, but the sounds really didn't change all that much during his performance... after a few minutes it started to get old. not too bad, though, & he only played for 15-20 minutes. here's another pic.

after that came intermission. we went outside so i could have a cigarette, then went inside so i could get some wine. there we ran into wobbly again... he said he was feeling much better than he had been the previous day (when he had pneumonia) & we chatted for a bit about the sfemf & his views on "academic" experimental music (like the fact that academics these days seem terrified to use even a hint of rhythm in their work, & how he felt maybe there wasn't enough variety in the sfemf lineup: too much drone). he asked about my true data 12". when i said that i hadn't brought any copies with me to sf, connie suggested that i could send him a copy. and really, we were there that night because he had put us on the guest list, saving us $30, so shipping his one 12" was the least i could do...

after the intermission came krystyna bobrowski. she had an elaborate setup. first she played a solo piece on a big water jug, playing the edge for awhile, then dipping her hand in the water & changing the timbre of the tone. that piece was very short. then three more people came onstage for her main piece. she had four custom glass tubes, each four or five feet long, set up on a pivot. inside each tube, apparently, was a speaker, and each speaker, so i hear, played a different track off of a multitrack recording. the speakers were attached to some kind of long string, and the players would pull on these strings, moving the speakers inside of the tubes, which would make all kinds of subtle changes in tone and timbre of the sounds. this was when the fact that i'd been taking slow-exposure no-flash photos really paid off, because i got a couple really nice ones with motion blur (see also the first link in this paragraph)

last for the evening was keith fullerton whitman (also known as hrvatski; he goes by his "real" name for his "serious" work). he sat in front of his laptop & also had a pretty nice video, with slow cinematic landscapes as well as twitchy digital-looking footage. wobbly had told us that he plays "drones, just drones" but it wasn't all drones. there were some clicks, and at the end he got very noisy (the noisiest and most dissonant i'd heard at the sfemf, probably). because he was in a dark corner & the video screen gave off so much light, i couldn't get any good pictures of him but here is another one anyway.

after the show, we took the 9 bus back home & made delicious choco/peanut butter milkshakes.

saturday afternoon we hung out for awhile watching more upright citizens brigade. then we caught a bus up to "the haight" to go back to amoeba... ostensibly so i could do some record shopping for humdrum (who had supplied a list of records he was looking for), although naturally i bought a few more things for myself while we were there. for dinner we went to some cafe (don't recall the name; it was an odd name). it was a breakfasty kind of place with lots of crepes on the menu. i had a croissant sandwich (like ham & eggs on a croissant; tasty but huge & a little messy). this time we were more assertive with our leftovers and immediately gave them to a homeless couple who were seated nearby the cafe entrance.

from there we caught another bus to the market district to go to bootie, a monthly mashup/bootleg event. i had never been to such an event, & connie had never gone because it's not in a good neighborhood & she's nervous walking around there alone. on top of that, it was the one-year anniversary for the monthly, so it was a special event & they were giving away free mashup cds w/each $10 admission.

we showed up around 9 (when the doors were supposed to open) but the doorman said they were behind & wouldn't actually open for another 20 minutes or so. we decided to hop a bus back to connie's house for a quick smoke (& so i could drop off my big bag o' records, which i didn't feel like having to carry around all night at the club). by the time we returned to the club, the doors were open & things had started happening. we snagged a table near the wall, but with an okay view of the stage (except we were off to the side). there were "fun size" candy bars on the tables, so we got our snack on too.


pretty quickly i noticed that the PA did not sound very good. it was very muddy sounding, making it hard to hear the vocal track clearly sometimes (not good for mashups). maybe it sounded better directly in front of the stage, but it sounded pretty bad where we were.

after awhile, smash-up derby took the stage. they claim to be the world's first (and only) mashup cover band, a somewhat novel concept. at first, i commented to connie that i couldn't really tell if they were any good or not, because the PA sounded bad. but it didn't take me long to decide. the idea behind a mashup cover band is fine, but to truly pull it off (so that it sounds at least comparable to the studio tracks) would require an outstanding frontman (or even two or three), with versatile voices and broad range of styles. smash-up derby does not have such a frontman. he was off-key and did not have half the range i would think such a band would really need. maybe the rest of the band was fairly competent (hard to say with a bad PA), but the frontman could not pull it all together well enough. oh well. here's another photo.

the club was really filling up so i tried to take a couple no-flash photos of the crowd. a couple of those came out okay. after the band finished someone started djing for a bit.

a stout, older gentleman (dressed like he'd just left the office; he definitely stuck out from the crowd) claimed the table in front of ours after awhile, & occasionally he would ask me to save his seat while he ran off to the bathroom, or to the bar, or to have a smoke. at one point he accidentally sat on his free bootie cd (he showed it to me, snapped in half) & had to run off to get another one. this guy will become significant later.

the headliner for the event, all the way from fucking scotland, was mcsleazy, mashup superstar. he played a bunch of his hits (a couple of which smash-up derby had covered earlier in the evening). he was at the far end of the stage so getting no-flash photos proved almost impossible. i gave up (this was a jumpin' nightclub after all, a very different environment from the quiet, museumlike sfemf shows) & turned on my flash, but even then i had to get up from my seat & walk closer to the stage to get a photo worth taking.

now that i'd stood up & was 15-20' from our table, i snatched the opportunity to turn around and snap a picture of my precious connie (not the greatest picture, but i have so few of them overall...). our tie-wearing friend at the next table spotted me doing this and suggested that we might like a photo of the two of us together. since there were no "couple" type photos of us in existence, we agreed that such a thing would be nice to have. while i was showing him how to work my camera he managed to pull off one askew unaimed picture (you can see part of connie's blouse & her half-drank cosmopolitan); then he took a fairly decent picture of me & connie.

the name of the night is bootie, so (this time at least), pirate garb was encouraged. i had totally forgotten to take any of my pirate gear with me so i just wore a doormouse t-shirt. connie wore stripes; they were kinda piratey. others had much better outfits, but this dude was the ultimate, bringing what appeared to be an actual live parrot on his shoulder. represent.

but parrot boy wasn't the only character in attendance: they also had go-go dancers! yes, the go-go dancers (male and female) would take the stage while the djs played & shake their slender asses for all to enjoy. some of the sexier audience members would jump onstage with them. i got a bunch of okay-to-mediocre photos of them onstage, (like i mentioned, we were off to the side of the stage, not a good vantage point for photographing go-go), but i did get this nice ass shot of one of the dancers (she was actually offstage standing near us at the time... [here you can see a nice profile of connie with the go-go dancer's ass in the background.] most of my stage shots look somewhat like this [extra points if you can guess the gender of the dancing crowd member in the foreground]).

the club was totally packed, refreshing to see at a mashup event (though maybe it's not that packed every month). now that i was taking flash photographs, i decided to try to take some more crowd shots to prove that the place was full of folks. here's another one.

mcsleazy finished his set, though it wasn't totally obvious he was done until i saw that he was now standing closer to us, near the side of the stage. it was actually easier to take pictures of him there, so here's a shot of mcsleazy bordered by connie's profile, and here's one with less of connie & more of mcsleazy. and here's one of connie, clearly embarassed that i'm taking her picture.

we didn't stick around too much longer, though we were still there when a few people dressed in milkshake costumes came onstage to dance to a mashup (kelis vs ray parker jr), so i got a bunch of horrid photos of them. finally, here's one more pic of connie making her way through the crowd. not long after that we ran outside & grabbed a taxi back to her house.

sunday morning was no fun. we actually had to get up early (after staying up late) to get me to the airport. i was depressed about having to leave, knowing that i wouldn't see connie again until october, & on top of that i was anxious about catching my flight ontime. we walked to the bart station, ate burger king and pizza hut in the airport, & finally kissed goodbye while i waited in the 15-minute line to get through the security checkpoint. SFO makes everyone take off their shoes for the security check. IND doesn't do that, nor does reno. on the flight i read some crytonomicon and listened to new cds.

i had a layover for an hour or two in chicago (at midway, not o'hare). but i had spent the last of my cash on riding the bus to SFO and eating burger king there. i wandered around midway for a bit looking for someplace that might accept plastic so i could get a snack (as well as a restroom that wasn't swarming like a hornet's nest). the food court was crowded & i ended up going to a small gift shop & buying a 20oz coke & a bag of combos with by debit card.

my flight back to indy was on a tiny saab plane (i called it a puddle-jumper), the kind where you have to walk on the tarmac to board. the plane didn't even board until a few minutes before we were supposed to leave. it was small. but we were only in the air for about 40 minutes. when we got back to indy, i went to the baggage claim & picked up my suitcase. barry was nowhere to be found; when he showed up 15 minutes or so later he explained that 38th street had been totally blocked off by cops & he'd had to do some maneuvering, delaying his arrival. (it was brickyard weekend, so i'm sure traffic on the west side had been horrible, although the airport was fairly empty.) we drove home & i had a few hours to adjust before having to go to bed so i could return to work the following morning.

that was my san francisco area vacation. i had a fantastic time. i hope i didn't forget anything too important. i did leave out all the hours of hot sex, though, but for your convenience (or maybe your frustration?).

mms

well my show at mms was eminently disappointing and anticlimactic. turnout was as low as at the non-conference shows i typically play... & i seemingly even drove off half the crowd when i started playing! just like old times... i'm used to that so it doesn't phase me much anymore, but i felt bad for the out-of-town bands like infinite number of sounds, who did a great set & deserved a much better turnout than they got. hell, the INS boys were the only other band (out of 4) that actually stuck around until the end of my set, and i only played until midnight on a saturday! respek.

at least a half dozen people told me they'd be there (or would "try to make it out") but didn't show. which is pretty much how every show i play locally goes, so at least people are consistent. but dan crall from the sound experiment was there, so i had one supporter who wasn't performing.

but overall the mms was good. i got lots of free crap, some decent press (not that anyone noticed, apparently), drank a bunch of free jack daniels, & got to see lots of live music for free... even if the vast majority of that was rock music i typically wouldn't be interested in. and i got to meet a few people in person, people i'd only communicated with online... look out for me to appear on both the listenable local radio shows in the future: the sound experiment as well as the free zone.

looks like i have a couple more show opportunities coming up soon, too; odd considering that neither opportunity really came out of the mss, but i heard about both this weekend... anyway, looks like i'll be djing at a fairly big show on 9.11, & there's another possibility i probably shouldn't comment on until i know more.

sf part ii: no other possibility

okay, quickly because i want to get to the nuvo party for mms (& the liquor is only free from 4-5)

wednesday connie had an errand or two to run without me, so i laid around reading cryptonomicon for a couple hours until she was done. it was relaxing. after she got back, we went out for sushi. we had planned to go to a place called "tokyo go-go" but when we got there we discovered it was closed for a private party. but after walking only about a block, i spotted another japanese/sushi joint called "restaurant yo yo"... such is the magic of san francisco. & yo yo was probably cheaper than go go, to boot.

after dinner we headed down to the odeon bar (connie's favorite bar in the world) to see "ask dr hal". dr hal is a well-known subgenius (he's on the puzzling evidence show on kpfa, right after over the edge). for the ask dr hal show, audience members write down esoteric questions and enclose a small gratuity. chicken john, odeon owner, moderates while dr hal tries to answer every question, typically with a stream of beautiful bulldada and rambling genius. musical accompaniment is provided by krob: perhaps somewhere between djing & live performance? (i had seen a variation of ask dr hall at indyvival 2003, but that was moderated by ivan stang, with no krob, so it was not quite the same.) we also saw a couple short films, one by an odeon regular/employee about how television affects people, the other a new short by stang called "bug porn". good times. after the show they were rounding up people for a bus trip to go bowling in some suburb (daly city?). i like bowling but wasn't too eager to get potentially stranded in some strange town late at night, so we headed home.

thursday was my birthday. instead of the usual "breakfast" of pop-tarts, i decided i'd rather go to st. francis, a soda fountain & pancake house that's only a block or two from connie's house. i had french toast and ham; i think connie had a sandwich. the first time i went there, in december, i noticed that they have a great collection of vintage (or retro) stickers & trading cards for sale: garbage pail kids, wacky packages, & all sorts of other such campy goodness. so i spent more than $20 on wax packs of cards & stickers like yo mtv raps, wacky packages, pee wee's playhouse, and rocky horror picture show, as well as surprisingly lame cards starring the simpsons and bill & ted. we went back home for a few hours, before eventually going back out to get tapas for dinner, connie's treat. i'd never had tapas before: basically like ordering a half dozen appetizers for dinner. some of them were quite good, some were not quite as good. it was also my first time drinking sangria: it will not be the last.

from there we began the walk to the somarts gallery, to see the first night of the san francisco electronic music festival. during the hike i spotted a busted computer lying on the sidewalk (not the first i'd seen, but the most picturesque). so i finally took out my camera & used it for the first time in the trip (after carrying it with me every day): take a look.

note: all pictures are 1280x960 & are like 200-300KB. deal with it.

eventually we found the venue. it was basically some old warehouse space, with a very nice stage built in a back room, & an art gallery in another section. i thought the music was all excellent, but for a ticket price of $15 i was underwhelmed. if it had been $10 i wouldn't have complained; if it had been $5 i would have most likely raved about how great it was. but for $15 it was rather boring: just sitting in a dark room, theater-like, watching some guy stand there in front of his gear.

first up was marcos fernandez. i was in the bathroom for the first part of his set, but what i heard was pretty good avant garde ambient type stuff. (it's been a full week since i saw these shows, so you'll have to forgive me if i can't remember too much detail about what they sounded like; i've seen lots & lots of live music recently.) apparently there was some kind of internet stream going out: whether audio or video i know not. but i didn't see anyone taking any flash photography, so in an effort to not distract the artists, i tried taking some pictures without my flash. it was really dark, meaning the shutter had to stay open for a few seconds, & i had some trouble holding the camera still for that long. at one point i gave up trying & decided to just let the camera jiggle or capture movement. i took several such pics, most of which came out looking like this, but the most abstract one looked like this (i think for that pic, i actually rotated the camera 90 degrees while the shutter was open).

up next came cenk ergun who did some experimental laptop work. it was similarly avant garde and ambient sounding, although i think he got pretty dissonant near the end, which i definitely enjoyed. i only got one pic of him, and it's not very good.

following cenk there was an intermission. we went outside while i had a cigarette. after that, i finally found the bar area & got a glass of white wine. the merch table was next to the bar & picked up a wobbly 12" called multiple pleady. it appears to be a remix disc, with mixes by blevin blectum, people like us, and someone else (too lazy to check right now, & there's little time before i leave).

after the intermission came perkis/wobbly, a collaboration between plunderstar wobbly and some guy named tim perkis. they were a bit ambient, a bit noisy, occasional hints of rhythm... none of the recognizable pop samples that are prevalent in much of wobbly's work, but i'm sure many or all of wobbly's sounds came from plundered sources. here's another photo.

after their set i ducked out to get another glass of wine. while out there i ran into wobbly, who recognized me from when we'd met in december. he was about to rush home, sick with bronchitis. but we talked for a minute & he said he would put me & connie on the guest list for the following night. that was good, because i wasn't going to spend another $30 for two more admissions to the festival, but i was indeed interested in coming back.

last for the evening was joan jeanrenaud, who i discovered was a former cellist for the kronos quartet. i took no pictures of her because, from my vantage point, there was a mic stand that would have been right in front of her in the shot. she had some kind of electronic device (sampler? delay?): she would play a cello part, then loop it electronically while she played on top of it. quite excellent; possibly my favorite performance of the night.

then the show was over. we took the 9 bus home, and laid in bed watching episodes of strangers with candy and upright citizens brigade an old vhs tape i'd brought. connie's cat, girl, was lying on the foot of the bed... at one point connie pointed out the interesting effect of her red room lights and the blue light of the tv screen on girl's white fur. so during a bathroom break i took a few more no-flash photos.

okay, it's almost 4pm, which means i'm off to broad ripple for the nuvo party. coming soon: part 3: friday night (more sfemf), saturday night (bootie), & sunday (my return trip).

when it rains it snows 3

as part of the media blitz for mms, a photo & a short blurb about stAllio! turned up in this week's INtake (this is what i was writing/researching when i was inspired to post about the skinny puppy game).

the online version does not have the photos, so if you want to see those you will have to come to central indiana & grab yourself a copy.

the great white hype lives up to his name

if you follow the news you might have recently heard about a beheading video that was hoaxed... it turns out to have been possibly the most successful media jam in quite some time. thanks to connie for the tip on this one.

turns out the "star" of the phoney beheading video is none other than the avant garde hip-hop artist the great white hype. i first heard about gwh years ago on rec.music.industrial... his first release was a hip-hop parody of coil's scatology, & future releases also dabbled in industrial parody and sampling. but i'd never heard any of his work until recently, when i ended up discussing gwh with connie (living in the bay area [where gwh is from], she had also heard of him but never heard his work. so i tracked it down on slsk and some of it is pretty interesting... at times very lo-fi with clumsily improvised lyrics (and i am an expert on clumsily improvised lyrics), so i can see why some people on rmi & the coil list couldn't appreciate it.

so recently i've been downloading all this gwh stuff (which took forever to find) & suddenly he is all over the national news for this media jam. his label's site (linked above) links to this article in the sf chronicle:

The faked beheading story broadcast on two Arab language television stations and sent out on international news services early Saturday was based on a grainy video that was made by three Bay Area residents as an experiment to find out how quickly erroneous information could be spread by the Internet.

The experiment had a delayed reaction, but when it came, it did so more dramatically than the people who made the video ever dreamed.

sadly, none of the media coverage mentions "the great white hype" by that name... they use his "given name": benjamin vanderford. the chronicle mentions that he is a "musician and video game designer" but that's about it.

gwh/vanderford even appeared on fox news. you can watch a video clip of it online: the host displays the typical fox news arrogant attitude by totally missing the point when gwh tries to explain why they made the hoax video.

gwh's point is pretty clear: to demonstrate that the media needs to be more suspicious before propogating unverified misinformation. the vanderford doesn't even show a severed head, only a blade held up against his neck, AP and reuters picked up the story as true, without bothering to check up on it, or acknowledging that they hadn't.

okay, it's bedtime now... tomorrow the mms begins. don't forget: i'll be playing an mms show saturday night at united states of mind, & i'll also be spending a fair amount of my weekend at the summit, so i'm not sure when i'll get to write "sf part ii" but it will happen.

sf part 1: the coldest winter

multipartite for easier read/write/execute

there's an old saying: "the coldest winter i ever spent was summer in san francisco." this is attributed to mark twain, but one of the first things i learned during this trip was that the quote is apocryphal: twain never said it. who did? who cares?

i left indy on sunday afternoon, 8/1/4. IND airport was crazy busy for some reason. but everything was pretty routine once i got through the ticket line. luckily i had scored the only nonstop flight from indy to SFO, so i just listened to mp3s on my new mp3cd player and started to read cryptonomicon (the first actual novel i've tried to read in at least a year, & a 900+page monster to boot.) my precious connie met me at SFO and we took the bart back to the mission. later in the evening, after some cuddling and relaxing, connie cooked dinner (i don't remember exactly what; sorry honey. i'm pretty sure it was some kind of chicken... hey, how many of you remember exactly what you had for dinner more than a week ago?). and mac and cheese.

monday we slept late and left the house even later (this is pretty much the routine every day). we went to the castro, allegedly the gayest place on earth (maybe i should say "most gay-friendly"). a great place to go if you're looking for gay bars, gay porn, or gay greeting cards. i wasn't really looking for the former two, but we stopped in a few shops and i did pick up a couple greeting cards (for collage-type use): one of a beefcake with a "smiley-face" superimposed over his face (inside is a [cheap] smiley-face whooppee cushion), and the other with a penis, dressed up like a face, wearing army clothes. it's the cutest penis card ever. at some point we went to "lunch" at a nice thai place. it was good.

on the way home we stopped by good vibrations (another "adult" store) and aquarius records, which is a pretty good but tiny record store in the mission, not too far from connie's house. (the same shop where connie once left fliers for unszene's button-making business, & one ended up in the hands of drew daniels from matmos.) i tried not to buy too much because i knew we would go to amoeba later in the week, but i got a couple cds, the doormouse i [heart] rap 12" (oops, originally i wrote "hate" there), a scorn 12" (which i wasn't sure if i had already... turns out it was the one scorn record on hymen that i didn't already have), and a few old dhr records... i found a lot of used dhr records last week for some reason... at aquarius i picked up we punk einheit! (nintendo teenage robots), and shizuo vs shizor, so i was excited about that.

on tuesday, we had a delicious curry for "lunch" at a halal indian/pakistani place, then took the bus up to "the haight" to stop by amoeba. if you've never heard of it, amoeba is an enormous place, the size of a department store, but it's all records & cds (they also have a dvd room). truly amazing, and easily the coolest record store i've ever seen... no question. but with its enormous size, it does give you that disorienting, dehumanizing feeling common in such large, crowded stores: let's call it "the best buy effect" (actual dept stores defuse this somewhat by having cash registers scattered throughout the store; at amoeba you wander around, pick your records, and queue up to enter the checkout farm by the entrance when you're done... quite different from the relatively friendly & hospitable air of a shop like aquarius). i won't even begin to list all the stuff i got there: big bunches of stuff, much of it used, on sale, or just all-around cheap. suffice to say that i learned on my first amoeba visit (in december, at the slightly-smaller-yet-still-enormous berkeley location) that you get a free tote bag/dj bag with the purchase of $200 or more, and i got my second free dj bag that day.

later that night, at home, we made beef stroganoff and brownies (i think that was tuesday, but it might've been monday.) and when did we watch adaptation? i'm not sure; we watched my adaptation dvd one of those nights... it's much easier to recall going somewhere than to remember whether we listened to cds or watched a video while we laid in bed... come to think of it, we listened to cds monday night & watched adaptation on tuesday. but i'm still not totally certain of that.

up next: part ii (i need to sort through my photos & post some before i get to thursday... right now, i have some comics to catch up on, since we never made it to a comic shop)

there can be only one

there was a time, a few weeks back, when i thought i might have big shows in september three weekends in a row. by now it looks like i'll only have one: indytron, a big noise/experimental fest put together by noiseman433.

it's funny: i submitted to two festival-type events at around the same time: the midwest music summit and an event called oranje. i figured that if i had a chance of being booked for either event, it would be oranje... since mms is a huge corporate event where oranje is supposed to be "arty" and claims on the site that it will "showcase the best in progressive music" (extra funny, because of the bands & musicians listed on the site, melk the g6-49 is the only one that strikes me as even remotely "progressive", although to be fair i haven't heard all of those bands, so it's possible that just maybe karl leichty or one of the djs is a little "progressive" [though since they also have "chicago's premier house and techno group", i rather doubt that as well]... why are people who're into experimental visual art & video so mind-numbingly conventional when it comes to their taste in music?).

it turned out to be just the opposite: i got booked for the big corporate event, and the smaller, supposedly progressive event booked a bunch of indie rock bands, "singer/songwriters", and even house music. house music!!!

okay, that was probably my last blog entry before i start recapping my sf trip.

back in the house that jack built

i got home tonight after a wonderful week in san francisco with the lovely connie. the worst part was having to come home... i'm not looking forward to going back to work in the morning (nor my dentist appt in the morning, though that probably won't be too bad).

i plan to write a bunch more about my trip (with pictures!) but it might take awhile; i expect to be super busy at work, plus i have some "catching up" to do at home as well (including lots of new records to listen to).