First LA Record, now LA Weekly has a weed column, erm, blog. Jeff Weiss is only the most entertaining music writer in Los Angeles. I don’t even smoke weed and I’m adding that thing to my RSS.
The Henry Clay People: “just bad Weezer” (In defense of this, I too once over-used Weezer comparisons. Weezer is a common band comparison people default to when they they mean “rock music that has drums, guitar, and lyrics”)
I’ve been thinking how I wish I could have seen The Airborne Toxic Event in Pomona last week. (Boy, this will win-over the KXLU crowd who visit CGT after my appearance on Demolisten.)
I’ve seen Airborne more times than I can remember, but I would have liked to have seen and documented the expanded stage spectacle. I guess Darren is up on risers and they have big ol’ video screens now. That seems like a sensible evolution for them. Airborne started as a club-playing indie rock band, but with every “big” show the epic catharsis aspect of their music swelled in importance to the band’s identity. More U2-like spectacle makes sense to me.
My unashamed love of The Airborne Toxic Event has cost me and this blog more indie cred deductions than any other opinion I’ve offered. In retrospect, I think I over-praised their album; some tracks are now skippers for me. But others (“Wishing Well” and “Missy” come to mind) still swell something in my chest when I hear them. And Airborne’s fans truly love them. Few blog-reading indie nerds feel genuine emotional connections to Girls or Neon Indian or whatever Band of the Month is on their radars, but The Airborne Toxic Event’s fans (many who are not indie nerds) really feel something through that band’s music.
No amount of snobbery or misperceptions about The Airborne Toxic Event trumps that. I still stand by it. Scanning fan tweets this week I found that Airborne is still greeting fans in line hours before shows. They don’t have to.
The Airborne Toxic Event are a contradiction; selling a spectacular show packed with literary lyrics, bombastic sounds, and preconceived artifice while still wearing their hearts on their sleeves and earnestly celebrating on stage. Mikel’s experiences drive the songs, but Anna is the real heart and soul of that band; my strongest impressions of The Airborne Toxic Event are all memories of Anna banging her tambourine in rapture, or offering herself onto the finger-tips of an adoring crowd, eyes squeezed shut in overwhelming joy.
I think by the end of the fall I’ll be ready to do another Fiend Folio show. Putting-on shows is a lot of work and I don’t love being emotionally invested in the financial performance of a night of music, but I’m starting to get the itch again. Might retool it as a considerably less noisy night. We’ll see.
The solution to all our consumption problems: shrink ourselves! If only!
Folks often decry the internet as making us stupider. I disagree. By the way, literacy is going-up. Thanks to Facebook, myspace, blogger, and the ilk, more Americans are now writing than ever before.
During dinner at GenCon my comrades were agast when I suggested that Tweeting makes people smarter, better writers. I mean it. Twitter is the first social networking phenomena that places limits on creativity, and we all know that self-imposed limits is what fuels great creative work. In essence, Twitter has taught a nation of babbling instant messagers how to self-edit. They only get 140 characters.
I’ll be seeing Surrogates this weekend. Don’t laugh. It will be cyberpunkarific.
“The Surrogate” was one of my favorite Arrested Development gags.
Ghost Rider 2? (“You might have mah soul, but yull never get mah spirit!”) Uh, pass, David Goyer writing or no.
Ed Norton is pushing for the Avengers movie to feature the rest of the Avengers taking down The Hulk. This is precisely what the movie should be.
Here’s a sweet Iron Man 2 set visit where Entertainment Tonight (where I was once employed) spends their interview asking the stars about… the other stars. That F1 race is going to be sweet. If you’re sharp you’ll catch Iron Man / Tony Stark chilling in the giant Randy’s Doughnut down in Inglewood.
More augmented reality… this stuff is the future, kids.
That Colts-Dolphins game on Monday is why American Football is not only the greatest sport, but the greatest pastime on earth. The human drama in football teaches us more about life, about the human experience, than the collective histories of music, drama, and fiction combined.
It’s blood, sweat, tears; devotion, victory, failure. Most of all, delayed gratification with no guarantee that gratification will come at all.
Colts 2-0 with wins against a division team and a 2008 playoff team on the road. Not a bad start. They have a short week and have to travel to the other coast for a prime-time matchup against last year’s Super Bowl also-ran. That won’t be easy. They might not win another game if the defense plays as poorly as they played Monday night. But I like where we’re at. Manning scored 14 points out of 44 seconds of game time, so there’s always that ace in the hole.
The Colts’ offense had less than 15 minutes of possession time and won the ball game. Cripes!
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